Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2008 (Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook)

Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2008

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Kierkegaard Studies Edited on behalf of the

Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Hermann Deuser

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

Yearbook 2008 Edited by

Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Hermann Deuser and K. Brian Söderquist

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

Kierkegaard Studies Edited on behalf of the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Hermann Deuser Yearbook 2008 Edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Hermann Deuser and K. Brian Söderquist

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ISBN 978-3-11-020533-6 ISSN (Internet) 1612-9792 © Copyright 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in Germany Disk conversion: OLD-Media, Neckarsteinach

Preface The Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre had another productive year in 2007. Once again, the Centre helped organize conferences devoted to Kierkegaard’s relationship to other thinkers. Among these was a seminar, devoted to the German idealist J. G. Fichte’s real and apparent influence on Kierkegaard held in Copenhagen in October, 2007. Likewise, the annual Research Seminar at the Kierkegaard Research Centre was held in August at Vartov in Copenhagen. The theme of the seminar was one of Kierkegaard’s most flexible and influential works, Either/Or, which was published in Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, vols. 2 and 3. As is our practice, the papers delivered at the Research Seminar make up the first section of the Yearbook. These articles are representative of the versatility and interdisciplinary appeal of Either/Or, ranging from interpretations in the existential tradition, to psychological readings of Part 1, to literary readings exploring gender issues, to the theological implications of the “Ultimatum,” and finally to a pseudonymous letter that reopens the relationship of the ethical and the religious for Wilhelm. Several articles re-examine A’s insight into Mozart’s Don Giovanni, as well. The second section, which contains the reception histories of Either/ Or in a number of different languages and regions, is extensive in this volume given the fact that Either/Or has received such great attention in the secondary literature. Other 2007 publications affiliated with the Centre are worth noting. The publication of Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter continued with the June publication of vols. 23 and 23K, comprising Kierkegaard’s journals NB15-NB20, and the November publication of vols. 24 and K24, made up of journals NB21-NB25. The Centre also oversaw the publication of the first two volumes of a new research series, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources. These first volumes are made up of articles treating Kierkegaard’s philosophical and theological contemporaries in the German speaking world. In addition, the

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first three books in the Danish Golden Age Studies Series were published, along two more monographs in the Monograph series. The year 2007 also saw the publication of Either/Or in Spanish, O lo uno o lo orto, part of the continuing series Escritos Søren Kierkegaard. The first volume of the French translation of Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter was published, Journaux et Cahiers de Notes, which contains Journals AA, BB, CC, and DD based on the text and explanatory notes in SKS vols. 17 and K17. The English translation continued with the publication of volume two of Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks. We would like to thank philological assistant Irene Ring for her enormous help and support with the textual editing and production of this volume. We likewise wish to express our gratitude to Walter de Gruyter Verlag for their continued cooperation with the publication of Kierkegaard Studies and to express special thanks to Dr. Albrecht Döhnert, the Editor-in-Chief responsible for Kierkegaard-related publications. April 2008 Niels Jørgen Cappelørn Hermann Deuser K. Brian Söderquist

Table of Contents

Section 1 Agnes Heller The Papers of B as the Modern Answer to both Aristotle and Kant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Ramin Jahanbegloo Reading Either/Or in Tehran: Either Kierkegaard or Fundamentalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Ronald M. Green Either/Or: Kierkegaard’s Great Overture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Philipp Schwab Innen und Außen. Zu Kierkegaards Auseinandersetzung mit der romantischen Ironie vor dem Hintergrund der Mitteilungsform von Entweder/Oder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Vincent McCarthy The Case of Aesthete A in Either/Or . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Céline Léon The (In)Difference of Seduction: The Aftermath of Seduction, or the “Interesting” Difference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Elisabete M. de Sousa Kierkegaard’s Musical Recollections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Nils Holger Petersen Seduction or Truth in Music? Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Ettore Rocca “The Immediate Erotic Stages” in Either/Or as Christian Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Camilla Sløk Don Giovanni as the Re-entry of the Spirit in the Flesh . . . . . .

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Thomas P. Miles Either/Or: Reintroducing an Ancient Approach to Ethics . . . .

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Anthony Rudd Reason in Ethics Revisited: Either/Or, “Criterionless Choice” and Narrative Unity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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M. Jamie Ferreira One’s Own Pastor – Judging the Judge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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George Pattison Remaining True to the Ethical? A New Letter from Assessor Vilhelm, with Commentary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Section 2 Steen Tullberg Either/Or in Denmark . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Thor Arvid Dyrerud “The Great Unknown” – Kierkegaard in Christiania: The Reception of Either/Or in Norway . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Camilla Brudin Borg The Philosopher of the Heart – Who Did Not Dance: A Swedish History of Reception of Either/Or. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Leonardo F. Lisi On the Reception History of Either/Or in the Anglo-Saxon World. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Philipp Schwab „Ein altes, seltsames Buch kommt uns aus dem Dänischen zu…“ – Grundlinien der deutschsprachigen Rezeptionsgeschichte von Entweder/Oder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Simonella Davini The Reception of Either/Or in Italy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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András Nagy Our Long Way From Enten – Eller to Vagy – vagy: The History of the Reception of Either/Or in Hungary. . . . . . .

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Darya Loungina Either/Or in Russia: Unfinished yet Exhaustive Reading.. . . . .

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Wang Qi With Affection and Confusion: The Chinese Reception of Either/Or . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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News from The Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre . . . . . . . .

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Contributors to the Present Issue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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The Papers of B as the Modern Answer to both Aristotle and Kant1 By Agnes Heller

Philosophers have never invented ethics. They have simply presented the model of the ethical world of their own age. This was usually an idealized model insofar as they presented moral perfection. Philosophers have never cherished the illusion that this moral perfection is generally achieved or even achieved at all. Yet moral philosophers are not moralists. Their main business is not to ridicule or to criticize the vices of their contemporaries, but to create the “moral center” around which men and women can approximate. If no moral center is presented, human beings will not even know whether they have approximated the center or ended far behind. The center presents the image of the “good person,” the one who may serve as a yardstick for all the others. The presentation of the idealized moral of an age functions as a measure concerning good and evil. Yet, I repeat, this center is not the artifact of a clever philosopher, but rather the image of morality embodied by living persons the philosopher knows, usually people of their own age, city, or family, people of pure morals, decent and upright human beings, perhaps the philosopher’s friends or at least the people a philosopher would like to have as friends. There is tradition for contrasting virtue ethics with divine command ethics. It became typical with the Greeks, and later with Christian Europe. There is another important difference between the ancients and the moderns, which is best illustrated with Aristotle and Kant. I choose Aristotle and Kant because in my view it is Aristotle who best presents all the basic features of ancient ethics, whereas Kant presents in its purest version the moral philosophy of early modernity: the best 1

The editors of Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook would like to thank Summer Henderson for her careful and thoughtful editorial work on this article.

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philosophical answer to the collapse of ancient and Christian virtue ethics. But, different as they are, both Aristotle and Kant have organically embedded their moral philosophy in a metaphysical system. As a result their ethics conform to their epistemology and are inserted into a holistic world picture. Moreover, this holistic world picture remains immanent, or, to refer to Heidegger’s formula, oblivious to ontological difference. Let me now present Kierkegaard’s existential ethic as it appears in the papers of B, though this paper will not embrace all the moral issues Kierkegaard reflected upon. Kierkegaard abandons metaphysics early on in Either/Or, especially in the papers of B, and the so-called ontological difference occupies a central place only in his Fear and Trembling in the discussion of the teleological suspension of the ethical, in the papers of the young man in Repetition, and in the works of the pseudonyms Climacus and Anti-Climacus. Still, I believe that B formulated most clearly the fundamental issues for a post-metaphysical ethic – a kind of post-metaphysical ethic that can lay claim to universality, that is, a modern ethic accessible to all. B’s frequently repeated claim that the individual (the singular) is the universal presents the reader with a catchphrase. Every single individual can become the universal. This is a different interpretation of universality than the one presented in Fear and Trembling, where the question is whether the singular stands higher than the universal (the teleological suspension of the ethical) or the universal stands higher than the singular (the case of tragedy). In this paper, I will limit myself to B’s papers, and the proposition that the singular (the individual) is the universal. His letters to A present the archetype of post-metaphysical ethics as it appears in postmetaphysical philosophy and literature after Kierkegaard (regardless of whether the authors knew the work of Kierkegaard or not). What Kierkegaard presents in the letters of B is the first formulation of an ethics of personality. Thus Kierkegaard (or, in this paper, B) did not invent an ethic. He simply devises an ethic in the same way his predecessors did: He presents the moral center for modern men and women, a center which was also already in statu nascendi in his time. He may have had models such as P. M. Møller or even himself. Or better yet – his own predicament. He could not, however, understand himself as a moral person, which he certainly was, within the categories of Aristotelian or Kantian ethics. To break his engagement with Regine cannot be described as an ethical gesture in terms of any traditional moral philosophy. It was neither a “virtuous” act, nor does he wish

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that everyone should act similarly. And since he was a thinker, he had to ruminate on why traditional moral philosophies could not offer a yardstick for his morally justifiable decision. He justified it with the papers of B – by devising a new moral center. He simultaneously presented a new ethic while answering the post-modern question of how an individual can become the universal. One can break with tradition absolutely. Or one can break with tradition while reformulating the questions of the tradition. Speaking of ethics, the second proposition is the viable one. After all, the answer to the question about who is a decent person has not drastically changed in the last two thousand years. Socrates formulated it like this: It is better to suffer injustice than to commit injustice. We can still subscribe to this principle and add that a person who suffers rather than commits injustice is a just, decent, honest, and good person. It still holds that a decent person gives preference to the choice between good and evil as well as the choice between useful and harmful and pleasant and unpleasant. In answering the question of “becoming” Kierkegaard preserves the teleological concept of ethics of Aristotle while rejecting the Kantian absolute causal nexus, (causality by freedom). Yet he preserves the Kantian claim for moral universality against the socially/politically embedded ethics of Aristotle. B develops his idea in letters written to A, his alter-ego. One of the letters is entitled “The Balance between the Aesthetic and the Ethical.” Despite the absence of interruptions and some indications that A might have asked several questions in between, the text gives the impression that all this might have happened with clarifications and hypothetical responses. That is, the fundamental conception is presented right from the beginning, but there are initially lacunae in the conception, and we are left with some undigested issues. I cannot answer the question of whether Kierkegaard himself asked those questions while writing and specifically worked out his answers underway, or whether this step-bystep procedure was a shrewd strategy, a kind of theoretical hide and seek where the trump card is played only at the end. At any rate, the reflections on existential choice are always interrupted by other issues. First and foremost, there are other kinds of issues concerning the relation between the aesthetical and the ethical, and only after some time does B return to the interrupted ruminations. Either/Or shouts B’s advice to A from the outset. The either/or is uttered with pathos, yet remains traditional. There are crossroads in every person’s life, suggests B, where these words have absolute

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meaning: “namely, every time truth, justice, and sanctity appear on one side and lust and natural inclination, dark passions, and perdition on the other side.”2 This warning, of course, sounds like preaching. The either/or seems here to be the choice between the seven vices and seven virtues, not even between aesthetic and ethical life since the aesthetic way of life A presents is far more complicated than this simple choice suggests. B even reassures A that the momentous choice is already behind him, although only “to a certain degree.”3 All readers of Kierkegaard will notice that the sentence is ironical as one cannot choose absolutely yet to a “certain degree.” There is either/or, there is choice, not just between the aesthetic and the ethical (which, as I tried to show, is rather banal) yet also an either/or within the aesthetic “sphere” and an entirely different one within the ethical “sphere.” The aesthetic either/or is very poetically and rhetorically presented in the papers of A. No matter what one chooses, one will regret one’s choice. The kind of choice presented there as “aesthetic” can be described as an entirely contingent choice. For example, I choose by lot, thus whatever I chose has nothing to do with me and my preferences at all. This is merely a pseudo choice and my character is not involved in choosing. I regret both for neither choice is “me.” There can be an interpretation of this either/or where the choice itself is not pseudo. I choose what I really prefer. For example, I choose one mask instead of another. Since I am choosing, my character is a part of the choice. The choice seems to be free. Why then do I regret all my choices? Because they are not built into my character; because at every new choice I begin again at point zero. As my sense of self is not increasing, the choice is not upbuilding. In another sense, the choice remains contingent. Yet, this kind of choice is not without worth or interest, for choosing the most beautiful, interesting, or amusing alternative based on aesthetic preference is still a free preference. B suggests, however, that the subject of such a choice remains unhappy. Finally, we tend to let others choose for us instead choosing for ourselves. In principle, this is also a pseudo choice, yet, unlike the choice by chance, it does not display even the semblance of freedom. Nietzsche would call the “subject” of such a choice “the last man.” It is at this point that B slowly turns to his endorsement of the ethical choice.

2 3

EO2, 157. EO2, 163 ff.

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First, B declares that the ethical choice is at the same time easier and more difficult than the aesthetic one. At this point he immediately departs from his formulation at the beginning of his letter. Here he says that it is first and foremost not what “a person chooses that makes his choice ethically relevant,” but the way one chooses, namely “the energy, the earnestness and the pathos with which one chooses.”4 And he adds that choosing in earnestness means “that the personality declares itself in its inner infinity and in turn the personality is thereby consolidated.”5 Even if the person chooses the wrong thing, “by virtue of the energy with which he chose, he will discover that he chose the wrong thing.”6 And little later he continues: “Rather than designating the choice between good and evil, my either/or designates the choice by which one chooses good and evil or rules that out. Here the question is under what qualifications one will view all existence and personally live.” 7 The question of what we choose is organically linked with the question of how we choose. Better yet, the “how” of the choice has preference over the “what” of the choice, although the latter is by no means unimportant. For he immediately adds that he who chooses between good and evil will learn to choose good rather than evil. At this point there is a strong similarity with Kant’s Religion within the Limits or Reason Alone. Here Kant proposes an understanding of radical evil as the reversal of the hierarchy of maxims. At the top of the hierarchy are the maxims concerning good and evil, lower in the hierarchy are the maxims concerning pleasant/unpleasant, useful/ harmful and even beautiful/ugly. If one chooses by the guidance of beautiful/ugly and only afterwards considers the maxims concerning good and evil, this in itself suggests that the choice, the action, is “radically evil.” Kierkegaard, that is B, also speaks of a hierarchy between the ethical and the aesthetical, where the ethical is fundamental. The priority cannot be reversed. Yet he never mentions maxims. He talks about the choice, about the earnest choice which reaches the infinite interiority of our personality; he never speaks of maxims. How do we then choose good over evil after having already chosen the choice between good and evil? We see that as a result of our pathos and earnestness, we have chosen wrongly. But what are the criteria of this self judgment? We must wait for an answer. 4 5 6 7

EO2, 167. Ibid. Ibid. EO2, 169.

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Instead of an answer, a long theoretical detour follows. The detour is about Hegelian philosophy, Hegel in general, and philosophy in general. He ridicules the philosopher who constantly mediates, who has no eye for immediacy, who contemplates the past instead of answering the ever urgent questions of actors, who remains outside and has nothing to tell us about interior actions. Then B speaks about himself, about being a married man with children, about practicing a profession as a judge; he speaks of himself as a man who needs an answer to the question “what I am supposed to do?” We cannot avoid the detour because it is also a circuit that leads us back to our question. Not to mention that it is only one thread which will assume great significance both in philosophy and literature. In particular, the importance of the portrayal of interior action such as Ibsen’s dramas, where dialogues breath out interior actions, and in Proust or Joyce where interior action makes up the backbone of the novels. Finally B returns to the either/or, “his” either/or. The “personification” of philosophy challenges Hegel. B (who is not a philosopher) does not present his own concern as “the” universal truth, as the outcome of human history, but as his personal truth. The last sentence of Either/ Or, which was not written by B, also suggests the personification of truth as a conclusion: “Only the truth which edifies is truth for you.”8 What takes precedence in my either/or, he says, is the ethical. The point is not the reality of that which is chosen but rather the reality of choosing.9 Seemingly nothing happened, for B seems to repeat what he has already said. Yet something has changed. B has already made a case for internal action. It is the conception of internal action that allows him to juxtapose two kinds of realities: the reality of choosing and the reality of what is chosen. Now B continues: “And yet the point here is a choice, indeed, an absolute choice, for only by choosing absolutely can one choose the ethical….The Either/Or I have advanced is, therefore, in a certain sense absolute, for it is between choosing and not choosing…. But since the choice is an absolute choice, the Either/Or is absolute. In another sense, the absolute Either/Or does not make its appearance until the choice, because now the choice between good and evil appears.”10 Instead of finally getting to the resolution of the issue, we poor readers become more and more confused. 8 9 10

EO2, 354. EO2, 176. EO2, 177, 178.

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This is the first time B makes the crucial point about the word “absolute,” a Hegelian favorite. B is not speaking of an absolute idea, of course, but rather about the absolute choice. We know what makes an idea absolute, namely that it is fully determined. Obviously the same makes the choice absolute – it must also be fully determined. But what determines a choice? A choice is free if one can also choose something else. Kant could interrupt at this point and warn us that as far as morality is concerned there is only one free choice (which is really not a choice at all): obedience to the law. Is there only one kind of free choice as well in B’s advice? Is this choice also absolutely determined? This does not sound like Kierkegaard. Yet maybe the choice is absolute because it is the end, the goal, the final result, and because it is irrevocable. This sounds more like Kierkegaard. Yet there are still more questions than answers here. Up to this point, we have been led to believe that the ethical either/ or meant the choice of good and evil. What does B mean when he asserts that absolute choice, the choice between good and evil, makes its appearance in and with choice itself, that only when I choose absolutley will the choice between good and evil appear? What do I choose absolutely? I choose the choice? This is not a circular argument, but a circular phenomenon. I could go on and say that I choose to choose the choice absolutely. A married man with children and a profession who wants to know how he ought to act can hardly feel comfort in this answer. Kierkegaard, that is B, leaves us in a state of confusion. Perhaps because he himself needed time to rethink the issue, or perhaps because he was teasing us. But he will not forget us. We must still wait before B proceeds towards a philosophical answer. The second detour, just like the first, is not a real detour. B makes a decisive philosophical step by distinguishing between doubt and despair. He already suggested that we need to choose absolutely, but he now adds that the absolute is not doubt but despair.11 And then he proceeds: “I go back to the category of choosing. When I choose absolutely I choose despair, and in despair I choose the absolute, and I myself am the absolute.”12 It is here, for the first time, that the central thought of the existential choice gets formulated. While choosing absolutely I do not choose good and evil, neither good nor evil, for the object of my choice is never absolute. I choose rather myself, in 11 12

EO2, 211-213. EO2, 213.

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despair, for I alone am the absolute. It becomes obvious that Kierkegaard confirms the credo of modern ethics that is expressed radically in Kant’s moral philosophy. In choosing something outside of ourselves, we can never choose the absolute. Kant would say that such a choice is never autonomous, and B goes on to say that while doing so one is always in doubt, which practically speaking, though not theoretically, is the same. We can choose the absolute by choosing something internal; for the right external choice can also result only from internal choice. There is, however, one essential difference between Kant and Kierkegaard. With Kant, one chooses the universal as humankind in us, against our individual contingent nature and singularity; with Kierkegaard, we choose ourselves as such, the universal and the singular in one gesture. For in ethics, B insists, the singular is the universal. This is the decisive step in overcoming metaphysics. Kant can make his conception work by dividing human beings in two parts: homo nuomenon and homo phenomenon. This gambit requires the division of the world into Freedom and Nature, into ”thing in itself” and phenomena; it requires a metaphysical solution. In ethics, if the universal is the individual and vice versa, metaphysics is overcome while the Kantian answer to the modern problem is preserved. It is not factual truths that are chosen, nor is it “virtues” or “goods” as in Aristotle’s time or the Christian tradition, but the individual chooses herself, because the individual is the absolute; there is no doubt here. Yet there is despair. The question remains whether this strategy works. B thus returns to his category of despair. In despair one chooses the absolute and oneself as the absolute. One chooses oneself, and in the moment of absolute isolation one becomes another self, myself in my “eternal validity.”13 The self I choose is the most concrete and the most abstract: it is freedom.14 B proceeds dialectically. One remains oneself the chooser and one becomes oneself, a different self, the chosen self. But the chooser and the chosen are the same. The chooser does not determine the chosen, but it is the chooser. Between the chooser and the chosen is the leap, or the choice itself. The chooser cannot determine the chosen because there would be no leap. And the chosen, although entirely different, remains identical to the chooser for it is the chooser who leaps. In addition to their similarities, a crucial difference between Kant and 13 14

EO2, 211. EO2, 214.

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Kierkegaard becomes evident here. Regarding freedom, autonomy is the alfa and the omega of morality. But in Kant freedom is nontemporal. It is eternal, whereas in Kierkegaard freedom is becoming. It must be so, for there is no transcendental freedom for B; freedom is namely personal because only the single individual can become free. And he becomes free if he chooses himself in despair absolutely. While several aspects of B’s argument are clarified, some questions remain. How can a person become free absolutely, as a concrete individual person, as a whole? Imagine a person with infirmities, neuroses, temporal determinations, which cannot be annulled or abandoned? Does he not need an imperative power? How can he be the person who has chosen the choice between good and evil and be good? B takes up this issue. He suggests that the person who isolates himself in his absolute choice repents himself back into his family, his time, his infirmities, his cleverness or stupidity, his childhood – back into all of his contingencies, and finally to God. For B, and for Kierkegaard, it is essential that the person who chooses himself absolutely repents himself to God. Otherwise the pathos of the minister from Jutland – who preaches about the uplifting idea that before God we are always in the wrong – would not be essentially connected with the so-called category of existential choice. Yet because the proposition of B turned out to be the basic structure of the ethics of personality of the late modern age in general, both in philosophy and literature, I will now deal only with the general conception. No question about it: If one finally repents oneself back to God, the existential choice results in grace, even if it does not require grace. The fundamental conception can work, however, without resulting in grace. For if a person who chooses herself as a decent person, as someone who distinguishes between good and evil and chooses the good absolutely, she need only choose herself back into her family, age, her own infirmities, her own childhood; for if she did not do so, she would never be free. If at any time she does something out of character, she can say that she has not chosen it. Yet if she repented back into all of her life contingencies she could never say that she did something because she was determined by this or that, because she has chosen all her contingencies freely; thus nothing could determine her from the outside. To choose ourselves back to all our contingencies has, also for B, further ramifications. A person who chooses himself as a concretion chooses himself in his continuity. I have already mentioned that in Kierkegaard, inner history is of great existential importance. Personal

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history is concretion, especially interior history.15 Think again about Ibsen or Proust. History is a self-chosen person’s actuality, yet it is also possibility, but a different possibility than the one open for men and women who let others chose for them. A contingent personality sees possibilities everywhere. This is why he can regret all his choices. For an individual who lives ethically, possibility appears as a task, a goal, or an objective. We have thus moved from the Kantian moment in B’s papers to the Aristotelian moment. It is not necessary to think of something external when one things of a task or an objective: Just as history can be internal, so also can goals and objectives. The historical development of an ethical individual is teleological. Yet, as we know, the ethical individual has repented himself back into outside contingencies. His development will be free, internal, but not unrelated to the outside. He remains open to the outside as he develops from the inside. For how could one choose the good without being related to others? To quote B again: “The individual has his teleology within himself, has inner teleology, is himself his teleology, his self is then the goal towards which he strives….His self must open itself according to its total concretion….In this way his movement becomes a move from himself through the world to himself.”16 This is the act of freedom as an immanent teleology. “To become what I am” sums up, with Nietzsche, the teleology of his life. In his famous book After Virtue, MacIntyre admits that objective ethical teleology has been lost since Antiquity and the Middle Ages. This, indeed, seems to be the case. In Aristotle’s time, for example, men and women were thrown by birth into a social world where they received the telos of their life already in the cradle. If you were born a free man and citizen (and Aristotle devised his ethics for free men and citizens) you would have received a list of virtues the moment you started to speak and understand language. To achieve those virtues, to become virtuous, became the purpose of your life. Your subjective and objective purposes coincided. Knowledge and good education were the conditions for living up to those virtues. Teleology was subjective; for you were striving, even if you were not always successful in the end. It was also objective; for the virtues were there and also the models of men who already practiced them. There were sceptics like Plato’s Socrates who doubted that anyone ever could be perfectly good, yet no one doubted that there is goodness and that it consists 15 16

EO2, 216. EO2, 274.

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of the practice of the sum total of commonly known virtues. No one questioned the notion that it becomes easier and easier to be virtuous as one practices virtues, and that a character can arrive at the state of perfection where he will only be able to act virtuously. In the modern world, where men and women are thrown into freedom – to express myself in the terms of one of Kierkegaard’s philosophical grandchildren – they do not receive their life paths in their cradle. The modern world gives the feeling that we are thrown into nothing, and objective teleology is seemingly lost forever. Subjective teleology certainly persists as both a freedom and a burden. B, though exaggerating a bit, says something important when he describes this merely subjective (aesthetical) teleology as a web of infinite possibilities and quasi choices among the variety of choices whose results we always regret. Heidegger’s das Man is also a good and picturesque description of this modern vicissitude. This merely subjective teleology, as long as it remains on the level of presenting mere subjective possibilities, presents mere objective possibilities without any kind of objective teleology. As mentioned, Kant contrasts these possibilities with the necessity and objectivity of the moral law. While I cannot discuss Kant’s important contributions to the philosophy of teleology in this paper, I do want to remind the audience that he excludes it from moral philosophy, sensu stricto. He doubts whether the teleology of nature can ever bridge the abyss between Nature and Freedom, but there is no doubt in his mind that this coincidence remains impossible for the single individual unless we presuppose the immortality of the soul. And here enters Kierkegaard or, better, here enters B. The letters of B offer a new kind of moral teleology, where objective and subjective purposes almost merge without presupposing the preexistence of an “outside” purpose or inner determination. Modern men and women are, indeed, thrown into contingencies at birth; they do not receive “objective,” that is valid, virtues from the cradle. They are, indeed, open possibilities in “negative” freedom. Yet those open possibilities can transform possibilities into destiny. They can destine themselves through an absolute choice; for while choosing absolutely they choose themselves. To choose absolutely is itself a leap. Not birth, but the leap, that is, the second birth, is the beginning of becoming, or the teleology of a personality. Through the leap and through the choice to choose ourselves, we begin to become what we are. This is an ethic of personality. In B’s letters, the ethic of personality was identified with ethical choice or with the choice of the ethical. B has formulated the exis-

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tential choice in a polemic against the credo of an aesthetic form of life, thereby also claiming aesthetic validity for the ethical. Yet even Kierkegaard has not remained entirely with B. The leap into the religious sphere, which he devised while discussing the sacrifice of Abraham, is not identical with the leap into the ethical (although the structure is almost the same). New and different approaches appear again in the work of Taciturnus and Climacus. In the aftermath of Kierkegaard, from Ibsen via Nietzsche to the present day, the “category” of the existential choice has been expanded. It is no longer identical with choosing to distinguish good from evil, but it applies to all kinds of self-choice. One can choose oneself as a writer, as a painter, as a statesman, as a lover, as anything; one must simply choose absolutely and become what one is. One can, of course, also choose oneself as a good decent human being and also as a knight of faith, again becoming what one is or what one has chosen to be. Absolute choice remains the choice of the absolute, and thus remains irrevocable. If one revokes it, then one fails as a personality. Absolute choice excludes many succeeding choices and opens up the possibility for others. Every modern personality, as far as she is a personality, has chosen herself in order to “become,” whether he or not she is aware of it or not. Interestingly, more often than not, modern personalities are at least remotely aware of having made such a choice, and sometimes even know when and where the choice was made. Is there anything “ethical,” then, in absolute choice of self if Napoleon or Rothschild fit into the picture as well as Nietzsche, Proust, or Mother Teresa? I think that there remains something “ethical” also in the non-ethical choices of choosing ourselves, which might include lying to oneself or remaining true to oneself. Yet we know from experience, as well as from literature, how thin the ice is on which we dance. Peer Gynt, for example, could not distinguish between the moral imperative to “be yourself!” and the egositic moaxim to “be sufficeint unto yourself” and thus became an existential failure. The combination of Kant and Aristotle in B’s letters as an ethics of personality preserves its validity. Becoming what we are, that is, the teleology of personality, preserves a grain of the Aristotelian heritage. The absolute choice of ourselves as as men and women involved in distinguishing good from evil preserves a grain of Kantian ethics. There are other philosophical solutions as good as B’s, but I do not know better practical advice. Let me return to the beginning of this paper. Philosophers have never invented ethics, they have simply systematized the ethics prac-

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ticed by the best people of their age. If they rejected systems, they nonetheless reflected upon the moral predicaments of their times. Kierkegaard, alias B, reflected upon an ethics in statu nascendi. Since then, we have lived with it.

Reading Either/Or in Tehran: Either Kierkegaard or Fundamentalism By Ramin Jahanbegloo Abstract The essay investigates the theory of dialogical individualism in Kierkegaard’s philosophy, which stands in opposition to all forms of fundamentalism. With an eye to Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, I will focus not only on the Socratic task of Kierkegaard’s philosophy, but also on philosophy as a form of dissident thinking opposed to the monolithic and one-dimensional discourses of political tyrannies. The aim of this essay is to show that a political power conceiving of itself as the embodiment of an ideology and the summit of philosophy cannot tolerate any philosophical thinking. With this sketch in mind, reading Kierkegaard in Tehran is an encouragement to look for signals of individuality in everyday human experience under tyranny. It is a commitment to the individual in its fullest potential and fallibility.

1. Introduction Since Plato, philosophers have strived to imagine societies and political systems in which it would be safe to philosophize. In their effort to examine life, philosophers have always presented some kind of a danger to the status quo. Socrates’ example has been in many ways a guide for philosophers throughout the ages. The idea that one can examine life by asking questions, timeless and universal questions, is still as revolutionary today as it was in Socrates’ day. Plato came to believe that teaching philosophy was dangerous. The experience of tyrannies in history and, more specifically totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century, showed that a political power conceiving itself as the embodiment of an ideology and the summit of philosophy can tolerate no philosophical thinking. Philosophy, however, has always survived both its martyrs and its persecutors. As Friedrich Schlegel wrote in his Athenaeum:

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The fact that one can annihilate a philosophy…or that one can prove that a philosophy annihilates itself is of little consequence. If it’s really philosophy, then, like the phoenix, it will always rise again from its own ashes.1

This possibility raises the specter of a larger problem: philosophy is a task, but merely a sub-task of the larger task. Life itself is the larger task. Kierkegaard’s understanding of his “task” provides us with a model, if not a recommendation, for philosophizing under tyrannies. Kierkegaard set himself up as absolutely different from other theologians and philosophers. As such he turned to Socrates in order to understand his own philosophical undertaking. “My task is returning to the Socratic,”2 he affirmed in Philosophical Fragments. Kierkegaard’s concern with Socratic methodology is an expression of his conception of philosophy. The idea of philosophy against which he is reacting is that of the search for foundations and the construction of a unified understanding of the world. Kierkegaard’s use of Socratic methodology is a step in the breakdown of a monolithic philosophy which seeks to unify the world in understanding and action. In Kierkegaard the actual features of “knowing,” “understanding,” “judging,” and “acting” denote a strategy of differentiation which serves both to connect forms of life and to separate them. The motto behind all Kierkegaard’s writings is “I’ll teach you differences.” For instance, in Either/Or the title has distinct meanings for the aesthete (who uses the term ironically), the ethicist (who demands lawful choice) and the religious figure (who negates the ethical choice, which can only be rediscovered in faith through grace). The recognition of this differentiation by Kierkegaard is intended to suggest a “philosophical therapy” against the monolithic discourse of philosophy, theology and politics. He tries to grasp the world in its difference and variety. Therefore, “understanding” and “judging” are relativized simply by the introduction of the project of grasping the world in its variety. The mere fact that such a project could be conceived, and an attempt made to carry it through, demonstrates that for Kierkegaard the major question taken up by a philosopher is: “where must philosophy leave off?” Kierkegaard recognizes that abstaining from “going further” in philosophical discourse does not eliminate the necessity of “going on” in philosophy. For him this necessity is rooted in the essential difficulty and existential necessity 1

2

Friedrich Schlegel Philosophical Fragments, trans. by Peter Firchow, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 1991, p. 30. PF, 105.

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of philosophy as a Socratic task. As such, Kierkegaard’s philosophical attitude shares many features with Socrates’ analysis of philosophy as an unachieved task which, despite its constant drive for explanations of the world, never achieves its goal as a philosophy of totality, and ultimately remains aporetic. Kierkegaard’s reasons to “go on” in philosophy are existential, if no less dialogical. New problems are always arising in the course of life. Thus even if one is able to stop doing philosophy when one wants, there will constantly be new occasions to make philosophical decisions, and constant temptation to return to philosophical questioning. The aim is not an increase in the quantity of knowledge, but a continuous effort to expand the variety of the world. In other words, Kierkegaard’s criticism of objectivity presents itself as a project of regrasping the world at the level of its differences. Philosophy “leaves the world unchanged,” but it allows us to see things differently. It is important to understand that in the case of Kierkegaard, this shift in perspective is not a metaphysical demand. Rather, it is a call for a shift in emphasis away from the metaphysical in general. Such a shift suggests a radical change in the place of philosophical thinking in life. Rather than being normative and foundational, it remains “ethical” in a broad sense. Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith” is an ethical decision in this sense. It is a decision made by the individual in spite (not to say in defiance) of the public opinion. Kierkegaard’s understanding of this feature is expressed in the statement that “subjectivity is truth, subjectivity is reality.” Subjective existence is the mode of fullest actualization. This is what Kierkegaard calls the “truth for me” which “must come alive in me.” What gives this commitment significance is Kierkegaard’s intention to shout his resolution to everyone he meets. As Kierkegaard affirms in The Sickness unto Death: “The self is a relation that relates itself.”3 The emphasis in this relation is not placed in the existing self, but rather in the constant task of entering a dialogue with the world. Only in its relational capacity does the self enter philosophy, because the positing of a new philosophy would actually be the positing of a new self. Under such an active paradigm, philosophy could at most only be called a task. It could even be called a tool in the service of life. Philosophy’s progress then becomes a continual process of ethical self-realization and self-transcendence. The Kierkegaardian individual consciously chooses to find oneself in a free dialogue with God and the world. If, for Kierkegaard, dialogue is 3

SDP, 43.

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to stand, it must stand outside of the theological-political, in the area of philosophy as a task of life. As such, for Kierkegaard ontology is still a possibility for philosophy to cut beneath the traditional conception of human nature as something pre-established and given once and for all. In this sense, we can say that Kierkegaard argues for not an essentialist, but a dialogical mode of identity. Kierkegaard uses the “dialogical” manner of being against what he calls the “numerical” mode of existence. For him, the individual is always against the crowd. “The crowd is untruth” proclaims Kierkegaard in his dedication to That Single Individual, because the crowd destroys the individual’s capacity to make decisions and makes him/ her totally irresponsible. According to Joachim Garff, in his Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, when in 1848 thousands demonstrated in the streets of Copenhagen to demand labor reforms and constitutional government, Kierkegaard assured his readers: Every movement and change that takes place with the help of 100,000 or 10,000 or 1,000 noisy, grumbling, rumbling, and yodeling people … is eo ipso untruth, a fake, a retrogression …. A mediocre ruler is a much better constitution than this abstraction, 100,000 rumbling nonhumans.4

Kierkegaard absolutely hated the idea of a government of the crowd, by the crowd and for the crowd. Yet his fear of a possible authoritarian outcome of a herd ideal and his dissent against any fundamentalist religiosity does not prevent him from thinking of responsible dialogical citizenship. The Kierkegaardian subject is not a monological individual who oscillates among the false either/or of a possessive individualism, (which claims that I can find my identity in my private sphere), and a radical consensualism, (which leaves no space for the existential self-choice of the subject). Kierkegaard is neither in favor of individualist atomism, nor any kind of social holism. The true Kierkegaardian either/or is that of an opposition between moral individualism and fundamentalism. This gives the Kierkegaaardian individual an anti-totality or a kind of an anti-totalitarian reflex. The ethical self-understanding of the Kierkegaardian self does not absolutely belong to the inward perspective of the individual. Individual ethical continuity provides the individual with an intensification of his/her self-choice. In self-choice, the individual discovers his/her self-activating principle on the move. Therefore, self-choice is not necessarily a choice 4

Joachim Garff Soren Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. by Bruce H. Kirmmse, Princeton University Press 2005, p. 494.

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between good and evil, but rather a choice to exist as a dialogical self who is capable of a sustained ethical judgment. As Kierkegaard affirms admirably in Either/Or, “The greatness is not to be this or that but to be oneself.”5 Choosing oneself is prior to values conflicts. It is the existential condition of the ideal possibility of entering a dialogical actuality. Kierkegaard’s dialogical either/or brings a corrective to arbitrary modes of either/or which present forms of non-choice. Kierkegaard’s defense of a radical self-choice presents the individual with a well-formed identity and provides him/her with a check and balance on the totalitarian drives that threaten his/her freedom. This is a leitmotif that runs from Kierkegaard’s Either/Or to anti-totalitarian and anti-fundamentalist dissent in our times. Either/Or, as the title implies, is obviously about choice, but it is also about the possibility of change, not only from the aesthetic to the ethical, and from the ethical to the religious but also about change that aims at achieving the equilibrium necessary for moving against a fundamentalist view of faith and life.

2. Fundamentalism and Dialogical Individualism The term “fundamentalism” denotes a certain religious response to post-Enlightenment modernity. It criticizes the adaptation of religious tradition to the dictates of modern thought. In other words, fundamentalism emerges very often as a violent rejection of modernity and as retrogression to pre-modern religious fundamentals. But I think the most important feature of “fundamentalism” in our world is the politicization of religion and the ideologization of the tradition. In the case of many religions like Islam, Judaism and Christianity, fundamentalists advocate the religious rendering of the existing order through the revolutionary seizure of power or through social reforms. Fundamentalism designates religious movements that strive to reestablish the core elements of a religious tradition, socially, culturally and politically. Therefore, fundamentalism reacts defensively toward value pluralism and hermeneutical methodology applied to religious traditions; instead, in fundamentalist movements, there is an affirmation of the absolute validity of the fundamentals of a tradition. This is why it is easier to establish a fundamentalist movement where core principles are spelled out explicitly in a sacred text. 5

EO2, 157.

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The authoritarian and absolutist dimensions of fundamentalist movements manifest themselves in the ideological manipulation of a religious tradition. In the eyes of most religious fundamentalists, societies must be constituted on the basis of religious community. There ought to be neither singular identities nor idiosyncratic quests for personal meaning. In other words, all individuals must belong to a religious collective, and their everyday lives must be governed by the normative traditions of such collectives. As such, Kierkegaard’s postulate concerning dialogical individualism is rejected by all forms of fundamentalist thinking. In their eyes hermeneutical dialogue and individualism are diseases from which people require protection. This is not to say that any contemporary movement uncomfortable with Kierkegaard’s view of dialogical individualism is purely and simply fundamentalist. But religious and political movements inspired by defiance of this postulate are very often considered to be fundamentalist. Continued reaction to dialogical culture and a philosophy of self-choice makes a measure of religious fundamentalism the common undercurrent of all contemporary fundamentalisms. In their own eyes, the fundamentalists are people of dialogue and individual choice. In their commitment to the revelation of the religious tradition, they are pitted in a fight against dialogue and individual choice. Fundamentalists lay claim to exclusive possession of the divine truth and therefore proceed to show the “right path” to everybody. The impact of fundamentalist discourse can be witnessed all over the Muslim world today. Given the acuteness of the anxiety evoked by the problems of modern world, for younger generations of Muslims the orientation toward Islam provides a ready standard against which modern urban society is judged. The rise of fundamentalism and its violence against modernity does not absolve the “project of modernity” of its sins, but it does serve as an alarm to all those who, plagued by the philosophical ills of modernity, come to hope that the reassertion of religion will help create a new ethical community. This is where reading Kierkegaard can help us see the ontological difference between being critical of modernity, and remaining true to Kierkegaard’s radical self-choice, which requires the ongoing Socratic task of bringing inwardness into political life as a lived corrective to fundamentalism.

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3. Reading Kierkegaard in Tehran How might reading Kierkegaard affect a person living under fundamentalist rule here and now? In other words, how can one read Either/Or or any other writings of Kierkegaard in Tehran? As odd as it may sound, reading Kierkegaard in Tehran can not only be spiritually comforting, but also philosophically empowering. It is an open challenge to the monologism of fundamentalism, but it is also an invitation to become a responsibly dialogical self in a culture that has systematically sheltered itself from the Socratic task of learning through asking questions and “living in truth.” How can we make sense of this? Is it not probable that in a fundamentalist society in which everyone is forced to be religious and wherein theological authorities are worshipped, one has her hands full with the single task of becoming an individual? Is not Kierkegaard’s appeal that one become a responsible self in order to inhabit value spheres as an individual capable of a moral point of view, a philosophical offense to fundamentalist societies? Kierkegaard raises a relevant question for a fundamentalist society: what would it take to abandon or to transgress a fundamentalist view of human nature and to begin to learn from existence? The task is to maintain a radically honest distance from one’s traditions in order to find one’s place in the ethical sphere of existence. Distancing prompts self-choice, which, in turn, calls for an exodus from tradition. This repeated exile from tradition means that the self must reexamine the immediacy of its fundamentalist identity. As such, Fundamentalism is maieutically exposed by Kierkegaard as a form of self-forgetfulness. However, Kierkegaard opposes here the “self-forgetfulness” of the crowd to what he describes in Either/Or as a “forgetfulness” which “depends upon how one experiences actuality.” “To be able to forget,” writes Kierkegaard, “depends upon how one remembers, but how one remembers depends upon how one experiences actuality.”6 One who practices self-forgetfulness is blind to the character of one’s life, as opposed to the individual who cultivates a Socratic concern with selfknowledge. The idea that the philosopher in our age has “forgotten what it means to exist” is a central topic in Kierkegaard’s anti-fundamentalist mode of thinking. According to Kierkegaard, the philosopher tends to fail to bring his own life properly into imagination when philosophizing about what goes into the ethical or religious life – he 6

EO1, 293.

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is unable to recognize the disparity between how he actually lives and what he says about how one should live. Kierkegaard’s general term for this contradiction between one’s life and how one describes one’s life is hypocrisy. It is by no means a problem that he holds to be peculiar to philosophers. Indeed, he writes: “Hypocrisy is quite as inseparable from being human as sliminess is from being a fish.”7 Surprisingly, Kierkegaard does not oppose hypocrisy to a demands for an outward sign seen by men, but omsosts that one’s inwardness is unnoticed. Surely, we can say that secret inwardness is the cure for fundamentalism. It is easy to see that fundamentalism could not serve as a foundation for Kierkegaard’s ethical view of life. The situation of voluntarily being part of a “herd” public is the polar opposite of the “either/or” self-choice with which Kierkegaard confronts the individual. Taking Kierkegaard’s path of attacking mass identity, one can say that it is at the same time a standpoint which is endowed with a hermeneutical awareness. That is to say, in Kierkegaard’s thought individualism and intersubjectivity are inextricably intertwined, so that one cannot exist without the other, but that when there is conflict between individual self-choice and social beliefs, the individual must always take precedence over the masses. In this sense, Kierkegaard’s dialogical individualism is diametrically opposed to a fundamentalist standpoint which assumes that the teachings of a particular religious tradition represent an absolute truth and that consequently all other religious and individual interpretations are in error and in need of being corrected. It is, therefore, not surprising that Kierkegaard’s category of the individual is closely related to responsibility and is aimed either against possessive individualism or religious and political fundamentalisms. Singularity is always already obliged. This is to say, for Kierkegaard, community happens in the dialogical, not in the monological. To think community is to think singularity in-between [inter-esse] human beings. It is, then, an action that requires existential transformation, an opening of the self to the other. That is why Kierkegaard substitutes “love as obligation” for “legal obligation,” because it is a love that at all times makes singularity responsible to the other, to all others, in spite of their differences. Individual choice and obligation of the self toward the other become the building blocks for a Kierkegaardian dialogical philosophy. As such, Kierkegaard diminishes the 7

S. Kierkegaard “Journals, 1853-1855” in Kierkegaard: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Josiah Thompson, Garden City: Doubleday 1972, p. 165.

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role of divine law by underlining the role of the human. It would not be incorrect to say that Kierkegaard brings back philosophy to the human level, but Kierkegaard moves beyond the Romantic thinkers in his rejection of their extreme isolation of the individual. For Kierkegaard, a human becomes truly human in his/her exercise of choice in a truly inhabited world. This falling away from a Romantic view of the individual is coupled in Kierkegaard with a process of dialogue that is generative of a relational view which includes all voices. Kierkegaard aspires through such a dialogical view of the individual to stand in opposition to fundamentalisms of all types.

4. Philosophy and Tyranny With this sketch in mind, let us return to the challenge of philosophy in a tyrannical society. Anxious times make the Socratic task of philosophy all the more necessary, and can make some persons living under tyranny more receptive to its lessons. It is not so much a fact or a doctrine as it is a sense of reality – one particularly worth cultivating – that crises when life suddenly seems much more uncertain, and much less frivolous than it did before. How does the Socratic philosopher find his/her task in a fundamentalist regime? How does he/she move from indecision to decision? From either “indecision” or “a prechosen decision” to either “fundamentalist authority” or “individual choice-making”? The result of such a choice-making is a concrete consciousness in history which, as a result of the choice, gains a history. Any other approach to life, according to Kierkegaard, is unreflective and inauthentic. If one can say that for Kierkegaard the human person is a being who can grasp the eternal by choosing himself ethically in the present, then reading Kierkegaard under a theocratic tyranny would simply mean defending an ethical stand that has a metaphysical anchor in eternity. Kierkegaard explains this process as the very moment of conversion from “untruth” to “truth” from “not to be” to “to be.” “The continued striving is the great thing; it is a proud task,”8 Kierkegaard affirms in Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses. Philosophy under tyranny is an awakened knowledge of our untruth and the movement to a lived truth. That a seemingly powerless entity such as philosophy is actually able to overcome tyranny is indeed surprising and heartening. The 8

EUD, 357.

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assumption of power by Socrates and Kierkegaard is a genuine spiritual revolution. It is much different from most social revolutions in which new political forces struggle for power against older ones. It is a radical call to spiritual regeneration of the individual. The rejection of Manichean views is particularly significant when it comes to reading Kierkegaard under fundamentalist rule. Fundamentalism draws rhetorical strength from the assertion of the distinctions between “us” and “them.” Such distinctions help the imposition of a monistic vision, thematizing a collective destiny. Reading Kierkegaard under fundamentalist rule creates the need to retain a focus upon the real capabilities of individuals, a focus frequently obscured by inflated Manichean agendas. Nothing is more salutary in this respect than engaging in a Kierkegaardian task of philosophizing under fundamentalism, the form of politics in which the individual has never mattered less. Reading Kierkegaard in Tehran is an encouragement to look for “signals of humanity” (to use a concept used by Todorov) in everyday human experiences. It is this commitment to the full potential and fallibility of the individual that makes Kierkegaardian philosophy a suitable context for dissident thinking in an age of fundamentalist enclaves, where amoral angels can seize the rule of a society to its detriment and final destruction.

Either/Or: Kierkegaard’s Great Overture By Ronald M. Green Abstract Either/Or was written not only as the first work in Kierkegaard’s authorship, but also in some ways as a deliberate prelude to that authorship. More precisely, it serves as a keynote or overture to the authorship. Using the Latin word for work, Either/Or is the overture to Kierkegaard’s opera. I examine here the evaluative account of an overture offered in Either/Or in connection with the discussion of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. By focusing on several key sections of the Either/Or, I also show that in many ways Either/ Or fulfills the requirements that it establishes for a good overture.

Even among the diverse formats and approaches found in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings, Either/Or stands out. Its presents a collage of different contents and styles, ranging from the pithy and cynical reflections of the “Diapsalmata” to Judge William’s booklength philosophical treatises. This diversity of formats and approaches coheres with the pseudonymous editor Victor Eremita’s claim that the published volume represents his arrangement of a loose collection of papers that he had discovered in the hidden compartment of a second-hand writing desk. Despite Eremita’s comments, of course, Either/Or is by no means a haphazard collection of texts. Both in style and content, the book reflects careful authorial design. The young aesthete’s worldview shines forth in both the form and content of the materials of the first part and culminates in the narrative of a love-exploiting, love-destroying relationship of “The Diary of Seducer.” This provides occasion in the second part for the Judge to use romance and marriage as the springboard for his own defense of the ethical, while the Judge’s confidence that one can live ethically is called into question at the close by the country pastor’s sermon. Kierkegaard himself not only viewed the book as a coherent statement, but also perceived it as an appropriate start to his authorship. In

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The Point of View for my Work as an Author, he repeatedly describes the nearly simultaneous appearance in 1843 of the pseudonymous Either/Or and the signed Two Upbuilding Discourses as the foundations of the dialectical structure of his total authorship. Furthermore, although Kierkegaard in The Point of View explicitly denies that he had a fully accurate idea of the authorship from the beginning, he acknowledges that he reflected carefully on every step he took along the way.1 What I would like to suggest today is that Either/Or was written not only as the first work in Kierkegaard’s authorship, but also in some ways as a deliberate prelude to that authorship. More precisely, it serves as a keynote or overture to the authorship. Using the Latin word for work, Either/Or is the overture to Kierkegaard’s opera. Remarkably, Either/Or itself reveals that Kierkegaard gave considerable thought to what constitutes the appropriate prelude to a creative body of work. In the essay about Mozart’s Don Giovanni entitled “The Immediate Erotic Stages or The Musical-Erotic,” the young aesthete spends a good deal of time specifically developing the concept of an operatic overture and distinguishing a good overture from a bad one. “The overture,” he tells us there, “generally provides a profound glimpse into the composer and his psychical relation to his music.” If the author “does not have a profound rapport with the basic mood of the opera, then this will unmistakably betray itself in the overture.” Such a poorly crafted overture is merely “an assemblage of the salient points” but “not the totality that contains … the most penetrating elucidation of the content of the music.”2 “The overture,” the aesthete continues, “frequently is a dangerous temptation for minor composers” who are “easily prompted to plagiarize themselves” and “steal from their own pockets.” A good overture, he adds, “should not have the same content as the opera,” but neither should it “contain something absolutely different.” Instead, “it should have the same content of the opera, but in another way.” It should grip the listener “with the full power of what is central.”3 Illustrating his point, the aesthete draws our attention to the “perfect masterpiece” that is the overture to Mozart’s Don Giovanni. “This overture is no mingling together [Mellemhverandre] of themes.” It is “concise, defined, strongly structured, and, above all, impregnated with the 1 2 3

PV, 76ff. EO1, 126. Ibid.

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essence of the whole opera.” Furthermore, this is not attained “by sucking the blood of the opera; on the contrary, it is rather a prophecy in relation to the opera.”4 One must be cautious about applying this recipe for a good overture to Kierkegaard’s achievement in Either/Or. The aesthete himself tells us “it is appropriate that the overture is composed last so that the artist can be really saturated with the music.” Obviously, Either/ Or is not a deliberate summation of Kierkegaard’s work because it predates that work. Nevertheless, like the good overture the aesthete describes, whose “intended effect is to evoke a mood,” Either/Or does provide a lyrical anticipation of the pseudonymous writings that follow. It accomplishes this, moreover, without “sucking the blood” from those writings. Although some of the leading themes of Kierkegaard’s subsequent works make their appearance, and even in some cases are partly developed in Either/Or, these treatments are only suggestive. Even the illustrations used are very different from those offered in the later works. Like a good overture, Either/Or “sets the mood” for and prophecies what follows, but it avoids creating a situation where any part of the authorship plagiarizes another. Much of what I am saying will be familiar to students of Kierkegaard who have long perceived important harbingers of the authorship in Either/Or. What I want to do, however, is tease out a few of the major themes that make their appearance here to illustrate just how well Either/Or manages to evoke the mood of the authorship without anticipatorily stealing anything from the later writings. I organize this brief overview in terms of some of the key themes emerging in later works that make their first appearance in discreet sections of Either/ Or. Within the latter, I particularly want to focus on the description of the modern Antigone that appears in Either/Or, Part 1 and Judge William’s long letter/discourse on the “Esthetic Validity of Marriage” in Either/Or, Part 2.

The Modern Antigone Immediately following his treatment of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, the aesthete offers a lecture on “The Tragic in Ancient Drama.” Embedded within this lecture is an imaginative “modern” re-invention of Antigone, a reframing of the ancient drama in which “everything is 4

EO1, 127.

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the same and yet everything is different.”5 As in the Greek drama, Oedipus is hailed and admired by the Thebans, who he has liberated, and he is happy in his marriage with Jocasta. But in a deviation from the original, Antigone alone knows about her father’s past: that he has killed his father and married his mother. This secret is Antigone’s burden. While the tragedy of the Greek heroine lies in a young woman’s being destined to be “alive in a place of corpses, never at home with the living nor the dead,” the modern Antigone must say this of her entire life, since she bears within her heart an awful secret that she can reveal to no one. As a result, her life “is essentially at an end.”6 The modern Antigone cannot even break out of her solitude by commiserating with her father. “She loves her father with all her soul, and this love draws her out of herself into her father’s guilt. As the fruit of such a love she feels alien to humankind. She feels her guilt the more she loves her father.” Antigone would gladly confide in Oedipus. But not only can she not do this now that he is dead, “but while her father was living, she could not confide her sorrow to him, for she indeed did not know whether he knew it, and consequently there was the possibility of immersing him in a similar pain.”7 In the aesthete’s imagination, this tormented solitude pursues Antigone throughout her most intimate relationships. He imagines her as falling in love, but in that case “her dowry is her pain.” “Without this dowry, she cannot belong to any man.” To conceal this past “would be impossible; to wish to have concealed it would be a breach of her love – but with it can she belong to him?”8 Antigone “struggles with herself; she has been willing to sacrifice her life for her secret, but now her love is demanded as a sacrifice.” To this is added one further collision: her sympathetic love for her beloved. “With every protestation of love, he increases her pain; with every sigh, he plunges the arrow of grief deeper into her heart…. He beseeches her in the name of the love she has for her father … placing all his hope in this means, not knowing that he has actually worked against himself.”9 Close readers of Kierkegaard’s work will see that while this modern Antigone cannot wed, her story is nevertheless pregnant with many of the ideas developed later in the authorship. For one thing, she anticipates the several ill-starred lovers depicted in Fear and Trembling 5 6 7 8 9

EO1, 154. EO1, 156. EO1, 161. EO1, 163. EO1, 164.

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who silently bear a tragic secret. Like the young swain whose decision to wed could destroy a family, or like Sarah of the Book of Tobit all of whose previous grooms have perished in the bridal chamber,10 the modern Antigone inherits a legacy of familial misfortune that blocks the way to marriage. Like them, she is caught between the ethical mandate to reveal everything to the beloved and the compassionate instinct to spare the beloved suffering, an instinct that in some case requires the necessary cruelty of breach, deception, or concealment. The narratives of tragic love in Fear and Trembling are central to the book’s argument. On one level, they are used to illustrate the pseudonymous author’s point about the required communicability of the ethical (in contrast to the incommunicability of its teleological suspension). A lover aesthetically defies the ethical by failing to communicate with the beloved. Abraham religiously transcends the ethical by abstaining from open discourse with others. As Abraham’s impassioned defender Johannes de Silentio reminds us (and as his name suggests), silence and solitude may have a place in esthetics and are hallmarks of faith, but they are forbidden by the ethical. But these stories about ill-starred lovers in Fear and Trembling’s third Problema also have a much deeper relationship to the meaning of the text. In a series of published articles I have repeatedly argued that Fear and Trembling is not about ethics.11 By this, I mean to say that it is not primarily aimed at depicting and justifying a suspension of paternal (or other) moral duty in the name of obedience to God. Rather, it is a text, which, in a long tradition of Christian writing, uses Abraham as a “figure” for the God-Christ dynamic of salvation. On this account, the “teleological suspension of the ethical” points not to the human suspension of moral duty, but to God’s suspension of humans’ deserved punishment for sin through the atoning sacrifice of God’s own beloved son. Fear and Trembling, in other words, belongs more to the literature of soteriology than it does to ethics. When Fear and Trembling is read primarily as a text dealing with the theme of human sin and its forgiveness, many of its specific features assume a different meaning. For example, the relationship to 10 11

FT, 85, 102-107. “Deciphering Fear and Trembling’s Secret Message” in Religious Studies 22, 1986, pp. 95-111; “Enough Is Enough! Fear and Trembling is Not about Ethics” and “A Reply to Gene Outka” in Journal of Religious Ethics 21/2, Fall 1993, pp. 191-209, 217-220; “ ‘Developing’ Fear and Trembling” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. by Alastair Hannay and Gordon Marino, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998, pp. 257-281.

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Kierkegaard’s own life, usually seen as an undercurrent in the text, undergoes significant change and deepening in meaning. When the primary theme is taken as the tension between human moral duty (in the form of family obligations) and the relationship to God, the text points to Kierkegaard’s breaking of his engagement to Regine in order to pursue his vocation as a religious author. But when sin is the issue, then the breach with his fiancée becomes only the consequence of a much deeper problem: the Kierkegaard family’s own tradition of sin, begun by Kierkegaard’s melancholy father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard. As the book’s epigraph suggests, Fear and Trembling then becomes a secret message between father and son about their mutual involvement in sin and about the possibility – indeed, the hope – that God’s gracious forgiveness can redeem even such a tragic lineage. On this reading, Regine Olsen becomes a secondary secret reader who learns not that she was dropped in the name of a life devoted to God, but that Kierkegaard could not dare to involve her in this dark family history of melancholy and sin. On this reading, Regine is not Isaac to Søren’s Abraham. Rather, Søren is the sacrificed but possibly redeemed son while Regine is both a bystander and further victim of this family drama.12 This reading also makes much deeper sense of the repeated tales of obstructed love in the book. It is not just the fact that something intervenes to prevent the consummation of a union that is noteworthy. Rather what intervenes in almost all these cases – from the tale of Sarah and Tobias to that of Agnes and the Merman – is a destructive prior history of death or sin. These tales of impossible love, then, are not just asides introduced to make some subordinate point about ethical silence or openness. They are essentially related to the Kierkegaardian family drama that animates the book’s main preoccupation: sin and its forgiveness. This returns us to Either/Or’s modern Antigone. What initially seemed to be an imaginative discourse on the nature of tragedy now reveals itself as a window into the world of concerns that animates Kierkegaard’s authorship from start to finish. How is sin to be comprehended? How is it occasioned and transmitted? What are its consequences for the inner life of the individual and for his relationship to others, especially to intimates? What is the role of silence and soli12

For a treatment of the importance of Søren’s relationship to his father, including its connections to Søren’s thinking about hereditary sin, see Joakim Garff Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. By Bruce H. Kirmmse, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2000, p. 346ff.

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tude in the life of a sinner and of the religious individual? And yet, while this brief treatment of Antigone hints at all these questions, it does not answer them. Kierkegaard’s overture does not plagiarize the opera. The lyric note is sounded for those willing to listen, but the longer arias lie ahead. The connection of these passages in Either/Or to Kierkegaard’s larger authorship becomes even clearer when we note how prevalent within the treatment of Antigone are the themes of hereditary sin and anxiety. These themes, of course, are picked up and greatly expanded in The Concept of Anxiety, but they are also suggested here. For example, the aesthete uses the Antigone story to identify a further similarity and a difference between the ancient and modern narratives. Both heroines are shaped by their family’s history. The outer train of events, the inevitable workings of fate initiated by her father’s deeds, crush the classic heroine. “In her childlike piety the Greek Antigone participates in her father’s guilt.” For her, however, “the father’s guilt and suffering are an external fact, an unshakable fact that her sorrow does not move. But for our Antigone it is different.” Her love for her father actively implicates her in his sin and makes her a willing participant in it. Whether because she “did not have the courage to confide in him,” or because “she is continually in conflict with her surrounding world,” she does not merely inherit his sin, in the sense that she falls victim to his guilty deeds. Her life is a willed recovery and reappropriation of his guilt. Ettore Rocca significantly amplifies the possible meaning of the aesthete’s discussion by drawing our attention to the sexual motifs implicit in the aesthete’s treatment of Antigone. “Antigone,” Rocca observes, “is the bride of her dead father’s recollection and, in her sorrow, she expresses her love for him. In this love there is almost the symmetrical guilt of Oedipus: Antigone is the bride of her father’s sorrow, i.e., in inwardness she is the bride of her father. Therefore she becomes ‘equally guilty’ as Oedipus, guilty of the same crime: incest; a modern incest, of course, an incest of reflection, but still an incest. And the fruit of this love must be kept secret and hidden from the eyes of all, because it is the sign of the deepest possible guilt.”13 The modern Antigone is also familiar with anxiety. “At an early age, before she had reached maturity, dark hints of this horrible secret 13

Ettore Rocca “The Secret: Communication Denied, Communication of Domination,” in Søren Kierkegaard and the Word: Essays on Hermeneutics and Communication, ed. by Poul Houe and Gordon D. Marino, Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel 2003, pp. 116-124.

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had momentarily gripped her soul, until certainty hurled her with one blow into the arms of anxiety.” Anxiety, the aesthete explains, “is the vehicle by which the subject appropriates sorrow and assimilates it.” It is “the motive power by which sorrow penetrates a person’s heart.” As an erotic glance craves its object, “so anxiety looks cravingly on sorrow.” But unlike lust or love, “anxiety has an added factor that makes it cling even harder to its object, for it both loves and fears it.”14 Anxiety also contains a reflection on time. “I cannot be anxious about the present but only about the past or the future.” The past, in the form of her father’s unfortunate fate rests like an “impregnable sorrow” on her, and it is also the source of the forebodings about her own fate. The modern Antigone’s Greek counterpart also sorrows, but her sorrow is about the present. It is a deeper sorrow, “but the pain is less.”15 Readers of The Concept of Anxiety will see here anticipations of that work. Antigone’s ambivalent attraction to/repulsion from her sorrow becomes in the latter work anxiety’s “sympathetic antipathy and antipathetic sympathy.”16 Anxiety’s relationship to past and future takes form in the concept of anxiety as “freedom’s possibility.” In The Concept of Anxiety we learn that, like the modern Antigone, we can be anxious about our past, because a past that is not once and for all repented always “stands in a relation of possibility to me.” I can be anxious about a past “because I have not placed it in an essential relation to myself as past and have in some deceitful way or another prevented it from being past.”17 Compared with The Concept of Anxiety, Either/Or’s treatment of anxiety in connection with Antigone is only a promissory note, only a hint. In his discussion of Mozart’s overture the aesthete particularly draws our attention of the sensuous-erotic motif that represents Don Giovanni. He remarks that “the beginning of it is admirably expressed. We hear it so faintly, so cryptically suggested. We hear it, but it is over so swiftly that it is as if we had heard something we had not heard. It requires an alert ear, an erotic ear, to notice the first time the hint is given in the overture of the light play of this desire that is so richly expressed later in all its lavish profusion.”18 The same could be 14 15 16 17 18

Ibid., pp. 154ff. Ibid., p. 155. CA, 42. CA, 91ff. EO1, 128. Nils Holger Petersen believes that he is able to identify the precise point in the overture to which the aesthete refers. He believes that this is the anxious set of violin motifs occurring from bar 11 to bar 14 of the slow d minor introduction to the

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said of the motifs sounded only briefly in the treatment of the modern Antigone. It requires an alert ear, an ethico-religious ear to perceive them. Bringing together in a single illustration the key Kierkegaardian themes of hereditary sin, sexual transgression, spiritual isolation, silence, and the relationship between time and eternity, this brief discussion in Either/Or sets the tone for the works to come. By displaying the essential relationship between all these ideas, the treatment of Antigone also provides a key to understanding them as they are later developed. Gordon Marino has observed that The Concept of Anxiety is a “maddeningly difficult book,” in which, he says “there are many passages … the meaning of which completely escapes me.”19 Many of us have shared Marino’s frustration with this difficult work. But listening carefully to Kierkegaard’s overture at this fleeting moment, however, we can gather additional insight for the score that follows.

The “Aesthetic Validity of Marriage” In his review of Don Giovanni, the aesthete comments on the movement or progression of the opera’s overture. It begins, he says, “with a few, deep, even earnest notes.” These signify the Commendatore. But the interest of the opera is Don Giovanni alone, “not Don Giovanni and the Commendatore.” For this reason, “Mozart seems to have deliberately designed it in such a way that the deep voice that rings out in the beginning gradually becomes weaker and weaker.” It “must hurry to keep pace with the demonic speed that evades it” and that “gradually creates the transition to the opera itself.”20 In this respect, the overture is like a sunrise. “So it is in nature that one sometimes sees the horizon dark and clouded,” hiding everything in the obscurity of night. “Then in the most distant heavens, far off on the horizon, one sees a flash.” This slowly gathers strength until it begins to illumi-

19

20

overture, motifs which reappear much later in Don Giovanni’s surprised response in the second act to the arrival of the statue of the Commendatore. For Petersen the association of this motif with the Commendatore confirms the aesthete’s view that Don Giovanni’s sensuality betrays anxiety. See his “Søren Kierkegaard’s Aestheticist and Mozart’s Don Giovanni” in Interart Poetics: Essays on the Interrelations of the Arts and Media, ed. by Ulla-Britta Lagerroth, Hans Lund and Erik Hedling, Amsterdam: Rodopi 1997, p. 176. Gordon Marino “Anxiety in The Concept of Anxiety” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, pp. 308-328, p. 308. EO1, 127.

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nate the entire heaven with its flame and “it seems as if the darkness itself has lost its composure and is beginning to move.” 21 Don Giovanni represents “the full force of the sensuous.” After Mozart has had him come into existence this way, “his life now develops for us in the dancing strains of the violin, in which he lightly, fleetingly speeds on over the abyss…jubilating during his brief span.”22 Implicit in this description of the overture is the idea that a good overture should, in its development and progression, evidence the dominant theme of the opera, and, once again, Kierkegaard seems to have heeded the aesthete’s advice. The directionality of Either/Or also betrays the dominant motif of the authorship as a whole. But here the progression is in exactly the opposite direction of Don Giovanni. Since Mozart’s opera epitomizes the musical-erotic, it moves from moral gravity – earnestness – to utter sensuousness. Don Giovanni’s voice comes to eclipse that of the Commendatore. But in Either/Or, it is the light, cynical, bantering voice of the aesthete that is progressively overcome and eclipsed by earnestness. This progression is already evident in the papers of the aesthete. Beginning with a tone of haughty cynicism in the “Diapsalmata,” they conclude on the last pages of the “Seducer’s Diary” with a note of revulsion. The esthetic approach to life has lost its charm. The love object has utterly “lost her fragrance.” 23 The way is thus prepared for the devastating critique of the purely sensual-erotic life in the Judge’s treatment of the “Aesthetic Validity of Marriage.” Elsewhere, I have argued that this treatise seems be modeled on a Kantian transcendental deduction.24 Like such a deduction, it takes a given aspect of empirical experience and shows that that aspect cannot be given in experience without the presupposition of some prior, non-empirical, conceptual reality. In Kant’s case, this “not without” argument is used repeatedly in his writings to vindicate the a priori nature of space and time, the necessity of the categories of cognition, the moral law and human freedom. In the case of Judge William, the argument proceeds from a different starting point. It is not cognitive/moral experience but emotional/ moral experience. The Judge focuses on what the aesthete repeatedly 21 22 23 24

EO1, 129. EO1, 129ff. EO1, 445. Ronald M. Green “Kierkegaard’s Great Critique: Either/Or as a Kantian Transcendental Deduction” in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Either/Or II, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press 1995, pp. 139-153.

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admits is the pinnacle of sensuous-emotional life: the experience of first love. First love is distinguished above all by its relation to time. As the Judge puts it, such love “bears a stamp of eternity.” From the first moment that they see one another, the lovers are convinced that they have always been destined for one another and are also meant to stay together forever. The seducer expresses this sensibility when he asks, “What does erotic love love? Infinity. – What does erotic love fear? Boundaries.”25 The Judge agrees when he observes that all love, “whether it is superstitious, romantic, chivalrous love or the deeper moral, religious love filled with a vigorous and vital conviction, has precisely the qualification of eternity in it.”26 First love, he adds, “has an element of the sensuous, an element of beauty, but nevertheless it is not simply sensuous…. This is the necessity of first love. Like everything eternal, it has implicit the duplexity of positing itself backward into all eternity and forward into all eternity.” 27 Elsewhere, in terms reminiscent of Kant’s deductions, the Judge describes this sense of infinitude as “the apriority, that the first love has.” 28 It is true that the aesthete also sometimes appears to deny the reality of this transtemporal romantic experience. In his review of Scribe’s drama entitled “The First Love,” the aesthete observes that all talk about first love evidences a “sophistical thesis” because, when it is convenient, first love is presented quantitatively, as the first in a series. But at other times it is used qualitatively so that any intense infatuation, however late in a series, is offered up as a “first love.” These confusions, the aesthete observes, are laughingly displayed in the case of the widower and widow, each with five children, who “combine forces” and “nevertheless assure one another on the wedding day that this love is their first love.”29 But this derision of first love does not reflect the aesthete’s deepest beliefs. No less than the young lovers in the romances that he chronicles, the aesthete acknowledges the reality and power of the experience of first love. He never denies that first love presents itself as unique and timeless, and he exalts and pursues the experience of falling in love for its own sake. The seducer confesses that, although he “had not expected to be able to taste once again the first fruits of falling in love,” he is now dazed by the experience and has “gone under in 25 26 27 28 29

EO2, 442. EO2, 32. EO2, 42-43. EO2, 60. EO1, 254.

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love-rapture.”30 The aesthete’s problem, here and everywhere, is that his basic understanding of human existence does not permit him to make sense of this experience in any way short of deriding it. This deep internal contradiction in the aesthete’s worldview furnishes the occasion for the Judge’s “not-without” transcendental deduction. He writes his young friend, “However you twist and turn at this point, you must admit that the task is to preserve love in time. If this is impossible, then love is an impossibility.” 31 But can something as immediate and sensuous as romantic rapture be preserved? Can it survive the evanescence of human moods and feelings? The Judge believes that the answer to these questions resides in marriage. The very ought of first love, the overwhelming sense that it must continue, finds expression in the marriage vows. Furthermore, the fact that these vows can be meaningfully uttered, tells us that they are capable of fulfillment. In Kantian terms, ought implies can. For lovers, making these vows and obeying them is not the hard stick of duty that crushes and replaces emotion – what the cynical aesthete calls the birch switch (or “Master Erik”) that appears once love is gone. Instead, the vows are the promised fulfillment of love’s deepest impulse. In the Judge’s words, [M]arital love…in the ethical and the religious already has duty within itself, and when duty manifests itself to them it is not a stranger, a shameless outsider, who nevertheless has such an authority that by virtue of the secrecy of love one does not dare to show him the door. No, he comes as an old intimate, as a friend, as a confidant whom the lovers both know in the deepest secrecy of their love….To them it would not be sufficient for duty to say encouragingly, “It can be done, love can be preserved”; but because he says: It shall be preserved,” there is an implicit authority that corresponds to the inwardness of their wish. Love casts out fear, but if love nevertheless fears for itself a moment, for its own salvation, then duty is precisely the divine nourishment love needs, for duty says, “Fear not; you shall [skal] conquer” – says it not in the future sense, for then it is only a hope, but in the imperative mood, and therein rests a conviction that nothing can shake.32 This discovery of the imperative to faithfulness at the heart of romantic love completes the Judge’s transcendental deduction. He has demonstrated that the fulfillment of the sensual erotic cannot occur 30 31 32

EO1, 324. EO2, 141. EO2, 145.

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without a movement from a life based on a passive response to satisfactions and moods to one based on active ethical commitment and resolve. The aesthetic sphere of existence points to its successor, but the transition is made not by staying within aesthetic presuppositions but only by a willed decision to replace enjoyment with imperturbable ethical resolve. One cannot reach the certainty of love’s persistence by what Kierkegaard later describes as an “approximating transition” – by some ever-greater refinement of mood or feeling. One can only do so by a qualitative shift in one’s guiding premises, by a leap. In this ethical resolve, the married person also conquers time. Not only can love be made to abide, but time itself is recovered and permeated with the eternal. No longer the “dangerous enemy” of human finitude, time now lends meaning to human life. The married man, the Judge tells us, “has not killed time but has rescued it and preserved it in eternity.” He “truly lives poetically” and “solves the great riddle, to live in eternity and yet hear the cabinet clock strike in such a way that its striking does not shorten but lengthens his eternity.” 33 Readers of Kierkegaard will see all the motifs introduced here as crucial to his authorship as whole. The Judge’s deduction of love’s need for marriage provides the authorship’s first illustration of the leap as the “category of decision.”34 While Fear and Trembling and the Postscript will take these concepts to new heights and apply them across the whole compass of existence spheres, the Judge’s argument here provides a glimpse into the basic dynamics that Kierkegaard develops into a philosophy of existence. Indeed, at the very close of Either/Or, the sermon by the country pastor calls into question the Judge’s own tranquil confidence in his ethical integrity and fidelity, suggesting the religious leap that becomes the principal focus of Fear and Trembling and the Postscript. Judge William has already sounded the note and set the mood. The theme of time and its relationship to eternity that will become a leitmotif of the authorship also makes its appearance, but in an inverted form. Here the problem is how eternity can be experienced in time; how eternity can recover time, how love can survive the ravages of aging and death. In the Fragments and the Postscript, however, the problem is how an event in time, specifically the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, can be thought essential to an eternal destiny. In the words of the Fragments’ epigraph, the questions are: “Can a his33 34

EO2, 138. CUP1, 91.

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torical point of departure be given for an eternal consciousness; how can such a point of departure be of more than historical interest; can an eternal happiness be built on historical knowledge?” 35 Despite this different angle of approach, however, the underlying problem is the same. How can human beings, as creatures living at the intersection of time and eternity, make sense of their lives? How can we validate both time and eternity without fleeing from the eternal into the temporal or the temporal into the eternal? On this point I will conclude. There is much more that could be said. Woven throughout the texts of Either/Or are many more pointers to the authorship to come. For example, the theme of despair, not fully developed until near the end of the pseudonymous authorship in the Sickness unto Death, makes a repeated appearance even in this early work. We find it in the tale of the “Unhappiest Man.” In not being able to die, not being able to “slip down into a grave,”36 it offers a premonition of the later work’s assertion that “the torment of despair is precisely the inability to die.”37 And in the Judge’s assertion that the person who wills despair “is truly beyond despair,” 38 we find an anticipation of Anti-Climacus’s paradoxical assurance that “it is the worst misfortune never to have had that sickness” and “a true godsend to get it.”39 In his treatment of the overture of Don Giovanni, the aesthete remarks: “To anyone hearing the overture after he has become more familiar with the opera, it may seem as if he had penetrated the hidden workshop where the forces he has learned to identify in the opera move with a primitive power, where they wrestle with one another with all their might.”40 Much the same can be said of Either/Or. Although a youthful work in every sense it boldly anticipates the sophisticated body of work to follow. Re-reading it from the perspective of the later work, we truly feel that we have “penetrated the hidden workshop” of Kierkegaard’s creative endeavor.

35 36 37 38 39 40

PF, 1. EO1, 220. SUD, 18. EO2, 213. EO2, 26. EO1, 127.

Innen und Außen Zu Kierkegaards Auseinandersetzung mit der romantischen Ironie vor dem Hintergrund der Mitteilungsform von Entweder/Oder Von Philipp Schwab Abstract Kierkegaard’s relation to romanticism and to romantic irony is usually taken into consideration with emphasis on Kierkegaard’s criticism of the romantic-aesthetic form of existence. At the same time, however, Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works obviously make broad use of romantic irony. Based on the communicational form of Either/Or the article is supposed to elaborate that Kierkegaard’s method of indirect communication, which is considered the decisive principle of his thought, is closely related to the structure of romantic irony. As well as romantic irony, although under different circumstances, indirect communication works as a representation of the unrepresentable (Darstellung des Undarstellbaren) which is constantly aware of the limitations of its own approaches and perspectives and necessarily makes use of refracted and hovering forms.

I. Romantische Ironie und indirekte Mitteilung Fragt man nach dem Verhältnis Kierkegaards zur Romantik und insbesondere zur romantischen Ironie, so tritt zunächst der Aspekt der Kritik in den Blick.1 Schon in der Magister-Dissertation Über den 1

Dies ist auch die dominierende Perspektive insbesondere der älteren Forschung. Vgl. Anna Paulsen „Kierkegaard in seinem Verhältnis zur deutschen Romantik: Einfluss und Überwindung“ in Kierkegaardiana 3, 1959, S. 38-47; Gerhard vom Hofe Die Romantikkritik Sören Kierkegaards, Frankfurt a. M.: Athenäum-Verlag 1972. Differenzierter sind Hagemann und Feger, vgl. Tim Hagemann Reden und Existieren: Kierkegaards antipersuasive Rhetorik, Berlin: Philo Verlag 2001, S. 26; Hans Feger „Kierkegaards Kritik der romantischen Ironie als Wegbereiter einer

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Begriff der Ironie hatte Kierkegaard in zweifacher Hinsicht Kritik an der romantischen Ironie geübt. Einerseits sucht Kierkegaard in enger Anlehnung an Hegel den Nachweis zu führen, die romantische Ironie sei ,welthistorisch unberechtigt‘, 2 andererseits lässt sich in der Ironieschrift eine Perspektive aufweisen, die den romantischen Ironiker als Typus einer scheiternden Existenzform kritisiert, der es an Wirklichkeitsvollzug fehle, – die „Wirklichkeit der Ironie“ sei „bloße Möglichkeit.“3 Dieser zweite Aspekt zieht sich von Entweder/Oder und der Wiederholung an durch das gesamte pseudonyme Werk hindurch und findet schließlich ihre schärfste und begrifflich dichteste Formulierung in der Krankheit zum Tode. Was Anti-Climacus in den Abschnitten über die Verzweiflung der Unendlichkeit und die Verzweiflung der Möglichkeit als Modus scheiternder Existenz vorführt, ist der Entwurf des wirklichkeitsfremden Phantasten, der sich im unendlichen Möglichkeitsspielraum immer neuer poetischer Konstruktionen ergeht und so einen gelingenden, konkreten Selbstvollzug beständig verfehlen muss.4 Angesichts dieser ebenso nachdrücklichen wie weit gespannten Kritik muss es zunächst verwunderlich erscheinen, dass Kierkegaards pseudonyme Werke in augenscheinlicher Weise von den Darstellungsformen romantischer Ironie geprägt sind. Die virtuose Verschachtelung pseudonymer Autoren, das multiplizierte Spiel der Brechungen, die Heterogenität der Darstellungsform und nicht zuletzt der sprunghafte und bis in die feinsten Nuancen durchreflektierte Stil Kierkegaards, all dies sind zweifellos Merkmale romantischer Ironie. 5 Dabei verdankt sich Kierkegaards greifbare Anverwandlung der künstlerischen Gestaltungsmittel romantischer Ironie nicht einem äußeren, beiläufigen Umstand und kann auch nicht als persönliche stilistische Eigenart oder verschwindende dichterische Einkleidung seiner Schriften marginalisiert werden.

2 3 4 5

negativen Ästhetik“ in Fichte-Studien 19, 2002, S. 149-184. Feger hält fest: „Bei aller Kritik bleibt Kierkegaard der Tradition romantischer Ironie verbunden. Seine Ironiekritik ist hier selbst noch Bestandteil der Entwicklung, zu der sie sich kritisch verhält.“ (Ebd., S. 172) Vgl. BI, 247 u. 280 / SKS 1, 282 u. 311. BI, 285 / SKS 1, 315. Vgl. KT, 26-29 u. 32-34 / SKS 11, 146-148 u. 151-153. Exemplarisch ist diese Aufnahme romantischer Motive und Textpraktiken von Hagemann nachgewiesen worden in einem Vergleich des Vorworts der Elixiere des Teufels von E. T. A. Hoffmann und der „Fundanzeige“ der Stadien auf des Lebens Weg (vgl. Hagemann Reden und Existieren, S. 28).

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Die folgenden Ausführungen sollen vielmehr die These erhärten, dass Kierkegaard bei aller Polemik gegen den romantisch-ästhetischen Existenztypus die Struktur romantischer Ironie produktiv in seine eigene, von ihm selbst mehrfach hervorgehobene und reflektierte Methode einer indirekten Mitteilung übersetzt. Diese Aneignung ist deswegen möglich, weil Kierkegaards denkerisches Verfahren strukturell von einer Ambivalenz der Darstellungsform lebt, die auch für die romantische Ironie konstitutiv ist, nämlich einer Darstellung des Undarstellbaren. Dabei steht die weiter gefasste These im Hintergrund, dass Kierkegaards experimentelle Methode einer indirekten Mitteilung das bestimmende Strukturprinzip seines Denkens ausmacht, von dem her sein Werk sich überhaupt erst erschließt. Es ist Kierkegaard selbst, der auf die Wichtigkeit seiner Methode mehrfach und eindringlich hingewiesen hat. Die dichteste und nachdrücklichste Formulierung findet sich im Journal des Jahres 1847. Dort notiert Kierkegaard, bezeichnenderweise von sich selbst in der dritten Person sprechend: Aber wenn ein Schriftsteller einen eigentümlichen Begriff davon hat, was Mitteilung ist, wenn vielleicht gerade seine ganze Eigentümlichkeit, die Realität seiner historischen Bedeutung hierin konzentriert ist, ja dann hat es gute Weile – O, Schule der Geduld. Ehe die Rede davon sein kann, etwas von dem zu verstehen, was er mitgeteilt hat, muss man ihn zuerst verstehen in der ihm eigentümlichen Dialektik der Mitteilung und sie in allem, was man versteht, mitverstehen. Und diese ihm eigentümliche Dialektik der Mitteilung kann er ja doch nicht in der traditionellen Dialektik der Mitteilung mitteilen. Das möchte die Zeit freilich von ihm verlangen, was nur natürlich ist, weil es nämlich blanker Unsinn ist. 6

Dieser Journaleintrag gibt drei wesentliche Hinweise: Erstens erschließt sich, wenigstens dieser Notiz Kierkegaards zufolge, die Struktur des Werkes erst dann, wenn die Dialektik der Mitteilung nachvollzogen und stets mitverstanden wird; zweitens sieht Kierkegaard selbst die „Realität seiner historischen Bedeutung“, d. h. die geschichtliche Relevanz und zugleich das spezifisch Neue und Einzigartige seines Denkens in seinem Begriff der Mitteilung versammelt. Drittens schließlich verweist die letzte Bemerkung Kierkegaards, dass die Dialektik der Mitteilung nicht in der „überkommenen Dialektik der Mitteilung“, d. h. direkt mitgeteilt werden kann, auf den charak6

T II, 190 / SKS 20, 275 (Pap. VIII A 466), Übersetzung modifiziert nach: Tim Hagemann „Zur Entstehungsgeschichte von Kierkegaards ‚Dialektik‘“ in Sören Kierkegaard Die Dialektik der ethischen und der ethisch-religiösen Mitteilung, aus dem Dänischen und hrsg. von Tim Hagemann, Bodenheim: Philo Verlag 1997, S. 7-13, hier S. 9 f.

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teristischen Rückstoß von Kierkegaards Methode. Nicht nur hat sich das Kierkegaardsche Denken notwendig in den gebrochenen Formen des Indirekten zu vollziehen, – auch in der Ansprache dieser Methode als solcher entzieht sie sich einer definitiven Formulierung und Systematisierung. In dieser Hinsicht erscheint Kierkegaard außerordentlich modern: Als einer der ersten Denker der nachidealistischen Epoche entwirft er eine experimentelle, entschieden nicht-systematische Methode und antizipiert auf diesem Wege wesentliche Strömungen des späten 19. und des 20. Jahrhunderts.7

II. Darstellung des Undarstellbaren – Kierkegaards Anverwandlung romantischer Ironie unter umgekehrten Vorzeichen Obgleich die indirekte Mitteilung die spezifische und originale Signatur des Kierkegaardschen Denkens ist und zudem ihre wesentliche Pointe erst im polemischen Abstoß der Systemphilosophie des Deutschen Idealismus erhält, verweist sie doch explizit wie implizit auf historische Vorbilder. Kierkegaard selbst hat in dieser Hinsicht immer wieder auf die Figur des Sokrates hingedeutet. Insbesondere vor dem Hintergrund der in der Ironieschrift aufgerufenen Konstellation, in der Kierkegaard die sokratische Ironie als welthistorisch berechtigt, die romantische Ironie hingegen als vollkommen unberechtigt vorführt, droht die untergründige strukturelle Verwandtschaft zwischen indirekter Mitteilung und romantischer Ironie aus dem Blick zu treten. Der Verweis auf diese Verwandtschaft soll freilich keineswegs der simplifizierenden These das Wort reden, indirekte Mitteilung und romantische Ironie fielen einfach in Eines. Im Gegenteil kommt es gerade im Aufweis der strukturellen Gemeinsamkeit darauf an, die spezifischen Differenzen beider Konzeptionen hervorzuheben. Dabei ist zunächst festzuhalten, dass die romantische Ironie im Rahmen des Problemhorizontes und Bezugsfeldes der Fichteschen

7

Vgl. zum Mitteilungsbegriff ausführlicher: Philipp Schwab „Der Asket im System. Zu Kierkegaards Kritik an der Kontemplation als Fundament der Ethik Schopenhauers“ in Die Ethik Arthur Schopenhauers im Ausgang vom Deutschen Idealismus (Fichte/Schelling), hrsg. von Lore Hühn in redaktioneller Zusammenarbeit mit Philipp Schwab, Würzburg: Ergon 2006, S. 321-345, hier S. 337-341.

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Transzendentalphilosophie formuliert wird.8 Schon von diesem Bezugsrahmen distanziert sich die Kierkegaardsche Existenzialphilosophie mit ihrem Ansatz beim konkret existierenden Einzelnen nachdrücklich. Zudem entfaltet sich die romantische Ironie im Kontext spezifisch poetologischer Überlegungen, die eine Aufhebung der Philosophie in Poesie zum Fluchtpunkt haben.9 Die Kierkegaardsche experimentelle Miteilungsform arbeitet zwar ebenfalls beständig auf einen Bereich hin, der sich von der Philosophie nicht mehr erreichen lässt; – im scharfen Kontrast zu den ästhetischen Entwürfen der Frühromantiker ist dieser Bereich aber die Wirklichkeit, d. h. für Kierkegaard der konkrete Existenzvollzug des Einzelnen. Im Verhältnis zur romantischen Ironie operiert Kierkegaards Methode gleichsam unter umgekehrten Vorzeichen. Insbesondere in der Konzeption Friedrich Schlegels ist die Ironie notwendige Darstellungs- und Ausdrucksform der romantischen Poesie als „progressive[r] Universalpoesie“, die „ewig nur werden, niemals vollendet sein kann“10 und so für ein je entzogenes Absolutes einsteht.11 Noch deutlicher hat Schlegel die Nichtdarstellbarkeit des Absoluten in den Philosophischen Lehrjahren zum Ausdruck gebracht: „Erkennen bezeichnet schon ein bedingtes Wissen. Die Nichterkennbarkeit des Absoluten ist also eine identische Trivialität.“12 8

9 10

11

12

Vgl. hierzu Manfred Frank Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik. Vorlesungen, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 1989, bes. S. 248-262; Lore Hühn „Das Schweben der Einbildungskraft. Zur frühromantischen Überbietung Fichtes“ in Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 70, 1996, S. 569-599; Andreas Barth Inverse Verkehrung der Reflexion: Ironische Textverfahren bei Friedrich Schlegel und Novalis, Heidelberg 2001, bes. S. 59-88, und ausführlich Martin Götze Ironie und absolute Darstellung: Philosophie und Poetik in der Frühromantik, Paderborn u. a.: Schöningh 2001, bes. S. 73-157. Vgl. hierzu Götze Ironie und absolute Darstellung, S. 13 f., S. 217-31 u. S. 337-376. Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel Ausgabe, hrsg. von Ernst Behler u. a., Paderborn u. a.: Schöningh 1958 ff. (Im Folgenden: KFSA); Bd. II, S. 182 f. Dass die romantische Ironie wesentlich Darstellung des positiv nicht darstellbaren Absoluten ist, hat unseres Wissens zuerst Frank herausgearbeitet; vgl. Frank Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik, S. 222-247, S. 287-316, zur Ironie bes. S. 247, S. 289, S. 301-305; vgl. hierzu insbesondere Lore Hühn „Das Schweben der Einbildungskraft“, S. 570-578; vgl. auch Barth Inverse Verkehrung der Reflexion, S. 95 u. S. 138 und Götze Ironie und absolute Darstellung, S. 73-80, S. 189-194 u. S. 381. Vgl. zum weiteren Horizont der Thematik: Petra Bahr Darstellung des Undarstellbaren: Religionstheoretische Studien zum Darstellungsbegriff bei A. G. Baumgarten und I. Kant, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2004. Schlegel KFSA, Bd. XVIII, S. 511; im gleichen Heft notiert Schlegel, das Absolute selbst sei „indemonstrabel“ (ebd., S. 512).

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Es ist gerade die Unabgeschlossenheit der auf uneinholbare Universalität abzielenden romantischen Poesie, die das schwebende Verfahren der Ironie notwendig macht: Und doch kann auch sie am meisten zwischen Dargestelltem und dem Darstellenden, frei von allem realen und idealen Interesse auf den Flügeln der poetischen Reflexion in der Mitte schweben, diese Reflexion immer wieder potenzieren und wie in einer endlosen Reihe von Spiegeln vervielfachen.13

Bei Kierkegaard hingegen ist die gebrochene und doppeltreflektierte Form indirekter Mitteilung zwar ebenfalls notwendige Darstellungsform, aber notwendig im Bezug auf die Unabgeschlossenheit und uneinholbare Innerlichkeit des konkreten Existenzvollzugs des Einzelnen. Während die romantische Ironie gleichsam ,nach oben‘ auf eine übergreifende, aber nur im Modus ihres Entzugs präsente Universalität abzielt, geht das Denken Kierkegaards gleichsam ,nach unten’ auf die in keiner Darstellung einholbare Singularität der Existenz. Die Ausrichtung auf die Einzelheit der Existenz bringt noch eine weitere wesentliche Verschiebung mit sich: Die indirekte Mitteilung Kierkegaards zielt ihrer Struktur nach auf Aneignung; – das Nichtdarstellbare im Horizont von Kierkegaards Denken ist nicht ein uneinholbares Übergreifendes, sondern der wirklich gelebte Existenzvollzug, der dem Einzelnen in keiner Weise abgenommen werden kann. Dabei ist es gerade die Pointe indirekter Mitteilung, dem Leser ein Ergebnis entschieden vorzuenthalten, ihn durch die gebrochene Form in eine Stellung zu bringen, in der er auf sich selbst zurückgeworfen ist. Trotz dieser wesentlichen, von der romantischen Ironie klar abstechenden Charakteristika indirekter Mitteilung besteht die strukturelle Verwandtschaft von romantischer Ironie und indirekter Mitteilung in der Schwebe einer Darstellungsform,14 die auf einen Bereich abzielt, den sie per definitionem nicht erreichen kann. Zudem ist der für das Kierkegaardsche Denken charakteristische Rückstoß der Methode schon in der romantischen Ironie vorgeprägt. Seine mannigfachen Bestimmungen der Ironie gibt Friedrich Schlegel nicht in einer geschlossenen, systematisierenden Abhandlung, sondern in der gebrochenen Form des Fragments. Gerade dort, wo Schle13

14

Schlegel KFSA, Bd. II, S. 183; vgl. zur Interpretation des 116. Athenäumsfragments Michael Elsässer Friedrich Schlegels Kritik am Ding. Mit einem Geleitwort hrsg. von Werner Beierwaltes, Hamburg: Meiner 1994, S. 27 f. u. S. 35; vgl. auch Hühn „Schweben der Einbildungskraft“, S. 571 f., u. Barth Inverse Verkehrung der Reflexion, S. 147-149. Vgl. hierzu nochmals Hühn „Schweben der Einbildungskraft“.

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gel scheinbar den Anspruch erhebt, die eigentümlich fragmentarische und ironische, die „unverständliche“ Form des Athenäum zu klären, bekommt der Leser nur einen Auszug ironischen Sprechens mehr. In dem Prosa-Stück Über die Unverständlichkeit entwirft Schlegel zwar eine „Übersicht vom ganzen System der Ironie“,15 verliert sich aber dabei in immer weiteren Abschweifungen, die das eigene Vorgehen ironisch konterkarieren und brechen.16 Wie die Kierkegaardsche Ansprache indirekter Mitteilung nie im strengen Sinne direkt und vollständig ist, so ist Schlegels Erörterung der Ironie stets ihrerseits ironisch.

III. Die inkommensurable Innerlichkeit – zum Vorwort von Entweder/Oder Dass Kierkegaards Darstellungsverfahren in der beschriebenen Hinsicht auf die Struktur romantischer Ironie rekurriert, soll im Folgenden anhand des Vorworts von Entweder/Oder aufgezeigt werden.17 Schon die verschachtelte Herausgeberfiktion, die wesentlich die Mitteilungssituation des Werks ausmacht, stellt eine Anleihe bei den literarischen Gestaltungsformen romantischer Ironie dar. Potenziert wird die Brechung in der Herausgeberschaft, indem Victor Eremita ausdrücklich auf sie reflektiert. Er selbst als fiktiver Herausgeber steht nämlich vor dem Problem, das der Ästhetiker A nicht seinerseits Ver15 16

17

Schlegel KFSA, Bd. II, S. 363-372, Zitat S. 369. Vgl. hierzu allerdings Strohschneider-Kohrs, die trotz der konstatierten Brechung und Vielgestaltigkeit der Schlegelschen Rede die These vertritt, in Über die Unverständlichkeit werde keine Ironie künstlerisch gestaltet. Vgl. Ingrid StrohschneiderKohrs Die romantische Ironie in Theorie und Gestaltung, 2., durchges. und erw. Auflage, Tübingen: Niemeyer 1977, S. 273-282, bes. S. 280-282. Vgl. zur Interpretation des Vorworts auch: Karin Pulmer Die dementierte Alternative: Gesellschaft und Geschichte in der ästhetischen Konstruktion von Kierkegaards „Entweder-Oder“, Frankfurt a. M. / Bern: Lang 1982, S. 45-50 u. S. 146-153; Walter Baumgartner „Natürlich, ein altes Manuskript… Die Herausgeberfiktion in Almquists Amorina und in Kierkegaards Entweder-Oder – zum fiktionalen Kommunikationsangebot zweier romantischer Romane“ in Festschrift für Oskar Bandle. Zum 60. Geburtstag am 11. Januar 1986, hrsg. v. Hans-Peter Naumann u. a., Frankfurt a. M. / Basel: Helbing und Lichtenhahn 1986, S. 265-283, bes. S. 272-274; Achim Kinter Rezeption und Existenz: Untersuchungen zu Sören Kierkegaards „Entweder-Oder“, Frankfurt a. M. u. a.: Lang 1991, S. 15-22, u. S. 29-31; Smail Rapic Ethische Selbstverständigung. Kierkegaards Auseinandersetzung mit der Ethik Kants und der Rechtsphilosophie Hegel, Bd. 16 in KSMS, Berlin / New York: de Gruyter 2007, S. 9-18.

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fasser des „Tagebuch des Verführers“ sein will – ein Umstand, den Eremita folgendermaßen kommentiert: Dies ist ein alter novellistischer Kniff, gegen den ich weiter nichts einzuwenden hätte, wenn er nur nicht dazu beitrüge, meine eigne Stellung überaus verwickelt zu machen: der eine Verfasser kommt nun dazu, in dem andern drinzustecken wie Schachteln in einem chinesischen Schachtelspiel.18

Der erste Satz der Schrift, der im Folgenden eingehender analysiert werden soll, ist nun gar nicht dazu angetan, dieses Schachtel- und Verwirrspiel zu lösen, er greift es vielmehr auf und gibt ihm eine zusätzliche Nuance: Vielleicht ist es dir doch unterweilen beigekommen, lieber Leser, ein wenig an der Richtigkeit des bekannten philosophischen Satzes zu zweifeln, daß das Äußere das Innere ist, das Innere das Äußere.19

Zunächst ist in dieser Ansprache die Parodie der gelehrten Anspielung festzuhalten. Jener ,philosophische Satz‘, auf den Victor Eremita hier anspielt, dürfte selbst einem gebildeten Leserkreis nicht so unmittelbar ,bekannt‘ sein – schließlich steht er innerhalb des systematischen Zusammenhangs von Hegels Wesenslogik.20 Zweitens fällt die forcierte Ansprache des Lesers auf. Schon im ersten Satz wird dem „lieben Leser“ deutlich gemacht, dass er als Adressat es ist, an den das Buch sich ausdrücklich wendet. Dies ist insbesondere dann von Belang, wenn man zum ersten Satz der Schrift den letzten hinzunimmt, der lautet: „denn allein die Wahrheit, die erbaut, ist Wahrheit für dich.“21 Das Buch Entweder /Oder, so lässt sich schon aus den beiden zitierten Sätzen schließen, gibt dem Leser nicht einen neutral aufzunehmenden Gehalt, es nimmt vielmehr von der ersten Zeile an den Leser mit in seinen Gang hinein. Dass die Leseransprache im Falle von Entweder/Oder nicht einfach dazu dient, den Leser mit in das Erzählgeschehen einzubinden, wird deutlich, wenn drittens auf den Modus der Leseransprache reflektiert wird. Dem Leser wird keine Mitteilung gemacht, die er einfach aufzunehmen hätte, ihm wird auch keine Leseanweisung gegeben, an den 18 19

20

21

EO1, 9 / SKS 2, 16 (Übersetzung leicht modifiziert). EO1, 3 / SKS 2, 11; vgl. hierzu die These von Stewart, Kierkegaards polemische Abgrenzung beziehe sich eher auf Heiberg als auf Hegel: Jon Stewart Kierkegaard’s relations to Hegel reconsidered, Cambridge u. a.: Cambridge University Press 2003, S. 323-329. Vgl. G. W. F. Hegel Werke in zwanzig Bänden, auf der Grundlage der Werke von 1832–1845 neu edierte Ausgabe, Red. Eva Moldenhauer u. Karl Markus Michel, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 1969-71, Bd. 6, S. 179 f. EO2, 377 / SKS 3, 332 (Übersetzung modifiziert).

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Leser wird auch nicht in irgendeiner Weise appelliert. Es ist vielmehr der hypothetische Modus der Unterstellung, in dem Victor Eremita den Leser zweideutig anspricht: Es sei ihm „vielleicht“ „doch“ „unterweilen“ beigekommen, an jenem Satz „ein wenig“ zu zweifeln. Worauf der Herausgeber offensichtlich zielt, ist die eigene Erfahrung des Lesers, um diese scheint es wesentlich zu gehen. Dies lässt sich viertens stützen durch Reflexion auf den Gehalt jenes Satzes, der dem Leser womöglich zweifelhaft geworden sei; Victor Eremita unterstellt nämlich, dass es sich gerade umgekehrt verhalte, dass also das Innere gerade nicht das Äußere sei, und bringt dies dem Leser, immer noch im Modus des hypothetischen „vielleicht“, folgendermaßen Nahe: Du hast vielleicht selbst ein Geheimnis mit dir getragen, von dem du fühltest, es sei dir mit seiner Seligkeit oder seinem Schmerz zu lieb, als daß du andere darein hättest einweihen können. Dein Leben hat dich vielleicht in Berührung mit Menschen gebracht, von denen du ahntest, etwas der Art sei bei ihnen der Fall, ohne daß doch deine Gewalt oder deine Bestrickung imstande gewesen wäre, das Verborgene an den Tag zu bringen. Vielleicht passt keiner dieser Fälle auf dich und dein Leben, gleichwohl bist du nicht unbekannt mit jenem Zweifel; er ist ab und an als eine flüchtige Gestalt an deinem Geiste vorübergeschwebt. Ein solcher Zweifel kommt und geht, und niemand weiß, von wannen er kommt und wohin er fährt. Ich für mein Teil bin hinsichtlich dieses Punkts der Philosophie stets etwas ketzerisch gesinnt gewesen […]. 22

Die Unterscheidung von Innen und Außen bezieht sich also nicht auf einen beliebigen Gegenstand, sondern auf die menschliche Existenz. Hier ist es, so legt Victor Eremita wenigstens nahe, unmöglich, vom Äußeren auf das Innere zu schließen. Dass der „Widerspruch“ von Innen und Außen durch einen bruchlosen Übergang nicht einzuholen ist, ja womöglich gar nicht überbrückt werden kann, verdeutlicht die Bemerkung, das Innere sei dem Äußeren schlechterdings „inkommensurabel“.23 Dieser Hinweis ist deswegen entscheidend, weil er die zweideutige Position unterstreicht, die der Herausgeber im Verhältnis zu den von ihm aufgefundenen Papieren einnimmt. Victor Eremita macht keineswegs den Anspruch, das geheimnisvolle Innere der Schrift durchleuchten und dem Leser aufschließen zu können, – im Gegenteil ist er in jeder Hinsicht darum bemüht, seine äußerliche Stellung zu den von ihm herausgegebenen Schriften zu markieren. Dies zeigt sich darin, dass er alle von ihm stammenden Eingriffe in die Papiere minutiös notiert und jede Interpretation von seiner Seite deutlich zurücknimmt. So heißt es bezüglich seiner Kommentierung 22 23

EO1, 3 / SKS 2, 11. EO1, 3 / SKS 2, 11 (Hirsch übersetzt hier „unangemessen“).

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des „Tagebuchs des Verführers“: „Jedoch, ich habe meine Stellung vielleicht bereits missbraucht, um den Leser mit meinen Betrachtungen beschwerlich zu fallen.“24 Auch im Bezug auf die Titelgebung hebt er die damit verbundene „Täuschung“25 hervor und kommentiert sie wie folgt: „Was der Leser mit diesem Titel verlieren kann, wird nichts Großes sein; denn er kann ja bei der Lektüre den Titel ganz gut vergessen. Wenn er dann das Buch gelesen hat, kann er vielleicht an den Titel denken.“26 Die beständige Selbstzurücknahme des Herausgebers, die stets darauf bedacht ist, die dem Leser angebotene Interpretation als Interpretation kenntlich zu machen, gipfelt schließlich in der Hervorhebung des fehlenden Resultats von Entweder/Oder. In dieser Hinsicht haben diese Papiere nämlich kein Ende. Findet man, daß dies nicht in der Ordnung sei, so hätte man doch kein Recht, es einen Fehler zu nennen, sondern müßte es ein Unglück heißen. Ich für mein Teil sehe es für ein Glück an. Man trifft zuweilen auf Novellen, in denen bestimmte Personen entgegengesetzte Lebensansichten vortragen. Das endet dann gerne damit, daß der eine den andern überzeugt. Anstatt daß also die Anschauung für sich sprechen muß, wird der Leser mit dem historischen Ergebnis bereichert, daß der andre überzeugt worden ist. Ich sehe es für ein Glück an, daß in solcher Hinsicht diese Papiere eine Aufklärung nicht gewähren. […] Wenn das Buch gelesen ist, sind A und B vergessen, lediglich die Anschauungen stehen einander gegenüber und erwarten keine endliche Entscheidung in bestimmten Persönlichkeiten. 27

Was Victor Eremita als „Glück“ ansieht, ist die Tatsache, dass die Papiere dem Leser kein Ergebnis, genauer, kein „historisches Ergebnis“ geben. So wird verhindert, dass der Leser in die passive Haltung ästhetisch-distanzierter Betrachtung verfällt und sich den Fortgang eines Erzählgeschehens – nicht zufällig macht der Herausgeber den Vergleich zur Novelle – bloß vom Verfasser vor Augen führen lässt. Worauf der hervorgehobene Verzicht auf ein Resultat, die nachdrückliche Selbstzurücknahme des Herausgebers und nicht zuletzt das vollständige Fehlen einer verbindlichen Autorinstanz wesentlich abzielen, ist die produktive Aneignung durch den Leser. Ohne definitive Anleitung, wie der Inhalt der Papiere aufzufassen sei, sieht sich der Leser mit den einander gegenüberstehenden Existenzentwürfen konfrontiert und wird so zum tätigen Sich-Verhalten angereizt. Die ganze Kommunikationsstruktur des Werkes zielt darauf ab, den Leser in das titelgebende „Entweder – Oder“ hineinzustellen und ihm die 24 25 26 27

EO1, 11 / SKS 2, 17. EO1, 14 / SKS 2, 20. EO1, 15 / SKS 2, 21. EO1, 15 f. / SKS 2, 21.

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Entscheidung zu überantworten; – sei es, dass er der einen oder anderen Lebensanschauung seine Zustimmung gibt, sei es, dass er beide Anschauungen verwirft.28

IV. Die Undarstellbarkeit des sokratischen Standpunkts Das aufgezeigte Spiel von Innen und Außen in der Mitteilungsform von Entweder/Oder erschöpft sich aber keineswegs in einer Form gebrochener Kommunikation. Vielmehr schreibt es sich zugleich von darstellungstheoretischen Erwägungen her, die die begriffliche Darstellbarkeit und sprachliche Auslotbarkeit der einzelnen Existenz problematisieren. In dieser Hinsicht ist es von Interesse, dass die unaufhebbare Dialektik von Innen und Außen in Entweder/Oder nicht zum ersten Mal Gegenstand des Kierkegaardschen Werks ist. Schon zu Beginn der Magisterdissertation Über den Begriff der Ironie hatte Kierkegaard diese Dialektik aufgerufen, um eine erste, eindringliche Schilderung der Figur des Sokrates zu geben. Bezeichnenderweise findet sich die Dialektik von Innen und Außen gerade dort, wo Kierkegaard auf die Schwierigkeit der Darstellung des Sokrates zu sprechen kommt: Er [Sokrates] gehörte nämlich zu denjenigen Menschen, bei denen man nicht bei dem Äußeren als solchem stehen bleiben kann. Das Äußere deutete ständig auf ein Anderes und Entgegengesetztes hin. Mit ihm war es nicht so wie mit einem seine Anschauungen vortragenden Philosophen, bei welchem eben dieser sein Vortrag die Gegenwart der Idee ist, vielmehr bedeutet das, was Sokrates sagte, etwas anderes. Das Äußere war überhaupt nicht in harmonischer Einheit mit dem Inneren, sondern eher der Gegensatz dazu, und allein unter diesem Brechungswinkel ist er zu verstehen.29

Hier ist dreierlei festzuhalten. Erstens formuliert Kierkegaard in dieser noch vorläufigen Darstellung – oder vielmehr: Darstellung der Nichtdarstellbarkeit – des Sokrates seinen philosophischen Ausgangspunkt am konkret existierenden Einzelnen. Gerade darin, die Ironie als Standpunkt des Sokrates aufzufassen, hatte Kierkegaard die Pointe seines eigenen Verständnisses gegenüber dem Hegelschen gesehen: Man ist im Allgemeinen gewohnt, die Ironie ideal verstanden zu sehen, ihr als verschwindendes Moment im System einen Platz angewiesen und sie deshalb nur in Kürze beschrieben zu sehen; man vermag aus diesem Grunde nicht so ganz leicht zu 28

29

Vgl. zur Mitteilungsform von Entweder/Oder: Tilo Wesche Kierkegaard: Eine philosophische Einführung, Stuttgart: Reclam 2003, S. 180-212. BI, 10 / SKS 1, 74.

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begreifen, wie ein ganzes Leben in ihr hineingehen könne, da ja alsdann das Leben für ein Nichts angesehen werden muß. Aber man erinnert sich nicht daran, dass ein Standpunkt im Leben sich niemals so ideal, wie er im System ist, findet […]. 30

Während Hegel die Ironie stets nur als Prinzip oder Methode begreife, 31 setzt Kierkegaard bei Sokrates als Existierendem an; – und verweist schon an dieser Stelle, wenn auch nicht in der Schärfe späterer Schriften, auf den Kontrast zwischen einem systematischen und einem auf die konkrete Existenz sich richtenden Denken. Zweitens hebt die Charakterisierung des sokratischen Standpunkts auf die Unüberbrückbarkeit des Unterschiedes von Innerlichkeit und äußerer Darstellbarkeit ab. Es ist die Unaufhebbarkeit dieses Gegensatzes, die es unmöglich macht, einen positiven Begriff des Sokrates zu geben, – sein Äußeres lässt gerade keinen Rückschluss auf das Innere zu, das Innere bleibt stets unfasslich. Drittens ist es von entscheidender Bedeutung, dass Kierkegaard Sokrates von einem „seine Anschauungen vortragenden Philosophen“ unterscheidet. Während im Falle eines dozierenden Philosophen der Gehalt der Rede unmittelbar zugänglich ist, bedeutet die Rede des Sokrates „etwas anderes“. Was denn aber damit gemeint ist, wird hier absichtlich offen gelassen, es ist zunächst nur negativ festzuhalten: Das, worauf die Rede des Sokrates hindeutet, ist einem unmittelbaren Verstehen ebenso wenig zugänglich wie das Innere des Sokrates. Weder das Innere des Sokrates noch das in seiner Rede gemeinte lassen sich unmittelbar erfassen und zur Darstellung bringen. Dabei besteht ein markanter Unterschied zu der Darstellungsdialektik von Entweder/Oder. In der Ironieschrift nämlich entfaltet Kierkegaard die Undarstellbarkeit und Inkommensurabilität von Innen und Außen ausschließlich am ironischen Subjekt. Die Unmöglichkeit, einen positiven Begriff vom Inneren des Sokrates zu geben, arbeitet schon vor auf die These, der Standpunkt des Sokrates sei absolute unendliche Negativität. 32 In der Art und Weise, in der Victor Eremita diese Dialektik aufgreift, zeigt sich aber wiederum, dass Kierkegaard am Standpunkt des Sokrates seinen entscheidenden denkerischen Ansatz gewinnt. Victor Eremita weitet die Dialektik von Innen und Außen wesentlich aus: Nicht nur im ironischen Subjekt ist eine Inkommensurabilität von Innen und Außen anzusetzen, sie betrifft vielmehr einen jeden konkret Existierenden. Es ist die Innerlichkeit 30 31 32

BI, 171 / SKS 1, 214. Vgl. hierzu Feger Kierkegaards Kritik der romantischen Ironie, S. 151. Die zentrale Stelle hierzu findet sich BI, 266 / SKS 1, 299.

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der Existenz selbst, die sich einer unmittelbaren Darstellung grundsätzlich entzieht.

V. Doppelte Dialektik – Innen/Außen und Einzelner/Allgemeines Nimmt man die Ausführungen zu Sokrates und die Unterstellung des Victor Eremita zusammen, so zeigt sich die darstellungstheoretische Notwendigkeit eines indirekten Verfahrens für ein Denken der Existenz. Die Dialektik von Innen und Außen verdoppelt sich, indem sie auf den existierenden Einzelnen bezogen wird, in einer Dialektik von Einzelnem und Allgemeinem. Was sich nämlich gerade nicht in die Allgemeinheit einer äußeren Darstellung bringen lässt, ist die Innerlichkeit des Einzelnen. Es ist eben diese Dialektik von Einzelnem und Allgemeinem, die Johannes Climacus zum Ausgangspunkt seiner skizzenhaften Erörterung einer Dialektik der Mitteilung in der Nachschrift nimmt. 33 Climacus’ Ansatz geht dabei, mit deutlicher Anspielung auf die Figur des Sokrates, vom „subjektiven existierenden Denker“34 aus. Dieser bezieht, im Gegensatz zum im Neutrum vorgeführten bloß „objektiven Denken“ das Denken stets auf die eigene Existenz. Da aber der Einzelne als Einzelner nicht bruchlos im begrifflichen Denken aufgeht, das stets in der Sphäre des Allgemeinen verbleibt, spricht Climacus von der „Doppelreflexion“35 des subjektiven existierenden Denkers. Diese Doppelreflexion nennt Climacus bezeichnenderweise auch die „Reflexion der Innerlichkeit“: „Die Reflexion der Innerlichkeit ist die Doppelreflexion des subjektiven Denkers. Denkend denkt er das Allgemeine, aber als existierend in diesem Denken und es erwerbend in seiner Innerlichkeit wird er immer mehr subjektiv isoliert.“36 Die Unabschließbarkeit dieser Reflexionsbewegung hebt Climacus hervor, indem er, wiederum in Abgrenzung zum bloß objektiven Denken, die Stellung des subjektiven existierenden Denkers zum Resultat anspricht: Während das objektive Denken alles aufs Resultat abstellt und der ganzen Menschheit zum Betrügen durch Abschreiben und Hersagen des Resultats und des Fazits verhilft, stellt das subjektive Denken alles auf das Werden ab und lässt das Resultat aus, 33

34 35 36

Vgl. AUN1, 65 / SKS 7, 73 f. Vgl. zu der hier interpretierten Passage ausführlicher Schwab Der Asket im System, S. 338-340. AUN1, 65 f. / SKS 7, 73 f. AUN1, 65 f. / SKS 7, 73 f. AUN1, 65 / SKS 7, 73 f.

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teils weil es eben dem Denker gehört, da er den Weg hat, teils weil er als Existierender ständig im Werden ist, was jeder Mensch ist, der sich nicht wie ein Narr dazu hat verleiten lassen, objektiv zu werden, oder dazu, unmenschlicherweise die Spekulation zu werden. 37

Von der bezeichneten Doppelreflexion der Innerlichkeit und dem Werden des Existierenden leitet Climacus die Notwendigkeit einer indirekten Mitteilungsform ab. Die Unabgeschlossenheit der Existenz und ihre begriffliche Unauslotbarkeit widersetzen sich einer direkten und definitiven Form der Darstellung. In der Doppelreflexion indirekter Mitteilung findet Climacus die denkerische Form, die auf das hinzusprechen vermag, was sie niemals vollständig zur Darstellung bringen kann – indem sie sich beständig selbst zurücknimmt und durchkreuzt, das unzureichende der eigenen Darstellung stets klar vor Augen hat und in ihre künstlerisch doppeltreflektierten Modi der Ansprache einfließen lässt. Gerade im Verhältnis zur romantischen Ironie ist dieser Darstellungsaspekt indirekter Mitteilung zu betonen, den, ohne ihn terminologisch zu machen, schon Karl Jaspers hervorgehoben hatte: Indirekte Mitteilung heißt nicht, daß etwas willentlich verschwiegen werde, daß der Mensch eine Maske vornehme und zunächst verschweige, was er schon weiß. Das wäre Betrug oder pädagogische Technik eines Überlegenen. Indirekte Mitteilung heißt, daß bei stärkstem Klarheitsdrange und allem Suchen nach Formen und Formeln kein Ausdruck zureichend ist und der Mensch sich dessen bewußt wird, heißt die Einstellung, daß alles Kommunizierte, das direkt da, sagbar ist, letzthin das Unwesentliche, aber zugleich indirekt Träger des Wesentlichen ist. […] Socrates sagt zwar, er zeuge nicht, sondern helfe nur. Kierkegaard nennt die indirekte Mitteilung jedoch geradezu ,Existenzmitteilung‘. 38

Dass die indirekten Mitteilung in ihrer zwischen Darstellung und Undarstellbarkeit, zwischen Einzelnem und Allgemeinen, zwischen Innen und Außen schwebenden Form wesentlich auf die romantische Ironie rekurriert, kann abschließend nochmals an dem 42. Fragment des Lyceum verdeutlicht werden. Dort notiert Schlegel: Es gibt alte und moderne Gedichte, die durchgängig im Ganzen und überall den göttlichen Hauch der Ironie atmen. Es lebt in ihnen eine wirklich transzendentale Buffonerie. Im Innern, die Stimmung, welche alles übersieht, und sich über alles Bedingte unendlich erhebt, auch über eigne Kunst, Tugend, oder Genialität: im Äußeren, in der Ausführung die mimische Manier eines gewöhnlichen guten italiänischen Buffo. 39 37 38

39

AUN1, 65 / SKS 7, 73. Karl Jaspers Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, basierend auf d. 6. Aufl. v. 1971, München: Piper 1985, S. 378. Schlegel KFSA, Bd. II, S. 152. Zur Interpretation des Fragments vgl. Ernst Behler Klassische Ironie, romantische Ironie, tragische Ironie: Zum Ursprung dieser

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In diesem Fragment wird das zweideutige Verhältnis sichtbar, dass Kierkegaard mit der romantischen Ironie verbindet und ihn zugleich von ihr trennt. Einerseits hat Kierkegaard die unendliche Erhebung und poetische Selbstermächtigung des romantischen Subjekts durch sein gesamtes Werk hindurch kritisiert.40 Andererseits aber hat Kierkegaard mit der romantischen Ironie nicht nur das Problem eines wesentlichen Widerspruchs zwischen Darstellung und Undarstellbarkeit gemein, sondern auch einen strukturell verwandten Ansatz zu dessen Bewältigung. Wenn Schlegel von der „Unmöglichkeit und Notwendigkeit einer vollständigen Mitteilung“41 spricht, die die Ironie nötig mache, dann gilt dies unter anderen Vorzeichen auch für die Kierkegaardsche Existenzmitteilung, die sich notwendig in der gebrochenen und schwebenden Form des Indirekten vollzieht.

40

41

Begriffe, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1972, S. 33 f., und Barth Inverse Verkehrung der Reflexion, S. 135-138. Es ist dabei mehr als auffällig, dass Schlegel in der ironischen Erhebung und Distanzierung des Autors gegenüber seinem Werk, ja gegenüber der eigenen „Genialität“ (s. o.) eine Bestimmung vorwegnimmt, die Kierkegaard in seiner Konzeption einer „beherrschten Ironie“ gerade gegen die Romantik glaubt einfordern zu müssen. Vgl. BI, 328-330 / SKS 1, 352-354, und hierzu Barth Inverse Verkehrung der Reflexion, S. 133 f. Schlegel KFSA, Bd. II, S. 160.

The Case of Aesthete A in Either/Or By Vincent McCarthy Abstract This essay looks at Kierkegaard’s psychologising of Aesthete A in Either/Or, Part 1 along the lines of a Freudian case study. It begins with the seemingly compulsive selfrevelations of the secretive central character of Either/Or, Part 1, supplemented by Judge William’s observations and commentary in Either/Or, Part 2, and then looks at him and his problems in light of the schematized psychological categories of Concept of Anxiety and Sickness Unto Death. Yet while Concept of Anxiety and Sickness unto Death may be more tied to intellectual and cultural categories of the nineteenth Century, Either/Or’s Aesthete remains a recognizable character that twenty-first century readers can still readily relate to and learn from.

1. Introduction Either/Or has long been recognized for its rich character portraits, its psychological insight, and its inchoate philosophical-psychological ideas. And even before its formal publication, Judge William weighed in with an evaluation and psychological commentary in Part 2 itself. Some of the principal psychological characteristics of Aesthete A in Either/Or, Part 1 are later broadened to become the subjects of thinly pseudonymous treatises, most notably in Concept of Anxiety and Sickness Unto Death, works that schematize the full breadth of the condition targeted and thus naturally go beyond just Aesthete A. In time, both of those works would have a profound influence on twentieth century existential philosophy and on the existential psychologies that grew up from Freudian roots and Kierkegaardian (as well as other) graftings. Although melancholy figures importantly in Either/Or, not to mention Kierkegaard’s own life, there is no formal treatise on melancholia in the authorship, except insofar as Sickness Unto Death names and analyzes the underlying, root problem, just as

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it complements the analysis of critical possibilities for selfhood and non-selfhood first presented in Concept of Anxiety. The substance of melancholia is already there in Either/Or, just as a range of conditions of anxiety and despair is. (Anxiety and despair have survived into the twentieth century as psychological categories, whereas melancholia, to which every Romantic would have nodded – or even sighed – in recognition in the nineteenth century, is now sometimes regarded as a suspicious cultural construct.)1 Among others, Joachim Garff, in his SAK 2 essentially reads the anxiety of Either/Or going forward toward Concept of Anxiety, as did Kresten Nordentoft before him. 3 Theirs is both a sensible and insightful line of interpretation with which it would be difficult to disagree. Yet, in one sense, I propose in part to do exactly the opposite of what Nordentoft and Garff have done, namely to read the works, in their association, in reverse order and also to ask what, in retrospect, the schematization of anxiety in Concept of Anxiety tells us about the nature of anxiety as presented in Either/Or, and then to move on to a similar inquiry about despair in Either/Or on the basis of the forms of despair schematized in Sickness Unto Death.

2. “Psychology” in the Nineteenth Century Before venturing to apply Kierkegaard’s psychological treatises to the psychologies that emerge in Part 1 of Either/Or, we would do well to recall that when the word “psychological” in any of its forms appears in the pseudonymous writings,4 we need to keep ourselves from associations with the modern academic discipline as well as the professional practice of psychology as they have emerged in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indeed the term “psychology” did not, until about the year 1750, become freed from its habitual association with metaphysics – a realm which, somewhat ironically, the philosoph-

1

2 3 4

Meantime, Robert Burton’s famous Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) continues to enjoy a repute that has little to do with the believability of its seventeenth century analyses. Joakim Garff SAK, Copenhagen: G. E. C. Gad 2000. Kresten Nordentoft Kierkegaards psykologi, Copenhagen: G. E. C. Gad 1972. Whether as substantive or adjective in Repetition and Stages on Life’s Way, respectively – the one subtitled “venture in experimenting psychology,” the other “an imaginary psychological construction.”

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ically uninformed Freud entered only toward the end of his career in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Of course there is a cultural connection and overlap with psychologically oriented authors whose works appeared pre-Kierkegaard. The self, after all, was not first discovered in the nineteenth century!5 Kierkegaard, with his predecessors, is writing about the “pre-postmodern self” (a term he would heartily mock), a self whose reality and general properties are presumed, but in Kierkegaard’s case the emphasis is on a broken and fragmented self in need of comfort and cure. He too is seeking to schematize the various ways that this can happen and the various effects that can arise in a personality. Moreover and most crucially, he too is pointing toward what he – in contradistinction to Jamesian, Freudian, Jungian and a host of other psychologies – clearly believes is the one and only cure, namely a return to the One from whom human beings have become estranged through their own originating deed of sin. For Kierkegaard is quite sure that he knows what an authentic self is, that such a thing can exist and therefore can be restored because its true nature and destiny are already known, while only imperfectly actualized. And so, with Augustine (and Plotinus), Kierkegaard’s is a psychology of return, even if any level of achievement feels, paradoxically, like an entirely new – and not a remembered – experience. It is not possible here of course to sketch a full history of the emergence of the discipline of psychology. Suffice it to say that there were published “psychologies” in Kierkegaard’s day. But the background names here are the ever-famous René Descartes, the now obscure Christian Wolff (in Kant’s time the most prominent philosopher of the day) and the Hegelian Karl Rosenkranz (whose Psychologie (1837) Kierkegaard owned and read, although Kierkegaard went his own way when writing on some of the same topics, as was the case with Melancholie). Kierkegaard begins his writing career and his presentation of psychological material along other and still older lines, namely, literary models such as Shakespeare and Goethe.6 5

6

Nor, for that matter, was it first dissolved in the late twentieth century by post-modernism, Gautama Siddharta and Nagarjuna being the principal figures that preceded postmodernism in this and other respects. For those who once dismissed the psychological dimension of literature for its inferiority to psychology, it must be ironic, that, for the Freud who once seemed to reveal the standard for modern psychology, nowadays the tendency, when he is read at all, is for his so-called “case histories” to be treated more as literary detective stories than as reliable consulting-room findings or “science.”

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Important names for Kierkegaard in his own Copenhagen were Hans Brøchner and Frederick Sibbern, the former being one among many others whom Kierkegaard listened to, the latter one of the few who got to listen to Kierkegaard in the important but “amateur” practice of soulsearching and soul-tending that has characterized human relations and pastoral care for centuries. (He was, as we know, even present as a chaperone during engagement visits from Kierkegaard to Regine Olsen.) When we attend to Kierkegaard’s psychological thought – i. e., when we attempt to view it as a pre-twentieth century system of psychology as Kresten Nordentoft did so well and yet so inescapably dryly – we are venturing into that almost vanished realm of philosophy termed “philosophical psychology,” or “philosophical anthropology,” which in Kierkegaard’s case is combined with the practical interest that pastoral theology termed the care of souls. For the presentation of Kierkegaard’s psychological thinking, we thus have initial psychological novels Either/Or (1843), Repetition (1843), and Stages on Life’s Way (1845) followed by pseudonymous formal treatises that are in turn influenced by previous treatises in the European tradition, but none quite like these in their themes or in their analyses. (Kierkegaard is indebted to the Enlightenment tradition for freeing Christian thinkers to a more imaginative, rather than literal, interpretation of the doctrine of original sin, itself an interpretation of the human condition superimposed upon the Genesis myth of expulsion from the Garden of Eden.) Of course the more properly literary works are equally influenced by and modeled on preceding authors. Here we propose to focus only on the Bildungsroman that is Either/Or, Part 17 and the treatises Concept of Anxiety and Sickness Unto Death. (The pastoral psychological interest of the discourses, published in parallel with the pseudonymous works, is worthy of its own study.)

3. Either/Or 3.1 Aesthete A’s Self-Presentation In Either/Or, Part 1, we have the rich psychological and fragmented literary self-portrait of Aesthete A and the portrayal of a fictitious, subjunctive Johannes of “The Seducer’s Diary,” whose novella in 7

Perhaps better put the “anti-Bildungsroman,” since, among other things, no Bildung [development] takes place, except for the fictitious Cordelia.

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diary form will, following Victor Eremita, be attributed to Aesthete A. Not to be overlooked is the psychology of the equally subjunctive Cordelia, as represented and intimated by Johannes.8 The character behind the “Diapsalmata” is the victim of wild, often violent, mood swings. The cause, we are to infer, is not, as it would be in our time, his failure to take his medication (which in any case would not have been available in 1843) but rather his lifestyle, and his life-view. But both of these proceed from who he is. How might we imagine him or his counterpart updated to the early twenty-first century? A voracious reader with a fast-paced intellect and a fast-paced pen. A twenty-one year old Harvard junior perhaps or recent graduate.9 A young man of comfortable family background, precocious yet in many respects immature, wildly self-confident to the point of arrogance about his intellectual ability (but also essentially correct in his selfestimation), and certainly pretentious in his taking on major cultural figures of the age as, at most, his intellectual peers. Someone who has kept up with the fast crowd – at least the small circle of the intellectually serious fast crowd – and maybe outdone them in some respects. Someone who knows the taverns where the elite let off steam after a hard day of reading and ruminating, and maybe knows some of the other places where drunken young men used to go before there were co-ed universities and more convenient, dormitory liaisons. Someone always ready to debate at a tavern or in the debating club, whether he really knows what he is talking about or not. And someone quickly able to wax intense and convince himself, by virtue of his very intensity, that every spirited comment and critique that passes his lips is actually true. Sometimes he waxes passionate, but here, at least privately, he may draw back a little from some of the thoughts and utterances that are a little “over the top.” Yet all this passion and sparkle have not come cheaply. The price of the imbalance is emotional immaturity, and that is why he sounds still sophomoric at times – a bit juvenile in his Juvenalian barbs. Yet emotional immaturity by no means implies the absence of emotions. While he endures emotional explosions (he calls them “earthquakes”) that, to his credit, he does not seek to repress, neither does he seek to 8

9

For she, as Joakim Garff stressed in his SAK, is also a rich source of case material for anxiety (English language edition Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. by Bruce H. Kirmmse, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2004, pp. 270-279). Or equally an Oxbridge graduate, a French normalien, or a classic Tübingen-Marburg-Heidelberg graduate.

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surmount them. He wallows in his sorrows and knows that they give him, at minimum, something new to write about. And the memories of his sufferings supply him with a quickly tapped wellspring of resentment and world-hatred that can be summoned up almost at will. In short, a great character actor before character acting, or else a potential suicide. A poet, a performer, an exhibitionist. We do not have many nowadays who fill this bill. It takes some daring, after all, to let oneself develop in this direction to begin with. To our own current way of thinking, there has got to have been some emotional wound which has set someone apart from the crowd like this and individuated him/her – even if eccentrically – at the very time in life when most are only beginning to emerge from the firm grip of conformist pressures. In addition, the individual who emerges in the pages of Part 1 has not come to his sense of himself only recently. It has already been a while, and he already has a solid sense of himself as standing alone, and standing tall, if somewhat shakily when moods and emotions overwhelm him. In his thinking and in his feelings, he has been a rebel for a long time already, even if his sentiments could not be given utterance until relatively recently. And if it really is at a college like Harvard that we might find his twenty-first century equivalent, he knows that he still has a lot of intense competition for attention, despite his personal brilliance. It is no longer to himself and to his small circle of convinced admirers that he must prove himself but to a group of similarly talented others who are equally interested in obtaining recognition for themselves, not in granting it to others. And so he is wont to put others down, and they him, in a dialectic in which no one is affirmed. And, if in his moments of self-hatred, he also puts himself down, this requires demoting others even further in his estimation, so that the proper rank ordering can be maintained. He appears to be well on his way to being a young misanthrope, yet a social misanthrope all the same, for while he rejects the crowd, his feet are firmly planted on the soap-box at its center. It is more than incipient misanthropy that is in evidence here; it is already wide-reaching. He lashes out not just at himself and others but at “the world” – at everything around him that pretends to be important but that he knows, deep down, is not. And he dwells on this negative knowledge, not (yet or not ever) daring to explore the “deep down” – the depths in himself that are the source from which flow his negative insights and his growing disdain for the vanity of vanities surrounding him.

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3.2 Judge William’s Commentary on the Psychology of Aesthete A The psychological component of Either/Or, Part 1 was immediately recognized by its first readers, but the first (and highly astute) commentator on the psychology of Aesthete A was none other than Judge William himself in Part 2 of Either/Or, who is portrayed as knowing Aesthete A personally but who indicates no knowledge of A’s papers.10 “You who always pride yourself on being an observateur,” he writes, “must, in return, put up with becoming an object of observation.”11 And, after having already been doing so for some 80 pages, he now proposes, “Allow me to point out the dark side of your life…”12 The first twenty pages of “The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage” are a highly critical personal attack on the existence-stance of Aesthete A and a biting critique of his psychology. It is in fact so passionate and zealous as to make us wonder whether Ethicist B is not just formally frustrated with his younger friend but possibly reliving his own rejection of very similar positions and problems before his own ethical turn (which may very well be what the more sober 30-year old Kierkegaard was also doing in these pages vis-à-vis his own wayward student period). In advance of Either/Or, Part 1’s reading public, B recognizes the psychological power of Aesthete A. Ethicist B takes a dim view of Aesthete A’s self psychologizing. He chastises him for a psychological interest that lacks seriousness and that he dismisses as mere “hypochondriacal inquisitiveness”: in effect – and more in the language of William James than of Judge William – a “sick-soul” running wild with a kind of reflection that is nonetheless not genuine “intro-spection” because it fails to see. Going beyond but in the spirit of Ethicist B, it might be added that Aesthete A’ experimenting psychology – experimenting upon himself and others (including the subjunctive Seducer’s Diary) – is also not to be confused with “experimental psychology” of the twentieth century, since it lacks serious interest, focus, and control, to say nothing of open-eyed analysis of the data produced. That, in fact, is ultimately left for Concept of Anxiety and Sickness Unto Death, although Ethicist B ventures a number of observations about 10

11 12

And, for that matter, while Aesthete A is the recipient of B’s letters in Part II, he never formally replies to William, as William himself observes. None of A’s papers addresses B’s letters and therefore would give the reader the appearance of having been composed before receipt of B’s letters. EO2, 7 / SKS 3, 17. EO2, 84 / SKS 3, 88.

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anxiety and despair that anticipate, by one and six years respectively, the schematization of anxiety and despair in those subsequent works. And if Constantine Constantius subsequently raises the level in his own “venture in experimenting psychology”13 later that year in Repetition, he too is still far from the seriousness that Vigilius Haufniensis judges the only appropriate mood for considering the underlying problem. The Augustinian and “retro” soul psychology of Ethicist B comes through in many places but is nicely summed up in the comment, “Instead of saving your soul by entrusting everything to God, instead of taking this shortcut, you prefer the endless roundabout way, which perhaps will never take you to your destination.”14 The only thing that results from the moods of Aesthete A, according to B, is mere better acquaintance with moods. There is no progress, no action or deed, no Bildung. Just idle knowledge. This position will be echoed and sharpened by Vigilius Haufniensis who will stress that the point of thinking about sin is not to wallow in it or one’s understanding of it but to get out of it. And if Aesthete A mistakenly thinks that mood is the province of aesthetes alone, B instructs him in his second letter, “The person who lives ethically is also familiar with mood, but for him it is not the highest; because he has chosen himself infinitely, he sees his mood beneath him.”15 In putting the young aesthete, whom he calls “a total incarnation of mood,”16 under his critical gaze, William even begins a schematization of melancholia [Tungsind] when he distinguishes between “egotistic” melancholia and “sympathetic” melancholia, the former associated with the attempt to avoid real involvements with others, the latter having the somewhat redeeming characteristic of being oriented toward others, at least in fearing itself for the sake of others.17 But both forms evidence “self-indulgen[ce] in enjoyment.” William calls Tungsind, with his emphasis on tung [heaviness], the defect of the age, present even in the letsindig [light minded] laughter of the times.18 “[I]s it not [melancholia, Tungsind] that has robbed us of the 13 14 15 16 17 18

Subtitle of Repetition. EO2, 14 / SKS 3, 23. EO2, 230 / SKS 3, 220. EO2, 11 / SKS 3, 21. EO2, 25 / SKS 3, 33. William, who evidences no formal acquaintance with the papers that are Part I, does not employ, or comment upon, the melancholi that at times is at the center of Aesthete A’s self-observations in Part I. (The Danish wordplay that runs through-

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courage to command, the courage to obey, the power to act, the confidence to hope?”19 William views the manic/melancholiac aspects of Aesthete A’s personality and intellect on the one hand as a cold, sharp and biting March wind (the manic) and, on the other hand, as the shrunken and literally introverted pouch-form assumed by a jellyfish (the melancholiac).20 In his second letter (“The Balance between Esthetic and Ethical”), he calls melancholia “hysteria of the spirit” and the refusal of spirit to evolve/act: There comes a comes a moment in a person’s life when immediacy is ripe, so to speak, and when the spirit requires a higher form, when it wants to lay hold of itself as spirit….[N]ow spirit wants to gather itself together out of this dispersion, so to speak, and to transfigure itself in itself; the personality wants to become conscious in its eternal validity. If this does not happen, if the movement is halted, if it is repressed, then [melancholia, Tungsind] sets in. 21

He goes on to call it the mother of all sins, the refusal to will deeply and inwardly – and then to link it to original (hereditary) sin. It will be up to Vigilius Haufniensis to lay out the fuller, theological schematization of the states of sinfulness and the types of anxiety associated with them. William calls melancholia/Tungsind spirit’s revenge for mocking spirit by ignoring it in inaction.22 In declaring Aesthete A’s life to be despair, he also anticipates the fuller analysis of despair’s multiple forms in Sickness Unto Death. So it is William who first identifies the problematic psychology of Aesthete A, and it is William who puts his finger on the issue of moods – far in advance of the Heidegger who perceptively saw and powerfully seized upon this aspect of Kierkegaard’s work, and for which his acknowledgement (such as it was!) was expressed in one single footnote in Being and Time. For purposes of this paper, I propose to consider Aesthete A and Johannes separately and, while following Victor Eremita’s ascription of the diary to Aesthete A, I propose to follow the fiction of the fiction in treating “The Seducer’s Diary” as a literary production of Aesthete A, a work in the subjunctive. However, I do propose to attend to the

19 20 21 22

out the section is impossible to reproduce in English, and the choice of the Hongs to translate Tungsind with the twentieth century term “depression” is, in my view, highly misleading.) EO2, 23-24 / SKS 3, 32. EO2, 38 / SKS 3, 46. EO2, 188-189 / SKS 3, 183. EO2, 205 / SKS 3, 197.

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character of Johannes and of Cordelia, without conflating the subjunctive mood of Johannes with the indicative mood of Aesthete A. 23 We cannot treat the publication order of the papers in Either/Or, Part 1 as a chart of moods, since Victor Eremita constrains us by his claim that the papers fell out of the desk in the random order in which he presents them to the reading public. Still, the order makes an impression, and the passionate “Diapsalmata” would have been any editor’s dramatic choice to open the work. Here we meet an Aesthete A who hates the world, who hates living and who hates himself. Moreover, his world-hatred is clearly an extension of self-hatred. If he really had been Johannes of an actual seducer’s diary, we could understand his self-hatred after the fact, much as we can understand the quasisuicidal choice of Don Giovanni to accept the Commendatore’s invitation to supper (and a different kind of hell). He cannot stand the life that he has defiantly chosen; he refuses any other life. He is turned in upon himself; he refuses to turn outward. He is estranged from others, a misanthrope in the making, but he is equally estranged from the shallow existence that he has chosen for himself, and remains defiantly closed to exploring deeper depths that he knows are there. If he may be as sharply ironic as he is darkly melancholy, his is not the mastered irony that Magister Kierkegaard’s dissertation alluded to. He merely rages in negativity, refusing anything positive. He speaks of his nighttime battles with pale, nocturnal shapes that are more frightening than anything in fiction.24 He writes of the emptiness and meaninglessness of his life, and in the process provides commentary in advance on his sparkling essays that follow: they are quick-passing, intellectual entertainment but provide no longer-term deeper satisfactions. His only friend is Echo – the echo of his own voice. For all his knowledge of Greek myth, he fails to recognize the self-destructiveness of the narcissism that stares him in the face. But unlike the Narcissus of the myth, he does not embrace himself, even figuratively. Instead he rejects himself. In a poetic example of Roman praeteritio, he asks himself whether he should communicate his sorrow to the world and says that he will not, precisely while he is doing so. He speaks of movement within which presages an earthquake, and refers to a chain of inexplicable anxieties, although he already indicates an inkling of what they are about, which he summarily resists. 23

24

I did precisely this myself in considering the young Aesthete in The Phenomenology of Moods in Kierkegaard, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff 1978. EO1, 23 / SKS 2, 32.

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The “Diapsalmata” document his fascination with his own sorrows and suffering, his intention to continue in what he is doing, and his illusion that this is really a longer term possibility. After all, the images of loss of energy, of shrunkenness (the references to the Hebrew sheva and dagesh lene)25 have their own nihilistic logic and, combined with expressions of boredom, emptiness, meaninglessness and an inability to respond to desire, despite jabbing himself with its spur from time to time, 26 paints a portrait that is perhaps the nineteenth century literary foreshadowing of Edvard Munch’s Scream. In “The Immediate Erotic Stages,” he proves himself an insightful musical critic but, more importantly, a very capable analyst and theoretician of sensuous desire. We are to infer, thereby, that he has moved beyond the stages of the Page and Papageno, that he has lived through the emptiness and desperation of Don Giovanni with his compulsive sensuousness leaving him suicidally unfree. He will eventually try to outdo Don Giovanni in “The Seducer’s Diary,” but this is a fiction (as is, of course, Don Juan and his various literary incarnations across Europe).27 Full of insight into what it means to seduce psychologically rather than merely to act upon physical desire, he ultimately gives us a glimpse into, and one example of, the rich, outer intellectual life that provides distraction from the inner emptiness witnessed in the Diapsalmata. Others follow, and the moods of the Diapsalmata are rejoined in the gloomy peroration that is “The Unhappiest One” and then in the desperately ironic “Rotation of Crops,” although these are not direct personal statements. “The Seducer’s Diary” constitutes approximately one-third of Either/Or, Part 1. According to the editor Victor Eremita, it is a subjunctive remembrance on the part of a fictitious Johannes. “How it might have been.” “The Seducer’s Diary” would formally seem to be about Johannes, but in some ways it is really more about Cordelia, for she is the personality that develops in the course of the diary, that experiences anxiety (as we shall understand from Vigilius, all do and must) but who actualizes possibility, whereas Johannes undergoes no change. Her opening letters to him contain all the bitterness of an Elvira in “Don Giovanni,” but Elvira is a mature woman, we assume, before her seduction by Don Giovanni, whereas Cordelia was an innocent young girl. “She has imagination, spirit and passion – in short, all 25 26 27

EO1, 22 / SKS 2, 30. EO1, 41 / SKS 2, 50. Cf. Oscar Mandel The Theatre of Don Juan, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1986.

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the essentials.”28 By degrees, Johannes stimulates the stages of desire in her, so that in the end she cannot be satisfied with an Edvard/ Papageno but is compelled to take notice of one whom she can desire absolutely, namely the Johannes who has been charting and guiding her development through the stages of desire. Johannes’ psychological mastery of the interesting is demonic and fascinating. If only in the non-subjunctive world things could proceed at such a controlled pace! He woos Cordelia through misunderstanding and repulsion, so that she takes serious notice of him and he becomes increasingly interesting to her as Edvard becomes increasingly boring. His narrative has the perfection that one finds of course only in fiction: “One would not believe it possible to plot so entirely accurately the history of the development of a psyche,” he avers29 and the savvy reader takes him literally. Where does one meet such a systematic seducer, such a psychologist, he asks rhetorically. 30 We know the answer: Only in literature! The improbable psychological “seduction” of Cordelia, with the attendant manipulation of Edvard and Cordelia’s aunt, is the drama of the work that initially catches the reader’s attention, but from Johannes’ viewpoint the real story begins after the engagement, as he tries to bring her to his preordained goal of breaking the engagement. A Don Giovanni can make any woman desire him, but only a Johannes can make a woman desire him so that he can then drive her to not desire him! “Strictly and abstinently, I keep watch on myself so that everything in her, the divinely rich nature in her may come to full development.” 31 Not quite: his notion of development stops at the erotic. In his ensuing letters to her, he continues the manipulation that he started in the Baxter parlor. Is this really psychology? There are insights along the way about the power of the interesting, but the seduction is neither real nor realistic. And even if it were, we have learned only about the twisted psychology of a most unusual individual, in effect “abnormal psychology.” This is not “Unum noris omnes” – the oft-cited (and altered) dictum from Terence’s play32 and the stated purpose of Augustine’s own introspection: in knowing oneself essentially and deeply, one knows what is 28 29 30 31 32

EO1, 343 / SKS 2, 332. EO1, 359 / SKS 2, 34. EO1, 363 / SKS 2, 351. EO1, 385 / SKS 2, 373. Demipho in Terence’s play Phormio II, 265: “unum quom noris omnis noris.”

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most universal and most important about being a human being. This is most certainly not what the diary is about. Johannes sees Cordelia developing to the point where she will seek to take him captive by means of the erotic. 33 In the process of the disengagement, Johannes concedes to his diary that she has become his preoccupation34 (his obsession), and to that extent he has lost control.

4. Concept of Anxiety In The Concept of Anxiety,35 Haufniensis-Kierkegaard elevates anxiety to a major philosophical-psychological category and proceeds to view its data through the lens of the (Augustinian) theological doctrine of Original Sin (“hereditary sin” in Danish and German). If the theological doctrine is false, this would of course make the consequent analysis faulty to possibly useless. But it is not without truth, even if neither it nor the biblical tale at its origin is literally true. While eighteenth century Enlightenment philosophy argued the illogic of the idea, and the divine injustice of inherited sin (based on eighteenth century notions of individual rather than tribal- or speciesjustice), most recognized the profound but nebulous truth that the doctrine attempted to articulate: that there is something amiss about the present human condition that needs positive, corrective action to be set right. Whether one thinks of this call to “perfection” as the need for completion (from incompleteness to completeness) or for restoration (from fallenness to perfection), it powerfully identifies the mood of anxiety with our current, incomplete, in-process, intermediate stage, sees anxiety as the tension (unconscious and conscious) between the what-is and the what-can-be, and then examines a variety of stances that one can take in relationship to the current stance/stage. As such, the doctrine is shown to possess great psychological truth about the human condition, while not of course an accurate historical account of its origin. The Concept of Anxiety is as distinctive in its genre as Either/Or is in its own. Formally, The Concept of Anxiety appears to be a theologi33 34 35

EO1, 421 / SKS 2, 409. EO1, 435 / SKS 2, 422. The remarks that follow, both in reference to The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness Unto Death in no way pretend to be a full account of either work but rather only a consideration of what each work contributes toward understanding the psychology of Aesthete A in Either/Or.

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cal treatise, with topics logically divided. It gives extended treatment to a category never so fully treated before, and does so within the perspective of original sin. Like so many treatises, it does not necessarily give equal distribution to each part, and so while “Objective Anxiety” and “Subjective Anxiety” are set up as paired sections, socalled “objective anxiety” seems to be considered mostly for formal purposes, whereas subjective anxiety is clearly where the author’s interest lies. Objective anxiety, for its part, is held to be the result of (original) sin in the external world – specifically, “the effect of sin in nonhuman existence.”36 Subjective Anxiety is therefore a consideration of the kind of anxiety that emerges in individual subjects, and in all individual subjects because of the universality of original sin. Obviously, original sin itself is not a psychological observation, nor is it empirical. It is a tenet of Christian theology, but recent philosophy in Kierkegaard’s time, after denial by many Enlightenment rationalists, had given independent philosophical content to the idea, most famously in the philosophies of Kant and of Hegel. Kierkegaard’s Haufniensis continues in this tradition, but brings to the inquiry the pastoral theological interest of overcoming the condition, not merely observing it. A glance at the table of contents of The Concept of Anxiety and an observation of page distribution will tell a reader what is at the heart of The Concept of Anxiety. For while the work is divided logically, one might even say systematically, it is by no means divided evenly: “Objective Anxiety” has four pages; “Subjective Anxiety” thirty. “Anxiety about the Evil” has five pages; “Anxiety about the Good” has fourty-five. And, in the subdivision of “Anxiety about the Good,” the discussion of “Freedom Lost Somatically-Psychically” is one page, whereas “Freedom Lost Pneumatically” is twenty-five pages long. Structurally, one could say therefore that the emphasis of the work is on the sections “Subjective Anxiety,” “Anxiety about the Good,” and the pneumatic (spiritual) aspects of the latter. This would be in keeping with its opening statement about seriousness, rather than mere academic observation, and its pastoral/therapeutic interest in overcoming anxiety – not in Idealist speculation, Romantic observation (or twentieth century psychoanalytic talking), but in acting, i. e., in painfully taking on the self-consciousness that brings the promise of overcoming anxiety. Here then we see more exactly the problem,

36

CA, 57 / SV1 IV, 328.

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the predicament and the adamant stance of Aesthete A who knows all this and will do no such thing. Kierkegaard’s citation of the “poet’s poet” – that non-psychologist most cited by psychologists, namely, Shakespeare – is very apt here. King Lear is a figure who may be said to have driven himself mad by out-of-control reflection, and this is a threat lurking beneath the surface of the “Diapsalmata” as well. The blinded Glouster, who had earlier been told by Lear that he does not need eyes to see the madness of the world, speaks to the fallen, shrunken figure of Lear in Tieck-Schlegel’s German and says: “O du zertrümmert Meisterstück der Schöpfung”37 (cited by Kierkegaard) and that continues “So nutzt das große Weltall einst sich ab/ Zu nichts.” (King Lear IV, 6). It can justly be said here that Kierkegaard/Haufniensis is more truly citing Tieck-Schlegel than Shakespeare, for the Tieck-Schlegel translates back into English as “O, thou ruined masterpiece of Creation,” rather than the Shakespearean “O thou ruin’d piece of nature.” All the characters of Either/Or must of course be considered to populate a world where there is objective anxiety, but in their cases too it is their subjective anxiety that is of most interest. The author of The Concept of Anxiety makes reference to Either/Or and to the problem of melancholy that emerges there, and its relation to anxiety, writing in a footnote that the first part of Either/Or “expresses the melancholy in its anguished [angestfulde] sympathy and egoism, which is explained in the second part.”38 Kierkegaard-Haufniensis’ exposition of anxiety presupposes that human beings are a dualism of matter and spirit. It locates anxiety in the spiritual capacity of human beings, but a spiritual capacity that is as yet “Nothing,” and it is from this reified Nothing that anxiety arises. 39

37

38 39

The German that Vigilius cites is thus theologically more pregnant than the original English. Shakespeare wrote, “O, ruin’d piece of nature! This great world shall so wear out to naught.” (King Lear, IV, 5) vs. English of the Tieck-Schlegel German: “O thou ruined masterpiece of creation. And so will the great cosmos itself one day wear itself down to nothing.” The German of Tieck-Schlegel lends itself more not only to theological reflection but also to nihilism. CA, 43 / SV1 IV, 314. Implicitly Kierkegaard is following here a distinction that Schelling had emphasized between ÍÓÈÍË and ÊÅÍË in Greek, between that which is not in the definitive sense (is and can not be) vs. that which is not in a contingent sense (is not but might possibly be). “Anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility” (CA, 43 / SV1 IV, 314).

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Anxiety is held to be possible because human beings are both physical and spiritual. In an oft-quoted passage, Vigilius writes: …[A]nxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs in this dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go.40

According to Haufniensis’ interpretation of the Fall, Aesthete A lives in a world of objective anxiety in which anxiety has been increasing by generation and in which sensuousness has become sinfulness because of sin. In Haufniensis’ schematization, Aesthete A’s anxiety is essentially “Anxiety about the Good” and this is confirmed by Aesthete A’s own declaration of enclosing reserve [Indesluttethed], which is one of its principal marks in The Concept of Anxiety. He is anxious in the face of the possibility of the Good, of overcoming his deficient lifestyle and life view. At the same time, his anxiety is also anxiety about evil, because his problem, namely his stance in the sensuousness, has not been negated. And in this aspect of anxiety, there is the possibility that he can sink further. It is no doubt to emphasize dramatically the further sinking that Kierkegaard-Haufniensis chooses the tragic figure of King Lear, who in every scene of the play sinks to yet a lower level, until he catches hold of himself after the death of Cordelia and recovers himself in an internal sense. Vigilius Haufniensis will eventually help us to see, in retrospect, that Aesthete A’s objectless fear is his own unactualized possibility of becoming an authentic self, and so his fear is in a real sense a fear of “nothing,” something which is not (or not yet). He has the “sympathetic antipathy” and “antipathetic sympathy” to which Vigilius famously refers, without employing Vigilius’ terminology. For he is fascinated with himself and his own sufferings, as the “Diapslamata” amply document. And he enjoys scrutinizing himself, without going the whole way toward serious introspection. In the “Diapsalmata” he dissects himself more thoroughly in the indicative mood than the subjunctive Johannes ever does to Cordelia or Edvard in the diary, even if that later exercise is more fascinating to the reader. He senses that he is out of control, that the movement within him is not under his power, any more than an earthquake would be. His resistance and insistence on standing still, rather than making any movement, testifies to the impotence of his life-view. That is clear enough to the outsider, the reader, and not at all unclear to Aesthete A himself. 40

CA, 61 / SV1 IV, 331.

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He laments the absence of possibility in his life, but rejects possibility. He hates his present, no less the past, and he dreads a future that is mere repetition of the present. Any real and possible future he rejects out of hand (despair of possibility). He is in “anxiety for the good,” according to Vigilius’ schematization, insofar as he totally rejects any change (and betterment) in his existence stance. But since he cannot still or eliminate the subterranean force of possibility in his life, he is always subject to the inner eruptions – the earthquakes to which he refers. His anxiety is not what Vigilius calls “anxiety for the evil,” for that is the anxiety of one who makes some movement, but not the whole movement into self-consciousness as sinner. Aesthete A’s defiant stance of standing still is the demoniacal in him, even if the character Johannes will ultimately strike us as more demon-like, and Aesthete A gives voice to it in a defiant, sharp, sometimes bitter irony – not the softened irony of remembrance and reflection but the hard irony of pained experience. These materials will later be mined very successfully by existentialist philosophers and psychologists. But even without them we have a good grasp of the psychology of Aesthete A. The psychological analysis and schematization makes clear that Kierkegaard regards the problem of Aesthete A as a conflict between flesh and (emerging) spirit, and that the emergence of spirit must be understood in relationship to the universal existential fact of personal fall into sinfulness (otherwise stated, of not being the self that one is impelled, but not compelled, toward becoming). The emergence of spirit here must in fact be understood in terms of a de facto “semi-Pelagian” theology of self-recovery, in which the individual must do certain things for himself, even if it is maintained that only God’s grace can ultimately conclude the process.41 (In Kant’s version, the problem is justification before God, being counted righteous in view of the fact that one has sinned and therefore can never be considered fully righteous before the Author of the Moral Law.) The problem of Aesthete A, and the cause of his ongoing sufferings, is that he will not do anything to alter his situation. He rejects out of hand the real possibility open to him, even as he laments the absence of possibility in his life. He rejects in effect what is truly possible for him, whereas the possibilities he laments are the speculative, fanci41

Even Saint Augustine, the chief opponent of Pelagianism, has been sometimes himself accused of “semi-Pelagianism” by the “grace extremists” in faith-vs.-works controversies.

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ful things that proceed from his lively and unrealistic imagination. An example might be something like a non-Dane carrying on and lamenting the possibility of being a Dane – something that, because of other actualized possibilities, is now genetically and culturally a non-possibility – rather than fulfilling the genetic and cultural possibilities that s/he has by virtue of the nationality and homeland that s/he actually does have.42 When all is said and done, what, if anything, have we learned about Aesthete A from The Concept of Anxiety that we might not already have known from Either/Or? From a Kierkegaardian perspective, we learn that the essence of his problem is spiritual, that the dead-end nature of his battle with sensuousness is only an appearance: he is not trapped, except insofar as he insists on being trapped. There is a way out, if only he will take it, but we have no indication that he will, and every suggestion that he will not. His underlying problem, theologically, is sin. His surface problem is lack of will to do the one thing about his problem that can be done, and that he himself already senses needs to be done: to move beyond merely aesthetic categories, to become a more fully developed human being. We also realize from The Concept of Anxiety that the earlier proposed answer offered by Judge William is only part of the answer. William’s proposed solution of Aesthete A moving into ethical categories is part of the solution, but The Concept of Anxiety instructs us that he needs to enter that widest sphere of the ethico-religious. The difference between the anxiety of Aesthete A and Cordelia is that the character of Cordelia, and thus her anxiety, evolve before our reading eyes in the diary, whereas the character of Aesthete A does not: Cordelia begins as a naïve young girl in near-“spiritlessness,” because she is an individual in whom spirit has not yet stirred. “In spiritlessness there is no anxiety,”43 observes Haufniensis, but anxiety lies in wait. And it will be Johannes the Seducer’s self-appointed role to stir spirit in her, until she has emerged as the very formidable personality whose passionate and spirited letters of hate formally open “The Seducer’s Diary.”

42

43

Comparable perhaps to the anecdote about Voltaire, surrounded by a mob in England shouting “Hang the Frenchman,” and winning them over with the lament of lost possibility (=impossibility): “Am I not punished enough in not having been born an Englishman?” CA, 95 / SV1 IV, 365.

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5. Sickness Unto Death The Sickness Unto Death, like The Concept of Anxiety, reflects a schematization that constitutes a check-off list against which to visualize the full range of anxiety- and despair-forms that Aesthete A actually has. In some sense, he has most of the forms catalogued, for many of them are overlapping. And he has all the most essential and critical forms of both anxiety and despair. That is the point already being made in Either/Or in dramatic fashion and that is then underlined in theoretical fashion in the two practical treatises. For recall, neither of them is merely interested in observing forms of anxiety and despair. Each wants to embody the serious mood that is concerned about getting out of the condition, not wallowing in observation or any mere intellectual pleasures in theorizing. (This is of course a very anti-Hegelian point, in advance of the school of Marx: the point is not merely to know and to formulate concepts but to do something about the problem.) The Sickness unto Death really does help us to interpret Aesthete A somewhat more clearly, for it presents us with a chart of personality development where we can see for ourselves where Aesthete A would be placed. Since despair is universal, of course he is to be regarded as in despair, but he is also conscious of his despair, as he reveals in his diapsalmata. While Aesthete A is not totally transparent to himself about his condition, he does have a clear inkling about what is wrong. Aesthete A shares the same theory of the movement and development of spirit as Johannes the Seducer manifests in his seduction of Cordelia and as Anti-Climacus articulates in fuller philosophicaltheological explicitness, and so he implicitly knows that it applies to himself as well. Yet Johannes suggests that it is an emotional wound that unlocks spiritual development, which is to say that he is not subscribing to any theology of baptism as unleashing it. Anti-Climacus captures Aesthete A very well when he observes: …[T]hose who say they are in despair are bound to become conscious as spirit or those whom bitter experiences and dreadful decisions have assisted in becoming conscious as spirit: it is either the one or the other; the person who is really devoid of spirit is very rare indeed…[E]ternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about you only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not, whether you have despaired in such a way that you did not realize that you were in despair, or in such a way that you covertly carried this sickness inside of you as your gnawing secret, or in such a way that you, a terror to others, raged in despair. And, if so, if you have lived in despair, then regardless of whatever else you won or lost, everything is lost for you, eternity does not acknowledge you, it never knew you

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– or, still more terrible, it knows you as you are known and it binds you to yourself in despair.44

When we leave Aesthete A, we know that he risks remaining in despair, that he risks spending the rest of his life spinning his wheels, as it were, in aesthetic pleasure, including the mixed pleasure of psychological self-observation. But the problem is that his psychological acuity is un-scientific: it does not include self-scrutiny, it does not ask itself what is wrong. Instead, it merely catalogues his suffering, and does not ask itself what the long-term cure is. As a result, all that is left is the short-term remedy of emotional exhaustion, sleep and a bit of forgetfulness before it all starts up all over again. The Sickness Unto Death, in contrast, provides a theory and a remedy – the long-term and the sole cure for the problem of Aesthete A and every aesthete, i. e., of every “sinner” or non-self. The attentive reader of Either/Or already recognizes that Aesthete A is conscious of the fact that he is in despair. Yet something is wrong in addition to his unwillingness to do anything about it. The Sickness Unto Death makes clear that part of his problem is that he does not have the correct conception of despair: “…[T]he true conception of despair is indispensable for conscious despair.”45 Aesthete A has more than mere dim knowledge of his condition, but he is far from perfect clarity. In fact he seems to be engaging in a stratagem of distracting himself from his self-knowledge through various kinds of mental busyness, whether it be aesthetic essays or self-observation. His is not the “despair of the earthly.” That is left for conformists and external practitioners of Christianity. His is rather “despair of the eternal,” which is regarded as “a significant step forward”46 and one of its principal indicators is enclosing reserve [Indesluttethed],47 as is his longing for solitude. Carried to its extreme, in which one remains totally secretive and a secret to all, without a confidant or the ability to have a confidant, Anti-Climacus observes, it brings with it the danger of suicide. In Either/Or, we do not know how far the character might eventually go toward this, but we do know that the Young Man of Repetition was, in an early draft, sleighted for suicide, before a repetition occurred that even the author had not contemplated.

44 45 46 47

SUD, 27-28 / SV1 XI, 141. SUD, 47 / SV1 XI, 160. SUD, 61 / SV1 XI, 175. SUD, 63 / SV1 XI, 175.

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Despair of the eternal is also characterized as the despair of a self with apparent self-mastery, abiding in the illusion/delusion of being autonomous, but is in reality an absolute ruler who presides over nothing, the proverbial king without a kingdom.48 The despair of the “Diapsalmata” would be well understood as the intensified, demonic despair that accompanies growing self-consciousness, and this demonic despair, formulated in the paradoxical language “willing to be oneself in despair,” is held to be its most intensive form.49 There are other forms of despair that Aesthete A does not manifest. For example, his is not the despair characterized by religious aestheticism. He is not a poet of the religious (as is Johannes de Silentio, formally, in Fear and Trembling, someone who understands something of the religious and of a God-relationship but still stands outside it).

6. Conclusion In conclusion, let us return briefly to the nineteenth century young man that I attempted to translate into twenty-first century terms at the beginning of this essay. We have seen his problem and reviewed it from several angles. The portrait of Aesthete A is of a character dancing sometimes wildly, sometimes wearily, on the edge of the abyss. Kierkegaard, through his pseudonyms Vigilius Haufniensis and AntiClimacus, would seem to offer him The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death as manuals that could help him further understand his problem and point him in the direction of a cure. Would we recommend the same for our twenty-first century version of the brash young intellectual seeking to find himself in our own, perhaps even more confusing, world? Would we (with Kierkegaard’s sense of seriousness) “seriously” offer this updated young man The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death as aids? I think not. Both are bound not only to nineteenth century culture and a theological-philosophical tradition that is (unfortunately) less known and valued today. Perhaps even more importantly, that receding intellectual tradition contains presuppositions that are no longer shared. For Vigilius Haufniensis’s notion of original or inherited sin, while freed from the historical interpretation as simply the sin (and the con48 49

SUD, 69 / SV1 XI, 180. SUD, 73 / SV1 XI, 184.

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sequences of that sin) passed on to all the descendants of Adam, is still bound in the fine web of speculative Christian doctrine spun from biblical narrative by a series of brilliant Church Fathers and given its definitive form by an intellectually dexterous Saint Augustine. Moreover, the Christian doctrine of original sin, we now realize, is neither historically nor literally true. Yet it is profoundly true all the same, at least in the sense that it contains profound truths about the human condition that are overlooked at our own peril. For something remains very wrong, very incomplete, very imperfect among the six + billion current living descendants of mitochondrial Eve. 50 What can we offer our twenty-first century young man instead? Should it be Prozac or Ritalin or some more subtle cocktail of pills? Would that hold him in check until he matures? Or should we offer him The Sickness Unto Death, or an attempted secularized version thereof, such as one finds implicitly in Heidegger’s Being and Time? Dasein’s Geworfenheit, Verfallenheit and encounter with Angst and his search for authenticity had their attractions as concepts in the early- and mid-twentieth century and some of them may still linger in the twenty-first. But Being and Time too may well be a dated work by now. If we seek a twenty-first century way to reformulate these old truths, in light of the anti-metaphysical prophesies of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra that have largely come to pass and of the foundation-shaking facts of neo-Darwinism, how shall we proceed? To date, those who have sought to do so in a totally secular way have not succeeded. Do we perhaps need a more Athanasian Kierkegaard, in contrast to our Augustinian Kierkegaard, capable of steering us at least away from problems of guilt and, if one retains restoration imagery, at least emphasize the restoration of the God-image shattered by sin? But Kierkegaard warns us in advance through his pseudonym Constantine Constantius that there are no such aesthetic, intellectual repetitions. It may be already too late for an Athanasian version of Kierkegaard to find an audience. Meanwhile, the one work that I believe that one can still offer our twenty-first century young man, to good effect, would be Either/Or itself. It offers not a cure, not even a full analysis, but a warning and perhaps the shock of recognition in seeing himself in a (not-too-distant) mirror image of intellectual and spiritual lostness. Depending 50

According to the best genetic evidence currently available, all humans are the descendants of one original woman (presumably from an early group of human females whose descendants died out). Only the descendants of this one woman, sometimes described as the Mitochondrial Eve, have survived and evolved.

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on how culturally developed our young man is, he may need to widen his cultural horizons by taking in a few evenings of Mozart in order to fully appreciate the text. But with only a few Greek and Hebrew cultural footnotes to help him, he can discover himself in the poignant cries of the “Diapsalmata,” in the heady irony of “Rotation of Crops,” in the maudlin self-pity of the “Unhappiest One” and stimulate his fantasy life by a reading of “The Seducer’s Diary.” Thus, of the psychological works of Kierkegaard here briefly considered, it is Either/Or, his first proper publication, that best stands the test of time, that stands the best chance of speaking across almost two centuries about persisting phenomena in the human condition and the persistent inkling that we have it in our power to do something about it. Kierkegaard’s treatises would remind us that whether we emerge as twenty-first century Pelagians or semi-Pelagians in our theory is far less important than what emerges in our praxis.51

51

Unless of course one still believes, as orthodox Christians once did and many still do, that correct theory or doctrine can actually affect praxis.

The (In)Difference of Seduction The Aftermath of Seduction, or the “Interesting” Difference1 By Céline Léon Abstract Because – aesthetically speaking – the man-woman distinction is never more visible than in the aftermath of seduction, the Kierkegaardian notion of “the interesting,” which emerges on this occasion, provides an invaluable tool with which to ponder and take measure of the asymmetry opened up between the situations of women themselves, and men. Should the disparity that is assumed and encouraged between the sexes be understood as (re)marking the indifference which, according to males, characterizes the manner in which women look at the objects of their desire (“any man will do”)? Or do the seducers, even as they proclaim their eagerness to liberate women, succeed in imparting little more than their indifference to the Other’(s) gender (“no woman will do”)?

From the essay on Don Juan, which opens the “Immediate Erotic Stages,” to the “Seducer’s Diary” which closes the book, through “The Tragic in Ancient Drama Reflected in the Tragic in Modern Drama,” through “The Unhappiest One,” which begins with a sorrowing maiden reminiscent of Regine, the wordless wail of women whom men have pursued and abandoned resonates throughout the first volume of Either/Or. Made to feel that only the mediation of (a) man would enable her to fill the void lying at the core of her being, each one of them, like a stranded and expectant vessel, has, at some point, presented her slack sail to the afflatus of masculine desire.2 A young girl, whose realization/visibility is equated with the catching of a man, seiz1

2

Céline Léon The Neither/Nor of the Second Sex – Kierkegaard on Women, Sexual Difference, and Sexual Relations, Mercer, GA: Mercer University Press 2008. EO1, 186, 203, 213.

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es the opportunity when it arises; when this fails to occur, she tries all the harder and, like an Ariadne, gives thread without hesitation, spins without a return.3 At no point do the aesthetic personae question the universality of a girl’s willingness to sail these uncertain, and often lethal, waters. To the Fashion Designe, self-evident is the truth that, given enough time and the “right” circumstances, “every woman’s virtue” “is salable to the right purchaser.”4 A woman – for whom any male is preferable to the curse of indifference – welcomes the enslavement, although it may eventually mean her self-annihilation for the benefit of an elusive seducer.5 Even the women whom the aesthete presents as unconventional or passionate enough to taste love outside the bonds of matrimony are portrayed as dedicating their lives to the undertaking. Made to think in terms of the feminine role, they believe anything from a man to be better than nothing – better than the nothing which their solo existence would constitute. The male aesthetes evince remarkable consonance in the sentiment that a woman is bound to think herself flattered to have been espied by a true master of the erotic and fortunate to have been, if only for a while, the sweetheart of an individual endowed with such fabulously seductive powers.6 The truth of the matter, however, is that whether it takes one woman, or a multiplicity of women (varietas delectat!) to satisfy a single man (Johannes, or Don Giovanni – respectively), the aftermath of the seduction further demonstrates, and in effect, dramatically accentuates, the difference between the sexes. Having made love her sole reason for being, a woman loses more than just her love (Kjærlighed, or love in all its reaches) when she loses a man. Once she has surrendered everything, she finds herself a wailing outcast, whom her exile from the fields of Eros dooms to haunt the graveyards of patriarchy, along 3 4

5 6

EO1, 191, 196, 197, 201, 210. SL, 68. Kierkegaard echoed the offensive remark in a January 16, 1842 letter to his friend Emil Boesen who, like him only a few months earlier, was in the throes of seeing a relationship come to an infelicitous end: “That a girl should be unconquerable, that thought has never yet been entertained in my recalcitrant, if you will, or proud head” (JP 5:5548). Furthermore, trying once to explain to King Christian VIII how to deal with the crowd, Kierkegaard likened it to a woman, whom one cajoles and eventually, with time and patience, wins over: “[In either instance] one never engage[s] in direct battle, but indirectly, help[s] it get carried away, and since it lacks thought, it always would lose in time – but just stand firm” (JP 6:6310). EO1, 201; EO2, 331. EO1, 101, 186, 203, 213; SL, 78-79. According to Kierkegaard: “To be selected by a seducer is for a woman what it is for a fruit to be pecked by a bird – for the bird is the connoisseur” (JP 6:6472:19).

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with a bevy of others, similarly deceived, defiled, and discarded.7 To the man in/out of her life, she is a hydra on whose neck he keeps grafting heads, the better to sever them: (1) virginity; (2) independence; (3) personal identity; (4) further (erotic) prospects. Or, to give the decapitation a more radical expression: The female victim, confounded and destroyed by the alternating ardor and coolness of the male, 8 not only loses it (her virtue, her reputation), but also him (her seducer), herself (her life, her sanity, and so forth), and them (other loves). (1) Because, for a female, seduction is the loss of innocence once and irreparably, to be or not to be a virgin constitutes an absolute disjunction, an either/or whose terms admit neither increase nor diminuation. “Woman,” Johannes the Seducer explains, “is separated from man, and the partition of modesty is more decisive than Aladdin’s sword that separates him from Gulnare.”9 Equating his jouissance with her reticence, he simultaneously describes the hymen as “the impenetrable secrecy of modesty” which, by pointing to “the passion of desire behind it,” enhances the enticement.10 While an unchaste man does not lose anything in the eyes of the world, a deflowered woman may as well no longer be, for, in a difference which the Seducer underscores: “When a girl has given away everything, she is weak, she has lost everything, for in a man innocence is a negative element, but in woman it is the substance of her being.”11 A male may acquire virtue; a female can only lose it. This retroactive and deferred valuation of the masculine ideal of female chastity has been perceptively noted by Louis Mackey: “Virginity of the spirit, as of the flesh, is never loved until it is lost, and by then it cannot – short of a miracle – be restored.”12 In fact, inasmuch as “virginity of the flesh” is a virtue with which her/a seducer invests (a) woman after he has depreciated her by (potentially) taking it away, it can be said without exaggeration that it is not merely the appreciation of chastity, but its very existence, that is a back-formation of (a) woman’s ability to lose it. (2) Once the excitement is gone, once copulation has been achieved, it is all over for the woman, if only because a seducer, unlike a husband, does not have to stick around. The corollary of the equation of 7 8 9 10 11 12

EO1, 183, 187, 189, 192. EO1, 307. SL, 78. SL, 78, 77. EO1, 445. Kierkegaard:A Kind of Poet, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1971, p. 2.

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a maiden’s personal worth with her virginity is that, along with her maidenhood, goes her seducer’s interest. Quite different, however, is the story for the girl, who, by his agency, has metamorphized into a woman, and whose dependency has been increased by the arousal which he has incited in her “femininity.”13 Whether she is then encumbered by feelings which, at least in Johannes’s opinion, graft themselves upon immediate sensual gratification, or finds herself unable to shed the masquerade of femininity which has been imposed on her, she fastens herself all the more tightly to her seducer. Like Zerlina, this most solitary character in “Don Juan,” for whom it begins all over again the minute she sees the Don, the woman betrayed by her lover nurses but one wish: To do it (to have it done unto has) all over again!14 She fights all the more desperately to retain her love; having been “had,” she no longer “is.” (3) As the aesthete’s reflections on a variety of literary and artistic projections of the masculine imaginary amply demonstrate, a betrayed woman loses everything when she loses her seducer. Take, for instance, the three “brides of sorrow,” whom A adduces in his “Silhouettes [Skyggerids].” When Marie Beaumarchais loses Clavigo, Goethe’s eponymous hero, she loses not only her fiancé, but also her world, her childhood illusions, and, to the extent that her faith in love is eroded, her entire future.15 When, in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Elvira, the seduced woman par excellence, loses Don Juan, she loses not only the Don, but also the world and her past.16 When, in Goethe’s Faust, Margarete loses Faust, she loses not only her love, but, because “the energy to comprehend her misfortune has been drained out of her,” also her ability to grieve.17 In the wake of her seduction, the queen (regina) for a day finds herself without a kingdom; worse, she no longer knows whether she ever actually reigned. To the question: “Is there not the same law for a man’s love as for a woman’s?” which the aesthete puts in the mouth of Marie Beaumarchais, the answer is a resounding “no.” Rather than adducing plausible reasons for the difference, the aesthete grounds his argument on evidence and puts forward the sexes’ emotional and behavioral disparity. Marie has doubly deceived herself – a first time, when she traded the delusions of childhood for 13 14 15 16 17

EO1, 307. JP 5:5498; EO1, 203. EO1, 180, 183, 187, 189. EO1, 195, 190. See EO1, 211.

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those of erotic love, and, a second time, when, in the aftermath of Clavigo’s deception, she bartered the illusions of sorrow for those of erotic love.18 Nor does the bit of circularity – which consists of equating woman with her tears and of concluding hence that she is good for nothing but tears – shake A’s conviction that “unhappy love is in itself undoubtedly the deepest sorrow for a woman.”19 This is quite a trick when you think about it, for he then insists she is inauthentic for being less than she should be. In yet another instance of the double bind, woman, unlike man, is not permitted to doff the illusion of sorrow. For, were she able to do so, the aesthete continues, “her grief would attain masculine maturity, and she would be compensated for her loss” by what would in fact amount to a sex-change.20 A, who bases his argument on a state of affairs created by his own sex, asserts antithetical priorities by at once comparing woman unfavorably to man and enjoining her not to relinquish representations detrimental to herself, and more generally, to her sex. (4) Although not immediately evident, the fourth loss experienced by woman in the aftermath of her seduction must be formulated within the context of a larger question. What does a woman want, or, more accurately, what can she do, once she has been seduced and so irretrievably abandoned as to be convinced of the irrevocability of the breach? To Johannes, the answer is clear: (a) Either, she will desperately begin to look for a new partner, or (b), more daringly in her seducer’s view, she will displace the attention which he thinks she owes him, or others like him, onto herself.21 In the first instance, “essentially determined by the conception of her emotion,” she remains faithful to her (feminine) nature by remaining faithful to man; in the latter, betraying man, she betrays her nature, with the consequence that she can be declared both unfeminine and unnatural. (a) Glad to be rid of the girl, yet either loath to deprive his sex of the convenience of her services, or to rob it of its belief in its own indispensability, the Seducer is eager to recommend another man, yet he abstains from doing so in the conviction of the vanity or superfluity of such a move. Will not a jilted girl throw herself into a man’s (any man’s) arms and hand herself to the highest bidder?22 There emerges, 18 19 20 21 22

See EO1, 189. EO1, 172. EO1, 189. EO1, 339. In the last part of Stages on Life’s Way, Quidam bemoans: “One also often hears that a girl could not live without a man, and it was true, but it was not that man but another

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however, a difficulty at this point. In the aftermath of her erotic surrender, the woman, depreciated by occupancy, ceases to be of any value, not only to her seducer but to other men as well. In fact, so useless is she that she may as well abdicate her sex, Johannes sardonically concludes.23 Thus, after having (allegedly) “deflowered” Cordelia, he – somewhat redundantly – formulates the wish that, like Poseidon who changed the nymph Kainis into a man, Kainus, he could “transform her [Cordelia] into a man.”24 Needless to say, so radical a metamorphosis would be doubly helpful to a (dis-)interested seducer by at once ridding him of his victim (what would/could he do with a man?) and justifying him in his own eyes (she would be better off). Should the sex-change fail to take place, all Cordelia/a seduced woman can hope for is the good fortune of finding somebody – anybody – generous, or foolish enough, to buy secondhand! Adding insult to injury, Johannes brings up the matter of her indebtedness to the man without whose intromission such prodigies would not have come to pass: “[I]t is not such a great misfortune for a woman to be seduced, [in fact] it is her good fortune if she is seduced. A girl who has been seduced in a first-rate way can become a first rate wife.”25 Not his wife, of course, but someone else’s! She should, in other words, be thankful for an initiation which, he now claims (never mind the contradiction!) has the effect of putting her in circulation. Convinced that the end of the „affair” will restore him to himself, Johannes cynically envisions Cordelia’s „restoration” as yet another (final) act of control on his part: He will return her to the care of her former and discreet fiancé, whose gratitude will overflow for the training and experience she has acquired at his hands!26 (b) Should this fail to occur, there remains the second option – that which a woman might have chosen instead of surrendering to (the)

23

24 25 26

man” (SL, 392). The terms are singularly reminiscent of those used by Kierkegaard to describe what he perceived to be Regine’s unfair rotation of loves. His one-time fiancée – her many protestations of death notwithstanding – had had the audacity to (re)turn to Schlegel in the short interval (two years) that had elapsed since the day of the rupture which he (Kierkegaard) had initiated (JP 6:6470, 6472, 6478)! This “removal from circulation” corresponds to the mechanism which, almost a century and a half later, Luce Irigaray would describe in This Sex Which Is Not One [Ce Sexe qui n’en est pas un]: “Once deflowered, woman is relegated to the status of use value…she is removed from exchange among men.” Translated by Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke, Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press 1985, p. 186. EO1, 445. SL, 79. EO1, 347.

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seduction – namely, that of a displacement of attention from him to herself, from his sex onto her own. This is where the category of “the interesting” intervenes, which corresponds negatively in woman to that of self-love in man. A woman, it is said, cannot focus on herself, or on others like her, without making herself interesting; on the other hand, the seducer – who after a detour or digression through the other(’s) sex returns to himself or to his homologues – becomes interestingly reflective.27 Unlike a male – who is encouraged to speculate and to specularize himself, hence, to move over to, and perhaps cross, border-regions – a female is forbidden to acquire, or to exhibit, qualities and interests of/on her own; she is permitted neither to be thinking of herself, nor to mirror herself in a fellow woman; she remains aesthetically bound.28 If, for a man, there is no contradiction between egotism and singularity, between masculinity and reflectiveness, woman is denied self-representation and auto-affection. Take, for instance, the case of the “modern” Antigone imagined by the aesthete in “The Tragic in Ancient Drama Reflected in the Tragic in Modern Drama,” in the first volume of Either/Or. A’s heroine is allowed to retain her femininity despite the fact that she dedicates her life to an idea, yet she can only do so by not becoming aware of that which prompts her sacrifice.29 On the other hand, were she bold enough to spurn the selfabnegating renunciation imposed on her by male strictures and to indulge self-cultivation or self-love instead, the aesthete would immediately declare her to exist outside the scope of his interest – as one who has abdicated the feminine side of her nature. Somewhat analogous is the situation of the woman who, in the wake of the seduction (in effect, also in scenarios from which seduction is absent), befriends other women. 30 Over against a male, for whom 27

28

29 30

EO1, 339; my emphasis. In Fear and Trembling (1843), another Johannes, Johannes de Silentio, defines “the interesting” as a “border category, a confinium between esthetics and ethics” (FT, 83); the pseudonym fails to specify, however, whether the concept is gender-specific. Gerda Lerner will reflect that, besides being “deprived of ‘cultural prodding,’ the essential dialogue and encounter with persons of equal education and standing,” women are forbidden to congregate or bond with others whose deprivation they share. The Creation of Feminist Consciousness, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1993, p. 12. EO1, 158. It is difficult not to be reminded here of the question which Luce Irigaray felt prompted to ask upon noticing the inexorable frequency with which, in a patriarchal economy, women are used as objects of mediation, exchange, and transference between men: “But what if [the] ‘commodities’ refused to go to ‘market’? What if

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“contact with others”31 is indispensable and for whom isolation from members of his sex would be dangerous, “there is,” according to the Seducer, “nothing more corrupting for a young girl than associating a great deal with other young girls.”32 Like the sorrowing bride encountered earlier, she has, Johannes “explains,” abdicated her womanhood, “surrendered her womanliness.”33 Neither fish nor fowl, neither male nor female, she has made herself into a hybrid, a hermaphroditic aberration – a fate which reproduces the neutralization/sex-change which he had dreamed to bring about through the seduction, or its aftermath.34 Although actively condoned in the male, every narcissistic stance which draws one’s thoughts away from others and fixes them on oneself is presented to the female as an offense against her sex. But – one must insist – to what motives can the egregiously differential treatment be ascribed? Whence stems such a relentless ferreting out in the Other of qualities that one would not relinquish for the world? Oddly, at this stage ethical reasons are adduced, which may demonstrate that all is grist to the mill of a male bent on illuminating himself with a little help from a girl.35 In the eyes of the Fashion Designer, women among themselves constitute an “indecent association.”36 By consorting with others of her sex, a woman foregoes, according to the Bible-quoting Seducer, her “fundamental qualification,” namely, that of being “company for the man;” rather damagingly for his moral character, she bars herself from helping the man in need of redemption: “If a man has gone astray in the interesting [note here the difference in connotations!], who is to save him if not a girl?”37 Typically, once again, there is no reciprocity between the sexes. A woman loses herself by not saving a man from dangers analogous to those she has incurred through his agency; conversely, no trap

31 32 33 34

35 36 37

they maintained ‘another’ kind of commerce, among themselves?” This Sex Which Is Not One, p. 196; Irigaray’s emphasis. EO1, 339. EO1, 340. EO1, 339. This desire to transform into a man the woman interested in her own sex has also been identified and depicted by Irigaray. Within the system of trade characteristic of patriarchal societies, she observes that “as soon as she (woman) desires (herself), as soon as she speaks (expresses herself, to herself),” it is immediately concluded that “a woman is a man. As soon as she has any relationship to another woman, she is homosexual, and therefore masculine” (This Sex Which Is Not One, p. 194; see also p. 172). See SL, 399-400n, 455, 456; also R, 185. SL, 71. R, 147; cf. Genesis 2:18-23; EO1, 340.

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awaits the man unable, or unwilling, to help the woman whose fall he has precipitated. But there are definitely deeper and less explicitly stated reasons for barring a woman from the solipsistic luxuries of self-assertion and from commerce with others like her. To the selfserving fear that a woman might enjoy freedoms analogous to those which the “first sex” deems to be its prerogative must be added a certain alarm at the thought that her example might become contagious – not to his sex this time, but to hers. Might it not constitute an open invitation to other women to transgress sexual boundaries? Will a woman’s smallest steps toward autonomy not turn out to be gigantic strides whereby a male (aesthete) risks being stripped of all authority? More fundamentally, woman must remain a negative to the man – a mirror, an obedient looking-glass which he can use to enhance his masculinity, to bring about self-glorification. Only by reducing her image can he blow up his own. Almost ninety years later, Virginia Woolf would aptly sum up the magnific(a)tion process and give it a not altogether unwarranted extension beyond purely aesthetic realms: “Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice his natural size.”38

38

See A Room of One’s Own, New York: Harcourt, Brace 1929, p. 35. For an application of this principle to philosophy, see Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, etc., trans. by Trista Selous, Oxford: Blackwell 1991, where Michèle Le Doeuff argues that “in the writings of a man philosopher, ‘woman’ may be no more nor less than a word for a foil whose role is to guarantee the philosopher’s ‘greatness’ by contrast” (xi).

Kierkegaard’s Musical Recollections By Elisabete M. de Sousa Abstract The essay ‘The Immediate Erotic Stages or the Musical Erotic’ is taken as a piece of musical criticism of Mozart’s Don Giovanni and of the question of representation and presentation in music. Some idiosyncrasies of A’s arguments concerning the opera will be correlated with their role in the essay and, more briefly, within the structure of the two volumes of Either/Or. However, more than questioning their value for musicology, I address their thought-provoking nature, which has led me to look for further elucidation in Kierkegaard’s musical milieu. In the first part, I present a few examples of A’s commentary, arguing that what is actually said and omitted about Mozart’s Don Giovanni is as significant for the structure of Either/Or and for the modern reception of the opera itself as it is for the understanding of the author’s relation to music and musicians. In the second part, I present musical sources for A’s statements beyond the philosophical debate on the essence of music during the first years of the nineteenth century. First, I provide evidence collected in the musical criticism of his day, namely by Hector Berlioz (1806-1869) and Robert Schumann (1810-1854), and secondly I draw attention to the musical practice of the virtuoso and the ideas concerning presentation and representation in music which are set in motion in the particular case of Franz Liszt (1811-1886).

I. The essay on the musical erotic commonly raises perplexion among musicologists or simple music lovers. A good number of them find it hard to accept that the only idea to be expressed by music should be sensuousness. The issue remains contentious when the expression of sensuousness in music is more indebted to philosophical thought, be it in the line of the early Romantics or Schopenhauer, than to musical theory. Music lovers, though, may forgive A’s obsession with Don Giovanni, the opera and the main character, taking Kierkegaard’s awe as the natural consequence of having fallen in love with Mozart’s masterpiece, a true state of rapture. Music lovers know only too well how

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many times they listen to the same piece and never tire of experiencing its repetition, how quickly they get used to matching a favourite piece of music to their present mood. Whether A would have liked it or not, ‘The Immediate Erotic Stages or the Musical Erotic’ has become a major reference in studies on the dramaturgy of Don Giovanni. Joseph Kerman’s ‘Reading Don Giovanni’1 and Bernard Williams’ 2 ‘Don Giovanni as an Idea’ are here taken as major representatives of a fairly large group of analysts who assume that the existence of Don Giovanni is framed by aesthetical and ethical concerns and who reject the claim that the opera should be limited to the idea of sensuousness. Kerman and Williams acknowledge that the essay on the musical erotic is the first essay in the reception of Mozart’s opera to highlight the coexistence of a disturbing mood and the erotic vitality of a seducer who is deprived of the use of reflection. Worthy of note for Williams is Kierkegaard’s influence on issues concerning the stage direction of the opera, namely, the relation between the main character and transcendence, the unavoidable choice between passing judgement on the seducer’s behaviour and undermining it, or merely leaving that decision to the audience. Another staging decision indebted to A’s particular insight is the option between the individualization of the feminine characters or their presentation as metonymies of the female gender. A also suggests that all the characters in the opera, except for the Commendatore, depend erotically on Don Giovanni, and this applies to their general definition as individual characters and their dramatic interaction in the whole opera. Williams’ hardest criticism is directed at A’s proposition that Don Giovanni is devoid of reflection and he appropriately points out that the act of not reflecting may result from the decision not to reflect rather than an innate inability to reflect. For that reason, Williams believes that Don Giovanni’s commitment to let his desire live freely implies the inevitability of punishment, as well as a deliberate non-commitment to the consequences of his acts. The 1

2

Joseph Kerman ‘Reading Don Giovanni’ in Write All These Down, Essays on Music, Berkeley: University of California Press 1994, pp. 307-321. Kerman provides a close reading of the libretto, analysing the characters and key moments in detail (the duet Là ci darem la mano, the aria Fin ch’an dal vino and the introductory scene). Bernard Williams ‘Don Giovanni as an idea’ in W. A. Mozart, Don Giovanni (1981), ed. by Julian Rushton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994, pp. 81-91. The essay has recently been reprinted in The Don Giovanni Moment, Essays on the Legacy of an Opera, ed. by Lydia Goehr and Daniel Herwitz, New York: Columbia University Press 2006, pp. 107-118. Williams starts with a relatively consensual synopsis of the chapter and criticism of its content and pays special attention to the reshaping of the Don Juan myth by later authors.

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fundamental idea conveyed by the opera would then be, for Williams, that man cannot escape the limitations of the human condition, even when, like Don Giovanni, one chooses to outlive such conditioning by intensely enjoying each conquest in the hope of transforming life into a series of victories. Nevertheless both Williams and Kerman provide musical evidence to validate A’s point that Don Giovanni lacks reflection in at least in two of the arias he sings. Though he claims that Eh via buffone (Act II, Scene I, n. 14)3 presents the natural tempo for Don Giovanni, Williams joins A when he agrees that the much faster vibrant tempo of the aria Fin ch’han dal vino (Act I, Scene 15, n. 11) denotes the intensity of his desire and his determination, leaving no time for reflection. As for Kerman, he believes that the aria Fin ch’han dal vino represents anger determined by a threatening sexual drive, a statement which, in my opinion, confirms A’s assertion that the opera and the character represent the idea of sensuousness. Kerman’s and Williams’s ideas that music represents sensuousness and that Don Giovanni is a nonreflective character leave A’s stronghold relatively unharmed. Still more significantly, Kerman’s essay opens new possibilities for reading the musical erotic by drawing attention to what is both said and omitted about the opera itself. Kerman remarks that A does not stress the fact that the characters Donna Elvira and Donna Anna follow a descendant line. In the case of Donna Anna, though, it must be taken into account that Kierkegaard did not watch the Scena Ultima. Here all the characters (with the obvious exception of the dead, Don Giovanni and the Commendatore) join together and sing of the inevitability of punishment and the sad end for the impious. As is known, the practice of omitting this scene started in Mozart’s day and became a regular feature throughout the nineteenth-century.4 Nevertheless, one need not listen to Donna Anna’s final lines with Don Ottavio when she appears to be emotionally and physically exhausted and begs to be left alone5 to realise that her will to live vanished the moment she lost her reputation, her seducer and her father in the first scene. 3

4 5

All the arias and lines of the opera are referred to in the original Italian libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte. Kierkegaard, however, saw the performances of Don Giovanni in the Danish version by Laurids Kruse. He possessed in his library the Danish text by Laurids Kruse, Don Juan, Copenhagen 1807, which is mentioned in the present article only when its discussion is pertinent. See W. A. Mozart, Don Giovanni, p. 26 n. 4 and p. 69. Don Giovanni, Scena ultima, l. 696, Lascia, o caro, un anno ancora / Allo sfogo del mio cor.

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As for Donna Elvira, she is humiliated three times, instead of the two mentioned by A; her third moment of humiliation takes place in the last scene when a merciless Don Giovanni rebukes her last appeal.6 Why should A then have left it out? On the one hand, had this final appearance of Donna Elvira been mentioned by A, I believe it would have been harder to sustain the claim that Don Giovanni is devoid of reflection; although the assertiveness of the seducer might emphasize the idea of seduction as victory, its dramatic function is intended as a premonition of the seducer’s inevitable punishment and, thus, it would endanger his image of vitality. On the other hand, this omission may weaken Donna Elvira’s tragic traits but it is compensated by her characterisation later in ‘Silhouettes’ the first part of Either/Or, where she is the representation of Don Giovanni’s epic fate, while the Commendatore is taken as the representation of his dramatic fate.7 Instead of an omission, it proves itself to be a deliberate narrative strategy for the textual cohesion of a volume which can be read as a collection of essays on modalities of drama. Moreover, it underlines A’s non-ethical reading of the dramaturgy of the opera; A takes it as a premonition of the Don’s refusal to change his conduct, since we remember that as Donna Elvira leaves the scene, she hears the steps of the stone guest pounding heavily to announce the punishment of the dissoluto. Thus, the scene recalls the ominous voice of transcendent powers heard in the overture’s opening measures, written in the famous ombra style, measures which exactly reproduce the condemning words of the Stone Guest in the churchyard scene.8 Once again, leaving this scene unmentioned reduces the possibility of any ethical commentaries and serves A’s and Victor Eremita’s purposes of separating the aesthetic and ethical points of view. 6

7 8

In two other moments Donna Elvira is vexed by Leporello, the first time in the catalogue aria (Act I, Scene V, aria n. 4) and the second by Leporello, impersonating Don Juan (Act II, Scene III, recitative and canzonetta). In her last appeal she asks Don Giovanni to change his conduct and he answers back with an epicurean vow (Donna Elvira, l. 627: Che vita cangi…Don Giovanni, l. 630: Lascia ch’io mangi; / E se ti piace / mangia con me, followed by l. 633, Vivan le femmine / Viva il buon vino / Sostegno e gloria / D’umanità!). Though Kruse’s translation is quite free, Donna Elvira’s humiliation is even more emphasized than in Da Ponte’s libretto, since the dialogue is all about Don Juan’s mockery of her proposal (Kruse, op. cit., p. 30). EO1, 191 / SKS 2, 188. Scene XI, l. 564, Di rider finirai pria dell’aurora and l. 568, Ribaldi, audace, / Lascia a’morti la pace. For the rethorics of the ombra style, see Birgitte Moyer ‘Ombra and Fantasia in Late 18th-Century Theory and Practice’, in Convention in 18 th and 19 th Century Music, ed. by W. Y. Allanbrook, Janet M. Levy and William P. Mahrt, Stuyvesant, New York: Pendragon Press 1992, pp. 283-306.

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This does not imply, however, that the double nature of the rhetorical impact resulting from the duality of verbal and musical language should have passed unnoticed by A; on the contrary, what was so subtly introduced by Mozart in the title, in the overture and throughout the opera, is cleverly and fully exploited in Either/Or; A’s description of Don Giovanni’s character is based on this duality to such an extent that it eventually accounts for the Don’s absolute inability to control language, and defines his aesthetic interest.9 This duality overflows as A further deepens the gap between musical and verbal language. He draws a line between Don Giovanni, the ‘impostor’, who expresses by music the idea of sensuousness and actually seduces by singing, and Johannes, the ‘seducer’, who sees the details of his thoughts and endeavour inscribed in his diary. Two different languages are then continually used as opposite means of presentation and representation; each one commands an ability or inability to express feelings and actions verbally, resulting from the possibility or impossibility to reflect. The implication is that musical language and verbal language ultimately preside over the notions of sensual love and psychic love. The duality is further stressed by the permanence of verbal language in time and space on the sequenced pages of the diary; this is a literary construction set against the evanescent nature of musical language. Consequently, when set against verbal language inscribed in multi-mediated historical time, musical language can be described as instantaneous but is perceived anew as it comes into existence with each performance. The moment where these two languages come face to face in word, music, and drama, is the duet Là ci darem la mano.10 This is one of the most striking omissions in A’s analysis of Don Giovanni. A favourite scene for musicians and music lovers, the duet was already the locus classicus for the operatic seduction scene11 and a key moment of the opera as noted in the article ‘A Cursory Observation Concerning a Detail in Don Giovanni’12 from 1845, where the implications of a correct interpretation of the roles of Don Giovanni and Zerlina are analysed in great detail. One may then ask why A took the trouble to comment on a duet he had decided to leave out two years earlier. After all, his criticism of the singers’ performances corroborates the 9 10 11

12

EO1, 99 / SKS 2, 103. Act I, Scene IX, n. 7. Julian Rushton The Music of Berlioz, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001, p. 297. Cor, 28-37.

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argument about the main character, namely, that he seduces ‘musically’ and should be represented as a non-reflective seducer, ‘a natural force’, while Zerlina is taken as the exact counterpart, a sort of nonreflective seduced partner, ‘a condition of nature’.13 Besides the obvious need to keep the two types of seducers at a distance, the reason for this omission may well lie in the refined ambiguity we hear in the dialogue. This contrasts deeply with the insinuating simplicity of the melodic line; this effect renders the scene irresistible to the imaginations the of seducer and especially the seduced, as is stated in ‘A Cursory Observation.’ Moreover, this effect blurs the division between verbal language and musical language as it is drawn in Either/Or, Part 1. The dialogue presents the act of seduction as a reciprocal process by developing variations in two lines, namely Vorrei e non vorrei for Zerlina which echoes in music the first line of the duet by Don Giovanni, and Andiam, andiam sung by both of them after Zerlina has manifestly overcome her doubts when singing Andiam mio bene with a ‘change of metre without change of speed’.14 In fact, Don Giovanni’s natural force of seduction relies on the clever manipulation of verbal language, achieved by an act of reflection on the power exerted by his words over Zerlina’s mental and physical attitude. In ‘A Cursory Observation’, however, A tries desperately to prove the opposite. Furthermore, Don Giovanni promises to change her life15 and expects her to accept this fate, though he will later refuse Donna Elvira’s last appeal. This mirroring effect in the finale is followed by similar one when the statue of the Commendatore addresses the seducer and asks for his hand,16 this time, though, thanatos taking over eros. In addition, the previous recitative opens with the discussion of the validity of faithfulness with regard to love promises and marital vows. A’s decision to take out references to the duet Là ci darem la mano is not due to a gross omission or lack of insight; on the contrary, it is a mature decision based on an accurate understanding of the dramatic inter13

14

15

16

Ibid., 31n.: ‘Don Juan and Zerlina are related spontaneously to each other as a natural force to a condition of nature, a purely musical relation.’ See Rushton ‘Synopsis’, p. 12. Kruse renders a non-literal translation of the duet lines, but there is clear correspondence in Jeg vil! – Nei! – jeg vil ikke! for Vorrei e non vorrei, l. 146. The first stanza is rendered less literally, though the invitation to go to the casinetto stands. Line 151, Andiam, andiam mio bene is rendered as Bær min, vær min, du Kiære! (Kruse, op. cit., pp. 33-34.) Line 149, Io cangerò tua sorte is accurately rendered as Jeg skal forbedre deres Kaar (ibidem). Line 666, Dammi la mano in pegno is literally translated as Giv mig til Pant da Haanden! (Kruse, op. cit., p. 125.)

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play during the duet and its consequences for an ethical awareness of the behaviour of Don Giovanni, both by the other characters and the public. The dialogue continuously recalls the power of the seducer (Là ci darem la mano) and the anxiety and hesitation of the seduced part (Vorrei e non vorrei) and their mutual consent (Andiam). This eventually transforms the seduced more into a victory token than prey won over by a false seducer. Therefore, leaving out the duet Là ci darem la mano sounds like a most reasonable option so that at least two of the cross beams in the structural organization of Either/Or gain stability. In the first volume, the omission underlines the separation of seduction in two types, one embodied by Johannes, the reflective seducer, and the other by Don Giovanni, the non-reflective one; and when the two volumes are taken together, it helps sustain the criteria set by Victor Eremita of separating the papers according to their nature, and presumably, the intentions of their authors, A and B, thus allowing for the separate presentation of aesthetic and ethical views of love. A’s statement that the character and the opera represent the idea of sensuousness in its genialitet is inseparable from the duality between verbal language and musical language. Initially, the statement is uncontroversial, since in Kierkegaard’s time there were no doubts about the eloquence of musical language. Either/Or was written and published at a musical turning-point, be it in philosophy, musical theory and criticism, or musical practice; part of the capricious character of A’s proposal, though, lies in the fact that it combines ideas about musical representation, which are seen as competing against one another. This is true to such an extent that it is virtually impossible to find one philosophical or literary trend which may, on its own, provide a reliable basis for A’s points of view. The choice of the word genialitet unites ingenium and genius, two concepts debated in philosophy, aesthetics, and poetics during the late eithteenth and the nineteenth centuries; an example of this is the discussion of a border between the artist as faber and the artist as artifex. This is overcome in the essay on the musical erotic through the canonization of Mozart and Don Giovanni. Genialitet also points at the original geniality of the human condition, as defended by Novalis. He also conceived of the relation between a deep emotional perception of music and its divine origin as a mystical experience. On the other hand, A can sound quite close to the early Schopenhauer. For both of them, an idea expressed by music is placed at a higher level than an idea expressed by verbal language, though the idea of the exclusive representation of sensuousness in music is far from Schopenhauer’s proposition that music would exist beyond phe-

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nomena, at a higher level than ideas, and that it could replicate and represent objectively and directly all the modalities of the will, regardless of the mediation of ideas. For Schopenhauer, musical language was truthful and accurate, capable of expressing the universal rather than the particular. This enabled him to claim that the ultimate goal for music is to reach true philosophy. Therefore, it could represent any absolute idea in its elemental state, not only the idea of sensuousness. A’s idea of music is more restrictive and based on the correspondence between the abstract nature of the medium and that of the idea it aims to represent.17 In fact, to defend music as an abstract medium recalls the musical theory of the Baroque, when music was considered a science due to its mathematical basic principles, and musical imitation was seen as the imitation of passions (feelings), taken as universals, not particulars. This was still part of Friedrich Schlegel’s formulation of music as ‘the most general of arts’ or of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s claims that Beethoven’s instrumental music was superior to vocal music.18 This combination of mimesis and abstraction shows some affinities with A’s claims. A obviously bypasses other classical notions, however, such as the recitative and music, that is, the presentation of dramatic situation and representation of feelings; he thus puts forward an analysis of the dramatic structure of Don Giovanni which interestingly points at an idea of opera as a kind of global drama. However, with the emphasis on abstraction and formalism, which Theodor Adorno labels as reading ‘eighteenth-century theses out of Hegel’,19 we are left with a state of affairs where A stands in an awkward relation to musical theory, as if he would theorize à la classique and exemplify à la romantique with an ambivalent but constant reference to the German Romantics. 17

18

19

See Arthur Schopenhauer Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Zürich: Diogenes Verlag 1977 [1818], Drittes Buch, § 52. For an overview of classical musical theory, see André Charrak Musique et philosophie à l’âge classique, Paris: Puf, Philosophies 1998; for an account of the relevance of mathematics to music theory, see Catherine Nolan ‘Music Theory and Mathematics’ in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. by Thomas Christensen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002, pp. 272-304, especially pp. 280-286; for a synopsis of German Romantic thought and its influences on Liszt and Wagner, see Kristina Muxfeldt ‘The Romantic Preoccupation with Musical Meaning’ in The Literature of German Romanticism, ed. by Dennis F. Mahoney, London: Camden House 2004, pp. 251-271. See Theodor Adorno Kierkegaard, Construction of the Aesthetic, trans., ed. and forword by Robert Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1989 [1933], p. 19.

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As is commonly suggested, 20 A’s three references to Heinrich Gustav Hotho’s criticism prove to be more a misguiding strategy than a reliable clue for A’s sources for the opera’s dramaturgy. We know that A starts where Hotho stops, that he borrowed from him some ideas for the structural frame of Either/Or which he could also have borrowed from other writers. In my opinion, to ponder the immediate representation of sensuousness as the ultimate preferential goal for music proves to be insufficient. It should rather be taken together with two of A’s other arguments, namely the celebration of Mozart as immortal, a creator who had the good fortune of accidentally finding the subject matter for his masterpiece, and of Don Giovanni as a classic, that is, a work of art in which it is useless to distinguish between form and content. It must be kept in mind that the 1830’s saw the celebration of the immortality of Mozart and the unanimous recognition of Don Giovanni as a masterpiece; thus, A’s statements follow a general trend. A definitely goes one step further when he tries to prove that the opera and the character are one and the same thing with regard to the representation of sensuousness. Therefore, the character’s representation of the idea of sensuousness corresponds to the presentation of Mozart’s use of the Don Juan myth. 21 For A, the absolute musical representation of the sensuous in Don Giovanni and Don Giovanni remains unshakeable, even though the musical genre involved is the opera, the most complex of all in its theatrical and musical conventions. This sounds to me quite incongruous with A’s insight of the dramatic interplay of Don Giovanni, as I have already noted. In addition, the most ignorant of music lovers – and I believe Kierkegaard is far from being one – knows that form and content are first addressed by the composer in the actual writing of the score. Once finished, it becomes definite as a score, but not fully perfected as a work of art, as Adorno rightfully points out. By nature, music exists in time, and this is one of the most debated issues in the ontology of the musical work of art. Similarly, the fact that each opera staging may construct interpretations or deepen meanings of a previously known work – which was the talk of the town in his day and is confirmed in ‘A Cursory Observation’ – does not seem to interfere with A’s plastic definition of a classical work of art, ‘where the idea 20

21

See T. H. Croxhall Kierkegaard Commentary, London: James Nisbet & Co. Ltd 1956, pp. 47-59 and Niels Barfoed ‘Hotho und Kierkegaard, Eine literarische Quelle zur Don Juan-Auffassung des Ästhetikers A’, Orbis Litterarum, vol. 22, n. 1, Mar. 1988, pp. 378-386. EO1, 103-115 / SKS 2, 107-118.

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is brought to rest and transparency in a definite form.’22 The fact is that A’s fundamentals remain imprecise. Perhaps this is due to A’s departure from Hegel, who allowed the musician the freedom of instilling meaning in the musical composition and who conceded that music would stand at a higher level than poetry because its sound and spiritual content could not be separated and were already inscribed in musical notation.23 Nevertheless, A himself points out that a musical composition can be perceived and interpreted only when it is performed;24 we are left here with another problem since making music is simultaneously an act of perception and of interpretation. By itself, this is as transient as the performance itself. Consequently, the temporal and spatial location of the definite form of the musical work of art is imprecise and variable, quite the opposite of having it ‘rest’ in ‘transparency’, as A claims. Some of A’s actual views, however, are very close to the musical criticism of his day. It is my belief that Berlioz, Schumann and particularly Liszt help clarify Kierkegaard’s relation to the musical world of his day, as I shall hopefully demonstrate.

II. Beginning in the 1830’s, France and Germany saw the rise of musical compositions, often structured in a dialogical pattern, which were intended to express actions, ideas and thoughts, more than feelings or passions. In 1830, Berlioz presented his Symphonie Fantastique, op. 14, with an autobiographical and literary programme. It depicts his love for Harriet Smithson, the Irish actress he would eventually marry, using the musical development of themes from his favourite novels. At the same time, Schumann had begun composing piano music, featuring his pseudonyms as co-authors and characters in the piano cycles Carnaval, op. 9 (1834-1835) and Davidsbündlertänze, op. 6 (1837). Until the end of the decade, he experimented with new musical forms in piano cycles with an ostensible literary connotation.25 In 22 23

24 25

EO1, 54 / SKS 2, 61. G. W. F. Hegel Aesthetics, trans. by T. M. Knox, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998, p. 903. EO1, 68 / SKS 2, 75. Further examples are Kinderszenen, op. 15 (1838), Kreisleriana, op. 16 (1838), Arabeske, op. 18 (1839), Humoreske, op. 20 (1839), Novelleten, op. 21 (1838) and Faschingschwank aus Wien, op. 26 (1839).

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the first half of the 1830’s, both of them had double careers as musicians and music critics, Berlioz in Paris, Schumann in Leipzig. They rapidly reached a critical musical stance which rendered their voices and sounds unmistakably recognizable wherever they were heard or read.26 In the beginning of the 1830’s, Berlioz contributed regularly to the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung and to Le Correspondant. Here he published his now famous definition of music as the ‘genre instrumental expressif’, taking Beethoven and Weber as role models; indeed, this definition may be taken as the matrix of his musical thought. The expressiveness of the music results, then, from the emergence of a poetic thought endowed with the power of stimulating the imagination of the listener, regardless of the use of verbal language and of the emotion it arouses. This poetic thought is part of the music itself and the feelings rendered by music are directly linked to the feelings it evokes. This means that music is ‘sentiment’ and ‘science’. Thus, the creativeness of the composer relies on his genius as well as on his techne. Both these factors are infused in his compositions; moreover, the creativeness of the composer is increased by the superiority of instrumental music over vocal music, one of the key arguments in Berlioz’s musical analysis. This would lead him to a systematic theory of instrumentalization, that is, the study of the technical expressive resources offered by the different instruments, eventually allowing the composer to create a musical language capable of producing an effect similar to poetry. 27 For over forty years (1832-1863), Berlioz wrote weekly articles for numerous publications, among them, Le Rénovateur and La Revue et Gazette Musicale de Paris. This included more than four hundred feuilletons for Le Journal des Débats, where he was known as the ‘mardiste’. Sainte-Beuve was the ‘lundiste’, since 26

27

Hector Berlioz’s musical criticism is collected in the Buchet / Castel ten-volume edition, with five volumes have been published so far, covering the years 1823 to 1848, henceforth mentioned as CM followed by the number of the volume. The best work on Schumann’s criticism is still Leon Plantinga Schumann as Critic, New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1967. See De l’instrumentation, Paris: Le Castor Astral 1994, based on the actual feuilletons and Grand Traité d’Instrumentation et d’Orchestration Modernes, Op. 10, New Edition of the Complete Works 24, ed. by Peter Bloom, Kassel: Bärenreiter 2003. The remarks on Beethoven are taken from ‘Beaux Arts, Aperçu sur la musique classique et la musique romantique’ (22.10.1830, Le Correspondant), in CMI – 1823-1834, Paris : Buchet / Chastel 1996, pp. 67-68 and ‘De la musique en général’ (10.09.1837, Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris) in CMIII – 1837-1838, Paris : Buchet / Chastel 2001, pp. 243-252.

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Berlioz published his musical column on Tuesdays and Sainte-Beuve his literary articles on Mondays. To this day, Berlioz’s criticism is the best source for the reception of Don Giovanni in the Opéra de Paris (1834-1866), though I shall here refer to his reviews only until 1842. As early as 1834, Berlioz canonized Don Giovanni as a perfect opera, both musically and dramatically; in an analogy with Raphael’s painting, he praised its classical beauty28 and uses the perfection of its forms and style to evaluate the standards of taste and musical knowledge of the Parisian public;29 he also stated that in all the major cities (except the Italian ones) Don Giovanni had already reached immortality. 30 The following year, 1835, Mozart’s Don Giovanni was classified as ‘extremely thoughtful music, conscientiously written, orchestrated with taste and dignity, always expressive, dramatic, truthful, a free proud music’, an array of qualities which assure its ‘strong youthful’ tone and secure its leading role in the ‘avant garde of musical civilisation’. 31 Three details deserve special note, since they are also present in A’s analysis of Don Giovanni. Though he commented the libretto extensively on several occasions, Berlioz never mentioned the name Da Ponte. The aria Fin ch’han dal vino epitomizes the character of Don Giovanni and the metaphor used to describe it accurately conveys the intensity and the joy of living of the seducer;32 and the ominous ombra style is remarkable for its prodigious orchestration, though it is extremely demanding for the imagination of the public. 33 As for Schumann, he started his critical practice in 1831 with the article ‘Ein Werk II’. Here four pseudonymous characters discuss Chopin’s piano and orchestra piece, the Variations on ‘Là ci darem la mano’ from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, op. 2, played at Chopin’s Vienna debut in 1829. 34 Two of these pseudonyms, Florestan and Eusebius, are 28 29 30 31 32

33

34

Jan. 5, 1834, Le Rénovateur, in CMI, 129. Jan. 12, 1834, Le Rénovateur, in CMI, 135. June 8, 1934, Le Rénovateur, in CMI, 271. Nov. 15, 1835, Journal des Débats, in CMII, 345-346. May 1, 1836, Journal des Débats, in CMII, 459: ‘ cet éclat de verve libertine où se résume le caractère de Don Juan’. May 15, 1835, Journal des Débats, in CMII, 348 : ‘Le rôle de l’imagination devient d’une exigence excessive’. ‘Ein Werk II’ was published in Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung on 7. 12. 1831, that is, before Schumann founded the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Two years later, the same pseudonyms appeared in ‘Der Davidsbündler’, a three-part article published in the Leipzig periodical Der Komet (Dec. 7 and 14, 1833; Jan. 12, 1834), structured as the minutes of the Davidsbund meetings, the musical society actually created by Schumann, which would use the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik as its mouthpiece.

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also the authors of the piano cycle Davidsbündlertänze. In ‘Ein Werk II’ they discuss the originality and the genius of Chopin with Raro and Julius, the narrator; they do it by inviting the reader, as music lover, to share their opinions, thus assuming that they are mere music lovers themselves, while all along they listen Eusebius reproducing on the piano “countless figures of the utmost lived existence.” They agree that Chopin’s music continually stimulates the listener’s reason and imagination, since it is by the musical understanding of the composition that the dramatic action of the opera unfold. Accordingly, Chopin’s music is depicted with adjectives which were common at the time when describing opera characters: the ‘dramatic’ nature of the variations is displayed in different manners, sometimes ‘aristocratic and coquette’, or ‘more intimate, more comical and more contentious’, or evoking ‘moonlight and fairy magic’ or letting us follow the dialogue between Zerlina and Massetto or Leporello and his master; the finale, triumphantly marked Adagio alla polaca, evokes ‘popping champagne corks and clinking glasses’.35 Right from the beginning of his career as pianist, Liszt was acknowledged as having a double talent, though of a different kind from Berlioz’s and Schumann’s. He was capable of presenting a musical work by means of the virtuosity of his transcription technique and he was the true piano virtuoso. The quintessence of this double virtuosity is Réminiscences de Don Juan, composed and played widely in 1841 (though only published in 1843). It is an operatic fantasy based on three themes from Mozart’s opera. As a form, the operatic fantasy is basically a set of themes and variations, following the classical pattern of variations, though often with a freer introduction and an extended finale. Widely cultivated by many piano virtuosos and composers, these concert pieces became extremely popular because they were the only means available for the public to recall or anticipate forthcoming performances of favourite operas. This is true especially of the most recent works. In the case of Liszt, the operatic fantasy is quite elaborate and offers two sets of difficulties: first, the choice of 35

My translation of Schumann’s quotations is based on Schumann on Music, A Selection from the Writings, transl., ed., by Henry Pleasants, New York: Dover Publications, Inc. 1965) and On Music and Musicians, transl. by Paul Rosenfeld, ed. by Konrad Wolff, New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company 1964. The currently available German edition of Schumann’s criticism is Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker (Reprint Ausgabe Leipzig 1854), Wiesband: Breitkopf & Härtel 1985, ed. by Schumann himself. For ‘Ein Werk II’, see Band I, pp. 3-7. For ‘Der Davidsbündler’, see the Martin Kreisig edition of 1914, pp. 260-272.

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themes is restricted and reflects a preference for the moments of the opera which might best convey the whole of it; second, the technical difficulties demand a highly developed keyboard technique. This is simultaneously due to and solved by Liszt’s compositional expertise. It is based on the use of thematic transformation which allows for a very small number of thematic ideas (usually between three and five) to provide musical material for a twenty-minute composition, though each time they sound different as a result of changes in modulation, rhythm, tempo, meter, or harmonic ornament. 36 In practice, thematic transformation presents the musical material of a few moments in an opera in order to represent its dramatic content. It does so as the variations are developed to describe the interplay on stage; A’s terms might here be used, namely, form and content; they are so totally permeated that it becomes useless to separate one from the other. What’s more, it became clear to the audience that a previous evaluation of the musical and dramatic texture of the opera had determined the actual making of the composition; this is clearly evident in Liszt’s case in the monothematic development of the chosen motifs. As these steps were presented to the public by means of a virtuosistic performance, the level of musical emotion involved in the act of perception would be extremely high. The audiences would go through a complex aesthetic experience since on stage Liszt embodied the presentation of the craftsmanship of two musicians, himself and the opera’s creator, the representation of opera as a musical drama, audible in his own treatment of the most relevant moments, and of the original work as a whole. All along he stood as a virtuoso, as a pianist capable of outstanding performances in terms of both keyboard technique and interpretation. Liszt made Hegel’s commentaries on virtuosity, published in his Lectures on Fine Art in 1836-1838 but produced at least a decade earlier, almost sound like a prophecy: In this sort of execution [virtuoso] we enjoy the topmost peak of musical vitality, the wonderful secret of an external tool’s becoming a perfectly animated instrument, and we have before us at the same time, like a flash of lightning, the inner conception and the execution of the imagination of genius in their most momentary fusion and most quickly passing life. 37

36

37

For a detailed explanation of Liszt’s monothematic technique, see Alan Walker Franz Liszt The Weimar Years 1848-1861, Ithaca New York: Cornell University Press 1993, pp. 307-310. G. W. F. Hegel, op. cit., p. 958.

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Though this paragraph was surely prompted by the extraordinary impact of Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840), who spread the image of the demonic virtuoso during the 1820’s, it is worth noting that the imagery evoked by the flash of lightning is already present in Edmund Burke’s explanation of grandeur and of the sublime.38 This is underlined by chiaroscuro effects and the immediate perception of its light, a set of images which is recurrent in most descriptions of Liszt, be it by Heinrich Heine, 39 H. C. Andersen or Berlioz;40 this is also true of pictorial representations, a stylistic pattern that has been extensively commented.41 38

39

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41

Edmund Burke A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1990 [1757], p. 73. ‘Mit diesem Vorzug verbindet er eine Ruhe, die wir früher an ihm vermißten. Wenn er z. B. damals auf dem Piano fort ein Gewitter spielte, sahen wir die Blitze über sein eignes Gesicht dahinzucken, wie von Sturmwind schlotterten seine Glieder, und seine langen Haarzöpfe träuften gleichsam vom dargestellten Platzregen. Wenn er auch das stärkste Donnerwetter spielt, so ragt er doch selber darüber empor, wie der Reisende, der auf der Spitze einer Alpe steht, während es im Tahle gewittert: die Wolken lagern tief unter ihm, die Blitze ringeln wie Schlangen zu seinen Füßen, das Haupt erhebt er lächelnd in den reinen Aether’ (in Lutezia, XXXIII, Paris, 20. April 1841) in Heinrich Heine Sämtliche Werke 13/1 Düsseldorf Ausgabe, Hamburg: Hoffman und Campe Verlag 1988, p. 125; also published in France in 1842. In 1842, Heine had already produced a vivid description of his musical emotion after watching Liszt playing, using, among other elements, the imagery of a combat between Satan and Christ; see Sämtliche Werke 12/1:1980, pp. 288-289. For an English translation, see ‘Heinrich Heine on Liszt’, select. and intr. by Rainer Kleinertz, trans. by Susan Gillespie in Franz Liszt and His World, ed. by Christopher H. Gibbs and Dana Gooley, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2006, pp. 441-465, especially p. 449. Berlioz labelled Liszt as ‘un phénomène de verve, d’audace et d’inspiration’ (Dec. 15, 1833, Le Rénovateur, in CMI, 119) and as a living genius and the embodiment of the piano, ‘il parle piano, comme Goethe parlait allemand, comme Moore parle anglais, comme Weber parlait orchestre’ (March 11, 1834, Le Rénovateur, in CMI, 189); Schumann in 1835 praised his fame, genius and compositional craft (‘…kann nur Sache eines Meister oder Genies des Vortrags sein, als welches Liszt von Allen ausgezeichnet wird ‘Gesammelte Schriften, Band I, p. 138. H. C.Andersen’s testimonies in Fædrelandet (Aug. 22, 1841), published later with some changes in En Digter’s Bazar (1842) are typical in tone and impression. See Susan Bernstein ‘Instruments of Virtuosity’ in Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century, Performing Music and Language in Heine, Liszt and Baudelaire, Stanford: Stanford University Press 1998, pp. 58-81; James Deaville ‘The Making of a Myth: Liszt, the Press, and Virtuosity’ in Analecta Lisztiana II, New Light on Liszt and his Music, Essays in Honour of Alan Walker’s 65th Birthday, ed. by Michael Saffle and James Deaville, Stuyvesant: Pendragon Press 1997, pp. 181-195; Katherine Ellis ‘Liszt: The Romantic Artist’, in The Cambridge Companion to Liszt, ed. by Kenneth Hamilton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005, pp. 1-13; Lawrence Kramer ‘Franz Liszt and the Virtuoso Public Sphere: Sight and Sound in

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Réminiscences de Don Juan is considered to be a landmark in the musical reception of Mozart’s treatment of the Don Juan myth.42 In the catalogue of works played by Liszt in concerts between 1838 and 1848, the fantasy on Don Giovanni opens the list, even though it was only composed in 1841. Testimonies show that its demonic power still stirred the audience, even in his old age when his good looks had faded and his career as performer had been over for over thirty years.43 In this fantasy, the whole is dominated by the idea of seduction as victory, though punishment is always present; it is sometimes present explicitly, other times almost stealthily. The piece begins with variations on the theme of the Commendatore as Stone Guest, resulting in a kind of amplification of the ombra style from the churchyard scene;44 it rapidly leaps into the central section with a radically different mood, consisting of a quite accurate transcription of the duet Là ci darem la mano; this is followed by two variations, an extremely melodious one, denoting the frivolity and the erotic atmosphere of the duet, and another where the melody is almost reduced to nothing but a rhythmical line. Thus, it loses intensity and liveliness, an effect emphasized by the reappearance of the ombra motifs in the transition to the second variation. This develops in very rapid descendant and ascendant scales, producing a sharp contrast with the first; it ends with four long notes taken from the Stone Guest’s last line (Ah, tempo più non v’è!). The transition to the third section is achieved with a sort of dispute between the motifs of the second variation of the central section and the musical material of the aria Fin ch’han dal vino. The latter rapidly takes over and is transcribed more accurately, then submitted to multiple variations in a fast wildly cadenced rhythm. The Réminis-

42

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the Rise of Mass Entertainment’ in Musical Meaning, Toward a Critical History, Berkeley: University of California Press 2002, pp. 68-99. See Thomas S. Grey ‘The Gothic Libertine: The Shadow of Don Juan in Romantic Music and Culture’ in The Don Giovanni Moment, Essays on the Legacy of an Opera, ed. by Lydia Goehr and Daniel Herwitz, New York. Columbia University Press 2006, pp. 75-106, especially pp. 76-78 for Réminiscences de Don Juan. ‘The Fantasy on Don Giovanni! The Fantasy on Don Giovanni!’…the only thing I remember is that the motif from Fin ch’han dal vino, calda la testa returned again and again, that the music became even wilder, ever more bacchanal, ever more daemonic, that the men, glasses in hands, finally all sprang up from the table and surrounded the player, and that in the end Liszt, as excited as everyone else, rose from the piano, and half laughing, half angry, burst out: ‘Il ne me faut pas faire jouer ces sortes de choses là! Je ne devais pas me faire entraîner! Mais enfin – c’est fait!’ in Adrian Williams, Portrait of Liszt, by Himself and His Contemporaries, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1990, p. 258. See note 8.

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cences end with a brief combination of the motifs of Stone Guest and the Fin ch’han dal vino. This is manifestly insufficient to undo the celebration of the hero’s joy of living and the experience of seduction as repeated victory.45 In less than twenty minutes, Liszt managed to combine the essence of Berlioz’s criticism of Don Giovanni, mainly the idea of seduction as victory and the outstanding powerful effects of the ombra style, and Schumann’s review of Chopin’s variations, that is, the coexistence of liveliness, amusement and eroticism in Là ci darem la mano. Performed by Liszt, it stood as a feat of double virtuosity. It is no wonder that he was acknowledged in his day as a demonic character himself. The visual impact of Liszt as a performer capable of dominating the piano, an instrument going through rapid improvements in his day, must have helped to undermine any sceptical tone or idea eventually conveyed by these Réminiscences; instead, the listener must have been left under the spell that death will never manage to win over love, an effect which helps to explain why the demonic character of the composition was described as embodied in Don Juan himself and in Liszt, the performer. The first documented evidence of Kierkegaard’s presence in Copenhagen musical circles is the fact that in 1836 he was consulted for the final draft of the by-laws of a Copenhagen music society during the preparatory stages of its foundation.46 This alone proves the relevance of his opinion for the improvement of musical standards. Kierkegaard could not have heard Berlioz’s music before writing the chapter on the musical erotic, since the musician’s first tour as conductor took place in Germany in 1843;47 however, it is likely that he heard about his music and orchestrational and conducting skills. Schumann reviewed Berlioz extensively,48 mainly using Liszt’s transcriptions, and the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik was available in Copenhagen. It is also listed in the catalogue of the Athenæum library. Many of the periodicals Berlioz wrote in can also be found in the Athenæum catalogue, 45

46

47 48

For a more accurate account of the Réminiscences de Don Juan see Serge Gut “Liszt Franz” (1811-1886) in Dictionnaire de Don Juan, Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, Bouquins 1999, pp. 559-562. See Joakim Garff Søren Kierkegaard, A Biography, trans. by Bruce Kirmmse, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2005, p. 140. Berlioz would publish Voyage musicale en Allemagne et en Italie in 1844. Schumann’s review of the Symphonie Fantastique by Berlioz (Schumann, op. cit., p. 118-151) is based on Liszt’s Partition de Piano (composed in 1833, three years after the first performance of the Symphonie Fantastique in Paris), that is, a transcription which reproduces bar by bar, note by note an original score, trying to reproduce the orchestral texture using solely the resources of the piano keyboard.

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including Le Journal des Débats and La Revue et gazette musicale de Paris.49 These were widely subscribed, 50 easily reaching private circles of music lovers and connoisseurs. Moreover, the Schlesinger House, be it in Paris, Vienna or Leipzig, as well as other publishing editors, put their scores on sale and offered their own periodicals or scores as a bonus. 51 Therefore, it is likely to have been available to Danish music publishers. 52 The case of Schumann is more straightforward. The Neue Zeitschrift für Musik and the Davidsbund concept behind it were so well known in the Copenhagen musical milieu that immediately after the publication of the first editions of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 1834, a group of musicians and actors decided to found a real Davidsbund instead of a fictionalized league of art militants; among them are Niels W. Gade (1817-1890) and the brothers Carl Helsted (1818-1904) and Edvard Helsted (1816-1900). H. C. Andersen and actors Nicolai Peter Nielsen (1795-1860) and his wife Anna Nielsen (1803-1856) were also occasionally present at their activities, these included visits to museums, country walks, discussion of poetry, novels, philosophy and obviously Schumann’s ideas as expressed in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Most of them were soon employed in the Royal Theatre and their comings and goings to Leipzig are well documented.53 As is known, Gade’s first great success in Leipzig was the overture Efterklange af Ossian, op. 1 (Echoes of Ossian) in January 1842; this was 49

50

51

52

53

See Fortegnelse over Selskabet Athenæum, Bogsamling, Copenhagen: 1847, p. 398: L’Europe Littéraire, p. 401: Journal des Débats, p. 412: Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, and Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. The periodical had a good subscription service and from 1834 foreign tariffs were announced; Leipzig was the first foreign outlet to be announced in 1837; in 1848, the following were publicly known – London (2), St. Petersbourg, New York, Lisbon, Madrid, Rome, Amsterdam, Stockholm and Vienna; in 1853, Geneva and Brussels were added to the list. In 1855, the details about foreign outlets disappeared altogether. See Katharine Ellis Music Criticism in nineteenth-century France: La Revue et gazette musicale de Paris, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999, p. 268. See Annick Devriès ‘Musique à bon marché’ in Music in Paris in the eighteen-thirties / La Musique à Paris dans les années mille huit cent trente, ed. by Peter Bloom, Stuyvesant, New York: Pendragon Press 1987, pp. 229-250. Søren Sønnichsen in 1783 is the first music publisher registered in ‘Denmark’ in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. by Stanley Sadie, London: Macmillan Press Limited 2001, vol. 7: 205-211. For the Copenhagen Davidsbund, see Anna Harwell Celenza ‘Imagined Communities Made Real: The Impact of Robert Schumann’s Neue Zeitschrift für Musik on the Formation of Music Communities in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’ in Journal of Musicological Research, 24:1, pp. 1-26, especially pp. 8-14.

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during Kierkegaard’s stay in Berlin, and Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809-1847), the celebrated musician and conductor at the Leipzig Gewandhaus at the time, was appointed as member of the jury for the 1840 society’s music competition, though he eventually did not come to Copenhagen. 54 The competition was part of a set of activities promoted by the Musikforening to boost concert life in the capital. The programmes of its concerts should provide helpful hints for the reception of Schumann’s music; the competition was won by Gade and his works would also be reviewed by Schumann. 55 In addition to this, Clara Schumann (1819-1886) was in Copenhagen in March and April 1842 for concerts, one of them held by the Musikforening. A special recital made history at the time: Clara Schumann was on piano and Johanna Louise Heiberg (1812-1890) delivered a poem specially made for the occasion by her husband. 56 In what concerns Kierkegaard’s involvement in musical life, I believe the case of Liszt is even less ambiguous than Schumann’s. Not only was Liszt widely known as a virtuoso since the early 1830’s, but his work was also performed in Copenhagen and Berlin and other German cities; one of his Lettres d’un Bachelier ès Musique was translated and published in Fædrelandet during the genesis of Either/Or. This makes it more difficult to find a good reason for Kierkegaard not having heard about Liszt; one can always ponder why he did not chose to mention the encounter. A brief chronicle of the period between July 1841 and March 1842 is essential to evaluate this possibility. In the last two weeks of July 1841, Liszt gave three public concerts and several private ones in Copenhagen; roughly two thirds of the programmes of the concerts consisted of operatic fantasies, though Réminiscences de Don Juan was only played at the Royal Palace by special invitation from King Christian VIII, to whom he dedicated the work, since the piece was the King’s favourite. Two newspapers, Corsaren and Fædrelandet covered his stay with reviews of the concerts and celebrated Liszt’s fame as a virtuoso and a genial composer, much in

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See Anne Ørbæk Jensen, Claus Røllum-Larsen and Inger Sørensen Wahlverwandtschaften, Zwei Jahrhunderte musikalischer Wechselwirkungen zwischen Dänemark und Deutschland, Copenhagen: Det kongelige Bibliotek 2004, pp. 55-59. Robert Schumann, Gesammelte Schriften, Band IV: 209; 285-6. See also ‘Niels W(ilhelm) Gade’ in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 9: 405-409. See Wahlverwandtschaften, pp. 84-87.

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the same praising tone of the Parisian and German press. 57 A month later, on July 22, 1841, H. C. Andersen published his account of the concerts and meetings with Liszt. 58 Back in Paris, in September, Liszt published his Letter XVI from Lettres d’un bachelier ès musique in the Revue Musicale on Sept. 19, 1841, with such laudatory souvenirs from Copenhagen that it was translated and published by Fædrelandet on November, 14. Liszt praises the refined musical taste of the king and was vividly impressed by Thorvaldsen’s statues in the Vor Frue Kirke. He notes that he regrets that music cannot withstand the passage of time as painting and sculpture do, and that great painters and sculptors can represent their thought, while all along they present their masterpieces until they are identified with the city which exhibits their art. 59 During Liszt’s stay in Copenhagen, it is possible to argue that Kierkegaard did not attend any of Liszt’s concerts; his dissertation had been submitted in early June. His engagement was in its final stages, and he could have been concentrating on how to maintain balance before the defence and the final break-up with Regine Olsen. However, it is also plausible that he attended the concerts exactly for the same reasons, if he had decided not to let it be known that he was enduring a difficult period. To my knowledge, there are no testimonies of his presence at the concerts, though it is hard to believe that he did not hear or read about them or the dedication of the composition to the King. But even if he did not, he would soon have the chance of a life time. On October 25, he left for Berlin to attend Schelling’s 57

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See Bengt Johnsson ‘Liszt og Danmark I’ in Dansk Musik Tidsskrift, n. 03, Copenhagen: Foreningen Dansk Musik Tidsskrift 1962, pp. 79-82. Johnsson’s source for H. C. Andersen is G. Hetsch H. C. Andersen og Musiken, Copenhagen: 1930. See note 40. ‘Laissez-moi plutôt vous parler d’un art qui n’est pas le mien, et auquel j’envie sa puissance de durée, d’un homme qui a laissé à Copenhague une glorieuse manifestation de sa pensée, et qui a élevé sur son sol natal un éternel monument de reconnaissance et d’amour. Cela [Thorwaldsen’s sculptures in Vor Frue Kirke] est simple et grand. Il y a là une unité de pensée et d’exécution qui frappe tout d’abord et dont l’impression demeure. Un seul Dieu, un seul art, un seul homme. Oh! Comment ne pas voir avec envie cette stabilité, cette permanence de la plastique, cette immortalité humaine acquise à l’œuvre de peintre et du statuaire? Comment ne pas réssentir avec désolation cette impuissance de notre art à créer, à fonder des monuments durables? Votre [Thorwaldsen, Rubens, Michelangelo] inspiration, revêtue de formes impérissables, se perpétue à travers les âges et rayonne à jamais sur votre patrie! Vous vous identifiez à elle, vous êtes ses représentants devant la postérité!’ in Franz Liszt Artiste et Société, ed. by Rémy Stricker, Paris: Harmoniques, Flammarion 1995, p. 204.

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lectures, meaning he was still in Copenhagen when Liszt’s letter was published in the Revue musicale, but was in Berlin when Fædrelandet published it. We know he attended forty-one lectures before February 4, and that he stayed for another month; we have his notes from the lectures, seven letters to Emil Boesen, and another few letters, with sparse irrelevant remarks. The situation is similar in his diaries, and we are left to conclude that apparently Berlin did not offer anything interesting to do, exactly the suitable mood for him to concentrate on his writings. Either he worked so hard that he cut himself off from the world completely, or he chose not to mention what was going on in Berlin during Liszt’s ten-week stay in the city, from mid-December 1841 to March 3, 1842; this means that Kierkegaard could have witnessed it all, since he arrived back in Copenhagen on March 6. In the words of Alan Walker, the greatest of Liszt’s scholars and his most committed admirer, ‘It was at Berlin that “Lisztomania” swept in. The symptoms, which are odious to the modern reader, bear every resemblance to an infectious disease, and merely to call them mass hysteria hardly does justice to what actually took place’. Among the symptoms, Walker enumerates the following: the ladies wore cameos with his silhouette, took cuttings of his hair, climbed onto the stage to fight over the broken strings of the piano Liszt had just played on, so as to make bracelets out of them, collected his cigar butts and coffee dregs.60 Lisztomania was indeed an infectious disease because some months later, in November, 1842, there was an outbreak of similar forms of public enthusiasm around Johanna Louise Heiberg after her success in the leading role of Oehlenschläger’s Dina. This leaves me convinced that news of the Berlin frenzy had reached the Copenhagen milieu just as it had reached other European cities where Liszt had performed or was scheduled to perform.61 Liszt gave over thirty concerts in Berlin, most of them attended by the Royal family; he played ca. eighty pieces, fifty of them from memory, one of them being Réminiscences de Don Juan. During his stay in the Prussian capital, Liszt played this piece at least six times, though he could have also played it at some of the eight concerts whose programmes remain unknown.62 Mean60

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See Alan Walker The Virtuoso Years 1811-1847, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press 1987, p. 372. See Peter Tudvad Kierkegaards København, Copenhagen: Politiken 2004, p. 263. Michael Saffle registers thirty-four concerts in Berlin on the following dates, with the concerts where Réminiscences de Don Juan was played here shown with an asterisk and the ones with unknown programmes indicated as such: 27 Dec. 1841, 1 Jan.

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while, the newspapers kept the public updated with reviews, caricatures and silhouettes, news of the parties in his honour and public homage, including the Order of Merit, bestowed by King Wilhelm IV, and the election to the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts in February. Finally, Liszt left Berlin on a coach drawn by six white horses and escorted by a faithful Prince, followed by another thirty coaches, in a procession down the Unter den Linden until the Brandenburg Gate. He was saluted by the King and the Queen from the Royal balcony, the crowds, and the University students, who had had a free day as classes had been suspended for Liszt’s farewell.63 I am convinced that Kierkegaard was fully aware of it all. For a brief moment in the essay on the musical erotic, A seems to assume Judge Wilhelm’s persona and describes vividly the demonic effects of music on an individual that contaminates the public, thus providing a very suitable commentary to the excesses of Lisztomaniacs: It by no means follows that man must regard it [music] as the devil’s work, even though our age provides many horrible proofs of the demonic power with which music can grip an individual and this individual in turn intrigues and ensnares the crowd, especially a crowd of women, in the seductive snares of anxiety by means of the full provocative force of voluptuousness.64 Moreover, it becomes evident here that the music presented by the performer is as demonic as what it actually represents and that this demonic nature must be sensuous. Early in the essay, A had already made an allusion to the danger of misjudging classical works of art; he warned against the Hegelian aestheticians who had broadened the concept of the classic so much that ‘this pantheon became adorned, indeed, overdecorated, [to such a degree] with classic knickknacks and bagatelles…’; for A, this is the result of ‘a one-sided emphasis on the formal activity’, which is also described as ‘the expression of the unbridled producing individual in his equally unbridled lack of substance’.65 This kind of work of art will then never gain immortality

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1842, 3 Jan. (unknown), 5 Jan., 8 Jan., 9 Jan.*, 12 Jan. (two concerts, one unknown), 16 Jan., 20 Jan. (unknown), 21 Jan., 23 Jan.*, 24 Jan., four private concerts before 25 Jan. (all programmes unknown), 25 Jan., 30 Jan., 1 Feb., 2 Feb., ?4 Feb., 6 Feb.*, 8 Feb., 9 Feb.*, 10 Feb., 16 Feb.*, 19 Feb., 23 Feb., 25 Feb., 27 Feb., 28 Feb., 2 Mar.* and 3.Mar (unknown). See Michael Saffle Liszt in Germany 1840-1845, A Study in Sources, Documents, And The History of Reception, Stuyvesant, New York: Pendragon Press 1994, pp. 244-251. See Saffle, op. cit., pp. 129-137. EO1, 103 / SKS 2, 106-107. EO1, 53 / SKS 2, 60.

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because ideas were sacrificed to ‘virtuosity’, seen here as a practise which emphasizes effect in detriment of the pursuit of true art; and yet it aims to do so, as if it had fulfilled the highest artistic goals: As a technical skill was more and more developed to the highest level of virtuosity, the more transient this virtuosity became and the more it lacked the mettle and power or balance to withstand the gusts of time, while, more and more exalted, it continually made greater claims to being the most distilled spirit.66

Later in the essay, the embodiment of Don Juan in a performer, be it a singer or a pianist, shows up as well; A claims vehemently that Don Juan can only be musical because ‘Words, lines, are not suitable for him, for then he immediately becomes a reflective individual’. It should never be forgotten that Mozart’s Don Giovanni is an opera; it is to be seen and to be heard, just like A demonstrates in his analysis of the inner construction of Don Giovanni. Nevertheless, A proceeds to state that it is not worth trying to present a visual image of the Don, since that would mean that ‘one easily loses the totality in dwelling on the particular, as if Don Juan seduced with his handsomeness or anything else that could be mentioned; then one sees him but no longer hears him, and thereby he is lost’.67 The insistence on an audible impression of Don Juan is further underlined when A passes his authority to the reader and makes him believe that it is actually the reader himself who is of the opinion that Don Juan can only be heard, but obviously not in words, only in music. To my knowledge, the only representation of Mozart’s Don Giovanni that seduces musically and not verbally that was performed in Kierkegaard’s time (and which in itself is purely musical, not vocal,) is Réminiscences de Don Juan. In fact, I believe that the long celebrated series of anaphors indicated with ‘Hear!…’ – that intensify the Don’s joy of living and his seduction power and that deliberately recalling the imagery of the flash and the speed of lightening – may be read as an outstanding literary paraphrase of the third part of Liszt’s composition. This repeats the vibrant final variations of the aria Fin ch’han dal vino which epitomize the Don’s character and the tone of current descriptions of Liszt’s virtuosity. Thus, the reader is left with the demonic sensuous nature of the music and the character, and this is exactly what he needs in order to contrast the musical Don Juan with the literary treatments of the myth that follow.68 66 67 68

EO1, 54 / SKS 2, 61. EO1, 102 / SKS 2, 106. ‘Listen to Don Giovanni – that is, if you cannot get an idea of Don Giovanni by hearing him, then you will never will. Listen to the beginning of his life; just as the

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As paraphrase, the passage reproduces verbally what is presented musically and, once more, presentation and representation are made to be coexistent; but this time it happens in Kierkegaard’s own act of writing. In Kierkegaard’s unique manner and style in the ‘Insignificant Postlude’, he pictures Mozart’s fortune as the fortune of those who understand him: ‘How much more, then, those who have understood him perfectly, how much more must they feel happy with the fortunate one’.69 Here, the reader is invited either to join Kierkegaard in his quest for a perfect understanding of Mozart or to share his necessarily concealed, yet nostalgic, tribute to Liszt.

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lightning is discharged from the darkness of the thunderclouds, so he bursts out of the abyss of earnestness, swifter than the lightning’s flash, more capricious than lightning and yet just as measured. Hear how he plunges down the multiplicity of life, how he breaks against its solid embankment. Hear these light, dancing violin notes, hear the intimation of joy, hear the jubilation of delight, hear the festive bliss of enjoyment. Hear his wild flight; he speeds past himself, ever faster, never pausing. Hear the unrestrained craving of passion, hear the sighing of erotic love, hear the whisper of temptation, hear the vortex of seduction, hear the stillness of the moment – hear, hear, hear Mozart’s Don Giovanni’ (EO1, 103 / SKS 2, 106-107). EO1,135 / SKS 2, 136.

Seduction or Truth in Music? Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or By Nils Holger Petersen Abstract Søren Kierkegaard’s (or the Aestheticist A’s) discussion of Mozart’s and Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni (1787) in Either/Or (1843) turned the traditional religious narrative behind the opera upside-down, claiming that the opera represents Giovanni’s life as a life in the moment, that the figure of Don Giovanni is a musical topic par excellence and that his spiritual opponent, the Commendatore, is not part of the opera proper. Kierkegaard’s construction contradicts the manifest historical structure of the opera. In this article, Mozart’s Don Giovanni will be discussed in a historical light in order to contextualize the understanding of music in Either/Or.

1. Kierkegaard, A the Aestheticist, Don Giovanni, and Music Søren Kierkegaard’s staging of a discussion of Mozart’s and Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni (1787) in the Aestheticist A’s account ‘The Immediate Erotic Stages of the Musical Erotic’ in part one of Either/Or (1843) changed the traditional reform Catholic narrative behind the opera markedly. This basic narrative is, of course, prominently found in the Spanish monk Tirso de Molina’s early seventeenth-century El Burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra [The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest] and was followed more or less closely in the popular dramatic (and musical) traditions in the wake of this most famous of early Don Juan plays, which, possibly, itself constituted an – also theological – response to a popular religious narrative reaching back at least into the sixteenth century. Mozart’s and Da Ponte’s opera stays fairly – recognizably – close to the original dramatic framework although the plot was taken over from a recent eighteenth-century Venetian

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opera on this subject, Don Giovanni o sia Il Convitato di Pietra [Don Giovanni or the Stone Guest] composed by Giuseppe Gazzaniga (1743–1818) to a libretto by Giovanni Bertati (1735−1815), performed in Venice in February 1787, and consequently less than a year before Mozart’s and Da Ponte’s opera premiered in Prague on October 29. The history of the Don Giovanni operas before Mozart has been treated by Stefan Kunze and is not the subject of this paper.1 However, in the context of the following discussion it is of some importance to note that generally, at Mozart’s time and thus seemingly also for Mozart and Da Ponte, an opera on the subject of Don Giovanni would have been seen as a banality, something already done over again and again. Kunze quotes the following statement by Goethe, written in a letter to Karl Friedrich Zelter in 1815, concerning experiences in connection with a performance of a Don Giovanni opera, not Mozart’s! in Rome 1787–88: Daher kömmt’s nun, dass bey lebhafteren Nationen die Stücke die einmal gegriffen haben, ins Unendliche wiederholt werden können, weil die Schauspieler das Stück und das Publicum einander immer mehr durchdringen, ferner auch ein Stadt-Nachbar den andern aufgeregt ins Theater zu gehen, und das allgemeine Wochengespräch zuletzt die Nothwendigkeit hervorbringt, dass jeder die Neuigkeit gesehn habe. So erlebte ich in Rom dass eine Oper, Don Juan (nicht der Mozartische), vier Wochen, alle Abende gegeben wurde, wodurch die Stadt so erregt ward, dass .Niemand leben konnte, der den Don Juan nicht hatte in der Hölle braten, und den Gouverneur, als seligen Geist, nicht hatte gen Himmel fahren sehen. 2

Much has been said, but more still needs to be done about the relation between Mozart’s Don Giovanni and the Don Giovanni tradition of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Usually, in scholarship, the differences between the traditional Don Giovanni operas and Mozart’s work are emphasized. These are marked, indeed, and it is far from my wish to deny the uniqueness or novelty of the work Mozart and Da Ponte created, but it is also important to highlight the strong ties of Mozart’s opera to the general tradition, and – as has been demonstrated by scholars like Kunze – the dramaturgical proximity of Da Ponte’s libretto to that of Bertati. I shall not pursue this historical topic further here, however. My point of focus is the relation between Kierkegaard’s – or A’s – text and the opera. One may say, on the one hand, that ‘The Immediate Erotic Stages of the Musical Erotic’ constructs a different Don Giovanni, a 1

2

Stefan Kunze Don Giovanni vor Mozart: Die Tradition der Don-Giovanni-Opern im italienischen Buffa-Theater des 18. Jahrhunderts, München: Fink Verlag 1972. Quoted from Kunze Don Giovanni von Mozart, p. 14.

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sort of parallel opera through literary means, and, indeed, this is what I have claimed in an article published 10 years ago. 3 However, it is clear that Kierkegaard’s literary text deals with the actual opera, taking its point of departure in it. This is true even of the theoretical claims concerning what music is and concerning the oppositions between the two ‘powers’ of the Commendatore and Don Giovanni, which are brought out in Kierkegaard’s fascinating description of the overture, although in his very own way and seemingly very much informed by his own theological and philosophical agendas. ‘The Immediate Erotic Stages of the Musical Erotic’ establishes such a scheme by an interpretation of the opera and its music which – at times – seems very free. The relationship between Mozart’s opera and ‘The Immediate Erotic Stages of the Musical Erotic’ may thus be said to be dialectical, not straightforward. The main point in the following account is not to discuss the authenticity or authority of A’s interpretation, but rather to characterize the differences in the approach to what music is and can do, between the music philosophy and interpretation of A and the compositional practice of Mozart. The wider perspective concerns the question of how these views relate to overall long-term theologicomusical concerns in the Western world. Kierkegaard’s or – as it is presented in Either/Or – A’s account claims that the opera and its music fundamentally represent Giovanni’s life as a life in the moment, from moment to moment: After Mozart has brought him thus into existence, Don Giovanni’s life evolves for us in the dancing tones of the violin in which he lightly, casually, hastens forward over the abyss. As when one skims a stone over the surface of the water, it skips lightly for a time, but as soon as it stops skipping, instantly sinks down into the depths, that is how Don Giovanni dances over the abyss, jubilant in his brief respite.4

For A, Don Giovanni is a musical topic par excellence, and the way this has been realized by Mozart is unique, not only by way of the quality of the music or the dramaturgy, but because Mozart’s opera constitutes a completely new concept of Don Giovanni, never heard before: ‘The way in which sensuality is conceived in Don Giovanni – as a principle – is one in which it has never been conceived before; for this reason the erotic is also defined by another predicate: the erotic 3

4

Nils Holger Petersen ‘Søren Kierkegaard’s Aestheticist and Mozart’s Don Giovanni’ in Interart Poetics, ed. by Ulla-Britta Lagerroth, Hans Lund, and Erik Hedling, Amsterdam: Rodopi 1997, pp. 167-76. Here I discuss A’s description of the overture to Don Giovanni. EOP, 130-131 / SKS 2, 131.

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here is seduction’. 5 This thought is part of a basic musical understanding presented by A which also lies behind his remark that Heinrich Gustav Hotho’s discussion of Don Giovanni, for which A expresses some respect, has not fully understood that Don Giovanni is not just the best opera (as Hotho claims), but that it is qualitatively different from all other operas.6 A further explains: Love from the soul is a continuation in time, sensual love a disappearance in time, but the medium which expresses this is precisely music. This is something music is excellently fitted to accomplish, since it is far more abstract than language and therefore does not express the particular but the general in all its generality, and yet it expresses the general, not in reflective abstraction, but in the concreteness of immediacy.7

The particular correspondence between the medium of music and the theme of Don Giovanni is developed from the very beginning of A’s treatise.8 It is due to the postulated intimate connection between the musical work Don Giovanni and the perceived idea of the work that A can also – much later – claim that the Commendatore is not part of the opera proper. After having asserted that the ‘whole opera consonate[s] in [the figure of] Don Giovanni’, he continues with the following statement: The only figure in the piece who seems an exception is, naturally, the Commendatore; but that too is why it is so wisely planned as to have him lie to some extent outside the piece, or circumscribe it; the more the Commendatore was brought to the fore, the more the opera would cease to be absolutely musical. So he is always kept in the background and as indistinct as possible. The Commendatore is the powerful antecedent and the fearless consequent between which lives Don Giovanni’s middle premiss, but the rich content of this middle premiss is the substance of the opera. The Commendatore appears only twice. The first time it is night, it is at the back of the stage, we cannot see him but we hear him fall to Don Giovanni’s sword. His gravity, made all the more strongly apparent by Don Giovanni’s parodying mockery, is something Mozart has already splendidly expressed in the music; already his seriousness is too profound to be that of a human being; he is spirit even before he dies. The second time it is as spirit that he appears, and the thundering of heaven resounds in his earnest, solemn voice, but as he himself is transfigured, so his voice is transformed into something more than human; he speaks no more, he judges.9

This particular text, however, directly contradicts the manifest construction of the opera by not acknowledging the important church yard scene – neither is this scene mentioned at any other point in A’s 5 6 7 8 9

EOP, 100 / SKS 2, 98. SKS 2, 91. Concerning Hotho, see SKS K2-3, 119 and 124. EOP, 101 / SKS 2, 99-100. EOP, 61-70 / SKS 2, 55-65. EOP, 125-126 / SKS 2, 126.

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account – a scene which in the opera brings about a fundamental change in the action, forecasting – for the first time – the judgment of Giovanni at the end of the second act.10 In spite of this, the Kierkegaardian interpretation (by A) has been strongly influential also for modern productions of the opera which – as a matter of course – include the churchyard scene. The point here is emphatically not to scold Kierkegaard for a ‘wrong’ interpretation but to emphasize a point where the different agendas and concerns of the two (or three, or four) authors involved can be clearly detected. The Hungarian stage director Ivan Nagel is a modern interpreter who, in his Autonomie und Gnade, has read the opera – with inspiration from Kierkegaard – as a play between opera seria and opera buffa. These two operatic genres belong to different social contexts: opera seria at the court where conflicts are resolved by the grace of the King or the Prince; opera buffa on the other hand is bourgeois and deals with human conflicts by way of negotiation, intrigues and the kind of action that belongs in the rational world. The nobleman Giovanni is rebellious and violates the traditional societal norms in his pursuit of happiness whereas the other – ordinary – people (whether noble or bourgeois) in the action called the Buffa-Gemeinde, the ‘buffa congregation’, by Nagel – cannot control him. They are no better than him, each occupied with his or her pursuit of happiness too, only less free or daring than Giovanni, and they thus have no authority over him. Therefore it becomes necessary that Heaven step in. This means that opera buffa, the general rational discourse is transformed into opera seria. Thus Don Giovanni becomes a tragedy, freedom is killed by the Stone Guest, and even the others’ pursuit of happiness is disturbed.11 Although clothed in a radically different language, a parallel between Kierkegaard’s – or A’s – and Nagel’s understanding is obvious. Nagel’s Giovanni is doomed from the outset, like Kierkegaard’s (or A’s), seeking what a human being cannot achieve, complete freedom. However, he is seen as a modern hero who sacrifices his life in a consistent insistence on living in the moments of his desire. The question of a theological interpretation of Mozart’s music has been taken up several times. In a recent article, ‘Mozart Among the Theologians’, David J. Gouwens discusses three important contribu10

11

In the above-mentioned article, Petersen ‘Søren Kierkegaard’s Aestheticist and Mozart’s Don Giovanni’ (see above, n. 3), I also comment on Kierkegaard’s distinctive literary reconstruction of the operatic narrative. Ivan Nagel Autonomie und Gnade: Über Mozarts Opern, Kassel: Bärenreiter 1991 [orig. München: Carl Hanser Verlag 1988], pp. 39-47.

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tions, those of Kierkegaard (or A), of Karl Barth, and of Hans Küng. One overall point is that each theologian – unsurprisingly – interprets Mozart from the vantage point of his own theological tradition. A’s account, since he is not being staged as a theologian, has a slightly different and maybe more hidden agenda than that of the others, but since the account has been formulated through Kierkegaard’s authorial strategy, it is, of course, reasonable to view A’s account as theological, the more so, as Gouwens remarks, since it does deal with the history of Christianity and music. Aside from the theological and philosophical agendas in Either/ Or which can be claimed to be at work in this musico-literary construction, A’s interpretation of Mozart’s Don Giovanni also seems to have broad aims in terms of a general understanding of the medium of music, seeing not only the opera Don Giovanni but the medium of music altogether as constituted by being ephemeral and, as emphasized above, in such a sense seductive. Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus (written 1943−46, published 1947), brought Kierkegaard’s – or A’s – interpretation of music as pure, sinful, sensuality into a broad discussion of the possibilities for ‘true’ music-writing in the twentieth century, in other words into the context of the aesthetic criticism of Adorno, or, conversely, he brought Adorno (disguised as the Devil) and his criticism into the context of the history of Christianity by which, as Kierkegaard or A stated, ‘sensuality was first posited’.12 Toward the end of this article, I shall contextualize Kierkegaard’s – or A’s – conceptualization of music in a broad sweeping historical perspective in which music has at times been understood as expressive of Divine truths, of human feelings, and of knowledge. But first I shall try to focus on Mozart’s Don Giovanni in order to highlight the idiosyncratic nature of the presentation of Mozart’s music in Either/ Or which, as Gouwens briefly summarizes it, claims that ‘just as the Don seduces the women around him with his effervescent gaiety, so the music seduces us as hearers’.13 In the following, I shall now focus on how Mozart employed musical means for his and Da Ponte’s dramaturgical agenda(s).

12

13

EOP, 72 / SKS 2, 68. See Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, chapter 25, Berlin: Fischer Verlag 1963; English: Doctor Faustus, trans. by H. T. Lowe-Porter, London: Everyman’s Library 1992. David J. Gouwens ‘Mozart Among the Theologians’ in Modern Theology, 16, 2000, pp. 461-474, p. 463.

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2. Mozart and Don Giovanni Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) grew up in a traditional (baroque) Catholic culture in which the arts were often brought to prominent use to highlight official as well as popular pious ceremonies. Not only were churches lavishly embellished as they had always been, but liturgical ceremonies were often adorned with impressive up-to-date artistry, musically as well as visually. This was true musically for major masses and vespers in important cathedrals and monasteries; in addition, processions, popular pilgrimages and numerous special ceremonies employed music and visual representations; this was a dominating feature of the culture. Pope Benedict XIV attempted in his encyclical Annus qui (1749) to scale down what he described as musical abuse in the form of secular concert music: …We cannot be silent over the most inconvenient abuse and which must not be tolerated: on certain days of the year sacred buildings are the theatre for sumptuous and resounding concerts, which in no way agree with the Sacred Mysteries which the Church, precisely on those days, proposes to the veneration of the faithful.14

Benedict’s regulations were moderate and did not lead to radical changes in the musical practices in Austria: church ceremonial and religious practices during Mozart’s childhood were still marked by traditional Catholic piety and baroque splendour, which retained many medieval liturgical traditions and which, in some ways, seem to have determined his approach to church music (also in his later life). However, when Prince Archbishop Hieronymus von Colloredo took over in 1772 after Archbishop Sigismund von Schrattenbach’s death in 1771, Enlightenment reforms gradually changed the overall picture in much the same way as did the reforms of Emperor Joseph II in Vienna in the 1780s. On a smaller scale, these had been initiated already during the reign of his mother Empress Maria Theresia (from 1765 until her death in 1780, she reigned over the Habsburg Monarchy together with Joseph, who had become Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire at the death of his father, Emperor Franz I). The religious and liturgical reforms under Joseph were important parts of more general reforms, which abolished the death penalty, strongly limited censorship and introduced a degree of religious tolerance toward Protestants, Orthodox, and Jews (though Catholicism retained its privileged status in 14

Pope Bendict XIV Annus qui (1749); English translation in Papal Legislation on Sacred Music 95 A. D. to 1977 A. D., ed. by Robert F. Hayburn, Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press 1979, pp. 92-108; p. 104.

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the Habsburg domain). Joseph’s reforms concerning church assets, his view on foreign interference with Papal and Episcopal privileges, and his dissolution of monasteries (that did not conform to Joseph’s ideas of social utility) soon led to a crisis between Joseph and the Catholic Church. Pope Pius VI travelled to Vienna in the spring of 1782 to negotiate with the Emperor. However, Joseph made no concessions, and the Catholic Church in the Habsburg Monarchy under Joseph II was essentially under complete administrative control of the state.15 In general, the Enlightenment is seen as a major step toward modernity. Ideas of man coming of age, religious tolerance, human rights and personal freedom circulated in various forms and were accepted and gradually introduced in different degrees in many European countries (and the United States). In Austria, such ideas were prominently discussed and promoted in the Masonic lodges. Empress Maria Theresia’s acceptance of the Masonic order, presumably because her husband (Emperor Franz I) was a freemason, caused problems between Rome and Vienna, given Papal bans (in 1738 and 1751) against freemasonry. However, because of the Emperor Franz, these bulls never had a real political impact in Austria. During the early reform years of Joseph II, the lodges became more powerful. When Mozart became a freemason in 1784, the most influential of the Vienna lodges was the Zur wahren Eintracht under the leadership of the scientist (metallurgist) Ignaz von Born. According to Nicholas Till’s discussion of the Masonic lodges in Vienna at this time, von Born’s lodge was Deist in its orientation and he argues that this was why Mozart did not join this most prominent of the lodges, but rather the much smaller Zur Wohltätigkeit whose Master was Otto von Gem15

For general historical information concerning the Enlightenment under Joseph II, I refer to Ferdinand Maaß Der Josephinismus I-V, II. Band: Entfaltung und Krise des Josephinismus 1770−1790, Wien: Verlag Herold 1953 and T. C. W. Blanning Joseph II, Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education Limited 1994. Concerning church music and liturgical reforms in the Austrian hereditary lands and Salzburg in the eighteenth century, see Hans Hollerweger Die Reform des Gottesdienstes zur Zeit des Josephinismus in Österreich, Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet 1976. Concerning Mozart and the church music situation, see Mozarts Kirchenmusik, Lieder und Chormusik: Das Handbuch, ed. by Thomas Hochradner und Günther Massenkeil, Laaber: Laaber Verlag 2006; Karl Gustav Fellerer Die Kirchenmusik W. A. Mozarts, Laaber: Laaber Verlag 1985. Further, see also Till Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue and Beauty in Mozart’s Operas, London: Faber and Faber 1992; The Mozart Compendium: A Guide to Mozart’s Life and Music, ed. by H. C. Robbins Landon, London: Thames and Hudson 1990; and The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia, ed. by Cliff Eisen and Simon P. Keefe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2006.

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mingen, ‘a committed Catholic’ in the words of Nicholas Till. Zur Wohltätigkeit seems to have been a centre for reformed Enlightenment Catholicism; it was basically influenced by the thought of Ludovico Muratori (1672–1750); it was also highly influential as the spiritual background for Maria Theresia’s and Joseph’s church reforms.16 For Till, Mozart’s decision to join this group rather than von Born’s (with whom he had early contact in Vienna) must have been conscious and reveals Mozart’s religious perspective. Examination of the small membership of Zur Wohltätigkeit (som thirty members only) indicates that it was quite specifically the meeting place for those who believed in a Catholic Enlightenment in Vienna. It was, undoubtedly, for this reason that Mozart chose to join Gemmingen’s lodge rather than the more radical and secular Zur wahren Eintracht.17

Mozart’s relation to religion has been assessed rather differently in scholarship. However, the evidence concerning Mozart’s Masonic affiliation convincingly contextualizes a number of statements of religious belief in his letters, which have not always been given serious attention.18 Nicholas Till has interpreted Don Giovanni on the background of Mozart’s affiliation with the ‘Catholic Enlightenment’ and Joseph II’s tendency in the second half of the 1780s to draw back or restrict the liberal reforms of the early years of his reign. Joseph’s reform of freemasonry in 1785, which restricted the number of lodges and required the registration of all members, has often been interpreted as an expression of Joseph’s embitterment and disappointment over the failure of his earlier reforms to establish a society based on true Enlightenment values: freedom and tolerance, social responsibility and morality, fellowship and true religion. Instead Joseph perceived a society of ‘moral libertinism and lack of concern for public welfare’.19 Joseph’s edict was issued on December 11, 1785 and consists of four points preceded by a short, seemingly critical (almost derogatory), reference to freemasonry where he states that he (the Emperor) 16

17 18

19

Till Mozart and the Enlightenment, pp. 125-129, and pp. 191-196. For Muratori’s influence on Joseph’s religious (and liturgical) reforms, see also Hollerweger, Die Reform, pp. 39-48. Till Mozart and the Enlightenment, pp. 124-125. Till Mozart and the Enlightenment, pp. 125-129, and see also the discussions in Hans Küng Mozart: Spuren der Transzendenz, München: R. Piper 1991, pp. 13−43, and Nils Holger Petersen ‘Time and Divine Providence in Mozart’s Music’ in Voicing the Ineffable: Musical Representations of Religious Experience, ed. by Siglind Bruhn, Hillsdale, New York: Pendragon Press 2002, pp. 265-286; pp. 275-280. Till Mozart and the Enlightenment, pp. 189-191; p. 190.

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never had any interest in getting to know the secret delusions of the freemasons. However, upon closer inspection, the whole document is clearly balanced between a positive statement, an official recognition of the freemasons, and centralized restrictions concerning the number of lodges and the registration of members. The latter points made the edict infamous for its contrast to Enlightenment ideals of freedom and tolerance. However, this is combined with acceptance and even state protection of the freemasons: Vormals, und in anderen Ländern verbot, und bestrafte man die Freimäurer, und zerstörte ihre in den Logen abgehaltenen Versammlungen, bloß, weil man von ihren Geheimnissen nicht unterrichtet war. Wir, obschon sie mir eben so unbekannt sind, ist genug zu wissen, daß von diesen Freimäurerversammlungen dennoch wirklich einiges Gutes für den Nächsten, für die Armuth, und Erziehung schon geleistet worden ist, um mehr für sie, als ie einem Lande noch geschehen ist, hiermit zu verordnen: nämlich, daß selbe, auch unwissend ihrer Gesetze, und Verhandlungen, dennoch, so lange sie Gutes wirken, unter den Schutz, und die Obhut des Staates zu nehmen, und also ihre Versammlungen förmlich zu gestatten sind. Jedoch ist folgende meine Vorschrift von denselben genau zu beobachten, und zwar…20

This leads to three sections of restrictions, primarily rules about the number of lodges and the registration of members. The fourth section again affirms that under these conditions, the lodges ‘are for ever to be free of any further inspections, examinations, or whatever kind of importunate requests for information, and may freely and in a relaxed way hold their gatherings’.21 In this way, the edict continues, this fraternization may be truly useful. As T. C. W. Blanning has stated, ‘there is more than a whiff of totalitarianism about this revealing instruction’, 22 yet the ambivalence of the edict is intriguing: was it mere tactics to help moderate freemasons swallow the pill, or does the typical Enlightenment terminology regarding the recognition of the freemasons also reveal that the edict may represent Joseph II’s absolute power and his will to exert this power, but at the same time does not reflect an abandonment of Joseph’s Enlightenment project. There are several theories about the political reasons behind the edict, which, however, are not important here.23 20

21 22 23

Joseph II ‘Das Kaiserliche Handbillett vom 11. Christmonat 1785’ in Joseph II. Und die Freimaurerei im Lichte zeitgenössischer Broschüren, ed. by Helmut Reinalter, Wien: Hermann Böhlaus Nachf. 1987, pp. 64-66; pp. 64-65. ‘Das Kaiserliche Handbillett vom 11. Christmonat 1785’, p. 65. Blanning Joseph II, p. 165. Helmut Reinalter ‘Einleitung’ in ‘Das Kaiserliche Handbillett vom 11. Christmonat 1785,’ pp. 9-26, see especially pp. 14-23, see also Blanning Joseph II, pp. 165-171.

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Nicolas Till’s understanding of Don Giovanni in the context of the political backlash in the mid-1780s emphasizes how the Don Giovanni narrative is concerned with individual freedom, which has gone too far, and has turned into libertinism and become a threat to the basic moral attitudes of the community. This is seen in light of what Joseph II and his main advisors perceived as the inner threat, which, in this view, was in part addressed by the edict of 1785. Accordingly, the proximity of Mozart’s and Da Ponte’s plot to the aforementioned Counter-reformation Don Juan narrative in Tirso’s ‘The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest’ becomes noticeable; they share the narrative point that things can go too far, in which case divine punishment can no longer be avoided. As Till remarks, however, the generousness of God’s forgiveness comes to the fore far more in Mozart’s and Da Ponte’s work than in Tirso’s, in agreement with Mozart’s preference for Enlightenment reform Catholicism. 24 Don Giovanni – as emphasized by Till – deals with a moral problem which may have seemed particularly relevant in the context of the contemporary Viennese society where questions of freedom or control were highly relevant. Whether libertinism and the potential dangers of political Enlightenment movements, or the anti-social behaviour of powerful individuals are seen as the most relevant contemporary context, the following lines from the 1785 edict are suggestive of the kind of thought which lay behind the wish for stricter control. In one way or another, these lines may well constitute the relevant background upon which the Christian morality and overall narrative theological construction of Don Giovanni works. After pointing out the above-mentioned ‘delusions’ of freemasonry, Joseph goes on to state: Diese Versammlungen, wenn sie sich selbst ganz überlassen, und unter keiner Leitung sind, können in Ausschweifungen, die für Religion, Ordnung, und Sitten allerdings verderblich sein können, besonders aber bei Obern durch eine fanatische engere Verknüpfung in nicht ganz vollkommene Billigkeit gegen ihre Untergebene, die nicht in der nämlichen gesellschaftlichen Verbindung mit ihnen stehen, ganz wohl ausarten, oder doch wenigstens zu einer Geldschneiderei dienen. 25

In other words, Joseph’s edict represents a need to curb individualism and anti-social behaviour within freemasonry and no doubt in many other places. This is what the opera deals with. In two scenes in Don Giovanni direct reference seems to be made to traditional theological concepts and even to musical representations of the divine 24 25

Till Mozart and the Enlightenment, pp. 197-228; pp. 202, 225. ‘Das Kaiserliche Handbillett vom 11. Christmonat 1785’, p. 64.

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in liturgical traditions: the so-called churchyard scene and the Commendatore’s final judgment of Giovanni. These two scenes directly represent supernatural religious themes. The question, of course, is to what extent this should be seen as part of the intended or potentially received meaning of the opera or simply as musical stage effects which were/are part of the seduction of the music. In Mozart’s and Da Ponte’s work – as in many of Mozart’s operas – comical and serious aspects are juxtaposed. This is also the case in Mozart’s musical representation of the judgment in Don Giovanni. In a fairly straightforward way, the narrative may be seen as a ghost story: the ghost of the murdered Commendatore comes back to punish the immoral and criminal Giovanni, who has tried to rape his daughter and has killed the Commendatore himself – in addition to leading a frivolous life in all respects. On November 29, 1780 the 25-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus wrote a letter to his father from Munich, during the final work on the opera Idomeneo which premiered there in January 1781. In this letter he commented on the role of the ‘voice’ [La voce], the figure of Divine intervention who – unlike the Commendatore in Don Giovanni – resolves the conflict mercifully, not through punishment. Even so La voce can be seen as a counterpart to the role of the Commendatore since both are divine figures, and both judge the conflicts established during the action. Also, as already mentioned, the Commendatore not only represents Divine judgment in its judgmental – punishing – aspect, but also God’s grace. He offers forgiveness until – almost – the very end; it is Giovanni who rejects it. Referring critically to the Ghost scene in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which Mozart found much too long, and aiming to get his librettist, Court Chaplain Giambattista Varesco to shorten the lines for La voce, Wolfgang writes: Stellen Sie sich das Theater vor, die Stimme muss schreckbar seyn – sie muss eindringen – man muss glauben es sey wirklich so – wie kann sie das bewirken, wenn die Rede zu lang ist, durch welche Länge die Zuhörer immer mehr von dessen Nichtigkeit überzeugt werden?26

Unfortunately, we don’t have any similar utterance about the Statue of the Commendatore in Don Giovanni. In any case, Mozart’s setting of the lines of the Commendatore in the so-called churchyard scene in Don Giovanni clearly reminds the listener of his setting of the merciful intervention of the Divine voice in Idomeneo. Both represent the 26

W. A. Mozart: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen. Gesamtausgabe, ed. by Wilhelm A. Bauer and Otto Erich Deutsch, Kassel: Bärenreiter 1962-75, vol. III, pp. 34-35.

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intrusion of an ultimate and divine voice, the intrusion of an ‘other’ into the ordinary human world. The means which Mozart used are 1) a recitation on one tone with a cadence on the lower fourth, a procedure strongly reminiscent of Latin liturgical chant, 2) an instrumental homophonic setting, which can be perceived as representing a chorale, using brass, notably trombones. Such a use of trombones was a musical commonplace in representations of the Divine in musical theatre. 3) In addition, in the instrumental setting, Mozart integrated the so-called lament figure, a series of tones descending chromatically (in halftone steps) creating thereby another sombre association to sacred music. In other words, Mozart used musical elements that his contemporary world associated with church music. The lament figure was woven into the musical texture in many places in the opera, as, for instance, in the instrumental conclusion of the terzetto from the beginning of ‘Act One’ when the Commendatore has been killed by Giovanni. 27 Also the judgment scene in Don Giovanni employs some of the same musical elements, although here no longer in the clearcut way as in the churchyard scene. At Giovanni’s dinner to which the Commendatore was invited – and comes – the lines of the Commendatore are not just a simple liturgical recitative; they are completely integrated into the musical dramatic web, although recitation of one note occurs occasionally as part of the more complex musical web. Further, in this scene the trombones are systematically part of the orchestral setting when, and only when, the Commendatore sings. From the last confrontation between Giovanni and the Commendatore where Giovanni is offered a last possibility of repentance, which he refuses, the trombones play consistently until the end of the scene which includes the pronouncing of the ultimate judgment, and Giovanni being sent to Hell.28 This last 27

28

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Don Giovanni KV 527, ed. by Wolfgang Plath and Wolfgang Rehm. Urtext der Neuen Mozart Ausgabe, Bärenreiter Studienpartituren, Kassel: Bärenreiter 1968), pp. 369-370; the churchyard scene in its entirety, pp. 367-381. For the mentioned terzetto in Act 1, see pp. 42-44. I have dealt with this in detail in Nils Holger Petersen ‘The Trump of God: Musical Representations of Divine Judgment in Mozart Works, 1767-1791’ in Transfiguration, Nordic Yearbook for Religion and the Arts 2008; in Nils Holger Petersen ‘Mozart und das Jüngste Gericht: der Komtur, die Posaune Gottes und Søren Kierkegaard’ in Mozart und die Religion, ed. by Peter Tschuggnall, Salzburg: Verlag Müller-Speiser, forthcoming; see also Nils Holger Petersen ‘Religious Judgment or Ghost Story: Modern Performances of Mozart’s Don Giovanni’ in Religion, Ritual, Theatre, ed. by Bent Flemming Nielsen, Bent Holm, and Karen Vedel, Amsterdam: Rodopi, forthcoming.

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confrontation does not – as pointed out by Nicholas Till – only consist of a judgment. Indeed, the Commendatore offers the possibility for repentance, the last possibility, and he only pronounces the final judgment after Giovanni has rejected this possibility. 29 The use of traditional liturgical musical elements and symbolic features (such as the lament figure) may be understood as further support for an interpretation which, along the lines of Nicholas Till’s interpretation, claims that historically, Don Giovanni should be read as a serious Christian commentary on the Enlightenment problem of freedom versus responsibility. Consider the associations from the liturgical recitative, the chorale, the lament figure and, especially, the symbolic quality of the trombones. The trombone, Posaunen in German, is the instrument which is used at the Day of Judgment in the German Bible translation as seen, for instance, in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians 15:52 (it is the trumpet in the English Bible). This lends the music a character of imminent seriousness, almost transcending a traditional theatricality. Moreover, the fugue exposition at the end of the scena ultima, where the morale of the opera is sung: ‘such is the end of the villain’ (questo è il fin di chi fa mal), 30 corroborates the understanding of the judgment of Giovanni as justified and as the basic message of the opera. In the musical world of the (late) eighteenth century, the fugue represented intellectual and ecclesiastical seriousness. Heinrich Christoph Koch (1749−1816) reports in his Musikalisches Lexikon (1802) that the so-called strict style (Der strenge Styl) is described as marked by a fugal way of writing (fugenartige Schreibart) and as having ‘a serious character peculiar to it wherefore it is above all applied to church music’ (einen eigenthümlichen ernsthaften Charakter, wodurch er vorzüglich zu der Kirchenmusik geeignet wird). 31 Altogether, the churchyard and judgment scenes – as well as the music dramatic construction of the opera on the whole – seem to represent Latin, Catholic liturgical musical traditions. These are integrated into Mozart’s contemporary, avant-garde, musical style.

29

30

31

For the judgment scene, see Mozart Don Giovanni KV 527 (Studienpartitur), pp. 425-454. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Don Giovanni KV 527, ed. by Wolfgang Plath and Wolfgang Rehm. Urtext der Neuen Mozart Ausgabe, Bärenreiter Studienpartituren, Kassel: Bärenreiter 1968, pp. 473-477. Heinrich Christoph Koch Musikalisches Lexikon. Kassel: Bärenreiter; facsimile reprint of original edition of 1802, Frankfurt a. M.: August Hermann dem Jüngeren 2001, col. 1451-1452.

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3. History and Interpretation Historical contextualization and associative interpretation do not necessarily lend meaning to a modern performance or interpretation. Few who read Kierkegaard today, I assume, would read him, or A, as an authority providing immediate modern answers for a theological interpretation of Don Giovanni. Conversely, there is no reason to want a historically convincing understanding of the opera to be binding for its modern interpretations. Even if we may assume that the ritualized elements from the baroque (or medieval) liturgy were used by Mozart to emphasize the ultimate authority of the moral or religious message he may have wanted to convey, or which may at least have been on his mind, he inserted these elements into a new, different framework, no longer part of an authoritative liturgical act, but transformed into an artwork. Thus, they became more susceptible to reinterpretation than moral doctrine, as well as to being played down in favour of other aspects of the work. As modern reception theory has emphasized, what we think of as a work of art cannot be considered a clearly delimited entity. We only know artworks – musical or theatrical – as interpreted. Even the score of a musical composition cannot – with some possible modernistic exceptions – be thought of as ‘the musical work itself’ but rather as a set of performance directions: important but not the ‘work’ as such. For most people, in any case, a performance of a piece of music, the staging of a play or an opera, constitutes the only possible encounter with the work. So one may ask to what extent can a performance of Don Giovanni today be said to be the work of Mozart and Da Ponte? The question is further complicated when we consider the influences on concrete performances of so many layers of interpretation and other inspiration since Mozart and Da Ponte wrote their piece – including, e. g., Kierkegaard’s ‘Immediate Erotic Stages’. An attractive metaphorical way to describe this situation has been suggested by Paul Ricoeur and André LaCocque: by reading, performing, responding, interpreting, one adds to the foreground of the original piece, as if painting yet another layer of paint, possibly in a new colour, on a wall.32 Many questions can be raised concerning this 32

André LaCocque and Paul Ricoeur Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies, trans. by David Pellauer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1998, pp. xiii-xiv. See also discussions in Nils Holger Petersen ‘Introduction’ in Signs of Change: Transformations of Christian Traditions and Their Representation in the Arts, 1000-2000, ed. by Nils Holger Petersen, Claus Clüver, and Nico-

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metaphorical description, but intuitively it points to two opposites involved in interpretation: 1) the intimacy of interpreting, i. e., the closeness of the interpreter to what is being interpreted, and 2) that something new is also involved. The degree of harmony or tension between historical background and what is added to the foreground, the possible tension between the involved intentions – historical and modern (as far as we may know them) – may vary. A’s picture of Mozart fits perfectly in to such a scheme. It obviously relates to Mozart’s and Da Ponte’s work, even in musical details as I have discussed elsewhere (concerning Kierkegaard’s musical observations in the overture), but it also changes and adds new layers to the musical and verbal texts. In a Swedish film from 1986, The Mozart Brothers (Bröderna Mozart) by Suzanne Osten, a modern stage director has the idea of presenting the main action of Don Giovanni as taking place in Giovanni’s mind in a split second, the moment in which he – Giovanni – is killed in the duel with the Commandatore, completely contrary, of course, to the action of the historical opera. Nothing needs to be changed, however, textually or musically, but the whole perception of the drama changes radically and basically turns everything upside-down for the theatre institution portrayed in the film. One could point to actual performances which have made similarly radical transformations of the opera as, for instance, the well-known staging by Peter Sellars (1990, also available on video and DVD) where the plot of the opera has been re-set to a black/Italian neighbourhood in Harlem, New York, in modern times. Also the recent Copenhagen performance of Don Giovanni at the Royal Opera House staged by Keith Warner that premiered in December 2006 may be mentioned in such a context, as, in principle, may every new interpretation. No modern Don Giovanni needs to be committed to the original strategies of ritualization or historical constructions of meaning. But there are interesting questions to be raised between history and interpretation, and perspectives to be considered. While probably no one would dare to change a note in the score – or diverge notably from the performance directions in it – except for the occasional decision to omit an aria or a scene, the modern stage interpretations in practice seem much less bound by textual content or by stage directions. Why this difference? And how far do we need to move from the historically las Bell, Amsterdam: Rodopi 2004, pp. 1-23; pp. 1-2. And Nils Holger Petersen ‘Introduction’ in Genre and Ritual: The Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals, ed. by Eyolf Østrem, Mette Birkedal Bruun, Nils Holger Petersen, and Jens Fleischer, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press 2005, pp. 9-26; pp. 17-18.

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preserved text (or music) or plot before the work is no longer that of Mozart and Da Ponte? How much do, in fact, changes in plot and setting change the perception of the music by way of re-contextualization? In a complex modern culture, it is not easy to determine which historical interpretations of, for instance, Don Giovanni have made their way so forcefully into the perception of the opera that they can no longer be separated from it: that for future generations they belong to its commonly agreed ‘foreground’. However, for large groups today, it seems that a direct interpretation of Don Giovanni in terms of its originally edifying plot and its emphasis on morality and Christianity would no longer be a viable possibility. Even Mozart and Da Ponte themselves, in their interpretation of the tradition, complicated any straightforward interpretation through the immense complexity of their work – musically, dramatically, psychologically, in many different aspects – even while forcefully accepting and emphasizing theological and liturgical themes and associations. The question for us concerns how we relate to what they did, and what questions from their work may be relevantly posed to us in our cultural, religious and political situation. This brings me to the question of how to understand the medium of music altogether, the very basic question on which A’s – and, we must ask, Kierkegaard’s? – interpretation of the opera hinges. Is music to be thought of as seduction in the sense of not having any transcendent potential, no eternity, only the pleasure, or the manifest sound impressions, of the moment? Here is how A describes it: …music always expresses the immediate in its immediacy. That is also why in relation to language music comes first and last; but from this one also sees it is a misunderstanding to say that music is a more perfect medium. In language there is reflection and therefore language cannot express the immediate. Reflection kills the immediate and that is why it is impossible to express the musical in language; but this apparent poverty of language is precisely its wealth. For the immediate is the indeterminable and so language cannot apprehend it, but the fact that it is indeterminable is not its perfection but a defect. This is indirectly acknowledged in many ways. Thus to cite but one example, we say: ‘I can’t really explain why I do this or that, in this way or that; I do it by ear.’ In connection with things bearing no relation to music we frequently use a word taken from music, but what we indicate by its use is the obscure, the unaccountable, the immediate. 33

This statement may be seen as a statement of secularization and as a part of the historical tradition of Western aesthetics. 34 This is, indeed, the way Thomas Mann uses the Kierkegaardian construction in Doktor Faustus. 33 34

EOP, 80-81 / SKS 2, 76. Gouwens ‘Mozart among the Theologians’, p. 463.

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What was an accepted understanding at a much earlier time in Western history – and was played down radically with the rise of modern aesthetics – was another aesthetical tradition which understood music as a medium for true faith and for the praise of God. Augustine – in a short passage from the commentary to Psalm 99 – defined jubilation (in accordance with statements in other of his Psalm commentaries) in the following way: ‘He who jubilates does not speak words but a sound of joy without words; for it is the voice of a soul overflowing with joy, expressing its state of mind [affectum] as much as it can without understanding the sense.’35 Concerning this understanding, which to some degree gives associations to the statement by A quoted above, Augustine further implies that some kind of understanding (as it seems non-verbal) must be thought to be part of the act of contemplating and praising God; although emphasizing that we cannot understand the ineffable God or ‘His Word’, he summarizes as the essence of jubilation: ‘you have understood the jubilation of the whole Earth if you jubilate for the Lord’. 36 Although the idea of music as seduction – connected to heathen cultic practices – was a commonplace among the early Church Fathers, Augustine’s understanding here – although in other texts, he also voices his worries concerning the sensuous seduction of worshippers through music – combines ideas of Divine truthfulness with the appeal of the sensuous and, moreover, represents a strong theological tradition which lasted throughout the Middle Ages, and which, as hinted at before, was still important, at least for Church music at the time of Mozart. 37 35

36

37

“In psalmum XCIX,” ibid., vol. XXXIX, 1393-1404, 1394: ‘Qui iubilat, non uerba dicit, sed sonus quidam est laetitiae sine uerbis; uox est enim animi diffusi laetitia, quantum potest, exprimentis affectum, non sensum comprehendentis.’ Cf. my discussion of the mentioned passages in my ‘Liturgy and Musical Composition,’ pp. 129-131. See also Østrem ‘Ineffable,’ pp. 279-281, as well as Eyolf Østrem ‘Music and the Ineffable’ in Voicing the Ineffable, pp. 287-312, esp. pp. 288-293. Concerning the iubilus and the liturgy, see James McKinnon ‘The Patristic Jubilus and the Alleluia of the Mass’ in Cantus Planus: Papers Read at the Third Meeting, Tihany, Hungary 19-24 September 1988, ed. by Laszló Dobszay, Peter Halász, János Mezei and Gábor Proazeky, Budapest: Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Musicology 1990, pp. 61-70. Ibid., vol. XXXIX, 1397: ‘intellexisti iubilationem omnis terrae, si iubilas Domino’. Concerning Augustine and Carolingian music understanding, see Nils Holger Petersen ‘Carolingian Music, Ritual, and Theology’ in The Appearances of Medieval Rituals: The Play of Construction and Modification, ed. by Nils Holger Peter-

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Similarly, although also on completely different premises, in the early twentieth century, in the musical thought of Adorno and what traditionally has been received as musical modernism, one finds a tendency to think of music as knowledge, cognition, although in this period and up to our own time a variety of attitudes towards music include ideas of seduction, which are no longer necessarily meant negatively, of play, as well as the idea of music as an intellectual epistemological activity. Adorno could claim concerning Arnold Schönberg’s twelve-tone music that this music was ‘no longer play, but truth itself [nicht Spiel mehr, sondern Wahrheit selber]’. 38 This is precisely the problematic that Thomas Mann let his composer protagonist Adrian Leverkühn live through in Doktor Faustus, possibly hinting, toward the end, at some kind of a synthesis of history, meaning and transcendence. 39 It is obviously not possible to give a scholarly answer to the question of whether music provides passageways between the transcendent and the human world or merely seduces its listeners. It is not even clear whether one could say that this is a question of reception or of conception; in the end, I guess conception and reception are bound together in a never-ending dialectical relationship. Presently, however, there does not even seem to be a consensus about how to define music in the first place. Which sounds or complexes of sound constitute music? It is not the purpose of my paper to answer such questions, but rather to make it clear that historically, Kierkegaard’s, or A’s, music philosophy, as a part of modern Western aesthetical thought departed from certain important and century-long stable historical understandings prevalent in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, ideas which were still influential to some extent at Mozart’s time and in the historical context of Mozart’s Don Giovanni seem to have been at work in the composer’s mind and practice. This in no way precludes that Mozart was very aware of and used musical means to establish theatrical illusions. This, in itself, has little to do with the kind of seduction about which Kierkegaard or A writes, it seems more reasonable to subsume the phenomenon of theatrical manipulation under the concept of representation.

38

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sen, Mette Birkedal Bruun, Jeremy Llewellyn, and Eyolf Østrem, Turnhout: Brepols 2004, pp. 13-31. See also Petersen ‘The Trump of God’. Theodor W. Adorno ‘Der dialektische Komponist’ in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 17, Musikalische Schriften IV: Impromptus. Zweite Folge neu gedruckter musikalischer Aufsätze, Frankfurt a. M: Suhrkamp Verlag 1982, orig. 1934, pp. 198-203; p. 203. See Petersen ‘Introduction’ to Signs of Change, pp. 9-16.

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Historical interpretations of Mozart’s Don Giovanni notwithstanding, this complex work always could and certainly also now can be perceived in a number of different ways, today probably often in ways much closer to Kierkegaard’s or A’s understanding than to that of Mozart’s own time.

“The Immediate Erotic Stages” in Either/Or as Christian Writing By Ettore Rocca Abstract The article’s thesis is that “The Immediate Erotic Stages or The Musical-Erotic” is written from a Christian point of view rather than being the expression of the aesthetic life-view. Since Christianity as spirit is that which posits and excludes sensuality, music can properly express sensuality only by presenting it from the point of view of Christianity and thus referring indirectly to Christianity. Music can also express spirit, but only by continually annulling itself. A parallel can be drawn between “The Immediate Erotic Stages” and the second part of The Sickness unto Death. Arguing that Christian doctrine posits and eliminates sin, Anti-Climacus repeats the structure of the argument used by pseudonym A with respect to sensuality. For Kierkegaard, not only music, but art in general, seems to have two possibilities. The first consists in expressing the untruth as untruth and thus referring indirectly to the truth; the second in showing itself at the very moment by giving place to a truth that it cannot express.

1. Introduction This article argues that “The Immediate Erotic Stages or The MusicalErotic” in the first part of Either/Or is written from a Christian point of view. Far from being the expression of the aesthetic life-view, the essay is perhaps the most Christian of Either/Or’s writings. Moreover, six years later a decisive argument used by the author of “The Immediate Erotic Stages” is repeated by the pseudonym Anti-Climacus in The Sickness unto Death. Hence, to put it provocatively, Anti-Climacus, the extraordinary Christian, could more consistently have been the author of “The Immidiate Erotic” than the aesthetician. In conclusion, I will apply what the essays state about music to art in general.1 1

I prefer “aesthetician” to “aesthete” as a translation of Æsthetiker for reasons given in Ettore Rocca “The Secret: Communication Denied, Communication of Domina-

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2. Aesthetic or Christian Point of View? The essay “The Immediate Erotic Stages or The Musical-Erotic” is not just about the myth of Don Juan. It wants to be three things at once. First, it aims to show that the content of the myth of Don Juan can be properly expressed in only one medium: music. Secondly (and reciprocally), that music can properly express only the content of this myth. Thirdly, that the myth of Don Juan has found its perfect and insuperable form in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. So the essay is at once an interpretation of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, a treatise on the essence of music and a treatise on the essence of the myth of Don Juan. Mozart’s Don Giovanni is said to be the perfect musical expression of the myth of Don Juan. The idea that comes to expression in music is sensuality, which is described as “power, life, movement, continual unrest, continual succession.”2 Sensuality appears to be life as original force, energy, desire; sensuality is something that could be compared with Schopenhauer’s will, but unlike the latter, sensuality is not the metaphysical principle of reality and cannot develop and enrich itself by going through the realms of nature and spirit; it is merely immediacy. “But this unrest, this succession, does not enrich it [sensuousness]; it continually remains the same; it does not unfold but incessantly rushes forward as if in a single breath.”3 The seduction emitted by this desire is a kind of naïve seduction: no reflection, no strategy is part of it; it is just a flow of energy which, like a river, takes all the objects that it encounters.4 The first and principal objection to this theory is: can music not express other ideas? What about Palestrina, Bach, Brahms: do they express nothing but sensuality? Can music never express spirit? A first answer to this question could be to weaken and attenuate A’s thesis by pointing to the artifice of the pseudonyms. Since this thesis is expressed by the aesthetician (the one who wants to make his

2 3 4

tion” in Søren Kierkegaard and the Word(s): Essays on Hermeneutics and Communication, ed. by Poul Houe and Gordon G. Marino, Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel 2003, p. 125. EO1, 71 / SKS 2, 77. EO1, 71 / SKS 2, 77. On Don Giovanni’s sensuality, which cannot properly be called a form of seduction, see Umberto Curi “Il mancato pentimento di Don Giovanni” in Kierkegaard contemporaneo: Ripresa, pentimento, perdono, ed. by Umberto Regina and Ettore Rocca, Brescia: Morcelliana 2007, pp. 175-195.

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life a work of art, who wants to live in continuous pleasure), it is an aesthetizising thesis on music. From the point of view of the reflected demonic, the aesthetician speaks of music as expressing the immediate stage of the demonic.5 A new scenario opens if we look closer at another main thesis of this essay: “Christianity is spirit, and spirit is the positive principle it [Christianity] has brought into the world.”6 Radicalizing the adage that omnis determinatio est negatio [every determination is negation], Christianity has posited what is opposed to spirit sensuality, in the very act of positing spirit. To make the claim that Christianity brought sensuality into the world seems boldly venturesome. But as they say: boldly ventured is half won. So it also holds here; it will become evident upon reflection that in the positing of something, the other that is excluded is indirectly posited. Since sensuality is that which is to be negated, it really comes to light, is really posited, first by the act that excludes [udelukker] it through a positing of the opposite positive. Sensuality is posited as a principle, as a power, as an independent system first by Christianity and to that extent Christianity brought sensuality into the world. But if the thesis that Christianity has brought sensuality into the world is to be understood properly, it must be comprehended as identical to its opposite, that it is Christianity that has driven sensuality out of the world, has excluded sensuality from the world…sensuality was placed under the qualification of spirit first by Christianity.7

Sensuality is brought to light, i. e., is properly expressed, only as spirit has posited itself and, by positing itself, has posited (and excluded) sensuality. This means that sensuality is unable to express itself as such. Metaphorically speaking, darkness cannot represent itself as darkness. Only light is capable of revealing itself as light and, at the same time, of revealing darkness as darkness. Darkness can only be enlightened as darkness (i. e., expressed, comprehended as such) by light, which is outside darkness and which is its polar opposite. Sensuality can only be expressed by something – spirit – which is outside it and which is its. There will be a disproportion between the positive and the negative principle: the negative cannot express itself through itself; the positive principle, on the contrary, posits and expresses itself 5

6 7

Among the recent secondary literature, that follows this line of thought, see e. g., Marcia Morgan Vahrmeyer “The Role of Music in Schleiermacher’s and Kierkegaard’s Writings” in Schleiermacher und Kierkegaard: Subiektivität und Wahrheit / Subjectivity and Truth, ed. by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Richard Crouter, Theodor Jørgensen and Claus Osthövener, Berlin / New York: Walter de Gruyter 2006, pp. 93-105. EO1, 61 / SKS 2, 68. EO1, 61 / SKS 2, 68.

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and, at the same time posits and expresses its opposite. Spirit is capable of self-reflexive knowledge; sensuality is not: it must go through spirit in order to express itself properly. The further consequence is that every proper expression of sensuality will presuppose spirit and will be done from the point of view of spirit. What has been said about sensuality [Sandselighed], can be repeated with respect to the sensuous-erotic [det sandselige Erotiske], which can be understood as sensuality seen in its relational aspect: the moment when sensuality, with its magnetic power, attracts other human beings to itself. When the sensuous-erotic is “concentrated in a single individual, then I have the concept of the sensuous-erotic in its elemental originality [Genialitet].”8 And now to music. Music is the medium that is able to properly express the sensuous-erotic concentrated in a single individual. If the elemental originality of the sensuous-erotic in all its immediacy insists on expression, then the question arises as to which medium is the most suitable.…In its immediacy, it can be expressed only in music.…The significance of music thereby appears in its full validity, and in a stricter sense it appears as a Christian art, or, more correctly, as the art Christianity posits in excluding it from itself, as the medium for what Christianity excludes from itself and thereby posits. In other words, music is the demonic. In elemental sensuous-erotic originality, music has its absolute theme. This, of course, does not mean that music cannot express anything else, but nevertheless this is its theme proper.9

There are two ways of interpreting this crucial passage. Both can be supported by textual evidence, but they cannot both be accepted at the same time since they are in conflict. The first and more straightforward interpretation equates music and the sensuous-erotic. Music is the sensuous-erotic, or perhaps the sensuous-erotic par excellence. Music “appears as a Christian art, or, more correctly, as the art Christianity posits in excluding it from itself….In other words, music is the demonic.” Music is posited and excluded by Christianity in the same way that sensuality and the sensuous-erotic are excluded. Music and the sensuous-erotic coincide; hence, music is demonic in its essence, and Don Juan is “the demonic qualified as the sensuous.”10 There is, however, another way of interpreting the passage, which, in my opinion, is a better textual fit. Music is “the medium [my italics] for what Christianity excludes from itself and thereby posits.” Music is the medium for what the aesthetician calls an “idea.” It is this idea 8 9 10

EO1, 64 / SKS 2, 71. EO1, 64 f. / SKS 2, 71. EO1, 90 / SKS 2, 95.

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– sensuality or the sensuous-erotic – which is what Christianity posits and excludes, not the medium as such. It would be a logical error to identify the idea with the medium that expresses it, i. e., the principle with its expression, an error that would destroy the aesthetic theory presented in the essay. Avoiding this error is crucial because, as we have seen, the idea of sensuality can be posited and expressed only by spirit. Only spirit can express sensuality through a medium, i. e., can mediate sensuality in its immediacy; and the best way of mediating it is not language, but music – music is the most abstract medium, but always-already a medium. This means that music can properly express sensuality (and the sensuous-erotic together with its “elemental originality”) only by presupposing spirit, only by presenting it from the point of view of spirit or Christianity. Sensuality cannot mediate itself through music, only spirit can mediate sensuality through music. Music in its perfection will tell about sensuality, but the agent who uses this medium is spirit, as it were. Music in its perfection cannot be other than the voice of spirit, even if it sings about sensuality. This interpretation is confirmed by the fact that music can also express other ideas, even if imperfectly – something which would not be the case if we were to identify music with only one idea, sensuality. There are two ways of hearing Don Giovanni: the first – and imperfect one – hears only the sensuous and the demonic. This happens both in the case of “religious fervor [den religiøse Iver],” which wants to “give up” music;11 and in the almost orgiastic effects of music on some individuals and on “the crowd” in modern age.12 However, “it by no means follows that one must regard it [music] as the devil’s work.”13 The other and proper way of hearing Don Giovanni is to hear the sensuous as expressed from the point of view of spirit; the proper way of hearing perceives that the expression of sensuality refers to spirit, that is, to that principle which posits and excludes sensuality. If this is correct, “The Immediate Erotic Stages” gives voice to the Christian point of view in a work, Either/Or, which is said to express

11 12

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EO1, 72 f. / SKS 2, 78 f. “…our age provides many horrible proofs of the demonic power with which music can grip an individual and this individual in turn intrigues and ensnares the crowd, especially a crowd of women, in the seductive snares of anxiety by means of the full provocative force of voluptuousness” (EO1, 73 / SKS 2, 79). For a convincing interpretation of this passage as a critic to the “excesses of Lisztomanies,” see Elisabete M. de Sousa Kierkegaard’s Musical Recollections in this volume. EO1, 73 / SKS 2, 79.

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only the aesthetic and the ethical life-views.14 With the exception of a paragraph from the “Insignificant Introduction,”15 no change in the essay would be needed, if the author were a Christian pseudonym. On the other hand, if the Christian point of view is presupposed in order to comprehend music as the proper expression of sensuality, it is difficult to understand what it is that communicates the peculiar aesthetic vision of life in this essay. “The Immediate Erotic Stages” breaks the dualistic scheme of Either/Or and should be perhaps read after the second part of the work: it is Kierkegaard’s first Christian writing.

3. Immediacy within Spirit Having argued that the essay on music is written from a Christian point of view, I return to the main objection against A’s treatise: Can music never express spirit? The first answer is therefore: “yes,” but by not expressing it, by expressing its opposite. Music refers to the truth (spirit) by expressing the untruth (sensuality). But this is not enough. Does a Mass by Palestrina or a Passion by Bach give voice to sensuousness, for example, without knowing it? I would like to draw attention to the following passage: 14

15

Referring to Christoph Schremp’s “Nachwort” to the German translation of Either/ Or (Entweder/Oder, 2 vol., Jena: Eugen Diederich 1922, vol. II, p. 319) Adorno remarks in 1933: “In the first volume of Either/Or the pseudonymous mask is the most minimal disguise that nowhere adequately conceals the features of naïve aesthetic speculation and positive Christian doctrine. Schrempf rightly notes that ‘even in the first part A always employs Christian thought in such a fashion that to one’s amazement one notices that this frivolous person in fact thinks remarkably like a Christian’” (Theodor W. Adorno Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, tr. by Robert Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1989, p. 16). For recent secondary literature, see Stefan Egenberger “Gibt es eine Christologie in Entweder/Oder I?” unpublished paper given at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Center, November 9, 2004, p. 1: “Beschreibt das Christentum das Auseinandertreten von Sinnlichkeit und Geist, so personifiziert die Don Juan-Figur das Jesus gegenüberstehende Ideal, gewissermaßen den ins dämonische gewendeten Messias.” According to Virgilio Melchiorre, music, as work of spirit, has a cathartic function in relation to sensuality; see Virgilio Melchiorre “Kierkegaard: l’arte come seconda immediatezza” in Søren Kierkegaard: l’essere umano come rapporto, ed. by Ettore Rocca, Brescia: Morcelliana, in press. The paragraph that ends with the sentence: “Indeed, if he [Mozart] were taken away, if his name were blotted out, that would demolish the one pillar that until now has prevented everything from collapsing for me into a boundless chaos, into a dreadful nothing” (EO1, 49 / SKS 2, 57).

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Now, if it is the immediate, qualified by spirit, that receives its proper expression in the musical, the question may be raised again more pointedly: What kind of immediacy is it that is essentially the theme of music? The immediate, qualified by spirit, can be qualified in such a way that it either comes within the realm of spirit [or it is outside the realm of spirit. When the immediate, qualified by spirit, is qualified in such a way that it falls within the realm of spirit],16 it can certainly find its expression in the musical, but this immediacy still cannot be music’s absolute theme, for when it is qualified in such a way that it will fall within the realm of spirit, this suggests that music is in alien territory; it forms a prelude that is continually being annulled. But if the immediate, qualified by spirit, is qualified in such a way that it is outside the realm of spirit, then music has in this its absolute theme.17

The author differentiates here between two kinds of immediacy, both qualified by spirit; the first one falls within the realm of spirit, the other outside spirit. As often repeated, the immediate, qualified by spirit, which is outside the realm of spirit, is music’s “absolute theme [absolute Gjenstand].” However, he mentions also the immediate, qualified by spirit, that falls within spirit. The author does not explain this immediacy within spirit, or spiritual immediacy, in more detail. What is it? In accordance with the aesthetic pseudonym, could it be Faust, the demonic-spiritual, which is discussed later in the work? But in Faust there is no immediacy, all is reflection and strategy. Furthermore, Faust, too, is posited and excluded by the Christian spirit, just as is Don Juan.18 The theoretical structure of a positivity that posits and excludes something which is both a positivity – qua posited – and a negativity – qua excluded – is repeated in Faust. Therefore, this immediacy within spirit must be a Christian spiritual immediacy. It is the first appearance of a theme which, later in Kierkegaard’s authorship, will play a different and fundamental role in its relation to faith.19 16

17 18

19

The passage in square brackets is present both in Kierkegaard’s draft (KA, B pk. 6 læg 3; see SKS K2-3, 22) and in the fair copy (Pap. III B 191,5; see SKS K2-3, 33) written by his secretary P. V. Christensen. It is missing both in the first (1843) and in the second (1849) editions. See the text critical variant in SKS 2, 77, footnote. EO1, 70 / SKS 2, 76 f. “Faust is the expression for the demonic qualified as the spiritual that the Christian spirit excludes” (EO1, 90 / SKS 2, 95). On this subject see Heiko Schulz “Second Immediacy: A Kierkegaardian Account of Faith” in Immediacy and Reflection in Kierkegaard’s Thought, ed. by Paul Cruysberghs, Johan Taels and Karl Verstrynge, Leuven: Leuven University Press 2003, pp. 71-86; Arne Grøn “Mediated Immediacy? The Problem of a Second Immediacy” in Immediacy and Reflection in Kierkegaard’s Thought, op. cit., pp. 87-95; M. Jamie Ferreira “Immediacy and Reflection in Works of Love” in Immediacy and Reflection in Kierkegaard’s Thought, op. cit., pp. 107-119; Merold Westphal “Kierkegaard and the Role of Reflection in Second Immediacy” in Immediacy and Reflection in Kierkegaard’s Thought, op. cit., pp. 159-179; Ettore Rocca “Vier The-

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With regard to this immediacy within spirit, the author does not claim that music is unable to express it, but such music will be in alien territory: “music is in alien territory; it forms a prelude that is continually being annulled [Musikken er paa et fremmed Gebeet, den danner et Forspil, som bestandig ophæves].”20 In order to express the spiritual, music must continually annul itself, like a prelude that always gives way to the core of the piece. Music reaches its limit and utters what it wants to express precisely by manifesting itself at the very moment of its dissolution. We can prove this reading by analyzing what the author writes about the Commendatore. If we understand the main thesis of the essay on “The Musical-Erotic” literally, the Commendatore would be unmusical, since he represents the point of view of spirit. However, precisely the fact that the Commendatore is a successful part of the opera would disprove the essay’s main thesis. But the position of the author of the essay is more nuanced. All the characters, we read, harmonize in Don Giovanni. The only character in the piece who seems to constitute an exception is, of course, the Commendatore, but therefore it is also so sagely designed that he to some degree lies outside the piece or limits it. The more the Commendatore would be drawn to the foreground, the more the opera would cease to be absolutely musical. Therefore, he is continually kept in the background and as nebulous as possible. The Commendatore is the vigorous antecedent clause and the outspoken consequent clause, between which lies Don Giovanni’s intermediate clause, but the rich content of this intermediate clause is the substance of the opera. The Commendatore appears only two times. The first time it is night; it is in the background of the theater; we cannot see him… his earnestness is too profound to be human; before he dies, he is spirit. The second time he appears as spirit…his voice is transfigured into something more than a human voice; he no longer speaks, he passes judgment. 21

The Commendatore is the background; he is the preface and the conclusion of the opera, its limit. As limit he is at the same time inside and outside the opera. We could even argue that he is precisely that form of the immediate that is within spirit, where “music is in alien territory,” the “prelude that is continually being annulled.” The Commendatore is therefore the musical trace of that which music cannot properly express: spirit. As spirit the Commendatore will be that which posits and excludes Don Giovanni from itself. Heidegger writes that “a boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks

20 21

sen zur Anthopologie Kierkegaards” in Schleiermacher und Kierkegaard: Subjektivität und Wahrheit / Subjectivity and Truth, op. cit., pp. 543-560. EO1, 70 / SKS 2, 77. EO1, 124 / SKS 2, 126.

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recognized, the boundary is that from which the essence of something begins.”22 Paraphrasing this sentence, the Commendatore is that from which the essence of Don Giovanni begins.

4. Anti-Climacus as Author of “The Immediate Erotic Stages” Until now I have tried to show that the essay on “The Musical-Erotic” is written from a Christian point of view; it undermines the dualistic structure of Either/Or, representing a point of view which is neither aesthetic nor ethical, a point of view which is not only religious, but the only properly Christian writing in Either/Or. Secondly, music can express spirit, but in an improper way, as a prelude that is continually being annulled. However, my suggestion that Anti-Climacus is author ante litteram of “The Musical-Erotic” has a deeper motivation: a parallel can be drawn between the argument used by the aesthetician and the argument used by Anti-Climacus in the second part of The Sickness unto Death. In the latter essay Anti-Climacus works with the opposition faith/sin. In the third chapter – in my opinion one of the most difficult parts of the book – he discusses the problem of sin as a “position,” not just a negative determination, like “weakness, sensuousness, finitude, ignorance.”23 That sin is a position means that is something that has been posited. But who or what posits this position? Anti-Climacus’ problem is not – like Vigilius’ in The Concept of Anxiety – how sin came into the world; his question is not the status of sin in the sense of its place in a temporal sequence of events. The problem here is how sin can be thought, and at the same time preserved, as a position. In trying to comprehend it as a position, speculation transforms it into a negation. The secret of all comprehending is that this comprehending is itself higher than any position it posits; the concept establishes a position, but the comprehension of this is its very negation.24

This is the destiny of every figure of Hegelian speculative dialectics. Every figure posited in the dialectical process rises as partial negation 22

23 24

Martin Heidegger “Building Dwelling Thinking” in Heidegger Poetry, Language, Thought, tr. by Albert Hofstadter, New York: Harper & Row 1971, p. 154 (translation modified). SUD, 96 / SKS 11, 209. SUD, 97 / SKS 11, 209.

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of the foregoing and is, in turn, negated; it becomes a moment which is negated and conserved in truth’s self-development and self-comprehension. More particularly, the explanatory notes in SKS 25 refer to Kierkegaard’s summary of Ph. K. Marheineke’s lectures in Berlin in 1841 on “Die Christliche Dogmengeschichte,” where he writes: “Evil is therefore not actual [virkelig], but is in becoming, in coming-intoexistence [Entstehen] and in passing-out-of-existence [Vergehen];” evil is “as such, non-being.”26 To posit sin in this way “is eo ipso the same as to nullify” it, 27 making it something apparent and not actual. On the other hand, sin cannot posit itself as a position by itself. I repeat: the problem is not how sin comes into the world. To this question The Concept of Anxiety answers that sin comes into world by itself. Here the problem is how sin can be conceived, thought of as a position. According to Anti-Climacus, sin can never call itself by name; the sinner can never call him/herself by name – a sinner. Sin, and the sinner, are mute. …no man of himself and by himself can declare what sin is, precisely because he is in sin; all his talk about sin is basically a glossing over of sin, an excuse, a sinful watering down. That is why Christianity begins in another way: man has to learn what sin is by a revelation from God. 28

As “The Immediate Erotic Stages” argues that sensuality cannot properly express itself by itself, The Sickness unto Death shows that, being in sin, it is impossible to distance oneself from it and to express it. Of course I do not mean that sensuality and sin coincide – something which is excluded both by A and by Anti-Climacus,29 but that both sensuality and sin are approached through a similar scheme of thought. Neither speculation nor sin can posit sin; on the contrary sin is “a paradox that must be believed.”30 According to Anti-Climacus, only Christianity – which proclaims reconciliation – is able to posit sin without transforming it into a negation. And, at the same time, Christianity eliminates the position of sin in the atonement. …the qualification that sin is a position implies in a quite different sense the possibility of offence, the paradox. That is, the paradox is the implicit consequence of the doctrine of the Atonement [Forsoningen]. First at all, Christianity proceeds to establish 25 26 27 28 29 30

SKS K11, 228 f. Not9:1 in SKS 19, 258. SUD, 98 / SKS 11, 210. SUD, 95 / SKS 11, 207. See EO1, 90 / SKS 2, 94 f., and SUD, 96 / SKS 11, 209. SUD, 98 / SKS 11, 210.

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sin so firmly as a position that the human understanding can never comprehend it; and then it is this same Christian teaching that again undertakes to eliminate this position in such a way that the human understanding can never comprehend it. 31

Christian doctrine posits and eliminates sin without transforming sin into negativity: this is the argument of Anti-Climacus. Spirit posits sensuality and excludes it from itself: this was the argument of the aesthetician. The two arguments run parallel and share the same structure. In both cases there is a position which is at the same time a contra-position. Something (a) posits something other (b), which is unable to posit itself. But b is at the same time posited counter to a and defeated by a. However, b remains something positive and independent, without becoming merely a negation and a moment of a’s self-development – as in Hegelian speculation. There is a subtle and fragile border between the two models, between Hegelian dialectics and Kierkegaardian paradox, reflected by the difference in the two media: thought as the proper expression of dialectics, faith as the proper expression of paradox. This is also why despair is a Christian sickness in the same way that music is Christian art. In the “Introduction” to The Sickness unto Death Anti-Climacus states: “Only the Christian knows what is meant by the sickness unto death.”32 Only the Christian can posit despair as the sickness unto death and despair as sin and exclude it from him/ herself.

5. Art’s Two Possibilities As we saw above, when music tries to express spiritual immediacy, it is in “alien territory.” According to Kierkegaard, however, it is possible to think of another kind of art which is not in alien territory in expressing spiritual immediacy? A full answer to this question would go beyond the limits of this article, and this I will limit my comments to a mere outline. During Easter 1848, five years after Either/Or was published, Kierkegaard imagined some “new discourses on the lilies and the birds”;33 it is the germ of what would become The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air. Here the problem of immediacy returns: 31 32 33

SUD, 100 / SKS 11, 212. SUD, 8 / SKS 11, 125. JP 2:1942, p. 337 / NB4:154 in SKS 20, 358.

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Poetically, immediacy is the very thing we desire to return to (we want our childhood again etc.), but from a Christian point of view, immediacy is lost and it ought not to be yearned for again but should be attained again. 34

In relation to this immediacy that must be reattained, “the poetic must be put aside,” “poetry in truth shall fall”; but at the same time poetry must “have an even more poetic tone and richness of color… it ought to wear its party clothes.”35 Poetry is in the same situation as music. Poetry “shall fall” just as music was “a prelude that is continually being annulled.” Both have spiritual immediacy as their imperfect object and can express it only by showing, in their very expressions, the “falling” of these art forms. Art in general seems to have two possibilities. The first is to express the untruth as untruth and thus to refer indirectly to the truth. This is not only the case in A’s reading of Don Giovanni, but also in his reading of Faust, the modern Antigone, 36 and his interpretations in “Silhouettes.”37 The second is that art, in trying to express truth, is always “falling,” is leaving the scene or, better, is always showing itself at the very moment it leaves the scene. They are Kierkegaard’s variations of the Hegelian question of the death of art. In Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics, we read that art, “considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past,” having “lost for us genuine truth and life.”38 In Kierkegaard, however, art keeps its present relation to truth, either as untruth, or by showing itself as it makes place for a truth it cannot express.

34 35 36

37

38

Ibid., (translation modified). Ibid. See, for example, my reading of Antigone as Anti-Virgin Mary in “The Secret,” pp. 116-126. See Stefan Egenberger “Gibt es eine Christologie in Entweder/Oder I?” Egenberger interprets the three literary figures discussed in Silhouettes as variations on the motif of the three women under the cross. Georg W. F. Hegel Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, tr. by T. M. Knox, 2 vol., Oxford: Oxford University Press 1975, vol. I, p. 11.

Don Giovanni as the Re-entry of the Spirit in the Flesh By Camilla Sløk Abstract In this article, I will look at how Don Giovanni is presented in Either/Or in relation to the notion of sensuality. In a challenge to some of the existing interpretations of the figure of Don Giovanni, I will undertake a close reading of the text that emphasizes Kierkegaard’s use of the concept of distinction. My aim is to show how Kierkegaard elaborates on the concept of sensuality through two distinctions: 1) a distinction between Greek culture and Christianity, and 2) a distinction between the early Christianity and the Christianity of the Middle Ages.

Introduction In order to better understand Don Giovanni (DG) it is necessary to distinguish three different historical epochs, namely, 1) Greek culture and its understanding of the erotic. 2) Christianity’s understanding of flesh and spirit.1 3) The Middle Ages’ new understanding of sensuality.2 In these three epochs, three different understandings of sensuality are presented, and DG is a representative of the third epoch. 3 However, understanding what it is that Kierkegaard wants to tell us about sensuality and DG is only possible through the comparisons that he makes between Greek culture, Christianity, and the Middle Ages. While DG stands in contradiction to Greek culture, the figure is also related to Greek culture in his celebration of sensuality. How1

2

3

EO1, 88 / SKS 2, 93. For practical reasons, I will use the name Don Giovanni throughout this article. Don Juan is used only when it appears in quotations. “So it was that the whole world on all sides became a reverberating abode for the worldly spirit of sensuousness, whereas spirit had forsaken the world” (EO1, 89 / SKS 2, 94). EO1, 87 / SKS 2, 92.

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ever, DG as a representative of “sensuality” 4 and “seduction” is more accurately understood as a figure that can only emerge on the basis of Christianity, i. e., DG stands in contrast to and as a prolongation of Christianity’s initial distinction between flesh and spirit. It is this distinction between flesh and spirit that DG, as sensuality, is related to, and this is why Kierkegaard talks of Christianity as the (first) manifestation of sensuality. I will now turn to how Kierkegaard makes use of the concept of distinction with his provocative idea that Christianity posits sensuality. 5

Christianity’s Positing of Sensuality Kierkegaard uses the concept of distinction as his core method when he describes how sensuality was (first) introduced by Christianity: “Sensuality was first posited as a principle, as a power, as an independent system by Christianity. I could add one more qualification that perhaps most emphatically shows what I mean: sensuality was placed under the qualification of spirit first by Christianity.”6 The passage says that a distinction is made between “before” Christianity and “after” Christianity: Christianity does something new in relation to sensuality and the medium for the making of this new situation is spirit. Spirit sets a distinction before and after its appearance, and in doing so, it differentiates itself from sensuality and flesh, Kierkegaard says.7 Kierkegaard here offers an interesting reflection on what a distinction does. A distinction creates difference between inside and outside, acceptable and not-acceptable. Spirit is on the inside of the distinction, i. e., acceptable. Sensuality is on the outside, i. e., unacceptable. What is being excluded, however, is still present in the name of exclusion: “But if the thesis that Christianity has brought sensuality into the world is to be understood properly, it must be comprehended as identical to its opposite, that it is Christianity that has driven sensuality out of the world, has excluded sensuality from the world.”8 It 4 5

6 7 8

EO1, 59 / SKS 2, 66. Kierkegaard is aware that his idea that Christianity posits sensuality is provocative. He says, “To make the claim that Christianity brought sensuality into the world seems boldly venturesome. But as they say: Boldly ventured is half won” (EO1, 61 / SKS 2, 68). EO1, 61 / SKS 2, 68. See also EO1, 44 / SKS 2, 71. EO1, 88 / SKS 2, 93. EO1, 61 / SKS 2, 68. See also EO1, 85 / SKS 2, 90.

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becomes clear that only the exclusion, the wrong side of the distinction, makes it possible to talk of sensuality as something Christianity brings in. Thus, exclusion does not mean negation. To the contrary, a distinction draws attention to both sides: the included side, spirit, as well as the excluded side, sensuality, come to the fore. In this way, Christianity posits and draws attention to sensuality in a different way than intended by drawing the distinction between inside and outside. Few preachers who speak against sensuality and the flesh are likely aware that in this making of a distinction, in this attempt to distinguish between two things, both sides are brought to the attention of the congregation. This idea of the distinction as method is also used in system theory, as formulated by the sociologist Niklas Luhmann. The theoretical perspective of the system states more explicitly the figure of distinction and adds the concept of re-entry as a way to understand what it is that Kierkegaard does when his pseudonym says that Christianity posited sensuality. On distinction and re-entry, Luhmann says that, when an author draws a distinction between two things, he/she points at that which is on the inside, positively defined, and what is on the outside, negatively defined: “The distinction used in constituting actions is that between system and environment. Within this distinction, the system (not the environment) is defined as the author of selections, and distinctions, like indications, are performed as operations of the system itself (not only of an external observer).”9 In order for the system to understand its own distinctions, it must make a so called re-entry into the distinction; that is, it must reconsider the distinction it has made, and how it was made. The re-entry is a new consideration of the initial distinction set. This means that a re-entry sets a new agenda for the understanding of the initial distinction’s two different sides. The distinction is transformed by a reconsideration of the contents of the distinction. This re-entry, this reconsideration, is what Kierkegaard does when he elaborates on DG as “an incarnation of the flesh by the spirit of the flesh itself.” The Middle Ages is the decisive time in history for such a re-formulation of sensuality and spirit and is therefore when DG emerges as a figure: “When the idea of Don Juan emerged is not known; only this much is certain – that it is linked to Christianity and through Christi-

9

Niklas Luhmann Social Systems, trans. by John Bednarz with Dirk Baecker, Standford: Stanford University Press 1995, p. 167.

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anity to the Middle Ages.”10 From a systems-theoretical perspective, this means that DG is a figure of re-entry in Christianity’s initial distinction between sensuality and spirit. The contents of the re-entry is explained when Kierkegaard says that DG is an incarnation of the flesh; DG becomes a new understanding of this initial distinction between spirit and flesh. Kierkegaard writes: “The Middle Ages had to make the discord between the flesh and the spirit that Christianity brought into the world the subject of its reflection and to that end personifies each of the conflicting forces.”11 DG, then, is a re-entry in this initial distinction: a re-entry that is described as a new incarnation of the distinction between flesh and spirit: “Don Juan, then, if I dare say so, is the incarnation of the flesh, or the inspiration of the flesh by the spirit of the flesh itself.”12 In the Middle Ages DG emerges and enters the distinction between spirit and flesh in the opposite way: spirit makes it possible for the spirit of the flesh to become flesh in a new meaning of sensuality. DG thus becomes a new positing of the principle of sensuality: a re-entry in the initial distinction, which implies a dissolution of the initial understanding of the distinction. Spirit’s entering flesh in the incarnation of Christ will be well known to many; but in the figure of DG, re-entry means that flesh now enters itself through spirit. Flesh is no longer flesh; it is spiritualized through Christianity’s initial distinction between spirit and flesh. This re-entering of the distinction between spirit and flesh means that DG represents a new understanding of sensuality that is an understanding based on Christianity. According to Kierkegaard, DG is a figure that reconsiders and even reconciles Christianity’s first distinction between spirit and flesh in the Middle Ages.13 One may ask why there is no talk of DG before the Middle Ages, and the answer in the text is that DG cannot emerge before the Christian spirit withdraws from the world, leaving a worldly spirit alone in the world: As spirit, qualified solely as spirit, renounces this world, feels that the world not only is not its home but is not even its stage, and withdraws into the higher realms, it leaves the worldly behind as the playground for the power with which it has always been in conflict and to which it now yields ground. Then, as spirit disengages itself from the earth, the sensuous shows itself in all its power. It has no objection to the change; indeed, it perceives the advantage in being separated and is happy that the Church 10 11 12 13

EO1, 87 / SKS 2, 92. EO1, 88 / SKS 2, 93. EO1, 88 / SKS 2, 93. EO1, 89 / SKS 2, 94.

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does not induce them to remain together but cuts in two the band that binds them. Stronger than ever before, the sensuous now awakens in all its profusion, in all its rapture and exultation.14

With this withdrawal, a new understanding of sensuality appears, and DG emerges as a representative of this sensuality. Summing up, Kierkegaard’s point seems to be a step of three epochs: 1) Greek culture and its understanding of the erotic. 2) Christianity’s understanding of flesh and spirit. 3) The Middle Ages’ new understanding of sensuality.15 Greek Culture and Eros Christianity’s Initial Distinction The Middle Ages and the Emergence of DG Psyche, individuality

Spirit, universalism

Worldly spirit, universalism

Eros gives away what he Christianity is the positing of does not have himself, a principle of sensuality, which the ability to fall in love happens through a distinction between spirit and flesh

“Don Juan then, If I dare say so, is the incarnation of the flesh, or the inspiration of the flesh by the spirit of the flesh itself”

No schism between spirit and flesh

A schism between spirit and flesh

A reconciliation between flesh and spirit, initiated by the flesh

No idea of sensuality

Sensuality excluded

Sensuality reintroduced

In the following, I will look more closely at these three epochs through the distinctions between 1) Greek Eros and Christianity, and 2) early Christianity and the Middle Ages.

1) Greek Eros and Christianity’s Distinction between Sensuality and Spirit This first distinction will show that DG’s emergence in the Middle Ages does not mean a return to a Greek understanding of the erotic. Kierkegaard clearly states that the difference between the Greek understanding of the erotic and the medieval understanding of sensuality is spirit. Since Greek culture has no concept of spirit while the Middle Ages 14 15

EO1, 89 / SKS 2, 94. EO1, 89 / SKS 2, 94.

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does (due to Christianity’s historical positing of the spirit), the figure that DG represents is not deprived of the Christian concept of spirit.16 Spirit is still there, albeit in an absent form, in the Middle Ages. Another difference between Greek culture and Christianity is the concept of distinction itself. In relation to sensuality, Christianity operates with distinctions, Greek culture does not. Kierkegaard writes that Greek culture does not make a concept of femininity and therefore does not have a distinction between man and woman, which is the basic and most dangerous structure within a Christian understanding of sensuality and seduction. It is only the concept of difference (distinction) that makes masculinity and femininity a possible and dangerous distinction in relation to the distinction between sensuality and spirit. Greek culture does not operate with this difference. It is also this basic distinction between man and woman (sensuality and spirit) that connects the concept of seduction to Christianity but not to Greek culture. Thus, one of the main differences between Greek culture and DG’s sensuality is the idea of spirit. “In Greek culture, the sensuous was controlled in the beautiful individuality, or, to put it more accurately, it was not controlled, for it was not an enemy to be subdued, not a dangerous insurgent to be held in check: it was liberated to life and joy in the beautiful individuality. Thus the sensuous was not posited as a principle.”17 Reading this passage, the reader sees that in Greek culture, the sensuous was not dangerous. In Greek culture, the erotic was a liberating realm of life, but it was liberating to individuals as individuals, not to both as a loving couple. Even in the act, they are alone. Because the Greek erotic is connected to individuality, and lacks the idea of spirit, it is not a principle of sensuality.18 When Kierkegaard treats DG, he repeats this point. DG is not an individual and Christianity is not about individuality. Kierkegaard expresses it like this: “Don Juan continually hovers between being idea – that is power, life – and being an individual. But this hovering is the musical vibration.”19 Kierkegaard even states several times that 16 17

18

19

EO1, 88 / SKS 2, 93. EO1, 62 / SKS 2, 69. Kierkegaard repeats several times the point that sensuality is not to be referred to DG as a unique individual, but that sensuality is about desire, and that DG is just an entry point to the understanding of sensuality that arises in the Middle Ages. Kierkegaard also says that DG sparkles like wine, which also has to do with nature (EO1, 101 / SKS 2, 104). EO1, 92 / SKS 2, 97.

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he does not want to look into DG as an individual: “for as soon as he is a particular individual, the accent falls on an altogether different place – that is, the emphasis is on those whom he has seduced and how….But when he is conceived in music, then I do not have the particular individual, then I have a force of nature, the demonic, which no more wearies of seducing or is through with seducing than the wind with blowing a gale, the sea with rocking, or a waterfall with plunging down from the heights.” 20 The metaphor for DG’s way of being is nature, which has a universal element.21 Thus, Kierkegaard clearly claims that DG, when presented in music, is not a representation of an individual. He hovers in between idea and individual, and he can be compared with nature, which does what it does without cunning strategies. Nature is what it is, and the same goes for the concept of sensuality that DG presents as a hovering in between an idea and an individual.22, 23 Such a sincere aesthete being apparently falls outside of ethical categories.24 According to Kierkegaard, DG even cannot be judged in relation to sin.25

20

21

22

23

24 25

EO1, 92 f / SKS 2, 97. Not even the number of women that DG has seduced matters, says Kierkegaard (EO1, 92 / SKS 2, 97). Sylvia Walsh Utterback suggests that Kierkegaard wants to point to DG as a representative of universalism, a love for all, and the number is therefore neither interesting for DG as an individual or as someone who has seduced 1003 individuals. Rather, this quantity simply denotes all women. See Sylvia Walsh Utterback “Don Juan and the Representation of Spiritual Sensuousness” in Journal of the American Academy of Religion, vol. 47, no. 4 (1979), p. 635. See also EO1, 92 / SKS 2, 97. Begonya Saez Tajafuerce connects this power of nature, which DG represents, to the question of time: “An interesting twofold consequence might be drawn from this negative definition of Don Juan as a nonreflective individual, as an expression of the power of Nature and thus as bound to immediacy and the sense….In short, fragmentation is bound to or founded on Don Juan’s missing psychological insight into any sort of temporal continuity.” See Begonya Saez Tajafuerce “Kierkegaardian Seduction, or the Aesthetic Actio(nes) in distans” in Diacritics, 2000, p. 80. EO1,102 / SKS 2, 106. Liessmann points to the fact that DG’s age, 33, can be interpreted as a play on Christ who, according to legend, died at the age of 33. See Konrad Paul Liessmann Ästhetik der Verführung, Frankfurt am Main: Anton Hain Verlag 1991, p. 47. Note also the comparison between the demonic and the forces of nature. The demonic and nature share the same element of immediateness, and “can’t help it or change it.” The argument here approximates the argument that DG is neither strategic nor calculating. He just “is what he is.” EO1, 98 / SKS 2, 98; see also EO1, 98 / SKS 2, 102. EO1, 90 / SKS 2, 95; see also EO1, 90 / SKS 2, 94 f.

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Individual Love and Universal Love As stated above, Kierkegaard says that DG is a principle and not an individual.26 It is Greek culture that stands for this idea of individuality and, therefore, a different understanding of the erotic. It is an understanding that connects the individual to the psychical (Greek: psyche), which is qualified as that which all individuals have as individuals. This idea of an individual psyche also transforms the idea of the erotic into something completely different than the distinction, between spirit and sensuality.27 Kierkegaard explains this difference by comparing Hercules and DG. In this comparison, we learn that Hercules cannot be defined as a seducer because of the difference in understanding 1) individuality, and 2) spirit. 28 The Greek focus on individuality means that the erotic does not become dangerous. There is no connection to the other through spirit and therefore no danger to the other. The Greek individual is always preoccupied with itself, not with the other. In contrast, with the Christian focus on spirit, sensuality becomes dangerous. It is a focus on the other side, the difference in the distinction. The otherness, the other side of the distinction, the other sex, makes the erotic dangerous. Thus, seduction is something that belongs to the Christian framework because of the idea of spirit. Spirit does something different to sensuality. It makes sensuality something that is outside the distinction. In order for the one sex to make the other sex enter the wrong side of the distinction, namely sensuality, seduction must take place. Thus, only Christianity can operate with an idea of seduction. “Since Greek culture does not have an idea of the flesh as something dangerous, or on the wrong side of the distinction between spirit and sensuality, the erotic (sensuality) does not become dangerous.29 Hercules therefore cannot be labelled “seducer,” though he also runs around with girls.”30 One might expect, then, that Kierkegaard would judge the Greek individual to be more happy in love relations than 1) Christian love, which excludes sensuality, and 2) more happy than DG, who is totally faithless in his love: “[Don Juan’s] love is sensuous, not psychical, and, according to its concept, sensuous 26 27 28 29 30

EO1, 92 / SKS 2, 97; see also EO1, 102 / SKS 2, 106. EO1, 95 / SKS 2, 98 f. EO1, 94 / SKS 2, 98 f. EO1, 62 / SKS 2, 69. EO1, 94 / SKS 2, 98.

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love is not faithful but totally faithless; it loves not one but all – that is, it seduces all. It is indeed only in the moment, but considered in its concept, that moment is the sum of moments, and so we have the seducer.”31 However, the Greek individual still has worries, because he always feels doubt and weariness about whether he will be happy with this particular individual, or with any at all. 32 The reason for this worry is that everything in love is related to the individual and its preoccupation with itself. And this individuality apparently empties the meaning of love. The idea of the individual makes it impossible to fulfil love as more than serial meetings between individuals. Since the sensuous idea of love, by contrast, does not have this idea of the individual, a completely different understanding of love emerges. It is a completely faithless kind of love; or rather, it is faithful to everyone because it loves all. The Greek idea of individualism thus stands in contradiction to the Christian idea of universalism. The commandment to love your neighbour is a universal, and means that you must love everyone you meet. No one is left out. All are to be loved. “You must love everyone” thus also means “no one in particular.” Individual inclusive love does not exist in this context, and a possible way to interpret DG in relation to the distinction between individuality and universalism is that DG is not individualistically oriented but, rather, universalistically. Taking the universal commandment literally, DG escorts “them all.”33

Loving Them All in the Same Moment DG’s ability to love in a universal way is also seen in the way Kierkegaard explains the “moment.” It is the time when love is present: “To see her and to love her are the same; this is in the moment. In the same moment, everything is over, and the same thing repeats itself indefinitely.”34 Taking it literally, DG’s love sounds both superficial and male-chauvinistic. DG would then appear as an object of condemnation. However, reading it from the perspective of a re-entry in the distinction between sensuality and spirit, Kierkegaard can be taken to make a rather different point. DG is not an individual. Rather, in a disturbing way, Kierkegaard seems to say that DG is the repre31 32 33 34

EO1, 94 / SKS 2, 98. EO1, 94 / SKS 2, 98; see also EO1, 94 / SKS 2, 98 f. See also EO1, 100 / SKS 2, 103 f. EO1, 94 f. / SKS 2, 99.

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sentation of the idea of sensuality that is a love that is present at all times, for all. 35 It is a sensuality that starts and stops endlessly. We are all involved through spirit. It cannot be stopped. DG is presenting, as a principle, what sensuality is: a love to all, to life, you might say. You might thus say that the character of this sensuality’s “everywhereness” makes sensuality a central part of being: Since it is now obvious that he is gone, it might seem strange that I mention him and in a way bring him into the situation. On closer scrutiny, one perhaps will find it entirely appropriate and here see an example of how literally it must be understood that DG is everywhere present in the opera, for this can hardly be more strongly expressed than by pointing out that even when he is gone he is present. 36

The interpretation that DG makes (as an idea) of love to all in a sensual way seems to be something unavoidable that emerges in the Middle Ages.

2) Christianity and the Middle Ages As mentioned, Kierkegaard labels the distinction Christianity introduces “a discord between the flesh and the spirit.” In the Middle Ages, Kierkegaard says, a need emerges to look anew at this discord, and in this “looking-at-it-once-more,” a re-entry happens, and DG emerges as part of this re-entry. He emerges as “the incarnation of the flesh, or the inspiration of the flesh by the spirit of the flesh itself,”37 as noted above. However, this re-entry also implies a new understanding of seduction. Looking deeper into the character of DG, we see that DG is not correctly be labelled a “seducer” since he does not make use of 1) reflection, nor 2) language. Rather, DG emerges as an innocent who has an excusable affiliation with nature that does what it does and cannot be blamed for it. 38 Kierkegaard understands the difference between DG and Greek culture as the difference that spirit makes in relation to seduction: The sensuous as it is conceived in Don Juan, as a principle, has never before been so conceived in the world; for this reason the erotic is here qualified by another predicate: 35

36 37 38

Utterback notes that the lack of individuality in DG, and the emphasis on universal love, may show that the sensuous love DG represents concerns all human beings: both men and women. See Utterback “Don Juan,” p. 635; see also EO1, 131 / SKS 2, 133. EO1, 131 / SKS 2, 133. EO1, 88 / SKS 2, 93. See EO1, 102 / SKS 2, 105.

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here the erotic is seduction. Strangely enough, the idea of a seducer was totally lacking in Greek culture. It is not my intention to laud Greek culture in any way for this, because, as everyone knows, the gods as well as human beings were promiscuous in love affairs; neither do I censure Christianity, for, after all, it has the idea only outside itself.39

Kierkegaard here connects Christianity’s idea of spirit to seduction. The passage notes that in a Christian context, the erotic is connected to seduction. As already stated, this is done to the distinction between spirit and sensuality. The distinction between spirituality and flesh also introduces the concept of seduction as something mean and wicked.40 The one who wants to lead the other to the wrong side of the distinction is a person who is dragging the other to himself for his own purposes, i. e., dragging the other to the wrong side of the distinction between sensuality and spirit. When Kierkegaard says that Greek culture lacks seduction as a concept, he says, that such a lack is not in itself laudable. In ordinary ethical terms, Kierkegaard might be thought endorse a culture without seduction, but this is not the case. Seduction is not simply to be rejected. Kierkegaard does not blame Christianity for condemning seduction because Christianity only does so outside its essence, namely, through the exclusion of sensuality through spirit. This exclusion is apparently not something Christianity can be held responsible for. The reader is therefore led to understand that Greek culture is not better because it lacks seduction, and Christianity is not to be blamed for condemnation of seduction. The new sensuality, posited by the exclusion of sensuality and the withdrawal of the spirit, is not a return to to a preChristian epoch. Instead, it is a sensuality that first of all maintains the spiritual element of the erotic, defining the new sensuality as some that occupies the space of immediate, non-reflective, and even nonethical categories.41 Secondly, the new kind of sensuality also maintains the possible excludability of sensuality. DG represents an exclusion from the social judgment of the world;42 but DG also, and more importantly, represents the idea that the new sensuality does not mean that everything is acceptable. 39 40

41 42

EO1, 93 / SKS 2, 98. We might also say “demonic,” but the problem with the word “demonic” is that Kierkegaard does not simply demonize the idea of the demonic, but brings it closer to positive concepts like nature and immediacy (EO1, 92 f. / SKS 2, 97) which changes the everyday meaning of demonic as ethically something wrong. EO1, 98 / SKS 2, 102. EO1, 90 / SKS 2, 94 f.

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Kierkegaard seems to say that the sensuality DG represents is acceptable since it is not a cunning, reflective strategy to seduce the other. DG represents a kind of seduction that is able to seduce because it has an element of innocence and immediacy. It does not know that it seduces.43 Reflective seduction, by contrast, is non-acceptable; it is certainly to be condemned. The decisive difference between acceptable sensuality and unacceptable sensuality is reflection. Reflection on “how” to catch the desirable object is not acceptable. Kierkegaard says explicitly that a genuine seducer (which DG is not), makes use of “method”: “This is the genuine seducer, the esthetic interest here is also something else, namely, the how, the method.”44 DG is not occupied with any method or “how to.” He simply is what he is when he seduces. It happens by itself: “Therefore, even if I go on calling DG a seducer, I nevertheless do not at all think of him slyly laying his plans, subtly calculating the effect of his intrigues: that by which he deceives is the sensuous in its elemental originality, of which he is, as it were, the incarnation.”45 So, if DG is not an ordinary seducer, what then is seduction, according to Kierkegaard? Here, an idea of “approach” emerges as a main distinction in relation to different kinds of seduction. The difference between “wrong” seduction and “acceptable” seduction seems to be the approach of the “seducer.” A reflective approach is wrong. An immediate one is acceptable. This approach is related to reflection and language: To be a seducer always takes a certain reflection and consciousness, and as soon as this is present, it can be appropriate to speak of craftiness and machinations and subtle wiles. Don Giovanni lacks this consciousness. Therefore he does not seduce. He desires, and this desire acts seductively. To this extent he does seduce. He enjoys the satisfaction of desire; as soon as he has enjoyed it, he seeks a new object, and this goes on indefinitely. Thus he does indeed deceive, but still not in such a way that he plans his deception in advance. It is the power of the sensuous itself that deceives the seduced, and it is rather a kind of nemesis.46

Kierkegaard’s point is that in order to be an ordinary seducer, you must be reflective, but DG is not. He simply does what he must do.

43 44 45 46

EO1, 98 / SKS 2, 102. See also EO1, 85 / SKS 2, 90. EO1, 99 / SKS 2, 103. EO1, 101 / SKS 2, 104. EO1, 98 f. / SKS 2, 102. Begonya Saez Tajafuerce translates Attraa with “attraction” instead of desire, which is a somehow more appropriate translation since attraction tells of the mutuality between DG and the women he meets, rather than emphasizing DG’s own inner status. See Tajafuerce “Kierkegaardian Seduction,” p. 80.

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A seducer, therefore, possesses a power that DG does not have, however well equipped he is otherwise: the power of words. As soon as we give him the power of words, he ceases to be musical, and the aesthetic interest becomes a different one.47 In contrast, a seducer like Faust has language as his medium.48 A seducer uses language as method which is, Kierkegaard says, qualified as a “lie.”49 Language has a deceptive element that DG does not make use of. His medium is not language, but immediacy. 50 The effect that the seductive meeting has on the other also bears importance. In relation to DG’s seduction, Kierkegaard’s says that the people involved were actually happy meeting DG: “Now, Don Giovanni not only is a success with the girls, but he makes the girls happy – and unhappy – yet strangely enough in such a way that that is what they want, and it would be a poor sort of girl who would not wish to become unhappy in order to have been happy once with Don Giovanni.”51 There is a positive mutuality in the relation that is not to be found in violence or manipulation. In both cases there is the force of subject-object-relation, but DG’s way of seducing dissolves such an impoverished distinction between subject and object. In DG’s desire, he is himself an object, bringing himself as an object to another subject, and this way of bringing himself to the other seduces the other with the situation. That is an entirely different positioning of the concept of subject-object. Seduction is rather a game we play with these two categories, where there is a constant shifting in roles between the parties involved: a desire that seduces the actors to play the game. Seduction, then, is something more subtle than the commonly understood, Kierkegaard tells us.

Faust and DG This particular understanding of seduction and sensuality can best be seen in the contrast posited between DG and Faust. In this comparison we see how sensuality in assessed differently when it is related to 47 48 49 50

51

EO1, 99 / SKS 2, 103. EO1, 57 / SKS 2, 64. EO1, / SKS 2, 103. EO1, 64 and 96 / SKS 2, 68 and 100. Saez Tajafuerce notices that aesthetic interest changes when there is no language. See Tajafuerce “Kierkegaardian Seduction,” p. 80. However, it is not clear, what Kierkegaard means by this expression. EO1, 100 f / SKS 2, 103 f.

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1) immediacy or 2) reflection.52 This comparison also shows that this (new) sensuality is not an approval of any kind of sensuality, or any kind of seduction. Only immediate, non-reflective sensuality is accepted. Kierkegaard states this more nuanced understanding of seduction when he says that DG does not seduce in the ordinary meaning of the word. Another difference between Faust and DG is that for Faust one woman is enough to occupy his thoughts.53 This is not the case for DG because he does not seduce through language, strategic thinking, or reflection, but simply “is what he is,” when “he does what he does” with the other. Faust’s preoccupation with reflection implies that Frust does not seek not pleasure, but rather distraction. From what? you may ask. The answer seems to be distraction from himself and his thoughts. 54 In order to get away from himself, Kierkegaard says, Faust sucks the blood of a young woman in a (naïve) hope of gaining an immediate relation to life.55 However, this goal will never succeed because the whole approach to the matter, reflection, is different from DG’s immediate access to immediacy. 56

Ethical Categories Since he does not actually deceive, DG escapes our ordinary ethical categories: This is not because Don Giovanni is so perfect, but because he does not fall within ethical categories at all. Therefore, I would rather call him a deceiver, since there is always something more ambiguous in that term. To be a seducer always takes a certain reflection and consciousness, and as soon as this is present, it can be appropriate to speak of craftiness and machinations and subtle wiles. Don Giovanni lacks this consciousness. 57

The same point is stated when Kierkegaard says that the medium of the sensuous-erotic expressed and presented must be immediacy, and 52 53

54 55 56

57

EO1, 56 / SKS 2, 64; see also EO1, 101 / SKS 2, 105. EO1, 205 / SKS 2, 207. This is also what Johannes the Seducer says in his reflections about Cordelia. EO1, 206 / SKS 2, 202. Ibid. Begonya Saez Tajafuerce points to journal entries in which Kierkegaard elaborates further on Faust as figure, and how it “underneath this great knowledge of so many things, there grows a feeling that this is the knowledge of very little…The Faustian element shows up as despair for not being able to attain complete evolution with an all-encompassing gaze.” See Tajafuerce “Kierkegaardian Seduction,” p. 82. EO1, 98 / SKS 2, 102.

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immediacy falls outside linguistic and ethical categories. 58 Only when mediated does it again fall under the purview of language and ethical categories. Even to look at DG in relation to sin is inadequate.59 He may be judged on social terms, as a man behaving badly and as the firstborn in this kingdom of joy. However, this is not a kingdom of Sodom or Gomorra. It is only reflection that brings a second order observation of what was there on an immediate (first order) level. It is the second thought that makes “sin” a possible label for DG, but that is not a label that describes what DG represents in himself. We can say that language cannot capture what DG is without labelling him “wrong, unethical, and sinful” but when DG is not language none of the negative features fit. This is why DG is presented essentially as a musical figure.

Incarnation and Re-entry The reason incarnation is not used in relation to Eros is, of course, that in Greek love there is no idea of the distinction between spirit and flesh.60 It is interesting to note how Kierkegaard plays on the theological theme, incarnation, and in doing so, applies Christian elements to DG. Kierkegaard’s thoughts on 1) Eros as a principle of love, and 2) the incarnation are most easily explained by the metaphor of “movement.” In relation to Eros, the movement goes from Eros to all others: It starts with gods and men detecting the power of erotic love in themselves and seeing it as something that comes from Eros. They receive from him what he himself does not have, namely, the ability to fall in love.61 Eros does not fall in love, but all others are indebted to him for their own falling in love. The movement is a radiation from the individual to all.62 Kierkegaard calls this Greek understanding of love the “opposite of a representative relation” and of incarnation.63 In incarnation, the full 58 59 60

61 62 63

EO1, 64 / SKS 2, 68. EO1, 90 / SKS 2, 95. If the two concepts are in any way to be applied to Greek, consciousness, one could argue that erotic love sees the two as the same, namely; as individuality in the form of the psyche. EO1, 63 / SKS 2, 70. EO1, 64 / SKS 2, 70. EO1, 63 / SKS 2, 70.

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plenitude of life is in the individual (Christ as incarnation), and the movement is a mutual flow between all those who observe the incarnated individual and the incarnated individual himself: “The incarnated individual imbibes, as it were, power from all the others, and thus the fullness is in that one, and in the others only insofar as they behold it in this individuality.”64 In Greek love, all the other individuals trace their erotic love back to him, Eros. He is himself almost powerless and impotent because he is busy giving to the world, busy giving to everybody else but himself. In the incarnation, the movement is a mutual flow between God and human beings. The incarnated individual receives from the other while also being what he already is. I now turn to Kierkegaard’s use of the concept of incarnation, especially in relation to Christianity. It here appears that Kierkegaard plays on certain theological structures in relation to God and Christ. One of them is the idea of “everywhereness” which Martin Luther also uses in Bondage of the Will. In relation to Christ as incarnation of the spirit, Konrad Liessmann has noticed that DG and Christ share the same age: “Dass alle Personen des Stücks ihre Kraft aus ihrer Beziehung zu DG ziehen, erlaubt A auch eine zart angedeutete Blasphemie: Sollte ich ein Alter vorschlagen (für Don Juan), so würde ich vorschlagen dreiunddreißig Jahre. In der Tat: DG ist der anderen Weg, Wahrheit und Leben.”65 Sylvia Walsh Utterback also sees an association with Christ: Reconceptualized as a figure who loves in this manner, Don Juan would become the representative of a “spiritual” sensuousness which may be ambiguous in outward manifestation but in its inner quality and expression is paradigmatic for human existence. Don Juan’s love for at thousand and three, for example, would not be the promiscuity it seems, but a metaphor for “loving them all.”66

By presenting DG as spirit’s re-entry in the flesh, Kierkegaard plays on these allegories of the incarnation of Christ. DG is explicitly presented as an incarnation of the spirit of the flesh in the flesh67 and the word “incarnation” is used to present DG as “the sensuous in its elemental originality.”68 Though they share features and tasks in universal love, it is noteable that Christ and DG each come out on their own side of the distinction. Christ on the positive side of the first distinction, as spirit, while DG is 64 65 66 67 68

EO1, 64 / SKS 2, 70. Liessmann Astetik der Verführung, p. 47. Utterback “Don Juan,” p. 635. EO1, 88 / SKS 2, 94; see also EO1, 89 / SKS 2, 94. EO1, 101 / SKS 2, 104.

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the negative side of the distinction, as flesh. In the second distinction (in the Middle Ages), DG, as the incarnation of sensuality, implies that flesh comes out on both the positive side and the negative side and that spirit is the difference between the two: spiritualized flesh is on the positive side, due to spirit69 and flesh without spirit, i. e., the Greek understanding, is on the negative side. On the face of it, then, we may think of Christ and DG as opposites, standing in contrast to each other. But they also represent different epochs in history. Their moment in the world is different. When Kierkegaard says that in the Middle Ages,70 the Christian spirit withdraws and the worldly spirit takes over, DG is given a different gloss than just being “opposite” Christ. DG is an incarnation of the relation between spirit and flesh in a different time. The mutuality in the movement between those who are being loved and the one who loves thus seems to be the same in both DG and Christ. They are following the command of universalism, to love all, and in this loving they foster mutuality between subject and object. In DG, this is a game that only desire can play.

69 70

EO1, 88 / SKS 2, 93. EO1, 89 / SKS 2, 93 f.

Either/Or: Reintroducing an Ancient Approach to Ethics By Thomas P. Miles Abstract In addition to containing many valuable insights about particular ethical issues, Either/ Or contains a powerful lesson for contemporary ethics about how to do ethics. I think we can read Either/Or as engaging in the ethical project of illustrating, analyzing, and evaluating different ways of life considered as a whole. In so doing, Kierkegaard has reintroduced to modern ethics what was once one of the central projects of ancient Greek ethics. In this paper, I show how this project is central to Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. I then discuss some important differences in the way Kierkegaard pursues this project in comparison with his Greek colleagues. I end by discussing how this project of focusing on ways of life as the central unit of ethical concern should be pursued alongside the currently dominant ethical projects, which focus on actions or character traits.

One of the most valuable questions we can ask as we read and re-read Kierkegaard’s Either/Or is: What basic project is being undertaken in the book? Why present us with the papers of a young aesthete? Why couple them with letters to this aesthete by an ethically-minded judge? In other words, what is Either/Or trying to accomplish in contrasting these two different “life-views” or ways of life? Scholars seeking to articulate how Kierkegaard can be valuable for contemporary ethics sometimes set aside these broader questions or treat them merely as background, even when they respect the pseudonyms. I think there is an understandable tendency to jump straight into the letters of Judge Wilhelm, searching them for particular insights into issues such as responsibility, choice, and personal duty. Scholars who take this approach surely do not come away empty-handed; Either/Or has an almost inexhaustible supply of particular insights that can be of great value to contemporary ethical debates. Nonetheless, I think this approach may cause us to overlook an even greater contribution that

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Either/Or can make to contemporary ethics. It is my contention that Either/Or has as much to tell us about how to do ethics as it has to tell us about particular ethical concepts. Either/Or’s comparison of ways of life can teach us a bold and valuable ethical project, a project that is seldom seen in ethics today, even if it was once central to ancient Greek ethics. As I see it, this is the project of illustrating, analyzing, and evaluating different ways of life. Either/Or focuses on the worth of ways of life considered as a whole, and asks the question: what is the best way of life to live? By way of contrast, at least in Anglo-American philosophy, ethics has tended to focus on the worth of particular actions. The two dominant schools of ethical thought, contemporary Kantianism and contemporary utilitarianism, are locked into a seemingly endless debate over which theory provides the best universal principle for deciding how to act. In the last half-century, the movement known as “virtue ethics” has emerged as a serious challenger to these schools of ethics. Virtue ethicists urge us to take a broader approach to ethics and to consider not just how we act, but what we are. Looking back to the works of ancient Greek authors, especially Aristotle, contemporary virtue ethicists have insisted that we evaluate the worth of an agent’s character and character traits, exploring which of these traits are virtues and which are vices. They have urged us to see that an agent’s actions can only be understood in the broader context of the agent’s character. Although virtue ethicists often have very different agendas and concerns, as a group they can be credited with enriching the scope of contemporary ethical debate by reintroducing these broader questions about character and the virtues.1 I applaud recent efforts to understand Kierkegaard’s works as contributing to this broader project of virtue ethics. For example, some have read Kierkegaard as developing an account of certain virtues like earnestness or authenticity. 2 Yet, however much Kierkegaard’s works may contain insights for virtue ethics, I think many of them, including Either/Or, aim at an even broader project. For Kierkegaard the basic 1

2

As Martha Nussbaum has pointed out, contemporary virtue ethics is far from a unified school of thought. She also points out that although Kantians and utilitarians tended to ignore questions about character and the virtues throughout much of the twentieth century, this was not the case for their intellectual predecessors such as Kant and Mill. See Martha Nussbaum “Virtue Ethics: A Misleading Category?” in Journal of Ethics vol. 3, 1999, pp. 163-201. Some of the best work along these lines can be found in Kierkegaard After MacIntyre, ed. by John Davenport and Anthony Rudd, Chicago: Open Court Press 2001.

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“units” of ethical evaluation are neither particular actions nor broader character traits, but – more broadly still – ways of life considered as a whole. What a way of life is for Kierkegaard can be a complex matter to explain, although I will attempt to do so shortly. For now, we can say that a way of life is defined by the fundamental existential stance one takes towards oneself, others and life as a whole. This fundamental stance can potentially unify an agent by giving a particular kind of normative structure to the agent’s various, goals, actions, and character traits. Therefore, just as we can best understand an agent’s actions within the broader context of her character traits, I think we can best understand both her actions and her character traits within the broadest context of her overall way of life. This helps to explain the value of focusing on ways of life as the central unit of ethical concern. As I see it, the ethical project found in Either/Or fulfills the call made by contemporary virtue ethics for a broader, richer, more holistic approach to ethics, a call only partially realized by accounts the virtues. I will not claim that Kierkegaard is unique in focusing on ways of life, even among modern thinkers.3 Also, and concurrently, I will not claim that this ethical project is entirely absent from ethical discussions today. Yet this approach is certainly not prominent in contemporary ethical discussions, even discussions within virtue ethics. In contrast, this project was central to ancient Greek ethics, especially among those authors who inspire contemporary virtue ethics. I will argue that something very much like the ethical project of Either/Or is a central project in both Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. My point in this comparison is not to suggest an influence of these ancient authors on Kierkegaard’s writing of Either/Or; I will leave aside all questions of influence.4 Likewise, my point is not to conflate Kierkegaard’s thinking with that of Plato and Aristotle. In fact, I will explore several points of contrast between the way Kierkeg3

4

I think this project is central to the work of Kierkegaard’s close contemporary, Friedrich Nietzsche, as I have argued in “Kierkegaard and Nietzsche Reconsidered” in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 2007, pp. 441-469. In that essay, I also give a preliminary outline of the case connecting Kierkegaard and ancient Greek ethics that I detail here. Several past studies have explored the possibility of such an influence and have suggested interesting points of comparison between Kierkegaard and these ancient authors. Although Kierkegaard certainly had some knowledge of these authors, especially via secondary sources, to my knowledge it is still unclear whether Kierkegaard had read either the Republic or the Nicomachean Ethics by the time he wrote Either/Or (see e. g., Not13:10-21 in SKS 19, 387-389, which was probably written while the manuscript of Either/Or was in its final stages).

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aard pursues this project and the way it is pursued by either Plato or Aristotle. I think it is valuable to see that the question of the best way of life can be pursued in very different ways. Those who agree that this is a central question for ethics need not agree on how to explore this question, and they certainly need not agree on how to answer it. My claim that Either/Or involves the consideration of different ways of life is, I would expect, not very new or controversial. We are all familiar with Kierkegaard’s supposed “doctrine” of the three spheres of existence, where these “spheres” are understood to be the aesthetic life, the ethical life, and the religious life. I should say from the start that I do not want to put any weight on this supposed “doctrine.”5 I do not read Kierkegaard as offering us a systematic “stage theory”; I think his thoughts on the dialectical inter-relations between “spheres” is at most a helpful shorthand for introducing the idea of there being different ways of life and the question of what way of life is best. In fact, far from presenting a monolithic “doctrine of the three spheres,” Kierkegaard suggests more than one typology for differentiating between ways of life and among various versions within a way of life. For example, Either/Or contains several typologies for the different versions of the aesthetic life. This life is defined most simply as the life lived for enjoyment. Yet there are different objects and methods of enjoyment, and there are, accordingly, different versions of the aesthetic life. In the second volume of Either/Or, Judge Wilhelm gives a typology of seven different versions or “stages” of the aesthetic life.6 In the first volume of Either/Or, A proposes several typologies of his own for distinguishing a way of life according to its primary object and method of enjoyment.7 Perhaps most helpfully, he suggests a fundamental distinction between those who seek enjoyment “immediately,” in actual experience, and those who seek enjoyment “reflectively,” in reflection on these experiences.

5

6

7

I agree with Edward Mooney that Kierkegaard’s intermixture of “rational critique and lyrical portraiture insures that Kierkegaardian perspectives do not collapse into a single abstract theory of selves, stages, or stage-shifts.” Edward Mooney Selves in Discord and Resolve, New York: Routledge 1996, p. xii. These vary depending on whether one’s object of enjoyment is primarily: (1) beauty or health, (2) money, honors or status, (3) talent, (4) the immediate fulfillment of desire, (5) reflective enjoyment, (6) cynical renunciation, and (7) poetic expression of the “nothingness” and despair of life. EO2, 180-195 / SKS 3, 175-189. For example, in “The Immediate Erotic Stages” A gives a typology of three different “stages” of immediate enjoyment, and in “Silhouettes” he gives a typology of different reflective methods of coping with disappointment.

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As this suggests, the task of comparing different ways of life and asking which life is best is not only implied by Either/Or’s structural juxtaposition of the “life-views” of A and B. It is also quite explicitly addressed within the papers of both A and B. This may be surprising in A’s case, since it seems odd for a representative of the aesthetic life to be undertaking a task we previously identified as an ethical task.8 Nonetheless A’s analysis of the failure of the life of immediate enjoyment and the superiority of the life of reflective enjoyment shows that he does pursue at least some version of this task. Given what he sees as the pervasive “evil” of boredom and disappointment, A is greatly concerned with the question of which way of living best escapes this “evil.” Of course, framing the question in this way leads A to develop a typology of different ways of living only within the “sphere” of the aesthetic life. In contrast, Judge Wilhelm denies that there are any essential differences between the different versions of the aesthetic life. He groups them together and contrasts all of them with the very different ethical way of life. Describing his central issue in this contrast, the judge declares that “the question is under what qualifications one will view all existence and personally live.”9 The judge admits that in some sense A is very interested in this question: “Every human being…has a natural need to formulate a life-view, a conception of the meaning of life and of its purpose. The person who lives esthetically also does that.”10 These descriptions offer some helpful ways of understanding what a “way of life” is in general such that we could compare one way of life to another. On one hand, a way of life involves what Kierkegaard sometimes calls a “life-view”: a basic, fundamental schema for understanding one’s existence according to some qualitative categories. Although this cognitive aspect of ways of life should not be overlooked, neither should it be overemphasized. There is a danger of mistaking an agent’s way of life for a theory about life that the agent holds as a matter of reflective belief. More than a passive interpretation of existence, or reflective theory about life, I think a way of life is defined by the values that are actively manifested in the way one “personally 8

9 10

As should be clear from the fact that what Kierkegaard calls “the ethical life” is just one of the different ways of life being examined, the ethical project I find Kierkegaard pursuing is not just “ethical” in the narrow sense of Judge Wilhelm’s “ethical way of life.” EO2, 169 / SKS 3, 165. EO2, 179 / SKS 3, 175.

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lives.” Perhaps the simplest way of defining different ways of life is according to what the agent loves or values the most. The aesthetic life is one in which one loves enjoyment the most, and the ethical life is one in which one loves ethical goodness or responsibility the most. (Perhaps we could add that the religious life is one in which one loves faith or God the most.) As I will explain shortly, this is a method of classifying ways of life that Kierkegaard shares with Plato and Aristotle. In Aristotle’s language, a way of can be defined by the highest telos or goal pursued in this life. Although this simple teleological classification is useful as a kind of shorthand, I do not think it fully captures Kierkegaard’s conception of what ways of life are and how they differ from each other. As I see it, what defines a way of life is not just what one values, but how one pursues this value. So, for example, what defines the aesthetic way of life is not just that one values enjoyment, but how one organizes one’s life around enjoyment. More specifically, what defines the aesthetic life is how one pursues enjoyment in the mode of trying to escape or avoid oneself, e. g. by seeking to “lose oneself” in pleasure. Likewise, the ethical life proposed by Judge Wilhelm is defined not just by the fact that one values ethical goodness, or even that this is one’s highest value. This life is defined by the way one pursues this ethical goodness in the mode of self-reliance.11 The ethical life is not so much about “being virtuous” as it is about taking a stance of responsibility toward oneself where this stance both guides and unifies one’s particular actions, goals, commitments and character traits. A way of life is the organization of these particular things around what we might call a fundamental existential stance or orientation that one takes toward oneself, others and the world. Or, more correctly, we can say that it is the manifestation of such a stance in one’s everyday existence.12 11

12

In contrast to the dependency on external conditions in the aesthetic life, which Judge Wilhelm finds to be the essence of despair, he insists that the ethical life “makes the individual infinitely secure within himself” since “there is always a point to which he holds fast, and that point is – himself.” EO2, 255, 253 / SKS 3, 243, 242. We might well ask: Does everyone have such an underlying existential stance? For example, we might wonder whether the dissolute aesthete can be credited with having any kind of unifying stance at all. Judge Wilhelm sometimes suggests that in some sense A does not have a “life-view.” EO2, 202 / SKS 3, 195. So we might think of a way of life as something that some people fail to attain, and then this lack of a unifying “way of life” is precisely the problem with the way these people live. On the other hand, in agreement with Anti-Climacus, we might say that behind the aesthete’s dissolution and fragmentation is a consistent stance of self-avoidance.

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Now that we have a better understanding of what a way of life is, we can better understand Kierkegaard’s treatment of different ways of life in Either/Or. I have said that Either/Or addresses the project of illustrating, analyzing, and evaluating these different ways of life. I will now say something about each of these tasks in turn. In one way or another, much of the text in Either/Or serves to paint vivid portraits of the aesthetic life and the ethical life. This is partly accomplished by the intriguing glimpses we get into the everyday existence of the book’s characters. This task is also accomplished by having the characters A and B speak about their respective ways of life. Much has been written about one of the most notable aspects of Either/Or, namely Kierkegaard’s use of first-person narrative accounts. In addition to insuring Socratic distance through indirect communication, this method is extremely effective in rendering convincing portraits of these ways of life. Rather than presenting us with generalized, abstract descriptions of these ways of life, Either/Or allows its characters to bear witness to what their respective ways of life are like from the inside. The resulting portraits are convincing enough such that readers can respond to them in a personal, passionate way, for example by identifying with these portraits and/or by being repelled by them. In other words, these first-person portraits allow not only a Socratic distance, but also something analogous to the Socratic method of one-on-one confrontations with actual people. Compared to abstract theoretical descriptions presented from a dubiously constructed “view from nowhere,” the first-person illustrations in Either/Or are both more vivid and more moving for the reader. Yet for all their first-person particularity, Kierkegaard also crafts these portraits such that they become icons expressing an entire way of life. After all, Either/Or does not aim to describe how these two particular people live, but (presumably) how each of us lives. Thus Kierkegaard artfully invests his characters with both convincing particularity and with the ability to stand for something beyond themselves. As Victor Eremita says in the book’s Preface: “when the book is read, A and B are forgotten, only the points of view confront each other.”13 I should add that much of the task of illustrating these ways of life is accomplished by subtly showing us, rather than overtly telling us, the underlying stance behind a character’s various statements and views.

13

Without trying to end this debate, I would simply add that the question of whether everyone in fact has a unifying stance defining a single “way of life” is one of the questions the project I am advocating could usefully explore. EO1, 14 / SKS 2, 19.

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For example, A’s papers leave us with a strong overall impression of the fragmentary, escapist nature of the aesthetic life even before we read the judge’s overt descriptions of this fragmentation and escapism. I should also add that just as Either/Or contains many characters, not just A and B, it contains many portraits that are helpful in illustrating ways of life. In fact, both A and B employ a range of characters to mark out the different possibilities within a way of life. For example, consider A’s detailed portrait of Don Giovanni, which nicely illustrates the ideally successful life of immediate pleasure. Also consider the example of the emperor Nero, who is discussed by both A and Judge Wilhelm as the exemplar of a certain extreme version of the aesthetic life.14 The next task to discuss is the task of analyzing ways of life in order to reveal their inner workings and their respective strengths and weaknesses. We might think that Either/Or contains no such analysis: nowhere does Kierkegaard appear in person to offer an objective, clinical dissection of the two “life-views” presented in the book. Nonetheless, we do find quite a bit of dissection of this sort within the writings of both A and B. For example, A analyzes what goes wrong within the life of immediate enjoyment and how a life of reflective enjoyment avoids this failure. Likewise, Judge Wilhelm analyzes the commonality in the various forms of the aesthetic life and why each of them suffers from despair. He also analyzes the ethical life and tries to explain why he thinks this life avoids despair. As I see it, both in the writings of Judge Wilhelm and in The Sickness Unto Death, despair names the internal collapse and failure of a way of life. This concept becomes one of Kierkegaard’s main tools in analyzing ways of life. Judge Wilhelm’s analysis attempts to show A that his feelings of boredom and despair are not the fault of a world that is insufficiently enjoyable; rather, they are the fault of his own inner orientation against and away from himself. Anti-Climacus explains that the stance that defines a way of life can be a “misrelation” to oneself if it is a stance in which one tries to avoid oneself or create oneself ex nihilo. As both Judge Wilhelm and Anti-Climacus insist, the sickness of despair need not manifest itself in any noticeable symptoms. It can be, as the judge says, “like the rot at the heart of a fruit, while the outside can look very delectable.”15 Yet quite often despair does manifest itself outwardly as a feeling of despair or as 14 15

EO1, 292 / SKS 2, 281; EO2,185, 204 / SKS 3, 180, 197. EO2, 222 / SKS 3, 213.

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a kind of scandalon or stumbling block over which one repeatedly stumbles. The aesthete’s boredom is an example of such a scandalon. Despite what he may think, the real source of despair in the aesthete’s life is not that he fails to fulfill his highest value of enjoyment; the despair is that he values enjoyment so much in the first place, and that he does so as a way of avoiding himself. Since he finds satisfaction only to the extent that he can escape and avoid himself, and since it is impossible ever really escape or avoid oneself, the aesthete is never satisfied. Thus, the despair of the aesthetic life entails that this life fails by its own standards: it values enjoyment the most, but for this very reason it constantly relapses into boredom. As this description implies, this analysis is inherently normative. The aesthetic life is a failure by ethical standards, but also by its own standards. Does this amount to an evaluation condemning this way of life? As with the task of analysis, we see that the task of evaluating ways of life is pursued within the writings of both A and B, even if Kierkegaard does not himself offer such an evaluation. As I will discuss later, it is one of the most striking features of Either/Or that it presents no objective conclusions about which way of life is best. But the task of evaluating ways of life is certainly pursued within the book by both A and B. As we might expect, from the perspective of each way of life, all other ways of life are condemned as inferior. This situation has given rise to the idea that the choice between ways of life must be some kind of irrational “leap,” ungrounded in standards that lie outside any of the value-paradigms being considered. Contrary to this traditional view, some scholars have suggested that Either/Or does in fact provide good reasons to guide this choice. As I will explain shortly, I think we can find support for this latter view in the work of Plato. For now, I will simply submit that whether or not Either/Or leaves us with any decisive evaluation of the ways of life it presents, it certainly prompts the reader to make such an evaluation. Perhaps it is also the case that the illustrations and analysis just discussed aim to move the reader toward an appreciation of the ethical life over the aesthetic life and possibly, as Kierkegaard later claimed, beyond the ethical life and towards the religious life. Having outlined what I take to be the basic ethical project in Either/ Or, I will now attempt to show how we can find an equivalent project at the center of ancient Greek ethics. I will begin with Plato’s Republic. On one hand, the Republic is a dialogue about the virtue of justice. Yet throughout the text Plato makes clear his intention to contrast two different ways of life; as he says, “the investigation concerns the

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most important thing, namely, the good life and the bad one.”16 Like Either/Or, Plato’s Republic is a dialogue between advocates of the life of wanton pleasure and advocate of the life of moral goodness; the central question in both is: what is the best way of life to live? One way that Plato, like Kierkegaard, addresses this question is by developing a typology of different ways of life. Plato sketches vivid psychological portraits of different internal “constitutions” (or types of souls) corresponding to different types of political constitutions. Also like Kierkegaard, Plato explores the morphology of these types, i. e. how one type somehow decays and breaks down, giving rise to another type. For both Plato and Kierkegaard it is important to see how one’s internal constitution grounds one’s external behavior. For this reason Plato sketches detailed accounts of how a person with a certain kind of internal constitution will treat himself, his family, and his fellow citizens. The central challenge in the Republic is first presented by Thrasymachus and then articulated by Glaucon. They challenge Socrates to show that the just life is intrinsically good, even if one has a reputation for being unjust, and that the unjust life is intrinsically bad, even if one has a reputation for being just. A common reading of the Republic is that Plato answers this challenge by appealing to an absolute standard, the Form of the Good.17 Yet I think if we read the text more carefully we will find that Plato’s theory of the forms plays only a minor role in answering the central question of the Republic. It seems to play no direct role in any of the several arguments that Plato considers “proofs” of his conclusion that the just life is intrinsically good and the unjust life intrinsically bad. Plato offers a first, preliminary argument for this conclusion at the end of Book IV. This argument centers on the idea of a kind of ethical health or sickness within one’s soul. Plato utilizes his analogy between the soul and the state in order to reveal the virtues appropriate to each part of the soul or state. He finds that justice in an individual is the internal harmony (harmonia) between the parts of the soul, with each 16

17

Plato Republic, trans. by Grube and Reeve, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing 1992, p. 249 (578c). An argument for this reading might go as follows: Someone who rationally grasps the truth about goodness can “participate” in the form of good by living a just life. Since this person knows and participates in what is intrinsically good, mere opinions about what or who is good are irrelevant: the just life is good in itself regardless of one’s reputation and regardless of the external rewards and punishments that result from this reputation.

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part doing its own job well. (This means that one is led by one’s reason with one’s emotional sense of honor or shame enforcing this leadership and with desires that are moderate, ensuring that basic needs are met without interfering with the leadership of reason.) Injustice in an individual, by contrast, involves a kind of “civil war” between the parts of the soul, a disharmony in which the proper leadership structure is disrupted.18 Plato’s argument then invokes an analogy between disease in the body and injustice in the soul. Bodily disease, as Plato understands it, is some kind of disorder and disharmony within the body. Injustice is an analogous disorder and disharmony within one’s soul. Plato then concludes that just as it is worthless to have every kind of pleasure and possession if one’s body is ruined by sickness, it is worthless to have the power to do whatever one wants if one’s soul is sickened and ruined by injustice: Even if one has every kind of food and drink, lots of money, and every sort of power to rule, life is thought to be not worth living when the body’s nature is ruined. So even if someone can do whatever he wishes…how can it be worth living when his soul, the very thing by which he lives – is ruined and in turmoil?19

We can see in this argument some striking points of comparison with Kierkegaard. Perhaps the most obvious similarity is the metaphor of sickness to describe a state of ethical failure. Of course, this is a common enough metaphor in both the Greek and Christian traditions, but I think it reveals an interesting similarity between the way Plato and Kierkegaard pursue the question of the best way of life. Here we see Plato answering this question not based on some external standard, but based on an analysis of the internal collapse and disharmony within a way of life. Plato’s argument here is nearly identical to the Christian challenge: “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world if he loses his soul?” (Mark 8:36). Kierkegaard’s notion of despair is precisely the “sickness unto death” by which one loses one’s soul or one’s self. Although Plato does not speak of “losing oneself,” 18

19

It is interesting to note that, like Kierkegaard, Plato suggests the presence or absence of this harmonia in one’s soul determines whether or not one has unity as a person. The soul of the unjust person is inherently fragmented; this person is in a kind of war with himself. In contrast, the just person “puts himself in order, is his own friend, and harmonizes the three parts of himself.” The result is that the just person is inwardly unified: “He binds together those parts and any others there may be in between, and from having been many things he becomes entirely one, moderate and harmonious.” Plato Republic, p. 119 (443e). Plato Republic, p. 121 (445b).

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his conception of this sickness is of a state of inner disharmony and turmoil, very much like Kierkegaard’s notion of despair. In The Sickness Unto Death, despair is defined as a kind of misrelation to oneself in which there is a disharmony among what Anti-Climacus calls “the factors which constitute the self as a synthesis.” In contrast, the opposite of despair, which is faith, is defined as a proper relation to oneself in which there is a harmony among these factors.20 This appeal to a notion of internal collapse rather than an external standard is also evident in the concluding “proofs” Plato offers towards the end of the Republic.21 The first and most powerful of these proofs involves the typology of different “constitutions” of states and souls mentioned above. One of the most memorable and convincing parts of this argument is Plato’s portrait of the tyrant. As a form of government, Plato considers tyranny to be the worst possible; it is one step down from democracy, which he considers to be the second-worst form of government. In fact, Plato analyzes what he sees as the inner weaknesses of democracy to show how tyranny evolves out of democracy. He explains the tyrant’s need to “stir up a war, so that the people will continue to feel the need of a leader” and how the tyrant is able to twist the people’s love of freedom into a justification for tyranny, enslavement, and unending war.22 As currently topical as this political portrait may be, I want to focus instead on Plato’s psychological portrait of the person whose soul resembles this tyranny. This is the person who lives guided by his worst and most unruly desires, which means that his soul is the most disharmonious and unjust possible, by Plato’s definition. (Plato discusses a worst-case scenario in which a political tyrant also has a tyrannical kind of soul, but this need not be the case.) Like the political tyrant who governs arbitrarily and recklessly, heedless of the rule of law, the desires that dominate the tyrannical person’s soul cause such internal disorder and disharmony that he really lives, as Plato says, “in complete anarchy and lawlessness.”23 Once again Plato uses the metaphor of sickness to describe this internal disposition. The sickness in this person’s soul is an intensification of the sickness that Plato thinks plagues the democratic type of soul. Like Kierkegaard’s aesthete, the person whose soul resembles 20

21 22 23

SDP, 59 / SV1 XI, 143. It is important to note, however, that these factors of the self are not “parts of the soul” in Plato’s sense. Plato Republic, p. 251 (580d). Plato Republic, p. 238 (567a). Plato Republic, p. 245 (575a).

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a democracy lives for the satisfaction of his desires. The democratic person indulges each desire equally and quickly moves from one to another, “yielding day by day to the desire at hand,” with the result that his life lacks any kind of commitment or “necessity.”24 This pattern holds true within the tyrannical soul as well, except that since he yields to his most perverse and unruly desires, his life is all the more disharmonious and unjust. Using Kierkegaard’s terminology, we might say that the tyrannical man is the “demonic” extreme of the democratic man. As Plato says, the tyrannical man’s “waking life is like [a] nightmare.”25 This argument seems like a particular application of the earlier, more general argument about the sickness or health within a soul. Yet I think there is an important difference. Earlier Plato argued that even if one gets everything one wants, it is useless if one soul is ruined and in turmoil. Now he argues that the fact that one’s soul is ruined and in turmoil actually brings it about that one will not get what one wants. Since a desire within the tyrannical soul is pursued and fulfilled only by pushing aside many other desires (not to mention the “better” parts of his soul), Plato suggests that, taken as a whole, this person’s soul remains perpetually discontent and unsatisfied: “a tyrannical soul – I’m talking about the whole soul – will also be least likely to do what it wants and…will be full of disorder and regret.”26 This self-defeating pattern holds true for the political tyrant as well. Plato thinks that what the tyrant most wants is to insure his own happiness, power, and security. But precisely because he lives like a tyrant, these goals will forever elude him. Plato indicates this ironic self-defeat when he concludes that “a real tyrant is really a slave,” living “full of fear, convulsions, and pains throughout his life.” 27 Thus, Plato, like Kierkegaard, shows that the internal collapse of a way of life can be made evident in the fact that this life is a failure by its own standards. Moreover, it is important to note that for Plato the analysis of the internal collapse within the unjust life is not merely the setup for a later proof. This analysis is the proof. I think this lends further weight to the suggestion that we can take the equivalent analysis in Either/Or to be a similar kind of rational argument. In the artfulness of his illustrations and in his concern for the internal collapse of ways of life, Plato stands closer to Kierkegaard than 24 25 26 27

Plato Republic, p. 232 (561d). Plato Republic, p. 247 (576b). Plato Republic, p. 248 (577e). Plato Republic, p. 250 (579e).

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Aristotle does. Yet Aristotle also pursues the ethical project of comparing and evaluating different ways of life. In fact, I would argue that this is the central guiding project of the Nicomachean Ethics. For Aristotle, the first and most fundamental question of ethics is what is the highest, most fitting, and most complete telos of human activity. But since he finds that we take our notion of the highest telos from our way of life [bios], 28 Aristotle’s central ethical question then becomes: what way of life is best for a human being to live? In the beginning of the book, Aristotle states that there are roughly three “most notable kinds of life.”29 The first of these is the life of pleasure. The second is the life of moral and civic virtue that Aristotle calls the “political life.” The third way of life involves reaching beyond the life of moral and civic excellence and aspiring to live in a way that is in some sense “more than human,” as Aristotle says, since it realizes something “divine” within us. 30 Described this way, we can see a striking parallel between these three ways of life and Kierkegaard’s usual trilogy. The most obvious difference is that whereas for Kierkegaard the third way of life is the life of faith, for Aristotle the third way of life is the contemplative life. As with Kierkegaard, Aristotle puts no weight on the completeness of his typology here. In fact, he mentions offhand a fourth possibility, which he calls the money-making life. 31 Aristotle and Kierkegaard agree that most people live a life of pleasure. This includes not only those whom Aristotle calls “the common run of people, and the most vulgar” but also those whose great wealth allows them to live a life of luxurious excess. (Aristotle uses the figure of the Assyrian king Sarandapallus as the iconic character representing this latter sort of person.)32 Unlike Kierkegaard, Aristotle dismisses the life of pleasure without much discussion. His argument for its inferiority is simply that this life is fit for only cattle. Knowing Aristotle, he means this not only as a pejorative dismissal of people who live this way; he also means this in a quite literal sense. Animals (and children) quite rightly live for pleasure since this is the highest telos their “sensible souls” can attain. Those who have “rational souls,” however, 28

29 30 31

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Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, trans. by Martin Ostwald, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall 1999, p. 8 (1095b15). Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, p. 8 (1095b15). Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, p. 290 (1177b25). As always Aristotle aims to provide only a “rough and general sketch” since he acknowledges that the kind of precise, systematic categorization possible in other sciences is inappropriate for ethics. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, p. 5 (1094b15). Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, p. 8 (1095b15-20).

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debase themselves by failing to realize their potential for a life guided by reason, whether this is the life of practical reason (the political life) or the life of intellectual reason (the contemplative life). Thus, Aristotle declares that people who live the life of pleasure “betray their utter slavishness in their preference for a life suitable for cattle.”33 Having dismissed the life of pleasure, the real question for Aristotle is whether the best life is the political life or the contemplative life. Most of the Nicomachean Ethics seems to idealize the active, political life. In contrast, between the first and last books of the Nicomachean Ethics, the contemplative life is hardly mentioned. For this reason, it takes many readers by surprise when Aristotle ends the book by returning to the topic of the contemplative life and arguing that it is in fact superior to the political life. This judgment is so surprising that it has become the subject of an ongoing debate among Aristotle scholars. How can we reconcile this judgment with his earlier praise for the active life and the moral or civic virtues? Why does Aristotle suppose that one must either live the political life or live the contemplative life? Why not suppose that one could live both at the same time, and thus have every kind of excellence, both practical and intellectual, to the highest degree possible? Perhaps the most plausible reading of Aristotle’s conclusion is that the contemplative life is not lacking in the moral virtues, even if it places more emphasis on the intellectual virtues. Since success in the contemplative life depends most on the virtue of theoretical wisdom, this virtue is more prominent than the others within this life. The contemplative person also displays the social and moral virtues in dealing with other people in his private life, 34 even if he does not display them on a grand, public scale, as the person living the political life does. Aristotle says that, “insofar as he is human and lives in the society of his fellow men,” the person living the contemplative life chooses to exercise the social virtues.35 But Aristotle also indicates that the person living the contemplative life will likely have neither the means nor the inclination to be generous and magnificent on the grand scale required for success in the political and military life. Likewise, we might think that the person living the political and military life will need the intellectual virtue of practical wisdom and may also have the intellectual virtue of theoretical wisdom [sophia]. But the person liv33 34

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Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, p. 8 (1095b20). For an opposing view on this topic see John Cooper Reason and the Human Good in Aristotle, New York: Hackett Publishing 1986, pp. 163-165. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, p. 292 (1178b5).

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ing the political life is not likely to excel in achievements of theoretical wisdom in comparison with the person who devotes his life to study. If this explanation holds true, it tells us something about the way Aristotle understands the relationship between a way of life and the virtues. This will also shed some light on the difference between the ethical project focusing on ways of life and the ethical project focusing on the virtues, which I see as the main focus of contemporary virtue ethics. For Aristotle, a way of life is a different kind of thing than a virtue. We cannot simply identify a way of life with a virtue, since this virtue is also likely to be found in a different way of life. Nor can we say that a way of life is simply the sum of the virtues, since this would fail to explain the differences between ways of life. In Aristotle’s schema, there are not different virtues for each way of life; there is a single set of moral and intellectual virtues for all humans. Both the political life and the contemplative life involve practicing each of these virtues to an excellent degree as this is appropriate for the situation at hand. But because different ways of life are aimed at different fundamental goals, what is appropriate in one way of life may not be appropriate in another way of life. I think a way of life can be understood as a configuration of the virtues around a highest telos such that those virtues that are particularly helpful for attaining this telos rise to prominence whereas the other virtues are cultivated to a lesser (but still excellent) degree. This means that the task of elucidating the virtues can be completed without having yet touched upon the task of evaluating different ways of life. As I see it, contemporary virtue ethics has accomplished much with respect to the first of these tasks, but has generally overlooked the second. This is problematic since, as some contemporary virtue ethicists admit, for Aristotle the task of giving an account of the virtues is of secondary importance in comparison to the central task of finding the highest good or best way of life for human beings. 36 I have already indicated that one point of comparison between Aristotle and Kierkegaard is that both think that the best way of life involves aspiring beyond what we might call “the merely moral life.” This aspirational standard in Aristotle’s thinking is often overlooked in comparison with his much more famous teleological standard. In the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle announces his inten36

See Alasdair MacIntyre “The Nature of Virtues” reprinted in Virtue Ethics, ed. by Roger Crisp and Michael Slote, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998, p. 123. See also Edmund Pincoffs “Quandary Ethics” reprinted in Ethical Theory vol. 2, ed. by James Rachels, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997, p. 188.

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tion to elucidate the highest good for man where this is understood to be the activity that is peculiarly fitting for our human nature. This kind of “essentialism” is often contrasted with Kierkegaard’s “existentialism,” which presumably has no conception of human nature. Yet at the end of the book, Aristotle admits that it is the activity of the political life that is “peculiarly human.”37 In contrast, Aristotle thinks that the activity of the contemplative life, “study” or “research,” is an activity we share with the gods. So he admits that the political life is really the most fittingly human life, given our human nature, but he insists it is nonetheless not the best life a human can live. He addresses the objection that the contemplative life seems “more than human” since a “man who would live it would do so not insofar as he is human, but because there is a divine element within him.”38 But Aristotle insists that we should aspire to a god-like life nonetheless: We must not follow those who advise us to have human thoughts, since we are only men, and mortal thoughts, as mortals should; on the contrary, we should try to become immortal as far as that is possible and do our utmost to live in accordance with what is highest in us. 39

Both Kierkegaard and Aristotle argue for a way of life that aspires to go beyond the “merely moral life,” but there is an important difference in the way they understand this aspiration. Only Kierkegaard has a biting critique of this merely moral life. For Aristotle, the political life is simply second best; it is a life of excellence in which one can become “happy in a secondary sense.”40 In contrast, for Kierkegaard the merely moral life, such as the life proposed by Judge Wilhelm, is subject to the critique that it is a life of despair. Although the exact nature of this despair lies beyond the scope of Either/Or, and beyond the scope of my study, I will say a few things about it since I think it marks one of the strongest contrasts between Kierkegaard and his Greek colleagues. If, as Anti-Climacus insists, everything that is not faith is despair, and the ethical life is not the life of faith, then we know the ethical life suffers from despair. Contrary to the possibility of a laudible “second best” way of life, The Sickness Unto Death suggests that those who would like to complacently repose in a way of life that falls short of faith are in fact defiantly resisting the life of faith.

37 38 39 40

Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, p. 291 (1178a10). Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, p. 293 (1177b25). Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, p. 290 (1177b30). Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, p. 291 (1178a10).

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The central problem with the ethical life is at least hinted at in Either/Or’s “Ultimatum”; this is the problem of guilt. “The Ultimatum” is a sermon sent to the judge on the theme that “in relation to God we are always in the wrong.” Although the judge claims that the sermon “has grasped what I have said and what I would like to have said,” the emphasis on the fact that “before God” we are always guilty has subtle but devastating implications for Judge Wilhelm’s ethics.41 As I discussed earlier, Judge Wilhelm insists upon a stance of self-reliance, arguing that “every life-view that has a condition outside itself is despair.”42 But this stance of self-reliance runs aground on guilt, since one can self-reliantly get oneself into a state of guilt, but there is nothing one can do by one’s own self-reliant willpower to get oneself out of a state of guilt. For this, forgiveness is required, and asking for forgiveness requires opening oneself to a kind of dependence that would qualify as despair according to Judge Wilhelm’s definition. Thus, the life the judge proposes also seems to fail by its own standards: one lives for ethical righteousness and responsibility, but in taking responsibility for oneself, one inevitably finds oneself guilty.43 Like the concepts of guilt and forgiveness generally, this stern condemnation of the “merely moral life” seems entirely absent from the work of Plato and Aristotle.44 Of course we should not lose sight of the fact that nowhere in Either/ Or does Kierkegaard draw an evaluative conclusion about which way of life is best. The internal collapse of the aesthetic life is apparent in the writings of A and is openly discussed in the letters of Judge Wilhelm. As I have just discussed, the internal collapse of the ethical life is hinted at in the book’s “Ultimatum.” But it is one of the most important features of Either/Or that there is no final conclusion 41

42 43

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EO2, 338 / SKS 3, 318. Here I am admittedly adhering to what might be called the traditional reading of this part of the text, in contrast to other authors in this volume. This traditional view is given a particularly strong defense by Louis Mackey in Louis Mackey Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1971, p. 87. EO2, 235 / SKS 3, 225. The judge claims to perform a “double movement” of repenting and receiving himself back again. But forgiveness is required in between, and forgiveness lies outside the domain of self-reliance. So the same stance of self-reliance that lifted one out of the despair of the aesthetic life now becomes a source of despair for the ethical life. Kierkegaard might also disagree with Plato and Aristotle that the best way of life, ethically speaking, is also the most pleasurable life. Kierkegaard often indicates that the life of faith will necessarily entail a good deal of suffering.

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in which Kierkegaard openly declares one way of life to be the best way of life. As Victor Eremita insists in the book’s “Preface,” it is a strength of the book that “these papers come to no conclusion.”45 This marks another strong point of contrast with Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle is forthright, if also controversial, in making his judgment on the best way of life. Plato is somewhat less direct in presenting his conclusions, if only because the Republic is a dialogue in which the conclusion is drawn not by Plato himself or even by Socrates as his mouthpiece, but by the interlocutor Glaucon, Plato’s older brother. But Plato makes sure that we do not miss the conclusion the Republic has reached about the best way of life. Having concluded the first of his “proofs,” Plato has Socrates ask: “Shall we, then, hire a herald, or shall I myself announce that the son of Ariston has given as his verdict”?46 Plato more than hints that this verdict is his own since, as Glaucon’s brother, Plato is also “the son of Ariston.” A final point of contrast between Kierkegaard and these ancient authors involves the possibility of a transition between ways of life. This is one of the most important, and least discussed, topics within the ethical project I am advocating. For Kierkegaard, such a transition is most often “the one thing needful” for someone living a life of despair. After all, the point is not just to recognize one’s despair, but to enact a transition out of despair and into a different way of life altogether. One of the most intriguing aspects of Kierkegaard’s account of this transition is his suggestion that we can somehow harness the destructive force of despair to bring an end to the despairing life, thereby clearing the way for a life free of despair. Thus, Judge Wilhelm actually urges the aesthete A to despair, and Anti-Climacus discusses “the despair which is a corridor to faith.”47 Plato and Aristotle do not seem to have any equivalent concept. Aristotle does not seem to have considered the possibility of a transition between ways of life at all, although to be fair he does not rule one out. Plato does have a “morphology” tracing transitions between ways of life, as we have seen. But Plato’s understanding of these transitions is very different from Kierkegaard’s. One difference is that Plato does not describe these transitions happening within a single individual, but within a family; for example, the democratic father produces a tyrannical son. The most striking difference is that for Plato 45 46 47

EO1, 14 / SKS 2, 20. Plato Republic, p. 250 (580c). SUD, 98.

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these transitions are all a matter of decay and decline; his morphology does not include any cases of a transition to a better life. Plato would almost certainly reject the idea that the decline or “sickness” infecting souls (or states) can be turned into a force for positive change. The only hint we get that such positive change is possible is in the cave allegory. There we learn that a prisoner to ignorance can be freed from his chains and compelled to turn his whole body around. Plato emphasizes the importance of this turning, which represents for him the complete orientation of oneself away from illusions and toward goodness and the truth.48 This is clearly the beginning of a positive transition of sorts, but it does not utilize the source of one’s problem to get rid of this problem in the way Kierkegaard suggests. In conclusion, I hope to have shown that Either/Or engages in a kind of holistic ethical project that was once central to ancient Greek ethics, even if it is largely absent from ethics today.49 My hope for contemporary ethics is not that this holistic project replace the currently dominant projects that focus on actions or character traits. Rather, I hope that we can we broaden our scope of ethical concern to include what we might call “way of life ethics.” I also hope to have shown that an interesting dialogue emerges among those who engage in “way of life ethics.” In addition to the main question of what way of life is best, this dialogue poses several other important questions, such as: What defines a way of life, and what differentiates between ways of life? How does one’s way of life relate to one’s particular actions, goals, beliefs, and character traits? How does one’s way of life relate to who one is as a person (i. e., to one’s character)? By what standard can we 48 49

Plato Republic, p. 190 (518c). To be fair, some contemporary virtue ethicists have introduced a kind of holism into ethics by addressing how the virtues can fit into an agent’s life as a whole. This is the question of how moral virtues and ends can fit together with one’s non-moral ends and attachments as part of a complete life, where this is simply understood as “the virtuous life” or “the good life.” See for example Martha Nussbaum “Virtue Ethics: A Misleading Category?” in Journal of Ethics vol. 3, 1999, p. 170) and Bernard Williams “Persons, Character, and Morality” reprinted in Ethical Theory vol. 2, ed. by James Rachels, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998, p. 174. Although I think this sort of holism is laudable, I think it is importantly different from the project I have presented here. What is missing in this kind of “completeness holism” is an evaluation of the worth of different ways of life as the units of ethical concern. For other discussions of holism in ancient Greek ethics, see Pierre Hadot Philosophy as a Way of Life, ed. by Arnold Davidson and trans. by Michael Chase, Oxford: Blackwell 1995, and Julia Annas The Morality of Happiness, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1993. See also Rick Anthony Furtak Wisdom in Love: Kierkegaard and the Ancient Quest for Emotional Integrity, Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press 2005.

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judge which way of life is best, or what goes wrong within inferior ways of life such that they are deemed inferior? Lastly, why should we think there is only one best way of life for all people, and even if there is only one best way of life, why could there not be some permissible second best way of life in addition to this ideal best way of life? In posing these questions and in attempting to answer them, Kierkegaard not only reintroduces this ancient approach to ethics, he also pursues it a unique and compelling way. In the dialogue that develops within this approach, Kierkegaard’s voice will surely continue to stand out and make a powerful, moving contribution. Or, rather, as we find in Either/Or, even when Kierkegaard’s own voice remains silent, the characters he creates pursue this dialogue from different sides and take it to new levels of depth, sophistication, and clarity.

Reason in Ethics Revisited Either/Or, “Criterionless Choice” and Narrative Unity By Anthony Rudd Abstract Kierkegaard has often been interpreted as an irrationalist. In particular, Either/Or has frequently been (mis) understood as presenting the choice between the aesthetic and the ethical as an ultimately arbitrary – because “criterionless” – one. Much recent Kierkegaard scholarship has rejected this interpretation. In this paper I defend my own previous account of the rationality of the choice between the aesthetic and the ethical in Either/Or against recent criticizms by Alasdair MacIntyre and by John Lippitt. I will look first at MacIntyre’s charge that the “criterionless choice” problem still holds; I will then consider problems that MacIntyre and Lippitt have raised about the nature of the teleology that John Davenport and I have ascribed to Judge William; and will conclude by looking at some of the problems Lippitt has raised with the crucial concept of narrative unity.

Once upon a time, it was common to interpret Kierkegaard as an “irrationalist”; that is, as someone who claimed that transitions between major life-views such as the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious, could only take the form of “leaps,” willed changes of commitment for which no reasons could be given. Alasdair MacIntyre famously took this view in his After Virtue, arguing that Either/Or is meant to show us that “the principles which depict the ethical way of life are to be adopted for no reason, but for a choice that lies beyond reasons, just because it is the choice of what is to count for us as a reason.”1 I think most Kierkegaard scholars would now reject this view. In my book Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical, 2 I argued that what Judge William develops in Either/Or, Part 2, is a kind of neo-Aristotelian 1 2

A. MacIntyre After Virtue, second ed., London: Duckworth 1985, p. 42. A. Rudd Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1993.

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virtue ethics and that the Judge gives good reasons why an aesthete like “A” should adopt an ethical life, understood in those terms. The Judge’s argument, as I interpreted it, went as follows: A is unhappy, despairing, even, because his way of live is based on the evasion of the need he has (even if he won’t acknowledge it) for meaning and coherence in his life, and for genuine relationships with others. It is rational for him to adopt the serious, long-term commitments and social relationships that constitute the ethical life because this will enable him to fulfil his nature, to live his life as a coherent narrative rather than as a series of disconnected fragments, and by so doing escape from the state of despairing stasis in which he currently lives. I also argued that, ironically, the Judge’s view is in many ways very similar to the substantive ethical position that MacIntyre himself advocates in After Virtue and elsewhere, and that the Judge’s arguments for favouring the ethical over the aesthetic were quite similar to MacIntyre’s arguments for choosing Aristotle (or, latterly, Aquinas) rather than Nietzsche. More recently, John Davenport and I edited a volume of essays, Kierkegaard After MacIntyre,3 collecting work by a number of authors who criticized MacIntyre’s account of Kierkegaard as a apostle of arbitrary choice, and explored in various ways the commonalities as well as the differences between Kierkegaard and MacIntyre. In his reply to those essays,4 MacIntyre withdrew some of the claims he had made about Kierkegaard in After Virtue, but reiterated his basic charge that Judge William could not give A a reason for adopting the ethical, the force of which A himself would be able to appreciate. 5 Subsequently, critics such as Ian Duckles and John Lippitt have also turned a sceptical eye on Davenport’s and my attempts to show that there is a compelling rational argument for the ethical to be found in Either/Or, Part 2.6 In this paper I will try to restate my argument for the rationality of the move to the ethical in Either/Or by responding to some of these criticizms. I will look first at MacIntyre’s charge that the “criterionless choice” problem still holds; I will then consider problems that MacIntyre and John Lippitt have raised about 3

4 5 6

Kierkegaard After MacIntyre, ed. by J. Davenport and A. Rudd, Chicago: Open Court 2001. Subsequently referred to in these notes as KAM. A. MacIntyre “Once More on Kierkegaard” in KAM. See MacIntyre “Once More on Kierkegaard,” pp. 340-342. See I. Duckles “Kierkegaard’s Irrationalism: a Response to Davenport and Rudd,” in Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, 2005; and J. Lippitt “Getting the Story Straight: Kierkegaard, MacIntyre and Some Problems with Narrative” in Inquiry 50.1, 2007.

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the nature of the teleology Davenport and I have ascribed to Judge William; I will conclude by looking at some of the problems Lippitt has raised with the crucial concept of narrative unity, which is central both to MacIntyre’s thought and to my reconstruction of Judge William’s argument. I will, I hope, be able to express myself in a way that will be less vulnerable to misunderstandings than some of my previous formulations may have been.

I. One important concession MacIntyre has made to his critics is to recognize that Kierkegaard does think of human nature as having a telos.7 But if there is such a telos, then it becomes possible to argue that a certain way of life may be one that frustrates the realization of that telos and, therefore, that it is rational to abandon that way of life since, although it may offer short-term pleasures, it cannot offer longterm satisfaction. And MacIntyre does, accordingly, now accept that “there are good reasons for individuals to move from the aesthetic to the ethical, and not merely good-reasons-from-the-standpoint-ofthe-ethical. Those reasons are in general the ones advanced by Judge Wilhelm.”8 But he continues to insist that this is not in the least inconsistent with the thesis that the transition from the aesthetic to the ethical is and can be made only by a criterionless choice. For to be in the aesthetic stage is to have attitudes and beliefs that disable one from evaluating and appreciating those reasons….So…on Kierkegaard’s view, what can be retrospectively understood as rationally justifiable cannot be thus understood prospectively. 9

So the problem is not that good reasons for the transition from the aesthetic to the ethical are lacking, but that the aesthete is someone who is not in a position to recognize those reasons until she has ceased to be an aesthete. But that cessation itself cannot, therefore, have been brought about by recognizing the force of the arguments in question. However, the aesthete is not literally disabled from appreciating ethical arguments, in the way that someone with brain damage may be disabled from appreciating certain forms of mathematical reasoning. The aesthete cannot, qua aesthete, appreciate the Judge’s arguments, 7 8 9

MacIntyre “Once More on Kierkegaard,” p. 344. Ibid., p. 344. Ibid., p. 344. Duckles and Lippitt both endorse versions of this argument: see Duckles “Kierkegaard’s Irrationalism,” p. 46 and Lippitt “Getting the Story Straight,” p. 42.

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but why can she not appreciate them qua human being? Does being an aesthete exhaust who somebody like A is? In my paper “Reason in Ethics,”10 I compared the aesthete with someone who believes that the Earth is Flat. Let’s imagine a Flat Earther with a strong commitment to his views. Considered simply as a committed Flat Earther, he may be “disabled” from appreciating the scientific arguments against Flat Earth theory. But, considered simply as a rational being, he can appreciate them. If he continues to reject what are objectively good reasons (not just good-reasons-from-the-standpoint-of-science), then he can be blamed for letting his desire to believe in the Flat Earth theory stand in the way of recognizing the strength of those arguments against it. Indeed, we might say that the force of the reasons against Flat Earth theory is so great that, if he is a rational being, then he cannot really fail to appreciate them, in which case his rejection of them is a refusal to admit what, at some level, he knows to be true. The Flat Earther is therefore a divided self in that his reason is in conflict with a belief system that he has motives (as distinct from good reasons) for wanting to maintain. But the aesthete is a divided self also. She has (qua human person) a telos of which she cannot be wholly and literally unaware, but also a set of attitudes which lead her to suppress or deny that knowledge. The crucial point about the aesthete is that, in the end, she rejects the ethical arguments because she doesn’t want to accept them. MacIntyre actually makes the suggestion that we might understand the aesthete in this way, though he presents it as an alternative to both his own original views and those of his critics: suppose…that the aesthetic personality is viewed as one that is engaged in a covert and unacknowledged resistance to the ethical…Implicit in that refusal is a recognition that only from the standpoint of the ethical are there answers to a set of questions which the aesthete needs to ask, but insistently evades asking….If that were so, then there would be that in the aesthete to which arguments from the standpoint of the ethical could appeal.11

Now I think this is exactly what Either/Or was intended to suggest to us, and – pace MacIntyre – that this was exactly what Davenport and I, among others, have been arguing. MacIntyre, however, thinks that this view is in conflict with the book’s insistence on the “radical discontinuity of the aesthetic and the ethical” and is therefore present in

10 11

A. Rudd “Reason in Ethics: Kierkegaard and MacIntyre” in KAM, p. 145. MacIntyre “Once More on Kierkegaard,” p. 348.

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Either/Or only as a “subtext.”12 But the “radical discontinuity” which the very title, of course, emphasizes, does not deny the fact that all of us are both aesthetic and ethical. We are all aesthetic in that we are all naturally motivated by desires to avoid pain and boredom and to seek pleasure and “the interesting.” We are all also naturally ethical, on both the Judge’s and on Kierkegaard’s own view, because human nature has a normatively significant telos. We are intrinsically temporal and social beings; also self-conscious, rational, willing – and therefore autonomous – beings; and also creatures of God. Therefore we cannot lead fulfilled lives if we lack temporal continuity, social relationships (ranging from the intimately personal to the socio-political), autonomous choice, and a positive relationship to God. And these are not facts about ourselves that we might need scientific investigation to find out (perhaps to our surprise); it is a fundamental presupposition of Kierkegaard’s whole authorship that the ethical truth, the knowledge of our telos, is already in us (though we are all – at least apart from divine grace – also at least partially in denial about that truth).13 So the aesthete is at some level of consciousness aware of ethical requirements, whether this awareness takes the form of the obscure dread that shadows even Don Giovanni’s exuberant sensuality,14 or the conscious defiance of the ethical practiced by Johannes the Seducer.15 The aesthete is not simply a pure innocent, knowing nothing of the ethical. But also, the ethicist is by no means someone who has simply abandoned the aesthetic. Judge William’s two letters are, after all, titled “The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage” and “The Balance Between the Aesthetic and the Ethical in the Development of the Personality”16 – titles that point to the “continuities” as much as the title of the book as a whole points to the discontinuities between the aesthetic and the ethical. The point, then, is not that the ethicist is not motivated by desire for the pleasant and the interesting, but that s/ 12 13

14 15 16

Ibid., p. 349. Philosophical Fragments appears at first to teach (or at any rate to formulate the suggestion) that we are wholly outside the truth; but the real point of the “nonSocratic” hypothesis developed there is that we are not ignorant of the truth (that would still be a Socratic position – sin is ignorance), but that we are “polemical against it” – which implies that we have some knowledge of what it is. For more on this, see my paper “The Moment and the Teacher: Problems in Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments,” Kierkegaardiana 21, 2000. EO1, 129 / SV1 I, 107-108. See e. g., EO1, 367 / SV1 I, 336. These titles were admittedly chosen by Victor Eremita, not by the Judge himself (see EO1, 10 / SV1 I, xii) but they do not, I think, mislead as to the contents.

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he has chosen to subordinate those to the requirements of morality should they clash. So, although Judge William does assert that “in the ethical…the aesthetic is absolutely excluded,” he immediately corrects himself: “or it is excluded as the absolute, but relatively it is continually present.”17 This is what the choice of the ethical in Either/Or involves, and it is interestingly close to Kant’s account of the choice of one’s fundamental maxim.18 In ethical choice, I choose “myself in my absolute validity”19 – that is, I chose the self as directed to its telos, or chose most fundamentally to direct it to its telos rather than to short-term satisfactions. In one sense, the ethical, or absolute self comes into being through the choice: “This self has not existed before, because it came into existence through the choice.”20 This assertion seems at once to raise again all of MacIntyre’s concerns (if my ethical self didn’t previously exist, how could I have chosen the ethical for ethical reasons?) but the Judge immediately corrects or qualifies this claim: “and yet it has existed, for it was indeed ‘himself.’ ”21 A few lines later he insists “I do not create myself – I chose myself.” The ethical self – the one that is committed to subordinating aesthetic to ethical motives (which is not to say that it always succeeds) – is there in potential before the choice of the ethical is made; what the Judge is urging A to do is to actualize that potential. This is why the ethical argument can have force for the aesthete prospectively and not merely retrospectively. Wanting to enjoy the maximum freedom to follow his whims, A refuses to acknowledge any normatively significant telos that could give point or meaning to 17

18

19 20 21

EO2, 177 / SV1 II, 161. Indeed, Judge William goes on to say, “if only the choice is posited, all the aesthetic returns and you will see that only thereby does existence become beautiful” (EO2, 178 / SV1 II, 161). See Kant Religion Within the Limits of Mere Reason, trans. and ed. by A Wood and G. di Giovanni, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998, p. 59. I should say that, especially in Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical, I wrongly downplayed the Kantian elements in Judge William’s ethical thinking. This was because at that time I accepted the caricature of Kant’s ethics as an empty formalism – a caricature that is still unfortunately prevalent in analytic philosophy. By recognizing that Judge William is in important respects a Kantian, I am not, however, retracting my basic substantive claim that he is a neo-Aristotelian virtue theorist – the point is that Kant was himself in important respects also such a virtue theorist. I am particularly grateful to Jeanine Grenberg for helping me to see this; see Grenberg’s Kant and the Ethics of Humility, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005. EO2, 214 / SV1 II, 192. EO2, 215 / SV1 II, 193. EO2, 215 / SV1 II, 193.

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his life. But the result is that he is plagued by boredom – not just the casual passing tedium that comes and goes in all lives, but the deep ennui that he defines as “demonic pantheism,”22 the sense of a void at the heart of being which renders any action equally absurd. The life devoted to the interesting becomes a desperate attempt to avoid boredom, to distract oneself from the ultimate pointlessness of ones existence. For all the brio with which he suggests strategies for doing this, A’s papers make clear that he is at best, only partly successful. By living in a way that defies the human telos, A is naturally dissatisfied and unhappy. This is why the Judge’s demand that A should make, rather than shun, lasting commitments and accept the ethical responsibilities that they involve, is one that has force for A. The ethical can diagnose and explain his condition and suggest a cure for it. A might almost take this in an experimental sense; something isn’t right with my life as I am now living it, so why not try this alternative? But for both Kierkegaard and the Judge, there is a deeper point. A is aware, not just of his unhappiness, but, at some level, of why he is unhappy. He desires the continuity, the friendship and love, the sense of meaning in his life, that he rejects; but he represses those desires. What he needs, then, is not really a nice intellectual argument proving the validity of the ethical, but psycho-therapy to put him in touch with the deep needs of his own soul, which he is refusing to acknowledge, his stifled potentialities.

II. There are various objections to what I have said so far, and in this section I will consider some of them in turn. I will start with Duckles’ claim that for the Judge to argue that A should adopt the ethical because only thus can he achieve continuity in his life will cut no ice with A, since “continuity is itself an ethical value and it is not clear what sort of purchase it will have on an aesthete, particularly an aesthete like A who has explicitly repudiated the value of continuity in favour of the freedom to follow his sensible nature where it takes him.”23 This is really a form of MacIntyre’s claim that ethical arguments can only work on an aesthete retrospectively, and can be answered in the same way; that A doesn’t acknowledge the value of continuity doesn’t mean 22 23

EO1, 290 / SV1 I, 262. Duckles “Kierkegaard’s Irrationalism,” p. 46.

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that he doesn’t need it, or even that he is really unaware of that need. What he needs is to be helped out of the self-deception which leads him to deny or ignore his need for continuity. Let us suppose, then, that A does have a desire for continuity, meaning, narrative unity, etc., and that he even (at some level) knows it. But is a desire for continuity, etc., yet a desire for the ethical? MacIntyre raises this question when he notes that “Davenport and Rudd… both ascribe to Kierkegaard a kind of teleological view that I cannot find in his writings: that it is a central goal of human existence to find meaning and coherence in our lives.”24 To this he objects that “it is not meaning as such nor coherence as such that we have to achieve if we are to become what we are capable of becoming as ethical subjects” but (for Kierkegaard) a very specific kind of ethico-religious meaning. MacIntyre goes on to suggest that Davenport may be assimilating Kierkegaard too closely to the empty authenticity of twentieth century existentialism; and, arguing against what he takes to be my position, he states “to say that a life that does not embody movement towards a telos may be found meaningless, is not to say that the goal of living a meaningful life ever is or could be the telos of a human life.”25 MacIntyre is certainly right to say that I cannot simply pursue “meaning” in all its naked generality; I have to pursue some particular goal or goals which I find meaningful. It is, however, possible to have a desire for meaning in a quite general sense. Finding that my life is meaningless, I may feel an intense need for it to have meaning, without knowing what precisely will give it that meaning, or what form that meaning will take. MacIntyre recognizes this, agreeing with me that someone may “very much want…her or his life to have point and purpose” and that this desire may play an important role in “an agent’s movement towards the discovery of an adequate telos for her or his life.”26 So where do we differ? I think MacIntyre’s concern is that my account would allow for anything to be embraced as a telos – that it reduces the Judge’s advice to saying that A needs to make a commitment to something, no matter what, in order to give his life meaning and stop it from disintegrating. But in fact the Judge is say24 25

26

MacIntyre “Once More on Kierkegaard,” p. 344. Ibid., p. 345. Though I do think MacIntyre himself came dangerously close to saying what he condemns here when he made the claim that “the good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man,” (After Virtue, p. 219). MacIntyre has, of course, come to accept a much more substantive understanding of the human telos since then. MacIntyre “Once More on Kierkegaard,” p. 345.

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ing far more than this; as Lippitt notes, “Judge William’s argument contains far more in the way of substantive normative claims than can be boiled down to talk of the…‘narrative unity’ of a life.” 27 Lippitt is of course quite right about this, and in providing a reconstruction of one crucial thread of Judge William’s argument, I certainly neglected other important aspects of that argument as a whole, such as the Kantian and the religious ones. This was deliberate; in seeking to determine what was of lasting philosophical value in Either/Or, Part 2, I was trying to disentangle stronger and weaker claims that the Judge makes there. The weaker, but still important, claim is that there is at least a minimal teleology in human life, that we need to have a goal or goals of some sort to which we are seriously committed. Even if we don’t think that any goal is intrinsically better than any other, Either/Or can help us to see that we need to have some goal if we are to avoid A’s despairing impasse. (And this claim isn’t quite as ethically minimalist as it might seem, since, as I argued in Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical, the pursuit of a goal, whatever it is, will require the development of certain key virtues.) However, there is no doubt that both Judge William and Kierkegaard himself are (also) arguing for something stronger. They think that our need for meaning will only really be met by our orienting ourselves to a quite specific ethico-religious telos – we need more than just the meaning and coherence that any seriously adopted goal can give us, but rather “that very specific type of meaning and coherence which belongs to the lives of those to whom it is given to stand before God and to acknowledge that they are in the wrong.”28 Judge William does consider the “aesthetic earnestness” which recognizes that one must make some definite commitments in order to make anything of one’s life, 29 and agrees that this can be “beneficial to a person.” 30 But he is clear that this falls short of the ethical. Someone might escape from A’s existential paralysis by committing to Nazism – and might have been motivated to do so by the desire to have some meaning in his or her life. But such an anti-ethical commitment cannot, for Kierkegaard or the Judge, give true meaning or coherence to anyone’s life. 31 For them, there is an objective telos for human life, so, firstly, 27 28 29 30 31

Lippitt “Getting the Story Straight,” p. 39. MacIntyre “Once More on Kierkegaard,” p. 344. See EO2, 225 / SV1 II, 202. EO2, 226 / SV1 II, 202. See the argument of Kierkegaard’s discourse, “Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, that Only the Good can be Willed Wholeheartedly.”

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the meaning of our lives has to be found rather than created, and, secondly, it is possible to think we have found it, and be wrong. All this is correct, and I don’t think I ever intended to deny it. But MacIntyre’s recognition that the desire for meaning can motivate the search for the true telos of our lives is significant, since this can help to solve the problem he raised about Judge William’s argument working only retrospectively, not prospectively. A isn’t admitting to himself that what he needs is to conform his life to the demands of the ethical, but he is aware of his despair and his need for meaning. This sense is still fairly inchoate and general, but it is already enough to motivate him (rationally!) to consider what the ethical has to offer. Hopefully, as he moves towards the ethical, he will come to specify more precisely what it is that he is lacking – which at the moment he can only do in highly general terms. But is A really in despair, so that he can be rationally motivated to look to the ethical as at least a possible cure for that despair? This is another problem MacIntyre raises. He quotes Judge William as saying “So then, chose despair, for despair is itself a choice.”32 But, MacIntyre points out, if A needs to chose despair, he can’t already be in it; and the aesthetic, which is the region from which (decisive) choice is excluded, can’t be characterized as despairing, if despair is the product of choice. MacIntyre is right to remind us of this important passage, but it represents only part of what the Judge has to say about despair. Elsewhere he insists that “every aesthetic view of life is despair and…everyone who lives aesthetically is in despair whether he knows it or not.”33 So there is the unconscious despair of anyone who lives in defiance of the true human telos as well as the despair that is chosen. The Judge however, suggests that A’s despair is different from either of these kinds. He is aware of the vanity and emptiness of the un-self-conscious forms of aestheticism which are directed to the simple pursuit of wealth, status, pleasure, etc. He has despaired of ever finding satisfaction in these ways; he thinks of life as meaningless; but he isn’t willing to fully face his despair and by so doing gain the impetus to move beyond it: You see, my young friend, this life is despair; if you conceal it from others, you cannot conceal it from yourself that it is despair. And yet in another sense this life is not despair. You are too light-minded to despair, and you are too heavy-minded not to 32

33

Quoted by MacIntyre “Once More on Kierkegaard,” p. 341, using Lowrie’s translation of Either/Or; see EO2, 211 / SV1 II, 189. EO2, 192 / SV1 II, 174. This passage obviously prefigures Kierkegaard’s later analysis of despair in The Sickness Unto Death.

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come in contact with despair. You are like a woman in labor, and yet you are continually holding off the moment and continually remain in pain. 34

A is in despair. He is even quite conscious of it; but he avoids really facing up to it by turning the experience of despair itself into an interesting psychological phenomenon to be explored with the detachment of the connoisseur. As a strategy of avoidance, this is precarious enough; A, it seems, can only intermittently distract himself from the pain he feels. All the better for him to accept his own acknowledgement of the inadequacy of a purely aesthetic life as a reason to move to the ethical. A further challenge to this argument, however, is raised by Lippitt, who points out that even if the aesthete is in despair, so too – at least according to The Sickness Unto Death – is virtually everyone else, certainly including Judge William. “Once we have noted this,” Lippitt claims, “it becomes relatively uninteresting to note that A in particular is in despair – or indeed that aesthetes more generally are.”35 Why should A jump from the aesthetic to the ethical, if that is just moving from the frying pan into the fire? It is worth noting here, though, that in The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard, so far from treating the differences between the ways in which different people may despair as “uninteresting,” goes to great trouble to construct a typology of different forms of despair. And I think it is quite interesting to note the differences between a despair that arises from ignoring or rejecting one’s telos and a despair that arises from failing to live up to the telos that one (at least partially) recognizes. Lippitt thinks that Either/Or presents us with two life-views, both attractive in their different ways, but both deeply (if differently) flawed, and gives us no reason to suppose that one is, all things considered, superior to the other. On this view, Kierkegaard is really saying: Neither/Nor; reject both and push on to the religious (and specifically, the Christian). I can’t ague the case in detail here, but I do think this is just wrong. For Kierkegaard the fundamental Either/Or is between the aesthetic on one hand, and the ethico-religious on the other. 36 Once one has accepted that true selfhood is only to be found through 34 35 36

EO2, 205-6 / SV1 II, 185. Lippitt “Getting the Story Straight,” p. 43. Except perhaps in his last years, when he does tend to simply contrast Christianity with everything else, lumped together as “worldliness.” This does seem to me to represent a polemical coarsening of his thought and sensibility, rather than a consequential development of it. See my Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical, pp. 167-169.

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a passionate inward commitment to an objectively existing normative framework that defines one’s telos, one has at least made the decisive move in the right direction. This is not to deny that getting stuck with a watered-down understanding of the telos can be disastrous. And I think this is what Kierkegaard saw Judge William as doing. He has made the commitment to subordinating aesthetic to ethical motives where they conflict, but he is not willing to admit how frequent or deep such conflicts may be. So from Kierkegaard’s own perspective, the Judge is guilty of watering down the demands of the ethical to make it more compatible with the aesthetic pleasure of his conventional bourgeois married life. (And this may mean that a serious religious commitment is more of a live possibility for the disturbed and restless A than for the rather complacent Judge.) It is also true that the despair of someone who really faces the demands that the ethical makes and then recognizes her inability to live up to them can be as terrible as the despair of someone who experiences his life as absurd or pointless. But these are problems that arise when one has at least started to move in the right direction. Indeed, Lippitt’s own comparison of the aesthetic and the ethical can help us – contrary to his intentions – to see the sense in which that latter is an advance on the former. He says, “the Judge’s recognition of the need for commitment in life is an important insight. But one suspects that A too has an important insight: that the Judge does not provide sufficient reasons for why we should commit to what he commits to, that in important respects he mistakes the local for the universal.”37 But the Judge’s insight, as formulated here, is a matter of fundamental principle; A’s insight is merely that the Judge goes wrong in applying that principle. Such a critical perspective can serve a valuable gadfly-like function, stinging ethicists out of their complacency. But it doesn’t suggest that there is anything wrong in principle with the Judge’s fundamental insight, and it certainly doesn’t suggest anything positive that can be set alongside it.

III. One way to explicate the Judge’s argument for the ethical is to appeal to the MacIntyrean notion of “narrative unity.” Neither Kierkegaard nor his pseudonyms make much use of the term “narrative” as such, 37

Lippitt “Getting the Story Straight,” pp. 40-41.

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but there seem to be substantial commonalities between some of their central themes, and the views of recent and contemporary philosophers – such as Paul Ricoeur and Charles Taylor as well as MacIntyre – who have developed explicitly narrative accounts of personal identity and ethics. 38 For a narrative (in this context) is not a mere chronicle, a listing of events in a time-order, but a framework for presenting events in a way that makes sense of them. Opposing the tendency inspired by the natural sciences to explain actions in atomistic terms, Macintyre argues that the concept of an “intelligible action” is more fundamental than that of an action as such; and that what gives an actions its intelligibility is its location in a narrative; a social and temporal context which makes sense of the action. 39 In asking “why did you do that?” I am not just asking for a prior cause (though that is already to introduce the temporal dimension) but trying to understand how that action was an intelligible response to your situation for someone with your goals, beliefs, values, motivations etc. And that is precisely what a narrative aims to do. I have claimed that the Judge’s argument in Either/Or appeals to something like this MacIntyrean sense of narrative intelligibility.40 For a central part of that argument is the claim that A’s refusal to commit to practices or relationships which require a constancy of behaviour over time means that his life is fragmented; there is no coherent storyline running through his life. He does a bit of this, a bit of that, but it doesn’t add up to anything. Accordingly, A lacks any clear sense of his past as being significant for his present actions, or of those present actions as being meaningful through contributing to long term goals he cares about. Most fundamentally, he lacks any sense of his life exhibiting a meaningful pattern, as progressing towards (or even regressing from) the realization of goals that matter to him, whether particular projects, or the realization of the telos of his life as a whole. Lippitt, however, raises two important objections to this stress on narrative intelligibility. He argues that “intelligibility” cannot be the distinguishing mark of an ethical as opposed to an aesthetic life, because “rather few of us cannot tell ourselves an intelligible story

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39 40

See P. Ricoeur Oneself as Another, trans. by K. Blamey, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1992; C. Taylor Sources of the Self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989. See MacIntyre After Virtue, pp. 209-210. See my Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical, chap. 3, and “Reason in Ethics” in KAM.

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about who we are and what we are doing.”41 And he goes on to note that there are other kinds of aesthetic life than A’s – lives lived in pursuit of honour, wealth, pleasure or power, for instance – and that these don’t seem to lack coherence or intelligibility. So, even if one concedes that Judge William does provide good reasons for A to adopt an ethical life, it does not follow that he provides a case for the ethical and against aestheticism in general. As Lippitt says, “we cannot dismiss the aesthetic life in general on the basis of the particularities of A.”42 Taking this second objection first, Lippitt is certainly right that there is more to the aesthetic than A’s attitude. Is it, then, “too hasty” to “proceed as if A’s occasional acknowledgment of his own despair suffices as a refutation of the aesthetic life in general”?43 Well, it would be if that were all we were doing. But Judge William has been careful to discuss a wide variety of types of aestheticism, including, as Lippitt notes, “lives devoted to wealth, glory, nobility or the development of an exceptional talent.”44 And (as we have seen) the Judge argues that all of these lives are, though generally unconscious of it, forms of despair. They are all characterized by simple-mindedness, a kind of naivety, that A himself has seen through as much as the Judge has. A’s aestheticism is thus presented as the ultimate kind; the version of aestheticism into which a maximally acute and self-conscious aesthete will find him or her-self driven to. So – whether or not we are convinced by them – Judge William does have reasons for taking the aestheticism represented by A as the serious challenge to the ethical life, the one that is really worth arguing with – rather than the aestheticism of someone devoted to the unreflective pursuit of money or prestige. Lippitt’s first objection remains, however. If, as MacIntyre and others have argued, one takes narrative unity (intelligibility, coherence) to be necessary for personal identity, how can one also take them to be definitive of the ethical as distinct from the aesthetic? For surely aesthetes are persons too, and, as Lippitt says, even the most happygo-lucky or variable of people can still tell some kind of intelligible autobiographical story. To meet this objection, I think it is necessary to distinguish between senses, or degrees, of selfhood. On the one hand, to be a self is to be a self-conscious rational being who has some narrative sense of his or her past; on the other, it is an ethical ideal 41 42 43 44

Lippitt “Getting the Story Straight,” p. 38. Ibid., p. 37. Ibid., p. 38. Ibid., p. 37. See for instance the Judge’s discussion at EO2, 179-194 / SV1 II, 163-175.

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of autonomy and integration. That selfhood is not an all or nothing status is clearly stated by Kierkegaard throughout his authorship. “[C]onsciousness – that is, self-consciousness – is decisive with regard to the self. The more consciousness, the more will, the more will, the more self. A person who has no will at all is not a self.”45 But the point is also made by Judge William in his comments on self-choice and self-creation that I quoted above. In one sense ethical choice brings into being a subject which did not exit before. But that self is still “himself,” the same person as before. It is a potentiality for full selfhood that is being actualized. Part of what is involved here is identification. An aesthete like A may be as able as anyone to tell an intelligible autobiographical story, but he doesn’t have any strong sense of personal identification with the protagonist of the story. Galen Strawson, perhaps the most influential recent critic of narrative, distinguishes between his inner sense of selfhood (self*) and the public history of the human being Galen Strawson (the GS Self). He is aware of GS’s history, and accepts responsibilities and entitlements arising from it, but he insists that he has no inner sense of being the same self* as the GS who did what he did last year.46 A doesn’t express himself in quite those terms, but they can help us to see the sense in which A lacks a conception of his past as having meaning for him.47 Compare A once again to Judge William. In the Judge’s case, we can make sense of what he is doing by telling a story that explains his current actions by looking back to past events (his getting married, the birth of his children, his appointment as a legal official, his taking on this or that case) and looking forward to the goals which he has developed on the basis of those past events (deepening his relationship with his wife, caring for and educating his children, rightly deciding the legal cases before him, etc.). But it is crucial to note that this isn’t just a story we can tell about him; his own sense of himself as an agent, acting in meaningful ways, depends on his having this sense of his past as significant for him now and for what he is trying to bring about in the future. So a central part of the ethical life is self-acceptance; the taking of full responsibility for what one is and has done and been: 45 46 47

SUD, 29 / SV1 XI, 142. See G. Strawson “Against Narrativity” in Ratio, XVII. 4, 2004. For more detailed critical reflections on Strawson and other recent critics of narrative theory, see my paper “In Defence of Narrative” in European Journal of Philosophy, 2008.

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[A] person who chooses himself ethically, chooses himself concretely as this specific individual, and he achieves this concretion because the choice is identical with the repentance, which ratifies the choice. The individual, then, becomes conscious as this specific individual, with these capacities, these inclinations, these drives, these passions, influenced by this specific social milieu, as this specific product of a specific environment. But as he becomes aware of all this, he takes upon himself responsibility for it all.48

A’s actions, however, lack that framework of reference to a meaningful past and future, because A refuses to see his past as having any binding meaning for him, or his future as having any teleological significance for him, since he has no long-term goals he is trying to realize. Hence he claims that “Not until hope has been thrown overboard does one begin to live artistically” and that “No part of life ought to posses so much meaning for a person that he cannot forget it any moment he wants to.”49 By “forgetting,” he does not of course mean literal oblivion, but the ability to assign whatever interpretation one pleases to past events, and thus to treat them as important or not, according to whim. This is the sense in which A, like Strawson, lacks a strong identification with his past. In sharp contrast, Judge William writes “The healthy individual lives simultaneously in hope and in recollection, and only thereby does his life gain true and substantial continuity.”50 Lacking the “true and substantial continuity” that comes through one’s life exhibiting a coherent narrative, A is in danger of volatilizing his soul, suffering the “disintegration of [his] essence into a multiplicity” and in that way losing “what is the most inward and holy in a human being, the binding power of the personality.”51 What I should have been clearer about before is that the intelligibility in question when defining the ethical isn’t just having a story that anyone can follow; it is this radically first-personal notion of having one’s own past life making sense to oneself as something meaningful, something one takes responsibility for. A crucial element here, which again I should have emphasized more, is the sense of autonomy, of being in control of one’s life. 52 The conformist who adopts the standards of any given social role or social group, and the sensualist who 48 49 50 51 52

EO2, 250-51 / SV1 II, 225. EO1, 292 / SV1 I, 264, and EO1, 293 / SV1 I, 265. EO2, 142 / SV1 II, 129. EO2, 160 / SV1 II, 146. Trying to insist on too much autonomy (especially vis a vis God) is, for Kierkegaard, a form of despair, and he would, I think, criticize the Judge for trying to make himself too much the master of his own life. But this is not to say that he simply rejects the ideal of autonomy in the end. Nothing is more central to the authorship as a whole than his insistence on the need for individuals to take responsibility for their

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simply follows whatever passing desires s/he may have, clearly lack autonomy in this sense. Their lives still have a narrative form, but they are not consciously working to be the authors (more exactly, the coauthors) of their own narratives. Whether or not their lives have a unity then depends, not on them, but on the contingencies of external circumstance. Do they have a complex set of different desires, or are they focused on one overriding desire? Do external events press them into roles where very different kinds of behaviour are called for (the good family man who is assigned to guard duties at the concentration camp) – or do they not? But whether or not their lives are in fact disunified, such people in any case lack the kind of personal unity that a subject makes for him or her self; or, better, they have it in only a low, faltering degree. They are, therefore, inauthentic in Heidegger’s etymologically precise sense – not fully themselves. 53 The problem of the lack of authenticity/autonomy still applies to people who do have ethical principles, but who are half-hearted in their commitment to them, or who see them as governing only one aspect of their lives, but not applying say to business, or politics, or sex. And it is arguably still true of even a very reflective and selfconscious aesthete such as Johannes the Seducer. He is committed to a ground-project with “aesthetic earnestness,” and may thus have a considerable measure of unity/narrative coherence in his life; he may also seem to be radically autonomous – he acts on the basis, not of passing whims, but of (aesthetic) principles he has consciously chosen. However, he is not constrained in the choice of such a project by the consideration that the project is of overriding worth in itself. For the Judge such a person still lacks autonomy, because the project has been chosen either arbitrarily, or on the basis of contingent desires; not because it is recognized as genuinely worthwhile. And hence this sort of “commitment” is somewhat unreal; it is not one that there can be any reason to maintain if one’s desires happen to shift. In other words, the Seducer has nothing that he accepts as having a claim on him. Perhaps he sees his aesthetic standards as having

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own lives, however paradoxically this interacts with his commitment to our need for divine grace. It’s worth remembering that for Heidegger we all start out inauthentic, and that for Kierkegaard we all are, or have been, in despair. The point of Kierkegaard’s sketches of people in the different stages of despair is not to allow us to smugly contrast ourselves with “them,” but rather to get us to reflect on the extent to which we are “them.”

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a claim on him? 54 But what if he becomes bored with them, tired of all this super-refinement? Would he still feel obligated to those standards? Does he experience them as having any authority over him apart from his choice of them? If not, he’s surely in the same bind as MacIntrye (rightly) thinks someone would be if s/he had chosen the ethical on the basis of a criterionless choice. 55 A himself is more problematic. He is neither an immediate aesthete, or a mere social conformist, but nor is he committed to bad values, like the existential Nazi considered above, and it’s not even clear if he is committed to purely aesthetic ones like the Seducer. But neither is he someone who is simply lazy, conflicted or half-hearted about his values. On the face of it, he does seem to be someone without a coherent narrative – he does a bit of this, a bit of that, but none of it hangs together in a coherent way. But it would seem strange to classify him as what Harry Frankfurt would call a “wanton” – someone who has no higher-order volitions, but who simply acts on whatever his strongest current desire happens to be and has no desires for one desire to be stronger than another. 56 Admittedly the wanton is someone who is lacking in will rather than intelligence or imagination, so technically, A might qualify, but it seems unhelpful to lump him together with mere unreflective sensualists. I think, in fact that Either/Or suggests two main ways of understanding A, and I suspect that the contents of Part 1 are arranged to indicate his development from one to the other. For much of the time he seems to be someone who is afflicted by a paralysis of the will, which results from the combination of the enlarged sense of possibility that his intelligence and imagination gives him, and the fear of cutting off those possibilities, which prevents him from committing to realizing any of them. This is certainly the impression one gets from the “Diapsalmata,” which give the sense, in Clare Carlisle’s words, that “the aesthete experiences his life as a dream, populated by ‘pale, bloodless and tenacious shapes,’ a realm of possibilities all equally 54

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See EO1, 437 / SV1 I, 404, where Johannes congratulates himself on having “been continually faithful to…my pact with the aesthetic.” It is true, however, that the Judge does not give very much attention to characters like Johannes the Seducer, who are consciously and defiantly anti-ethical, in a way that A seems not to be. On the whole Either/Or has little to say about evil (it’s significant that the Judge explicitly rejects the belief in “radical evil” (EO2, 174-175 / SV1 II, 157-159), and this does, I think, indicate Kierkegaard’s sense of one of the “limits of the ethical.” See H. Frankfurt “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person” in Journal of Philosophy, 68.1, 1971.

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lacking in the power of actualisation.”57 However, he is not simply a passive victim of fate; as Carlisle goes on to say, “Although Either/ Or’s aesthete speaks of his paralysis as though it were imposed upon him by some external force, his confinement is, of course, internal, and he is only deceiving himself by looking outward for the source of his sorrow.”58 It is A’s fundamental commitment to keeping all his possibilities open by fully embracing none of them that is the cause of his existential paralysis. Elsewhere in Either/Or, however, especially in “The Rotation of Crops,” one has the sense that A has become fully conscious of his previously perhaps implicit commitment to the ultimate value of freedom and living for “the interesting,” and has chosen deliberately to embrace it. Part 1 of Either/Or traces a development. After the Diapsalmata’s overture, we move from the immediate aestheticism that A can enjoy only vicariously, in the medium of art (The Don Giovanni essay), through the deepening melancholy of the Symparanekromenoi essays, to the turning point at the end of ‘The Unhappiest One’ when the successful candidate for that title – someone who cannot be present to himself and can find peace in neither hope nor recollection – is suddenly declared to be, in fact, the happiest of all. A sudden change of tone then comes, with “The First Love,” a virtuoso over-interpretation of a trivial play. Immediately afterwards, we have “Rotation of Crops,” with its advice on how to enjoy life by abandoning hope, manipulating recollection, and never getting too deeply moved by any present moment. (This can be seen both as explaining the strange conclusion of “The Unhappiest One” and as giving the theoretical justification for the arbitrariness in interpretation practiced in “The First Love.”) And finally, we get “The Seducer’s Diary.” The Seducer seems to be someone who has taken the advice of “Rotation” to heart as the formula for a consciously non-ethical life, in which everything and everyone becomes so much raw material to be manipulated and arranged into piquant and interesting patterns. And A – whether or not we take the Diary to be a fictional exercise which he himself had composed – seems seriously disturbed by this demonstration of what his ideas might mean in practice. 59 57

58 59

C. Carlisle Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Becoming: Movements and Positions, Albany NY: SUNY Press 2005, p. 55. Ibid. See A’s remarks in his introduction to the “Diary” (EO1, 303, 310 / SV1 I, 275, 281-282); his unease and disturbance are also noted by Victor Eremita in his “Preface” to the book as a whole. See EO1, 9 / SV1 I, xi.

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If this is right, then A – at least the A of “Rotation,” is in fact someone with a definite life-view, centred on a commitment to freedom and the enjoyment of “the interesting.” So his apparently incoherent, fragmented life really is a coherent self-directed narrative, after all. His apparently inconsistent activities make sense once we tell the right story about them; one which sees them all as parts of A’s project of living aesthetically. But, as Davenport notes, this project is not one that A can explicitly avow to himself; he cannot admit that he has a commitment to avoiding commitment, an overriding project of avoiding overriding projects, without having to thereby recognize that project as self-contradictory. Davenport analyzes A in Frankfurtian terms, not, however, as a “wanton” who lacks second-order volitions altogether, but as someone whose second-order volition is to have no second-order volitions, and who is therefore necessarily in a state of “Aesthetic Bad Faith.”60 Moreover, this overriding project gives only a formal and minimal sense of unity to his life. Once we understand what this project is, we can see why A is seemingly so inconsistent, why he breaks off relationships or projects he had seemed enthusiastic about, why he breaks promises, fails to follow through on stated intentions, etc. But, though we can now understand the meaning his actions have for him, and thus why he has done them, it is still impossible to see them adding up to anything; there is no accumulation of meaning in his life. His actions are intelligible, not so much in relation to his particular past and context, but in relation to the very abstract aesthetic principles set out in “Rotation of Crops.” In an odd way he is like an Act Utilitarian, always acting to bring about what he thinks will maximise happiness in these circumstances;61 his actions are given meaning by their relation to an atemporal principle, not to his own history of past actions and commitments. But, as critics of utilitarianism have pointed out, such merely abstract principles cannot form the basis for a life that the one living it can find meaningful.62

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See J. Davenport “The Meaning of Kierkegaard’s Choice Between the Aesthetic and the Ethical: A Response to MacIntyre” in KAM, p. 96. The difference being that the aesthete is acting on the principle of maximizing his own happiness (and has a much subtler understanding of happiness – the enjoyment of the interesting – than Act Utilitarians typically have). See Bernard Williams “A Critique of Utilitarianism” in Utilitarianism: For and Against, ed. by J. J.C Smart and B. Williams, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1973.

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The crucial issue then, as Kierkegaard sees it, is self-deception. In his picture, we all have some implicit, innate knowledge of the ethical (indeed the ethico-religious) but we are inclined to give aesthetic preferences priority over the ethical when they clash with it. Hence we engage in self-deception; we try to pretend to ourselves that the ethical principles don’t apply here, or they don’t really require me to do that; or we go further, and declare those principles to be illusory and give our allegiance instead to principles of enjoyment, or the interesting, or of power. If we have the talent and temperament for it, we may then deepen our self-deception by developing philosophies which purport to show that such aesthetic or anti-ethical values are more “natural” or “authentic” than the illusory ethical ones, or that ethical values themselves are merely social conventions or subjective preferences. For Kierkegaard, it is true that the aesthetic is the default position in that we are all of course always motivated by considerations of pleasure or interest. But it is also a default in the more sinister sense that we all tend to place aesthetic considerations above ethical ones when they conflict. To be ethical requires a constant, self-conscious struggle against this tendency; becoming ethical is not something that just happens automatically as one grows up. But none of this means that we are ever really outside the ethical, though we may want to be. The aesthetic is where we are but the ethical is where we should be, and this sense of it as our telos is deeply constitutive of who we are, however much we try to repress our awareness of it. So the disorientation and depression that A feels, the guilt that the Seducer or the Nazi may come to feel, would be ways of recognizing the ethical and its authority, breaking through the repression of it that they attempt.

One’s Own Pastor – Judging the Judge By M. Jamie Ferreira Abstract The “Ultimatum” has often been construed as giving us something radically new and qualitatively different from Judge William’s account. I want to offer an alternative reading that makes sense of William’s claim that the sermon says what he has wanted to say in his letters to A, although the sermon says it “better.” I want to suggest that William is giving us a hint about the relation between his view and the pastor’s sermon, when he says that “when a person has reached a certain age he ought to be able to be his own pastor” (EO2, 70 / SKS 3, 75).

The title given by Victor Eremita to the third letter from Judge William to his young friend A, unlike the simply descriptive titles given by him to the first two letters, is a provocative one – “Ultimatum.”1 The title gives the impression that here there is something decisive. 2 And it has often been construed along these provocative lines by commentators who suggest that the pastor’s sermon gives us something radically new and qualitatively different from William’s account. David Law, for example, concludes that “the Pastor’s sermon undermines B’s position,”3 or “begins to lay the conceptual foundations for the

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It is a “Final Proposal/Word,” but in a strong sense, not in the sense of a SlutningsTanke [concluding thought]. George Pattison suggests that EO was “recognized in its own time as an essentially religious book,” and that Victor Eremita chided the reviewers “for overlooking the decisively religious movement of the ‘Ultimatum.’” See “The Initial Reception of Either/Or” in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Either/Or, vol. 4, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press 1995, p. 305; hereafter abbreviated as IKC. Robert Perkins also argues for the “decisive significance of the sermon” in “Either/Or / Or: Giving the Parson His Due” in IKC, vol. 4, p. 208. David R. Law “Wrongness, Guilt, and Innocent Suffering in Kierkegaard’s Either/ Or, Part Two, and Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits” in International

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disintegration of the ethical sphere.”4 Robert Perkins has suggested the pastor’s theme expresses “a whole new view of God and the person that is different in principle from that of the Judge.”5 Joel Rasmussen argues more recently that “William has not fully understood the sermon, for he and the Jutland pastor actually say vastly different things.”6 Rasmussen formulates his view as follows: “In fewer than fifteen pages, this sermon from the heath completely recontextualizes the whole of William’s contribution to religious ethics, and reorients the reader toward a religious life view articulated by neither A nor William.” 7 He suggests that “already in its title…the sermon sounds a radically different note from that of William’s bourgeois Christianity of culture.” He points to the way the Scriptural reference made by the pastor highlights “the opposition between Jesus and the cultural-religious establishment” – paralleling that with the opposition between William’s “brand of religiously legitimated ethics [Sædelighed] and the country pastor’s sermon.”8 He continues: “According to the claim of the sermon, however, if William is right, he is only more or less right, and not right in any absolute sense. But if William’s view is not right in the absolute sense, then it is compromised, since what he wants to claim is the “absolute validity” of his ethical categories. William’s self-confident approach assumes the truth of Christianity, and then derives an ethical life view from his understanding of one particular historically conditioned and culturally accommodating form of Christianity.” Rasmussen suggests that William’s approach to ethics is not edifying because one “inevitably gets bogged down in finite ethical reflection.”9 In contrast to Judge William’s view, “the sermon from the heath emphasizes the negative side instead.” This is, I think, a common view, even though commentators may have different reasons for holding it, or emphasize different aspects of it. I wish to challenge such a view. I want to offer an alternative reading that makes sense of William’s claim to have a strong affinity with the pastor’s position: he suggests that the “Ultimatum” is not a decisive

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Kierkegaard Commentary: Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, vol. 15, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press 2005, p. 345. David R. Law “The Place, Role, and Function of the ‘Ultimatum’ of Either/Or, Part Two, in Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship” in IKC, vol. 4, p. 251. Perkins “Giving the Parson His Due” in IKC, vol. 4, p. 223. Joel D. S. Rasmussen Between Irony and Witness: Kierkegaard’s Poetics of Faith, Hope, and Love, New York: T & T Clark 2005, p. 42. Rasmussen Between Irony and Witness, p. 43. Rasmussen Between Irony and Witness, p. 42. Rasmussen Between Irony and Witness, p. 42.

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one, after all, since he claims that “in this sermon he [the pastor] has grasped what I have said and what I would like to have said to you,” admitting that the pastor “has expressed it better” than he was able to.10 I want to question the common view that there is a qualitative difference between the proposals offered by him and the pastor. (At the very least, such a difference needs to be located more precisely than it has been.) Perhaps William is giving us a hint about the source of the pastor’s sermon when he suggests that “when a person has reached a certain age he ought to be able to be his own pastor.”11 The third letter is really only a brief introduction to its contents – namely, a “sermon” from a pastor friend of William, entitled “The Upbuilding that Lies in the Thought that in Relation to God We are Always in the Wrong.” William begins by suggesting that the substance of the earlier letters, his “attitude,” “position,” and “thought” remain “unchanged,” but adds the somewhat odd note that he hopes “that in time the movements of thought will become easier and more natural for [him].”12 The claim for the continuity of his thought is striking, but William seems to hint that he is still not at home in this position, or that his adherence is not yet spiritually internalized, that he is still striving to feel what he says at such length. Moreover, as I noted earlier, William says that the sermon says “what I have said and what I would like to have said to you,” although the sermon says it “better.”13 This makes one wonder whether the title “Ultimatum” is misleading, since if the sermon is consonant with William’s preceding letters, it cannot represent a new choice in any strong sense. But it is, after all, Victor Eremita’s title and we need to consider the sermon itself to determine whether the sermon adds anything absolutely new to the picture or in any way forces a choice, or whether William is correct in his judgment that this sermon expressed what he wished to have said, or did say but inadequately. At any rate, Victor and Victor’s author seem to want us to stand back and consider whether there is an “ultimatum” and in what it might consist. So the sermon bears further examination.

10 11 12 13

EO2, 338 / SKS 3, 318. EO2, 70 / SKS 3, 75. EO2, 337 / SKS 3, 317. EO2, 338 / SKS 3, 318.

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1. The Sermon The sermon opens, not surprisingly, with a prayer and a Gospel passage. The passage does not have an obvious relation to the title of the sermon. It is Luke’s account of how Jesus wept over Jerusalem because of the fate he foresaw for it, and how he drove the moneychangers out of the temple. (It is worth noting here that the Judge had explicitly referred to this same Biblical passage.14) The pastor’s comment on it reveals that one of his interests in it has to do with the way in which “salvation is hidden,” the way in which what is “best for [our] good” is “hidden from [our] eyes.”15 Later, the pastor will suggest that when we are up built by the thought that we are always in the wrong before God we are “hidden in God.”16 The passage may also be read as calling attention to Jesus’s defense of the church, or, as Rasmussen suggests, to Jesus’s confrontation with the status quo.17 But the more straightforward reading of the emphasis is, as the pastor says, on the fact that Jesus “does not prophesy…he weeps over Jerusalem.”18 This is a message about Jesus’s love rather than about his confrontation.19 The pastor notes that other things in nature do not have the freedom to be “in the wrong” before God; they follow God’s laws necessarily.20 It may seem flattering to construe that freedom as our “perfection,” but the thought that in relation to God we are always in the wrong confronts us more forcefully: because there is no “more or less” or “degree” in relation to God, 21 if we are in the wrong we are infinitely in the wrong. It is interesting, therefore, that the pastor’s sermon does not raise the issue of guilt or repentance or sin, which one would expect to be raised in connection with being in the wrong.22 Instead, 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22

EO2, 239 / SKS 3, 228. EO2, 342 / SKS 3, 322. EO2, 350 / SKS 3, 329. Rasmussen Between Irony and Witness, p. 42. EO2, 342 / SKS 3, 322. The pastor’s comment on the passage as showing the destruction of Jerusalem as a punishment from God bears the unusual addition: “If it happened once in the world that the human condition was essentially different from what it otherwise always is, what assurance is there that it cannot be repeated…” (EO2, 343 / SKS 3, 323). It is not clear why he sees this as an essential change in the human condition. EO2, 346 / SKS 3, 325. EO2, 352 / SKS 3, 331. Note that in UD, Part Three, Gospel of Suffering, the discourse entitled, “The Joy of It that In Relation to God We Always Suffer as Guilty” suggests a distinction between being “always in the wrong” and “always guilty” (UD, 268 / SKS 8, 365),

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the discussion of being in the wrong is cast in a positive and hopeful light – it is an “upbuilding” thought. The exploration of why the thought can be “upbuilding” begins by making an analogy with a human person: if you love someone, you do not want him or her to be in the wrong – rather you would prefer to be the one in the wrong.23 In some sense a concern for the other makes this plausible, but the only way in which it might be upbuilding for us is if we “build ourselves up by the prospect that it will more and more rarely be the case.” 24 Given that “always” being in the wrong would preclude that, it does not account for why it is upbuilding for us. The explanation of why this thought would be “upbuilding” rather than discouraging, why the confession that we are always in the wrong before God should be “joyfully” attended by thanksgiving, 25 has to do with its converse side – namely, “should not the thought that in relation to God we are always in the wrong be inspiring, for what else does it express but that God’s love is always greater than our love?” 26 Being “in the wrong” seems to amount to being in debt to God, and our infinite debt reveals God’s infinite love. Appropriating the thought that we are always in the wrong is parallel to the “duty to remain in love’s debt” that will be developed later in Works of Love.27 The decisive thing is that this thought is a happy one because it combines the thought that “you could never love as you were loved” and the thought that “God’s love is always greater than our love.”28 If this is what the thought means, then it is understandable that the pastor would ask, rhetorically, whether we could wish things were different.29 It would be hard to understand why the pastor thinks there is something “upbuilding” in the thought that in relation to God we are always in the wrong if it did not carry with it the message of God’s love and the promise of the “wisdom” of “God’s governance.”30 David Law suggests that the “main theme” of the “Ultimatum” is “the problem of innocent suffering and how doubt of God’s justice and righ-

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

and between “being in the wrong and suffering as guilty, since it does not follow that a person suffers as guilty because he is in the wrong” (UD, 283 / SKS 8, 379). EO2, 348 / SKS 3, 327. EO2, 347 / SKS 3, 326. EO2, 341 / SKS 3, 321. EO2, 353 / SKS 3, 331. WL, 175-204 / SKS 9, 175-203. EO2, 351, 353 / SKS 3, 329, 331. EO2, 354 / SKS 3, 332. EO2, 351 / SKS 3, 329.

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teousness is to be withstood.”31 But the answer that we are not innocent is not in itself upbuilding. John Caputo suggests that the pastor’s message is that “before the tout autre we are infinitely responsible” – that is, “I can never have a good conscience about having a good conscience.”32 This may be true, but it is hardly upbuilding; it is hardly reason for joyful thanksgiving, hardly inspiring. The pastor realizes that he needs to make the further move to how this implies God’s love. What does the sermon accomplish? Even if one emphasizes the sobering dauntingness of the sermon’s message about being always in the wrong, it remains a hopeful sermon. The pastor mocks the pseudocomfort in the thought that “one does what one can”; the doubt, the anxiety, comes with the question whether this is all that I can do. 33 But he affirms our ability to do what we need to do, because we are loved. The supporting and empowering love of God explains why the thought of always being in the wrong does not “vitiate the power of the will and the strength of the intention,” but rather calms doubts and inspires to action. 34 Being in the wrong is not something we should want to change, but not wanting to change our condition of being always in the wrong does not mean we can be inactive. To be built up by the thought of being in the wrong demands something from us. Moreover, this upbuilding reassurance is not something that we can be “forced to acknowledge”35 – that is, it would not be upbuilding if we did not personally appropriate it and apply it to ourselves. So, the sermon reminds us of our need to act, while reassuring us of God’s enabling love. Two other very important and very positive notions are found in the sermon. First, it is true that being built up is not something that can be achieved and finished, 36 but the pastor adds the remarkable judgment that the thought “that [one] is always in the wrong” is “the longing with which [one] seeks God” and “the love in which [one] finds God.”37 The very longing and seeking God are the finding. Second, although the pastor fails to draw out the implication, given his claim that there is no matter of “degree” with relation to God, 38 he could 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38

Law “Wrongness, Guilt, and Innocent Suffering,” p. 319. Caputo “Either/Or, Undecidability, and Two Concepts of Irony” in The New Kierkegaard, ed. by E. Jegstrup, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press 2004, pp. 15, 17. EO2, 345-46 / SKS 3, 324. EO2, 353 / SKS 3, 331. EO2, 349-350 / SKS 3, 328-329. EO2, 348 / SKS 3, 327. EO2, 353 / SKS 3, 331. EO2, 352 / SKS 3, 331.

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have made explicit that this means that if we are loved at all by God, we are infinitely loved. In sum, the sermon’s contribution is both the sobering message and the hopeful message that infinite debt reveals infinite love, and that our seeking is our finding God. But to answer the question whether and in what way this is an “ultimatum,” we need to ask why William might think that the sermon says what he wanted to say, only better. Is William right, or does the “Ultimatum” put William in question? Rasmussen is right that the title of the sermon “sounds a radically different note,” but once we go deeper than the title, the sermon doesn’t seem to emphasize “the negative side” of anything, but rather, the positive side. So in what follows, I see myself as assembling some reminders, in a Wittgensteinian fashion of doing philosophy – some reminders about depth in William’s account and limits in the pastor’s account.

2. Judging the Judge We could begin to account for William’s judgment that the sermon is consonant with his own views by showing that the sermon offers an elaboration of William’s recognition that the ethical life is a life of action. Remember, William argued against the confusion of the spheres of thought and freedom, 39 and emphasized “duty” and “task” and was deeply impressed by all that is possible “if a person himself wills it.”40 Of course, this similarity may suggest a discontinuity with the sermon. It is sometimes said that the sermon’s sobering message of being infinitely in the wrong serves as a counter-weight to William’s cavalier optimism and sense of autonomy about our ability to fulfill our duty, his “muscular” account of ethics.41 The sermon might seem to differ from what William said because it highlights our anxiety about our ability, and more importantly, because it affirms our ability to do what we need to do only because we are loved by God. But is William really so confident? I suggest that re-reading William’s first two letters in the light of the sermon shows some impor39 40 41

EO2, 173 / SKS 3, 169. EO2, 256-257 / SKS 3, 244-245. Others read the Judge’s ethic as “merely aesthetic, grounded in external measures to which immediate experience becomes habituated, dare I say, obsessively.” See Elizabeth Jegstrup “A Rose by any Other Name” in The New Kierkegaard, ed. by E. Jegstrup, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press 2004, p. 82.

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tant ways in which he puts himself in question long before the pastor does. First, William has a rather nuanced vision of the freedom we have, including its relation to our dependence and our responsibility.42 His emphasis on choice is importantly qualified. He admits that we do not create ourselves;43 “the I chooses itself” is, “more correctly,” construed as “receives” itself,44 and each is an “editor” of himself.45 And if one wonders whether this means he just thinks we have been created by God and then are absolutely free, he makes clear that this is not the case. He points to a dialectic between “absolute dependence” and “absolute freedom” when he acknowledges that “since he has not created himself but has chosen himself, duty is the expression of his absolute dependence and his absolute freedom in their identity with each other;”46 “every human being develops in freedom, but he is also aware that a person does not create himself out of nothing, that he has himself in his concretion as his task.”47 Even “the highest in aesthetics” is only the product of one who “in the most profound sense feels himself creating and created.”48 William’s emphasis on our createdness reveals an on-going “absolute dependence.” And such dependence is expressed in his claim that God “has loved me first.”49 He refers to all he has “received as a gift of grace from the hand of God.”50 This sounds rather like the pastor’s notion that “you could never love as you were loved” for “God’s love is always greater than our love.”51 Second, William radically qualifies his own power, claiming that one would be “mistaken” if one would “feel able to finish the course under his own power.”52 This is not the language of someone who thinks he can do it all on his own. His confidence is tempered; emphasis on absolute choice does not imply absolute human autonomy. He rejects the not-so-subtle “attempt to deceive God, to sneak into something for which it thinks it does not need his help, and entrusts itself 42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

The repeated references to “task” and “responsibility” show the constraints of choice. EO2, 215, 258 / SKS 3, 207, 246. EO2, 177 / SKS 3, 172. EO2, 260 / SKS 3, 248. EO2, 270 / SKS 3, 257. EO2, 332 / SKS 3, 313. EO2, 137 / SKS 3, 136. EO2, 216 / SKS 3, 208. EO2, 238 / SKS 3, 228. EO2, 351, 353 / SKS 3, 329, 331. EO2, 34 / SKS 3, 42.

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to him only when it feels that things are not going well otherwise.”53 He rejects the idea that the person who has “chosen himself infinitely” says: “Now I possess myself; I ask for no more, and I meet all the ups and downs of the world with the proud thought: I am the person I am.”54 Such a person has, William says, gone “astray.” William’s letters, therefore, do not offer a homogenous account of the ethical in terms of autonomy and confidence – the judgment that “I myself am the absolute,”55 and that each man has an “immanent teleology”56 and is “his own providence”57 must be held in tension with his acknowledgement of our “absolute dependence”58 and his claim to be a “humble instrument” of “divine providence.”59 William puts his autonomy in question long before the sermon does. Third, William has already put himself in question even more radically by acknowledging the relevance of “guilt” and the need for “repentance” and “forgiveness.” When William acknowledges that he is not the creator of himself, he also acknowledges guilt: “only when I choose myself as guilty do I absolutely choose myself, if I am at all to choose myself absolutely in such a way that it is not identical with creating myself.” 60 Caputo suggests that the Judge “makes the wrong choice by not choosing to be in the wrong,”61 but the Judge actually goes further and chooses himself “as guilty.” But more importantly, William repeatedly affirms the role of repentance: the “love with which I love God…has only one expression in language – it is ‘repentance’”; in repentance, one “finds himself in God.”62 Indeed, “as soon as I love freely and love God, then I repent,” and “if there were no other basis for repentance as the expression of my love of God, it is this – that he has loved me first.”63 He contrasts the tragic hero’s torment with the experience of loving God in repentance: 53 54 55

56

57 58 59 60 61 62 63

EO2, 36 / SKS 3, 43. EO2, 230-231 / SKS 3, 221; my emphasis. EO2, 213, 224 / SKS 3, 205, 214. He says the two phrases “I myself am the absolute” and “I choose the absolute that chooses me” have “exactly the same meaning” (EO2, 213 / SKS 3, 205). EO2, 274 / SKS 3, 260. He explains this as meaning that “he does not exist for the sake of any other person” (EO2, 275 / SKS 3, 262). EO2, 282 / SKS 3, 268. EO2, 270 / SKS 3, 257. EO2, 13 / SKS 3, 22. EO2, 216-217 / SKS 3, 208. Caputo “Either/Or, Undecidability and Two Concepts of Irony,” p. 15. EO2, 216 / SKS 3, 207. EO2, 216 / SKS 3, 208.

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“I am not the tormented one who can be proud of his sufferings; I am the humbled one who feels my offense; I have only one word for what I am suffering – guilt, only one word for my pain – repentance, only one hope before my eyes – forgiveness.”64 Finally, he adds: “the tears the aesthetic sorrower sheds for himself are nevertheless hypocritical tears and are of no avail; but to feel one’s own guilt is actually something to cry about, and there is an eternal benediction in the tears of repentance.”65 He adds that “the Christian view attributes everything to sin, something the philosopher is too aesthetic to have the ethical courage to do.”66 Obviously, this is the standard Christian vocabulary and William may merely be mouthing it.67 But at least he speaks about guilt and repentance68 and forgiveness and sin,69 whereas the pastor never does. Fourth, I’d also like to suggest why William’s emphasis on “choice” as the hallmark of the ethical does not imply a muscular act of willpower that is unilaterally active. Although the term “paradox” is not used by William, the concept is integral to his description of choice. The “perilous” transition from aesthetic to ethical70 is a paradoxical performance because “choice here makes two dialectical movements simultaneously – that which is chosen does not exist and comes into existence through the choice – and that which is chosen exists; otherwise it was not a choice.”71 In other words, “it is, for if it were not I could not choose it; it is not, for it first comes into existence through

64 65 66 67

68

69 70 71

EO2, 237 / SKS 3, 227. EO2, 239 / SKS 3, 228. EO2, 240 / SKS 3, 229. Perkins finds the Judge’s view of repentance sadly lacking, implying that the Judge does not see forgiveness as God’s gift but as the causal result of a repentance I can achieve by myself, without needing divine assistance (“Giving the Parson His Due,” pp. 218-219). But repentance must be free – it cannot be forced on us – and I think the Judge sees everything as God’s gift. He actually refers to two of Kierkegaard’s favorite themes: every good and perfect gift (EO2, 98 / SKS 3, 101) and “the sinner whose many sins were forgiven her because she loved much” (EO2, 55 / SKS 3, 60). It should be noted that Perkins does go out of his way to be as appreciative of the Judge as possible, noting pros and cons. Julia Watkin provides support for the view that William is not merely mouthing these things, in her “Judge William – A Christian?” in IKC, vol. 4, pp. 120-124. Repentance: EO2, 175, 218, 224, 232, 237, 241, 247, 251, 258, 270 / SKS 3, 171, 209, 215, 222, 227, 230, 236, 239, 246, 257. Sin: EO2, 91-93, 111, 240 / SKS 3, 94-96, 112, 229. EO2, 232 / SKS 3, 222. EO2, 215 / SKS 3, 207.

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my choosing it, and otherwise my choice would be an illusion.” 72 In choice a person paradoxically transforms himself – a person “remains himself, exactly the same that he was before, down to the most insignificant feature, and yet he becomes another, for the choice penetrates everything and changes it.”73 The point of saying that someone “becomes another” is lost if he ceases to be at the same time the same self, for then “he” would not be becoming another – there would be a different person rather than a transformed person. The ethical task – to “become what he becomes”74 – is a paradoxical task. Choice involves maintaining a tension between his actual self and his ideal self, a task for imaginative appropriation: “The self the individual knows is simultaneously the actual self and the ideal self, which the individual has outside himself as the image in whose likeness he is to form himself, and which on the other hand he has within himself, since it is he himself.” 75 Only imagination can enlarge the horizon of possibilities through presenting the ideal self as an “image” of what is not yet actualized: “What he wants to actualize is certainly himself, but it is his ideal self, which he cannot acquire anywhere but within himself. If he does not hold firmly to the truth that the individual has the ideal self within himself, all of his aspiring and striving becomes abstract.” 76 William’s description of what and how one chooses is of a paradoxical transition that is facilitated by imagination. Imagination is called for whenever we have to “infinitize” anything and, for William, one’s “finite personality is now made infinite in the choice, in which he infinitely chooses himself.” 77 Moreover, imagination is called for to apprehend possibility as well as to see “possibility” as “his task.” 78 To see as a demand what could otherwise be seen (by you or others) as a neutral possibility relies on an imaginative “seeing-as.” Choosing is not a simple act of fiat from out of the blue – rather, “already prior to one’s choosing, the personality is interested in the choice.” 79 Choosing is a decisive engagement with a possibility that captivates you. When William says he “chooses himself as guilty,” 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

EO2, 213-214 / SKS 3, 205. EO2, 223 / SKS 3, 213. EO2, 178, 225, 226 / SKS 3, 173-174, 215, 216. EO2, 259 / SKS 3, 246-247; my emphasis. EO2, 259 / SKS 3, 247. EO2, 223 / SKS 3, 213. EO2, 251 / SKS 3, 240. EO2, 164 / SKS 3, 161.

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or that he chooses himself absolutely, we need to remember that he wants the idiom “Choose yourself” to be construed as “a collecting of oneself, which itself is an action” such that the one who chooses “penetrates his whole concretion with his consciousness.”80 William takes the emphasis away from volition or voluntarism, and puts the emphasis on freedom. But even his notion of choosing in freedom is nuanced. This is clarified by his criticism of the mystic. He criticizes the mystic, not for choosing himself, but because “he does not choose himself properly; he chooses himself according to his freedom, and yet he does not choose ethically. But a person can choose himself according to his freedom only when he chooses himself ethically, but he can choose himself ethically only by repenting himself, and only by repenting himself does he become concrete, and only as a concrete individual is he a free individual.”81 He adds: “He does not become concrete either to himself or to God…he lacks transparency….Not until a person in his choice has taken himself upon himself, has put on himself, has totally interpenetrated himself so that every movement he makes is accompanied by a consciousness of responsibility for himself – not until then has a person chosen himself ethically, not until then has he repented himself.”82 “To choose oneself is to repent oneself” – and he contrasts this with aesthetic repentance and with metaphysical repentance.83 In other words, I think William has a deeper notion of choosing than that of an act of fiat or deliberate and uncontextualized will-power. So William’s notion of choice does not support a claim to absolute autonomy. It is an emphasis on freedom, but freedom can be exercised in a response to something or someone. In fact, the pastor has an equally strong emphasis on freedom. He contrasts an “infinite relationship with God” with “an infinitely free relationship with God.”84 He writes: “He is in an infinite relationship with God when he acknowledges that God is always right; he is in an infinitely free relationship with God when he acknowledges that he is always wrong.” But he has made it perfectly clear that it is not upbuilding to acknowledge “that God is always in the right,”85 so interestingly, he is here accenting the free80 81 82 83 84 85

EO2, 258 / SKS 3, 246. EO2, 247 / SKS 3, 236. EO2, 248 / SKS 3, 236. EO2, 248 / SKS 3, 237. EO2, 352 / SKS 3, 330. EO2, 350 / SKS 3, 329.

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dom of our relationship with God as a dimension of acknowledging that we are always in the wrong. If we reconsider the letters, it becomes clear that the idea of the “religious” is not introduced by the sermon. It was present from the beginning in William’s account, present in several ways: first, in the claim that “in the religious, love again finds the infinity that it sought in vain in reflective love,”86 and second, in terms of his explicit commitment to “a harmonious unison of different spheres. [Love] is the same subject, only expressed aesthetically, religiously, or ethically.” 87 William suggests that “a religiously developed person makes a practice of referring everything to God, of permeating and saturating every finite relation with the thought of God and thereby consecrating and ennobling it”; he immediately adds in parentheses that “this comment is, of course, oblique here.”88 This obliqueness is probably a feature of every reference to religion that he makes in his letters, because there is no attempt to develop the distinctiveness of the religious since this is not necessary to achieve the specific task he has set out for himself in relation to his friend, A. The realm that both William and the pastor share is the realm of the ethical-religious. William’s references to “God” permeate the first letter, and God is characterized in important ways. Early on we find references to a God who is said to be “incomprehensible” (not because of our cognitive limits but) because he is a God of love and “his love is incomprehensible.”89 William sees this as due to the greatness of God’s love – indeed, God “loved me first.”90 He also affirms that “nothing is impossible for God.”91 His understanding of God is not an abstract one – God loves “earthly love” and is concerned with our earthly welfare.92 He writes, “a person is supposed to love God with all his soul and all his mind…but it by no means follows that the mystic is supposed to reject the existence, the actuality, in which God has placed him, because he thereby actually rejects God’s love or demands another expression 86 87

88 89 90 91 92

EO2, 30 / SKS 3, 38. EO2, 60 / SKS 3, 65. Love’s “proper dialectic” involves “the idea of its passionate struggle, of its relation to the ethical and the religious” (EO2, 18 / SKS 3, 27); “We have now placed the first love in relation to the ethical and the religious, and it has become clear that its nature would not need to be altered thereby” (EO2, 48 / SKS 3, 54). EO2, 43 / SKS 3, 50. EO2, 15 / SKS 3, 24. EO2, 216 / SKS 3, 208. EO2, 30 / SKS 3, 38. See EO2, 20, 50 / SKS 3, 29, 56.

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for it than that which God wills to give.”93 “It is not in this sense that one is to love God more than father and mother; God is not that selfish. Neither is he a poet who wishes to torment people with the most horrible conflicts, and if there actually were a conflict between love of God and love of human beings, the love of whom he himself has implanted in our hearts, it would be hard to imagine anything more horrible.”94 William’s God is a God who “became flesh” 95 and we find in the first letter numerous specific and positive references to Christ and to Christianity. The pastor’s sermon and William’s letters both may be said to be representative of Christianity in that respect. Whatever these passages mean, they give reason for William to claim his affinity with the sermon. I suggest that William thinks that the sermon says what he would say, what he wanted to say, because William did in fact say it many times. That is, I think it is true, although it is not immediately obvious, that the sermon says what the judge tries to say.

3. The Judge/Pastor’s Limits It is important to note, however, that although William uses all these words – religion, God, Christianity, guilt, repentance, forgiveness, sin – there is a limit to what they can mean. Of what does William repent exactly? Where does his guilt arise? The limit to what his guilt and repentance can involve is implied in his claim that “the religious is not so alien to human nature that there must first be a break in order to awaken it.”96 But there is nothing in the sermon to indicate such a “break” either. That is, there is no reason to think that the pastor’s “religious” view involves more. The notion of “always being the wrong before God” does not involve any qualitative break. David Law has argued that the commonality between the pastor’s title and the title of the fourth discourse in the Gospel of Sufferings, Pt. 3 of Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, “The Joy of It that we are Always Guilty before God,” shows the potential richness of the Pastor’s position. He writes: “We might say that the pastor’s sermon has now [in UD] been placed 93 94 95 96

EO2, 243-244 / SKS 3, 232-233. EO2, 245 / SKS 3, 234. EO2, 40 / SKS 3, 47. EO2, 89 / SKS 3, 92.

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in its proper context”; B was “mistaken in seeing the pastor’s sermon as an expression of the ethical sphere, for the pastor’s sermon hints at the ultimate dissolution of the ethical sphere.”97 However, this is reading back into the pastor’s position, and this does not seem justified. Moreover, Law’s understanding of the difference between “being in the wrong” and being “guilty” actually shows a huge difference between the two claims. Law claims that one can be guilty even when one is in the right (as in Job’s case), whereas being “in the wrong” is a matter of having different standards from God. Moreover, Law himself concludes that wrongness is a category of immanence and can be discovered by human inwardness, but guilt is a category that needs to be revealed by our comparison with Christ.98 This would imply that the Pastor’s sermon does not “hint at the dissolution of the ethical sphere.”99 Both the Judge and the pastor mention Christ, but neither gives any reason for seeing Christ in terms of the transcendence that will be made clear later in Kierkegaard’s writings. So, as I see it, the “Ultimatum” does not seem to force any choice that was not already offered by William. The relation between the two can even be considered complementary, a question of different accents: admittedly, the pastor’s sermon develops the notion of God’s infinite love for us and our infinite debt to God, but the Judge’s letters contain the counterpoint of being created in love, and the notions of absolute dependence, guilt, repentance, and forgiveness. (And this makes it difficult to claim that the “Ultimatum” “emphasizes the negative side,” as Rasmussen suggests.) It does not work to say that the Judge is self-confident in his power, emphasizing human autonomy, because the Judge acknowledges his own limitedness. A careful reading of the Judge’s remarks prevents us from saying that the “Ultimatum” gives us a decisively new religious picture – whether as the God in relation to whom we are always in the wrong, or as the God of infinite love. What is true is that the “Ultimatum” develops the notion of God’s love and our infinite indebtedness, but these notions were also part of the Judge’s ethico-religiousness. What might distinguish the “Ultimatum” is its claim that “only the

97 98

99

Law “Wrongness, Guilt, and Innocent Suffering,” p. 341. Law “Wrongness, Guilt, and Innocent Suffering,” p. 342. Law writes: “the guilt described in the fourth discourse is of a different order from the wrongness of the ‘Ultimatum’ and the guilt of religiousness A. The guilt in the fourth discourse is Christian guilt” (p. 344). Law “Wrongness, Guilt and Innocent Suffering,” p. 341.

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truth that builds up is truth for you,” but that is not decisively religious. This has implications for a general reading of Either/Or, because it keeps it as a two-part book.100 The “Ultimatum” remains part of the second alternative. One can assume that there was no need, and no attempt, to distinguish the ethical from the religious at this point in the authorship; that discrimination would come gradually. But if one keeps the book in two parts, it is important not to read the “either – or” in the wrong way. In my view, Either/Or is provocative because it does two kinds of things: (a) despite the title, it presents the possibility of a harmony of the spheres of existence rather than their mutual exclusion, and (b) at the same time, it presents the possibility that despite this harmony, there is still a qualitative difference in the way, the “how,” of the esthetic and the ethico-religious.101

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Note that in Point of View, he writes that Either/Or was a “poetical emptying, which did not, however, go further than the ethical,” confirming this in a footnote claim that “the transition made in Either/Or is really from a poet existence to existing ethically” (PV, 35, 78n / SV1, XIII, 526, 563). For more on this see my Kierkegaard (Chapter 2) forthcoming in the Blackwell “Great Minds” series.

Remaining True to the Ethical? A New Letter from Assessor Vilhelm, with Commentary By George Pattison Abstract The article describes the discovery of a document that is identified as a new letter from Assessor Vilhelm to A, written in the 1860s, at a time when both men’s circumstances have changed considerably since their first literary encounter in 1843. The letter raises important questions for how we interpret the ethical, as that is presented in Either/Or, but also, indirectly, raises questions for our assessment of A and his aesthetic point of view.

I may be unusual, but, as my friends know (and a careful scrutiny of my accounts would confirm), I believe one of Copenhagen’s main attractions to be the presence, right in the city centre, of an archipelago of marvellous second-hand and antiquarian bookshops. It is one of the features of the city that gives it such a distinctively human feel, compared with the recent development of British city centres, where the only book-shops that remain are the large chains, with their coffee bars, celebrity author signings, and late-night Harry Potter events. This, you might say, is just one more example of Copenhagen’s exceptionally sane culture of urban living, a culture that ensures that the city centre remains residential as well as commercial, local as well as cosmopolitan, and that the human scale of buildings and streets is not rejected for the sake of the sublime excesses of the architectural style favoured by contemporary multi-national corporations. I am starting to digress – though perhaps in a way not unconnected with the reflections to which I shall shortly be introducing you. To go back to the bookshops. In addition to the joys of stepping down into one or other cellar whose shelves are packed and floors piled with sets of Danish classics and every imaginable kind of ephem-

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era, and savouring that cool, slightly musty smell that always emanates from such shops, there is also – if one is lucky – the occasional treat of a Dutch auction in the hall of Helligåndskirken. Of course, not having an inexhaustible budget, I prefer to wait until the days when prices dip to 100 kroner per volume, but even then one can usually rely on something of interest and use, if not of value, turning up. Hope springs eternal in the human breast, it’s said, and it’s true that there is a part of me that always hopes to find a treasure that has somehow overlooked by the professional eye of the bookseller and the many bibliophiles who have preceded me. And there are tales, if not of an inscribed Kierkegaard first edition but of early editions of Hegel or curios such as a book inscribed by Peter Rørdam. The truth is, of course, that by the time the prices have dropped to 100 kroner, the best one can hope for is the curious rather than the rare, or a decent enough edition of a classic – one of those neat pocket-sized hardback Gyldendal editions of Paludan-Müller or Johannes V. Jensen – to fill a gap in the collection. Only once have I found something I believe to be truly exceptional, and that is what I now wish to share with you. It was three years ago, and I’d been rummaging for about twenty minutes amongst the piles of Colin Dexter and Lev Tolstoy in Danish translation. Having a side-interest in Copenhagen itself in the nineteenth century, over and above its being the site of that remarkable authorship we are here to study, I paused to leaf through a two-volume work on the city, published in the late 1870s. It was what we would now call a coffee-table book, produced for the idle half-hours that bourgeois life is so ingenious in generating. It was in rather tatty condition, but several of the illustrations were particularly nice, and I was beginning to hum and hah, to wonder whether, if I bought this, could I also buy that, and did I really want to fill my luggage with what my wife – a librarian – would certainly consign to the dustbin if it had been offered to her library. Occupied with these thoughts, I continued to flick through the pages. Inside the back cover of the second volume there was something jammed between the pages that prevented the book from being fully closed. On a closer look, this turned out to be a dozen or so pages of hand-written paper, and, on a still closer look, I could see that it was written in the archaic Gothic script of Kierkegaard’s time. I have to admit, that I’d always found this exceptionally hard to read, and it struck me that it could be a rather good exercise to have something like this to study at leisure and get up to speed for work on Kierkegaard’s own manuscripts, if occasion should ever arise. But did I really want the book? I had, in fact, already purchased Peter Tudvad’s

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by no means lightweight volume on Kierkegaard’s Copenhagen, and what with a bottle of aquavit and a couple of presents for my family, did I really have room for two bulky volumes in rather bad condition? Not wanting this presentation to turn into the kind of self-baring exercise encountered in that scene in Dostoevsky’s Idiot in which the characters entertain each other with accounts of their vilest acts, I must nevertheless confess that I only resolved my questions by a ruse of which I am still today not a little ashamed – and it may be that sharing the contents of my discovery with you today will go some way to expiating the guilt of that small but shameful deed. Of course, I could easily come up with any one of innumerable self-justifications, and, certainly if I had passed on and done nothing these few precious pages would by now have been tipped into some incinerator or recycling plant or whatever happens to the mountains of unsold books at the end of these auctions. In any case, I had no idea at the time that I was dealing with anything of any value, in any sense of the word. Be the balance of innocence and guilt what it may, I did what I did – namely, to slip the papers inside a much smaller, neater, and entirely ordinary volume of J. P. Jacobsen’s Niels Lyhne (that I’d shamefully never read at that point), presented it to the young woman on duty at the door and went out into the seething crowds of Strøget – how many of whom, I asked myself, would have even the slightest interest in a few scraps of dirty old paper covered in Gothic scrawl! It took me some time to get round to working on the papers. One of my students had found me a table correlating Gothic and Roman letters, and when I really set to, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was getting the hang of it more readily than I had supposed. I was even more surprised by the content of what I now found myself reading. It is, of course, possible that the progress I found myself making with the script was itself a reflex of the interest of the content – as I have often found in reading works in foreign languages, when the force of the narrative or the flow of the argument carries one along despite the limitations of vocabulary and grammar. In any case, each line I read seemed only to increase my surprise, I might even say awe. For, as I became increasingly convinced, what I had before me was a further chapter, a new primary source, in a literary saga with which we here are all familiar and which, indeed, is one of the great literary, cultural, philosophical, and even religious events of modern times – the work we know as Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. How so? How could one speak of a new primary source for Either/ Or if we are not speaking about a new manuscript in Kierkegaard’s

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own hand? And let me say at once that, for reasons which will become clear, I do not think this could possibly be a long-lost piece of original Kierkegaardiana. The answer is perhaps more surprising than if these had indeed been a new-found writing sample from the master himself. For, as I read on, it became clear to me that this was a new, hitherto unknown third letter from the man we know as Assessor Vilhelm, sent, like the previous two, to his unnamed correspondent, ‘A’. However, as soon becomes apparent from the letter itself, this is no simple continuation of the correspondence collected in Kierkegaard’s Or. It postdates those letters by about twenty years and, in terms of content, indicates what Kierkegaard himself might have called a ‘breach’, a break – arguably not complete, but nevertheless striking and dramatic – with the circumstances and the life-view of that Or. This, I think you will come to agree, is no longer exactly the same Assessor Vilhelm we all know and, for the most part, do not love: the complacent, bourgeois familyman, pillar of society and defender of a conformist, watered-down, soft-pedalled Biedermeier version of Christian faith. The break, however, is not complete, and some of the old character traits are still discernible in the new situation in which the Assessor now writes. He is still not, perhaps, ‘a new creation’ in all respects, though we might see him – in the spirit of Romans 8 – as a ‘new creation’ groaning and travailing in the birth-pangs of the old. I say ‘the Assessor’, but, as you will hear, we should now speak more accurately of the ‘ex-‘ or ‘former Assessor’. Nor is he the only one to have changed. The passage of twenty years has not left ‘A’ untouched, and, as has so often happened with Romantic poets, rebellious loafers, and aesthetic idlers, we are now dealing with a successful lawyer, domiciled with wife and five children in a capacious villa to the north of Copenhagen, a man of affairs and substance. I shall not further pre-empt the matter of the letter, except to say two things. The first is that what follows is, obviously, my translation of Vilhelm’s words, and even my limited experience of translation has convinced me of the truth of the saying that ‘every translation is an interpretation’. If I have not sought to translate Vilhelm’s words into the idiom and thought-world of what is sometimes referred to as ‘modern international English’ but into my own quirky and idiosyncratic English (unduly influenced in this case, I suspect, by the great impression made on me as a young Kierkegaard reader by Walter Lowrie’s rendition of the Assessor), I have to concede that what I am offering you today is, in a certain sense, not a text of the nineteenth century

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but of the twenty-first. Nor can I entirely suppress the thought that, as I came into possession of the text by a kind of theft (a fate to which the Assessor’s writings seem to be repeatedly subject), so too, in translating it, I might have stolen Vilhelm’s ideas as well as his words and replaced them with my own. Secondly, although I have undoubtedly, however unconsciously, brought Vilhelm’s words up to date, there are subtle shifts in his own style, including a marked conciseness in comparison with the rambling thoughts and periods of Either/Or. Occasionally the old loquaciousness breaks through, but there is now a terseness or a concentration in the style and, one suspects, in the man that makes this, indeed, something different. There is, finally, one more thing before I turn to my main business, which is to share with you my translation of Vilhelm’s third letter and which I have, provisionally, entitled ‘Remaining True to the Ethical’. It is this: the letter is unfinished and, indeed, breaks off in mid-sentence. This invites speculation. Was the letter never finished (and therefore never sent)? Did the recipient perhaps destroy the conclusion on account of the content, overwrought, perhaps, by the confrontation it set in motion between his young self and what he had become? Or was he perhaps so unconcerned by the re-appearance of one he might well have regarded as merely a silly old man that he left it lying around to be dispersed by the winds, or the careless hands of a child or servant? I do not think there is any possible evidence that could decide such questions, but, when I have finished my reading, I shall return in conclusion to the issue of the archival value of the letter, and its relation to how we might understand it. And so, the prologue ends: the play begins.

My young friend… How strange it is to write these words once more, after so many years have passed and so much has changed – you will at once note that I no longer even write on official paper! In truth, you are no longer young – though, as I observe, you are still youthful – but old habits die hard, and even today this is how I think of you: ‘my young friend’. It is indeed possible, that you are, in a way, even younger today than you were at the time of our previous acquaintance if, as I surmise, you have learned to relinquish the pose of god-like omniscience to which you once aspired and, as I hope, have also learned something from the laughter of your children.

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But what is ‘young’, what is ‘old’? I am now what many would call an old man, a grey-beard, yet whereas I once took a certain pride in being older than you, if not so much older in years yet, as I put it at the time, ‘ethically matured’, I now see no advantage in what is called ‘maturity’ if it does not free us to become as little children. Of course, you would not need the great powers of irony you once cultivated with such virtuosity to turn this phrase back on me in such a way as to imply that I am indeed crossing the threshold into a second childhood. That, at least, is what you might conclude if you read to the end of this letter. For though I shall attempt not to burden you with overlong and self-indulgent ramblings (something I may once have been guilty of in the days when I was so confident of my ethical probity that I dared to present myself to you as a kind of teacher or guide), and though it was never my ambition to arrange my thoughts into anything that could be called a system, I fear that I may no longer be capable even of producing anything that is at all coherent. For it is not only my outer circumstances that have changed so greatly: my inner world too has undergone a kind of metamorphosis – and one I had not counted on. And whilst from time to time I sense a crimson thread of continuity between my old self and what I am now (merely old, or, in an inexplicable manner, new?), I can no longer presume to be the author of that continuity nor even fully to understand wherein it consists. Yet I do believe – and I remain a man eager and willing to believe – that these reflections are not mere straws in the wind [Danish: Strøtanker], strewn hither and thither to no purpose; still less are they wilfully fragmentary, like those ‘Diapsalmata’ you yourself wrote those many years ago, fragmentary thoughts revealing and self-indulgently perpetuating a fragmentary life. Don’t worry! I’m not about to start ticking you off again. As you know, and as I shall explain further, I am in no position to do that. In any case, I suspect that you yourself now take a harsher view of your aesthetic years than I ever did. I imagine you at some dinner, subtly turning the conversation in another direction when one of your contemporaries, smiling at you with that kind of watery-eyed sentimentality that you always despised (and not without reason), starts to reminisce about those far-off days. And I think you would make such a diversion not merely because you know that experiences, thoughts, and ideas of that kind are all very well for youth, but are also best left to youth and become inevitably somewhat odious when taken up by old men, but also because, in your case, there are probably acts of which you are ashamed. I sense that in you. And though – be reassured! – this letter is not about you (least of all – I insist – is it intended

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to scold you!); I might hope that if it does have any effect on you at all, then it will be to encourage you to live at peace with that sometimes rather malicious young man you once were. But why then am I writing? There is nothing now I wish to reproach in you, nor am I in a position to reproach anyone, past or present, for faults no greater than those I have learned to see in my own life. Am I perhaps seeking to justify myself in your eyes? Such an idea might seem natural enough. After what I wrote before, and in the light of all that has happened since, it would be all too understandable for me to do that. And I cannot be entirely confident that such a motive is entirely absent. But if you read this as an apologia pro vita sua, then do so mindful of the ancient sense of the word ‘apology’: for this is not an exercise in offering excuses but simply a deposition – a testimony, if you like – to what I have lived through, what I have learned and am still learning from that, and written in the hope that you too, of whom, as you know, I was always inordinately fond, might learn something from it. I no longer aspire to instruct you, but nor am I asking for your pity. The life I have lived is the life I have lived, and whether there is a judgement over and above the judgement of men and of one’s own conscience, or whether the only judgement we are to dread is that found on this ‘bank and shoal of time’, I do not intend to make matters worse by an excess of self-pity, still less by hiding behind the pity of others. There are no alibis in being, and we must face up to being who we are and how we are as best we can. You must forgive me! This is starting to sound dreadfully serious, and whilst I have always extolled a certain kind of seriousness, I am now, as I always have been, appreciative also of the humorous side of life. So, please, listen to this ‘apology’ not as responding to an indictment (for who amongst us could be the judge of another?), but as a communication from one human being to another, from a human being bewildered by but learning from the passage of time and events, struggling with the limits of powers and intentions that we all have in common, ‘perplexed but not driven to despair…struck down but not destroyed’, and not forgetting, even in the most serious moments, the virtue of a smile. As Dr. Kierkegaard might have put it in his beautiful and consoling book on love, I write to you as like writing to like, seeking only to build up, in love, and for no other reason than love, and I do so gladly, rejoicing that our chance meeting has provided an occasion for me to address you in this way. First, maybe, I should say something about that meeting. How long had it been since last we met? It had been a long time – no doubt

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about that, maybe even twenty years. I must admit some fault in our estrangement, thinking that you had been complicit in passing on my letters to Dr. Kierkegaard and thus in making public certain remarks that should have been kept private. I also suspected that you had a hand in the theft of another rather cherished document that found its way into his possession and from thence made its way into print. But let me say I never lost interest in your doings or your career, nor was my interest without sympathy. I heard how you volunteered to fight in defence of the Duchies, which admittedly surprised me, although I have no doubt you cut a dash in your cavalry uniform and that your gallant patriotism did little harm to your subsequent career. However, I do not mean to tease and, in truth, our relations became so attenuated after our correspondence had so indiscreetly been made public that I do not know whether soldiering was merely one more role you tried on, or whether you were truly moved by the desire to serve something greater than yourself. If so, I salute you, for though war is never the harbinger of any lasting good for men, it is a great, if terrible, teacher in selflessness, and many a loafer has become something more through the selfless service of his country in war’s dreadful hour. Perhaps, after the love of a good woman, this is the commonest and most effective route whereby such transformations are effected. And yet I dread the advent of a new war, such as some are now starting to talk about. Did I see you in the multitude that gathered for Dr. Kierkegaard’s funeral? I thought at the time I spotted you in the crowd, which somewhat surprised me, since I have no doubt that you have never relinquished your aversion to the mob, and the kind of crowd that assembled on that occasion and the grotesque display that followed would have been as abhorrent to you as it was to me and would have been to the Doctor himself. Perhaps it surprises you that I myself was there. But though it is true that I was not a little offended by the manner in which he had made our correspondence public (and made quite a reputation for himself in doing so), I had subsequently learned to take comfort from some of his more upbuilding writings, and, in the degree that I became a kind of fellow-sufferer, I could guess at the compulsion that made him work out his inner truth in such an extroverted way and was thus able to think more kindly of him. I am digressing again – the short point is that it is many years since I last wrote to you or since we had any contact at all. Indeed, it is many years since I wrote anything of any substance to anyone. I am well and truly out of practice, and fear that I will only with great difficulty

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get round to what I wish to say. So, I shall leave the question as to our last encounter unsettled, and return to the present. You, of course, probably rarely visit the rather poor neighbourhood in Amager where I now dwell, further removed from your villa in Østerbro than the mere measurement of distance would suggest. I, for my part, do not have so many occasions to cross into the city and it was no great matter that brought me there last Tuesday, though I doubtless persuaded myself that it was. Without some good reason, I do not often go far outside the few poor streets that have become my world, except once or twice in the summer months to visit a relative in the country, where I am able to breathe the fresher air of the woods and sea. And if I pause in my wanderings, it is not solely because my physical powers are failing (when it comes to walking, I am still able to outwalk many a younger pair of legs, though I have nothing to boast of with regard to my eyesight, my digestion or my sleep). Rather, it is the memories that flood back to me in every street, on every square, in faces and people that seem unchanging whilst I have changed so much – like the old peasant woman in the checked scarf who, every week, has been selling her basketful of produce in Højbroplads for as long as I can remember: she was an old woman when I was a young man, and she is still there, seemingly no older, though I wonder how much longer her basket of onions and carrots will continue to be so wonderfully replenished! Such sights arouse in me a nostalgia by which I am often overwhelmed. It is not, let me hasten to say, nostalgia merely for my own youth, now so long vanished, nor even for the happy days when I was so blissful in my marriage and so proud of my little flock of children. It is a nostalgia for the human race, a nostalgia for us all, that all our lives are indeed being carried along like bubbles on a stream, bubbles that burst so soon and leave only air. And when I see something – or someone, like that old woman – something that seems to abide in the midst of this dreadful flux, so much the more conscious do I become of how all is constantly passing away, for all of us, all of the time. It is a paradox I cannot explain, but I feel it deeply. I am no Socrates, but my associates have often come upon me standing and staring, as Socrates, it is said, was wont to do: staring at nothing, as they think, but, as it seems to me, staring into the infinite mystery of time itself, a mystery no man can plummet. And so you found me, ‘loafing’ it may have seemed, where Østergade debouches into Kongens Nytorv, looking across, as I recall, at the Theatre in which we have each spent so many hours of delight: yours, I gladly concede, more refined and nuanced, but mine not less pleasur-

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able for all my lesser endowment with regard to the aesthetic – nor, in recompense, have I suffered the same extremes of displeasure that have doubtless afflicted your well-tuned aesthetician’s sensibilities when some piece has misfired in conception or execution. I earnestly hope that your change of life has not dimmed your love of the theatre, and I hope with all my heart that you too have now experienced the joys of sharing with your children (five, I’ve heard?) in the merriment of a pantomime or other performance that may well fall short of the highest aesthetic criteria but that, in its ‘immediacy’ (as one used to say), bestows laughter and tears that are truly cleansing. Perhaps you were walking home (you were always a practitioner as well as an eloquent advocate of the old saying qui ambulat salvus erit) and you were well into your stride when you caught sight of me. You can imagine that I have become rather skilled in the interpretation of such situations. I could almost rival your alter ego, the seductive Johannes, in finding opportunities for interesting situations in chance encounters on our city-streets. The situations that interest me, however, are – needless to say – of quite another character than those that drew his imperious eye. My chief claim to being a connoisseur of such encounters is in my ability in distinguishing in a flash between the following four kinds of erstwhile acquaintances: those who really haven’t noticed me at all simply because they notice nothing of their surroundings; those who really haven’t noticed me at all because, seeing me, their mind censors what the eye sees with a rapidity too quick for thought; those who do indeed notice me before quickly veiling their eyes and acting as if they are entirely innocent of my presence; and those who, noticing, conclude that the best way to deal with me is the slightest touch of the hat or nod of the head, the very slightest flicker of the eyes, but in such a way as to shut the door on any further intercourse. I do not say that all judge and condemn me, though some may. Rather, I believe that my existence among them is a somehow painful, I am a superfluous man, a real-life character from a drama that has gone out of fashion, a fool rather than a scoundrel, whose pronouncements on what he so solemnly called ‘the ethical’ were to be cast in a quite different light by the comi-tragedy of his life. (I here use the expression I found in another of Dr. Kierkegaard’s books, a work, in which he once more held me up somewhat to ridicule by publishing a misappropriated private document. The expression, which, he himself may well have invented, differs from tragi-comedy in that in comi-tragedy no truly great issue is at stake; it is a tragic outcome of a comic situation and of comic characters who lack the inner greatness

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of a truly tragic subject – and that kind of greatness, then or now, is certainly nothing I have ever claimed for myself.) Seeing you approach, I also saw at once that I had not escaped your eye, which, if it does not sparkle quite as maliciously as once it did, has by no means grown dull. I could also see – and perhaps you did not even notice this yourself – a slight flicker of uncertainty and an almost imperceptible pause in your stride, a momentary irresoluteness that you nevertheless instantly suppressed and – magnificently as well as magnanimously, I thought – raised your hat, greeting me by my title and family name. And then – which I scarcely dared expect – you spoke. I do not remember your exact words, but they were somewhat as follows: ‘It’s good to see you…all these years…time passes for us all…I trust you are keeping well …’ To which I replied with equal brevity. Then, touching the brim of your hat, you headed off with a crisp but courteous, ‘Farewell, then, old friend…I hope it’s not so long before we meet again.’ It was all little enough, but after what I have experienced in the world these last dozen and more years, it was water in the wilderness, you struck the rock – and look what gushes forth! It would have been easy enough for you to pretend not to have seen me (and you could certainly have carried the pretence off better than many), or merely to have tipped your hat. No word was necessary, but a word was nevertheless spoken. Unless you are in no way the man you were, I trust that you too will have been fully aware of the significance of that moment. With a history such as ours, not to have ignored or repulsed me is, in effect, to have invited me to speak, and so, I speak. But do not fear, I shall not demand from you the burden of any reply, nor of any further intercourse. I wish merely (as I have put it) to bear witness that, in my inner man, and despite all ill repute, I am still able to boast in my weakness, and, in my way, and if only in hope, remain true to the ethical I once expounded to you at such length. Nor do I do this with the aim of selfjustification, but rather to assure you and encourage you to find every joy and confidence in the life I see you now leading – I am repeating myself, I know, but then we have both learned more than a little from Dr. Kierkegaard’s amusing yet powerful little book about what even the simplest repetition can mean, and if, from time to time, I repeat myself too much, I have the further excuse of a lack of epistolary practice and of the forgetfulness of age. Although we have not seen each other in many years, we have not been unaware of each other. I knew of how, after your service in

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defending the cause of our little country against its ever more powerful neighbour, you entered the law, of how your career progressed, meteor-like it seemed – far beyond the mediocre achievement of my own legal practice; of how you married a young lady of aristocratic connections that she herself graced by virtues of mind and person (indeed, someone told me that you now spend your summers on the estate of a Swedish duke, but that is mere gossip and I mention it only to hint at my continuing interest in your life). Many are now predicting a rise in one or other of the ministries, although I do not know if that is what you wish for yourself – I am sure it is there to be had, if only you wish it. I was always admiring of your many and great gifts, and by no means begrudge you the full exercise of them now, at an age you may justly regard as the peak of your powers. As for my sorry tale, it is only too well known. The first catastrophe – a divine punishment on my presumption maybe, were one vain enough to imagine the divinity stooping to take notice of literary affairs – was the sudden and, for me, devastating break-up of my marriage. Indeed, I had made written boastfully of my wife, and she was, and is, a woman anyone might justly boast of. But how imperceptibly, in writing, we slip from praising another’s virtue to making that virtue our own, as if we ourselves are the ones to whom that virtue really belongs! It is as if the writer puts a stamp of ownership on everything he approves. And so, in holding her up as an example I had, by that very act, stolen something from her and belittled her. Not that I think the reason for her leaving me was merely that, through Dr. Kierkegaard’s thievery, she had become a figure of public comment, still less that I had been made somewhat ridiculous in my literary protestations of love (I am, I admit, no Shakespeare nor even a Christian Winther). The reasons – and the more I think of this, the more sure I am that it is true – were in our marriage itself, in a fundamental disequilibrium that she rightly observed and acutely suffered, all the time that I was smugly enjoying what I took to be the perfect balance of our lives. You have heard my views on women’s emancipation, and you might well imagine that I could have persuaded myself that she had become a victim of our unethical times, a silent sacrifice to that inexorable levelling process that is undermining all distinctions between noble and base, ruler and ruled, male and female – yes, and even between good and evil. I have little doubt that some prophet will soon arise to tell Europe that we have now progressed beyond the age of good and evil, that the sole remaining law of mortal kind is for each to do what is right in his own eyes. Nor do I have any doubt that men will fall

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down and worship such a prophet, translating his words into all the languages of the world, and making him their new Messiah. Perhaps I exaggerate, but thinking as I do – as I did – it was easy for me to think of her and, through her, of myself, as a sacrifice to the voracious Moloch of levelling, and so to rage against the times as if the responsibility were not hers and the fault were not my own. Rage I certainly did. That she had not only left me, who loved her so much, but taken from me the children, whom I almost idolized (although I had not known the extent of my idolatry when I saw them day by day) wounded me to the quick, and like a wounded animal I paced my solitary cage and roared to the silent, unresponsive night. Let me interject one small thing in my favour here. It would have been possible, not least with the advantage of my position in the law, to fight her for the children, and to have maintained the innocent party’s right – the husband’s right – against the marriage-breaker. I did not. The details of that time are now confused in my mind, and I cannot swear that it was out of magnanimity or from a belief that the bond of mother and child should take precedence over that of husband and wife. Maybe her leaving had simply drained all strength from me, as if my world had simply ceased to be and I had become unable to fight. If that is so, then my restraint was not, after all, ‘in my favour’ in any moral sense. On the contrary, it all the more revealed how I, the worshipper of gods who were no gods, was a mere nothing when once my gods had been taken from me. And so, I lay wounded, and I raged. For the wounded and the raging, there is only one hope that seems to count, and, untrue as it is, its promise never fails: forgetfulness, no, more than forgetfulness: oblivion. And, as all the world knows, the surest route to such oblivion is the bottle. I am no adherent of the new science of social statistics, and yet I believe that the quantum of alcohol consumed in the world would be a surer guide to the real quantum of despair that is amongst us than the musings of moralists and essayists. Look at that quantum – and despair, for you will surely see that, rich and poor, king and commoner alike, we are close to drowning in an ever-rising tide of hopelessness. I have come through that period of my life, and I look back on it without bravado and with not a little shame. I, who had so confidently proclaimed the power of resolution, the sovereignty, under God, of the human will, ran like the commonest sailor to humanity’s most universal and vulgar nostrum – only I should not libel the sailor, who, after all, earns his drink through exposure to the fiercest extremes of nature’s powers and who has little enough reward besides.

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There were, it is true, good friends who sought to warn me or, seeing my ears were deaf to warnings, to hold me back. But who can catch a man who has fallen from a great height and is already half-way down, gathering momentum all the time? It soon became clear that I could not continue in my position, and as was entirely predictable, the loss of my wife and children was followed by the loss of my post, my servants, my house, and such little fortune as I had inherited from my father. It is all gone and will never return. After the years in which I lived almost as a beggar, eating, drinking, and lodging on credits I had no means of paying, my present position is comfortable. I make do. If it is the fruit of an ethical life-view to be as content with second-best as if it were the best, I can at least now claim to be as content with fourth or fifth best as with the best I once had. I write letters to officials for my scarcely lettered neighbours, I advise on the sale of plots of land, or how to have recourse for minor torts. I give a little teaching in Latin. I help their cause, and they know how to be grateful. I shall not weary you with the story of how my downward path once more took an upward turn. Intimations of the continuing solicitude of my wife, the memory of my children and the thought of what I yet owed to them, the kindness of strangers, not least amongst the poor whose company I now so often shared and, let me say it, the words of the Bible, words I have never learned to read as a scholar but which touch my heart as they touch the hearts of all those who need them: Come unto me all that travail and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest, and I will give rest even to those lilies and birds that do not work, that have no great possessions or achievements to their name, yet are blessed with the Father’s every good and perfect gift. I am not a preacher and will speak no further about this. I am sure I do not need to. These words are known to all, even though not all believe that they are addressed to them. Perhaps it is true that it is only as sufferers that we can truly learn all that they have to say. I cannot make another hear them by shouting from the rooftops or by increasing eloquence or knowledge (were I able to do such a thing). But if you ever have need – as I pray you don’t – you will surely know where to turn, where there are truly ‘words of life’. And let me assure you, that they are ‘words of life’ to those who read them in solitude, no less than to those who proclaim them all-too loudly in their holy gatherings. For I am not surreptitiously exhorting you to go and mix with this or that set of those who claim the copyright on their true interpretation. Do not misunderstand me, I have no wish to deny the comfort these words offer to any who stand in need of them, and our human weakness

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takes many forms. Some need noisy hymns and noisier sermons. The vulgar will not be saved by the subtle works of dialecticians, though where a truly Christian spirit is at work in a dialectical mind, a truly simple Christian spirit will, I believe, see and understand, and will not reject the dialectician. If you are still such a one – take comfort! Nor, I might add, will the truly Christian dialectician scoff at the truly simple Christian soul. To cut a long story short, a way back, or, to be precise, a way forward, a way out of the complete confusion and corruption that my life had become was opened for me. I emphasize, ‘was opened for me’, for it was not the result of any resolve on my part. It is true that, in a way, I did choose the path that was opened up for me, but even that choice can scarcely be described as an act of will. It was rather as if I simply saw it, saw it for what it was, and having seen it, did what any sensible person would do and began walking. There was no fork in the road calling for my decision. There was only the emptiness behind me, and before me, suddenly, a road. At each uncertain step it was the hands of others that kept me upright and stopped me falling back into the abyss. A dialectician might say: and yet you walked! I cannot deny it. I walked, and I believe that I am walking still, even if, from time to time, I feel unsteady in my tired legs. Yes, I walked, and I walk – but I thank God, and, in God, all those kind helpers. It is no work of mine. Once, I recall, I told you that a man should think of his life as if he were acting in a play that had been written by God. Such a one would not imagine himself as his own creator, but as merely repeating the lines provided by his author. I do not disown what I was struggling to say there, but I am no poet and my analogies and similes have often been all too clumsy and so too, I think, in this case. For in the world of the theatre, it is on the actor that all eyes are fixed, it is the actor and not the playwright whom the crowd hoists shoulder high and carries through the streets in jubilation. The actor is the one to whom all eyes are drawn, the tremors of whose voice thrill manly and feminine hearts alike. And when I wrote those words, was I not really implying that perhaps I might be such an actor: the one standing centre-stage, whose life would be an example to all, an inspiration and goal for others. ‘I, the little hero of each tale,’ as Young, that severe but pithy teacher of melancholy so aptly put it. In a way, my view was maybe even more prideful than the egotism of the poets, for where the poet claims only his own sublime spirit as the source of his beautiful images, I was implying that God himself was the author of the beautiful image I imagined my life to be. What pride!

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Pardon me for mentioning Dr. Kierkegaard again, but he it was who bound our lives together with bonds that even time itself can scarcely undo and I believe that he can help me explain what I am now wanting to say rather better than I can do unaided. In recent years, I have become ever more appreciative of his many upbuilding writings, although even these are sometimes marred by that one-sided spirit that broke out so venomously in that last, sad year of his life. Somewhere, in one of these, he too uses the image of the theatre, and speaks of God as a kind of critic, sitting in the darkness of the auditorium and judging the performance that we humans carry out on what England’s great dramatist so excellently called this stage of fools. Yet I do not entirely agree with Dr. Kierkegaard. For I do not now think of God either as the author of my life nor yet as its judge. An author, perhaps, and a judge perhaps, but that great work, that story he is engaged in unfolding for us in time and history, is not a story that ever merges entirely with any one human story. With one unique individual’s story perhaps – but that one’s life is also a life we cannot now see in its entirety, and even if we knew all that could be known about him, it was the life of one who was amongst us not only as a servant but also a stranger, one we could never emulate, never imitate in all that he was. There is a story, then – a drama, if you like – and we are indeed responsible for working it out, building one another up in love, as so many so ceaselessly do, writing it along with God, we might say. For God is no longer out there in the dark, as a silent and absolutely demanding critic, nor is He exactly in us, as the secret author and controller of our lives, but somehow He is amongst us, building us up, as we build one another up, sharing the making of our play, or letting us share the making of his. It is neither a matter of God out there and us in here, in our patch of worldly light, nor of God in us and we becoming the manifestation in time of his eternal spirit. Neither the same nor different, we (we human beings and our divinity) weave together a dance whose steps have never before been tried. He calls to us as we call to him: our voices blending, merging, separating, echoing, fading and then, once more, resurgent. The pattern is not whole yet, is scarcely discernible, but sometimes, in a patch of light, it can be glimpsed, far off, infinitely beautiful. How profoundly I feel my lack of practice in these speculations, and whether it is good for me to be trying my hand at such things again or not, I am unsure. I hope that I am not entirely untrue to the ethical view of life I once proclaimed, but I hold to it more humbly, as befits

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one who has learned too much about his own ethical weakness. So I write now, not to declare or to expound, but rather in order…. Here the manuscript ends, and I too must finish. The question with which it left me was not simply how it might have continued – the quondam Assessor has, after all, already told us several times why he is writing this letter – but what I was to do with this document that through my rather unethical act had been so wonderfully given me. Am I to keep it? To sell it? To donate it to an archive – and, if so, to an archive in Minnesota, in Budapest, in Oxford or, as many would think most fitting, in Copenhagen? Am I, in any case, really the rightful owner that I might keep, sell, or give it? But who in any case would be helped by these few scraps of paper? I do not think that ‘the original’ holds any great secrets. There is nothing – is there? – in the physical marks of ink and paper that can help us understand Vilhelm’s words any better. And even if I had read to you today from his Danish text, would that really bring us any closer to what he has to say to us? For even if the Danes among us would not then need to translate, they, like the rest of us, would still need to interpret. But how can any of us interpret it, if we ourselves are not engaged by the questions with which this man of the nineteenth century was wrestling? Hasn’t our world moved on so far from his, that his quasi-religious ethical questions no longer have the force they clearly did for him? We, it seems, have journeyed much further into the domains of relativity – the relativity of culture, language, and history, as well as the relativity of the basic dynamics of the physical universe. Do we still look for any kind of pattern, purpose or meaning in our lives since we learned the thrills of whitewater canoeing down cascades of infinitely shifting signifiers? Is all of this ‘about’ anything at all? And if we are once able to find our way into the Fragestellung of the text, does it matter whether the text in question qua manuscript was written ‘by’ Assessor Vilhelm, Søren Kierkegaard, or whether I am the victim of a hoax or whether, in fact, the whole thing has been made up by me – though whether either I or a putative hoaxer could have thought of and executed such a thing without the assistance of both Assessor Vilhelm and Søren Kierkegaard is highly improbable. Even in such a case, one could still argue that either the Assessor or his author was the actual originator of the piece. Such reflections led me, in the end, to consign ‘the original’ to my shredder, leaving no recoverable original to answer such questions as scholars like to ask. Nothing now remains, and I have in a small way freed the idea from its historical roots to let it live, if it can live at all, from the oxygen of our common

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concern for what it is to be human, here, now, on an overheating planet in these strange years after the end of history. And what, precisely is that ‘idea’? It can perhaps best be formulated as a question, and the question is, simply, this: is it possible to remain true to the ethical, once we have learned that we, as the individuals that we are, have neither the insight nor the virtue that would make us adequate as living representatives of an ethical view of life, and, if we cannot be that, dare we even put ourselves forward as advocates of such a virtue? Vilhelm’s answer, it seems, is a tentative Yes – but his letter also signals to the price that such a Yes might exact. In any case, whatever his answer, it need not be ours. Once more, face to face with the testimony of one sometimes referred to as the Judge, we must judge for ourselves.

Detached Note on ‘A’, ‘B’, and Kierkegaard I hope it will not contradict the spirit of my closing comments above, to add a few thoughts – which cannot, of course, be binding on the interpretation of the Assessor’s letter – regarding, firstly, what we learn about ‘A’, and, secondly, the implications of the letter for our reading of Kierkegaard. As far as ‘A’ is concerned, the letter confirms a suspicion I have long nurtured (but which one is sometimes rather inhibited from speaking aloud), that he is actually rather less interesting than his seductive self-presentation might suggest. Of course, the letter gives us few enough facts to work on. We do not know whether ‘A’s change of life has been the result of some ‘great earthquake’, a violent conversion of his whole moral and personal framework, or, on the other hand, whether he is still (in his own mind at least) playing an ultra-refined aesthetic game, in which the forms of law and politics have merely replaced those of operas, ideas, and books. Nor do we know whether he has now become a loyal adherent of the People’s Church, or whether he has embraced the cause of cultural radicalism. We do not even know whether he is faithful to his wife, or whether, alongside his role of pater familias, he lives a second life of secret passions and affairs (although that, of course, would be entirely normal for many nineteenth century bourgeois men). Yet, whatever the answers to these more particular questions, to the extent that the papers collected in Either/Or now seem to represent a position that was, in the end, merely a phase, their claim to offer a credible existential alternative to the ethical view of life must be considerably weakened. If all that

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was being expounded was an inability to choose, an immaturity that had not yet found the courage to commit – rather than an existential decision in favour of non-commitment – then ‘A’s papers constitute a pose rather than a position. University teachers, at least, have seen far too many young men (and perhaps some, albeit probably fewer, young women) who have created an analogous image amongst their student contemporaries only to emerge a few years later as pillars of the establishment. A period of ironic disillusion may even have become a kind of rite de passage amongst certain groups in modern society – but to the extent that an ‘aesthetic stage’ à la ‘A’ thus becomes commonplace, it become proportionately less interesting. Perhaps more important than these rather general thoughts, is the question as to the implication of the letter for our reading of Kierkegaard. The Assessor himself seems to suggest a certain approximation of his new view of life to that of, e. g., Works of Love. An immediate and obvious question is whether such a transition from the ethical to the religious is conceivable and, if so, whether it is possible to concede a significant level of continuity between the two positions. In becoming what he now is, has the Assessor abandoned the position he set out in Either/Or, or has he simply deepened the religious element implicit in that position (as in his talk of dependence on God and repentance), and which he had attempted to indicate by sending the letter from his pastor friend to ‘A’? Another, related, question is to ask whether our view of the ethical in Either/Or may not be unduly coloured by those elements in the literary portrayal of the Assessor that most contemporary readers seem to find off-putting: does holding an ethical view of life have to involve the kind of priggish and pompous self-satisfaction that many readers see in ‘B’? To the extent that life itself has now largely stripped Vilhelm of these negative features, and if we also believe that he is still remaining true to the ethical, then the answer would seem to be No. Being ethical may take many forms other than those we encounter in the concrete figure of Vilhelm itself. The possibility of confusing the ethical as such with its actualization in Vilhelm’s bourgeois righteousness is, of course, much heightened by the very success of Kierkegaard’s ‘literary art’. The very strength of Kierkegaard’s characterization muddies the waters of philosophical interpretation, and obscures the real links between a ‘merely’ ethical view of life and the ‘radical’ view of later representations of the religious. But we might also ask whether, in fact, the position we now see Vilhelm as holding (or, as he puts it, testifying to) is actually identical

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with Kierkegaardian religiousness. For it is striking that in his new letter the Assessor seems to profess a kind of agnosticism regarding the ontological foundations of his new faith, and his God is scarcely the sovereign, all-commanding God we encounter in Kierkegaard’s religious writings. Can Kierkegaardian faith survive that kind of weakening, or does it depend on a robustly realist conception of the all-powerful and eternally unchanging God? From what he writes in the letter, Vilhelm is, on the one hand, prepared to let go of claims concerning the metaphysical basis of religious belief (not that he puts it like that, of course!), but still seems to find an important place for religious language: ‘God’ still seems to play an important part in his life, and there is nothing in the letter that prevents us from imagining him as a faithfully communicating worshipper in Vor Frelsers Kirke – indeed, there is perhaps much that might move some to regard him as a ‘better’ (since more humble) Christian than in earlier times. We should also note that for both Kierkegaard and Vilhelm (although we have only a small textual basis for this assertion in the latter case), whatever is to be said of God is crucially to be related to ideas of incarnation: that the God seen in Christ is in some way normative for our God-experience and God-talk. The question as to whether Christian faith can survive the kind of metaphysical weakening we see (or I, at least, see) in the letter is, of course, not a question that relates solely to the interpretation of this particular text. As a question that has become prominent in our own time, it is a question not only as to the compatibility of the Assessor’s (now) ‘weak’ faith with Kierkegaardian religiousness, but of the very viability of Kierkegaardian religiousness itself. If we are unable to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest the edification offered by Kierkegaard’s religious writings in such a weakened mode, then it seems that the heritage of those writings will be split between those who assimilate it to a realist and maybe even fundamentalist kind of Christianity and those who use it as an exemplary source of ethical and psychological reflections from which the ‘religious bits’ have been assiduously deleted. In my view, such a choice would be a far more serious weakening of the Kierkegaardian heritage than the affirmation of Kierkegaardian religiousness that has been reformulated in a post-metaphysical horizon. In favour of the latter would also be the role that Kierkegaard himself and, in his new letter, the Assessor give to the incarnate God, a God who is the antithesis of any kind of religious triumphalism. I have already said too much and am in danger of trespassing on my own injunction that each reader must judge for him- or herself. All I

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hope to have achieved in these notes, is simply to have highlighted the questions that I myself find most interesting in the letter I have shared with you. Others will not only come to different conclusions regarding these questions, but will want to ask entirely different questions. And that is as it should be.

Either/Or in Denmark By Steen Tullberg Translated by Paul A. Bauer

Either/Or is one of the few Danish literary works of world renown. It is without a doubt the best known and most read of Kierkegaard’s works and thus this work that has had the greatest and broadest appeal. The breadth of the appeal can be seen in Either/Or’s reception, where the work has been made the object of analyses and interpretations far beyond the circle of theologians and philosophers and has been a source of inspiration for countless artists. The title alone and the authors of the two parts – the aesthete and the ethicist – are the rare sorts of concepts that not only have found their way into works far removed from the source literature, but they have become part of the cultural soil, springing forth in unexpected places. F. J. Billeskov Jansen has written that we relate to a work of art in two ways. Initially, we are primarily absorbed in understanding its significance and subsequently we assess its worth. We ask what the work means – and what it means for us. This natural oscillation between interpretation and estimation reoccurs, according to Billeskov Jansen, in the Danish literature dealing with Søren Kierkegaard and he presents Georg Brandes’ monograph from 1877 as the principal explanatory text and Harald Høffding’s book Søren Kierkegaard as Philosopher from 1892 as the principal evaluative text.1 In the following, a number of important interpretations and evaluations of Either/Or are presented from the last 150 years of Kierkegaard literature in Danish. The subject matter is in part structured with a view to some polemical themes and the impact it has had, but it is principally a presentation of selected interpreters’ accounts of the 1

F. J. Billeskov Jansen “Æstetikerens æstetik” in Muserne er kærlige søstre. Samspil mellem kunst og litteratur, Copenhagen 1992, p. 44.

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work. It falls into five chronologically ordered sections: a section that covers the period 1860-1920, a period in which the biographical-psychological and the historical-philosophical accounts of the humanists Brandes, Høffding and Vilhelm Andersen dominate; a section that covers the period 1920-1950 and surveys the spectrum from the liberal theologian Eduard Geismar’s ethical focus through Frithiof Brandt’s examination of Kierkegaard’s personal history and on to the Buddhist Johannes Hohlenberg’s negative opinion of the work; a section that covers the post-war period 1950-1980, from Billeskov Jansen’s and Aage Henriksen’s aesthetic analyses to Niels Barfod’s review of the Don Juan texts from the perspective of intellectual history; and a section that surveys the literary criticism of recent decades, 1980-2005. Finally, a small section that traces the contours of the significance of Either/Or for Danish fiction writers concludes this review.

I. 1860-1920 Georg Brandes An over-arching trait of several of the treatments of Either/Or that will be emphasized in the following is the great impression it made on its recipients, who often made their first acquaintance with Kierkegaard through precisely this work and at an early age. One of the most enthusiastic mentions comes from the founder of Kierkegaard studies, Georg Brandes (1842-1927), who in his book from 1877, Søren Kierkegaard. En kritisk Fremstilling i Grundrids (Søren Kierkegaard: A Critical Exposition in Outline), tells of the impression the work made on him: If we wish to vividly imagine the mighty impression the book made on its contemporaries, then we can merely recall the effect it had on ourselves at first reading. For my part, I was 18 years old the first time I got my hands on it, and I still remember the overpowering impression. Never before in Danish literature had I met such superiority of spirit, such strength of intellect and (as it seemed to me then) such worldly experience. I had – just like Either/Or’s contemporaries had, my head full of Heine’s essays and poems, the deepest and most justified content of which I – again like the book’s contemporaries – did not understand, but whose defiance for the sake of defiance enthralled me. I had for several years been strongly absorbed in Lermontov’s interesting, but for a boy ill-suited novel A Hero of Our Time, whose man-of-the-world air struck me, whose courage, modesty, ennui, chill and doubt of the protagonist I thought made him a kind of depressive and seductive ideal – then I met in Kierkegaard this far more profound and far more consistent execution of that book’s basic themes, saw

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what lay behind them, where they led and heard them receive their sentence, with which I was forced to agree with all my heart. 2

Brandes’ words are at first directed at Part 1 of the book, but he continues by describing how excited he was at the time by Part 2 and also mentions how Hans Brøchner (1820-1875), his old and admired teacher, had been overwhelmed by the wealth of ideas contained in the work, which set his thoughts in motion like no other work since Hegel’s Logic. Either/Or is first treated seriously in Brandes’ epoch-making work in a section (chapters 8-15) in which Brandes, on top of an explanation of Kierkegaard’s special qualities based on his childhood experiences, strives to show how the philosophical-literary works from 1841-1843 are connected to Kierkegaaard’s own life in the same period. Kierkegaard’s engagement is central to understanding this connection, which, according to Brandes, is the event that concentrates Kierkegaard’s productivity and gives direction to his imagination. His engagement is conceived of as a red thread that can be traced through several works and the transformations of which describe a movement from Clavigo and Marie Beaumarchais in “Silhouettes,” through “The Tragic in Ancient Drama Reflected in the Tragic in Modern Drama” and Judge William’s letters, until they finally take on religious proportions and touch upon the category of the paradox in Fear and Trembling. One of Brandes’ main points is that the material in Either/Or already lies in embryonic form in the conclusion of Kierkegaard’s dissertation, The Concept of Irony (1841). According to Brandes, Kierkegaard in his treatment and criticism of Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde strives, as does the whole edifice of Either/Or, to achieve two ends; to annihilate the contemporary form of moral laxity by striking exactly at its supposed strong point, that is, in the area of aesthetics, by showing it less as immoral than as unpoetic; and to defend and celebrate the religious life in a manner that would satisfy an age infatuated by “the poetic,” by showing not that it is morally superior, but precisely that it is poetic. At bottom, Brandes’ thesis is: “It is not too much to say that the whole of Either/Or, Part 1 lies implicitly in the interpretation of Lucinde and the whole of Part 2 is bound up in the refutations of this book.”3 For example, the dissertation hints at the contrast between the unreflective seducer (Mozart’s Don Juan) and the reflective Johannes the Seducer, who again has a forerunner in Julius, the hero of Lucinde. 2

3

Cited from Georg Brandes Søren Kierkegaard. En kritisk Fremstilling i Grundrids in Samlede Skrifter, Copenhagen 1919, pp. 291 f. Ibid., p. 263.

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Brandes, as noted earlier, sees the engagement mirrored in the little essay “Silhouettes,” in which Kierkegaard creates personality types to represent the various aspects of his life’s hitherto most significant event: Clavigo is the idea that tears him away from the young girl; Elvira is the admiration the deceived has for her lover as one who is superior to all other men; finally Faust is, by an awkward reinterpretation, the fear that with the loss of her lover, Margrethe will not only lose her confidante, but also the faith he has striven to strengthen in her. Brandes sees Kierkegaard’s relation to his father and his father’s alleged secret cloaked in the figure of Antigone from the “The Tragic in Ancient Drama Reflected in the Tragic in Modern Drama.” According to Brandes, Kierkegaard has imbued Antigone with his own anguish over his insight into his father’s secret. The connection to the engagement, which is of course the red thread in Brandes’ interpretation, comes about by the sexes trading roles: Antigone becomes Kierkegaard himself, not the rejected woman, but instead the loving man who cannot reveal his life’s, i. e., his father’s, deepest secret to his beloved. Chapters 16-21 form the longest cohesive unit of the book, which breaks with the strictly historical method by giving a systematic presentation of Kierkegaard’s so-called theory of stages. For this purpose, Brandes draws especially on Either/Or, Stages on Life’s Way and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. His most important criticism is that Kierkegaard does not give his middle stage, the ethical, its due. Kierkegaard’s defense of morality and marriage in Either/Or, Part 2 does not build on any independent ethical theory, but finds its support in an external authority, i. e., Christianity, whereby the ethical stage is reduced to a province of the religious without any worth of its own. Brandes’ explanation is biographical – Kierkegaard is split (because of his originally sound nature and his unsound upbringing) and is forced to embrace two violently opposed extremes; there is only room in Kierkegaard’s personality for demonic, aesthetic desire and pure, religious spirituality and none for the healthy and natural median position. Whereas the religious works are “baptized,” i. e., expressions of a pious subjection to the ruling ideology (Christianity), the aesthetic works are on the other hand expressions of unbaptized passions, understood then as eruptions of the natural passions which Christianity has made taboo and supressed.4

4

Cf. Johnny Kondrup Livsværker. Studier i dansk litterær biografi, Copenhagen 1986, pp. 84-111.

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In his treatment of Either/Or, Part 1, Brandes at first judges the aphorisms in “Diapsalmata” to be small masterpieces, but on closer examination he believes many of them excite and glitter at the expense of comprehensibility and that the drafts of the aphorisms found in the journals are far preferable for their unforced and natural character. The subsequent essay on Mozart’s Don Juan, “The Immediate Erotic Stages or the Musical-Erotic,” reveals for the first time Kierkegaard’s unique talent as a critic, an ability of which Brandes – as he does with many other texts in Part 1 – gives an extensive and subtle description. He praises Kierkegaard’s critical sense, which is not without its weak spots but primarily accentuates the object of his criticism: “He manages to give the work he is extolling and explaining an extraordinary value for the reader, but he behaves like King Midas who changed everything he touched to gold, so the work radiates a golden nimbus before the reader. He fails the task, which is just as difficult, of giving everything its due, its natural color.”5 Kierkegaard reveals his critical potential most successfully in the essay on Mozart, because the treated work really is as worthy of admiration as he makes it, while the discrepancy between the critical method and the object becomes more severe when dealing with Scribe’s play “The First Love.” In this case, one finds one of Brandes’ few acknowledgements of Kierkegaard’s system of pseudonymity, which he otherwise does not take seriously. He ascribes the high estimation of the work to the aesthete, while Kierkegaard has probably had another opinion. Brandes also criticizes the essay on Mozart, which he believes rests on an antiquated, experience-independent aesthetic that is marked by Hegelianism. In addition, Kierkegaard is judged to be not particularly musical. If he had been, he would probably have preferred Beethoven, who had far more of Kierkegaard’s own deep nature than the carefree and effervescent Mozart. The admirable part of the essay is that Kierkegaard, without a sense of the musical himself, could penetrate so deeply into the soul of a musical work and to a degree that is unparalleled in the entirety of literary history. The relation between the critical method and its object is illuminated by a description of the overture, which Brandes does not think lives up to Kierkegaard’s praise. Despite Kierkegaard’s exaggeration of the overture’s external importance, he sees all the inner relations with razor-sharp focus. Kierkegaard completely ignores the technical side of things; this is not about aesthetically weighing Mozart’s successes and failures as a dramatic 5

Brandes Søren Kierkegaard, p. 296.

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composer, but more fundamentally to make room for him, to direct attention to Mozart. This focus springs from Kierkegaard’s infatuation with the idea of unconditional authority and he makes Mozart into precisely such an authority, thereby giving free rein to his natural tendency to humble and worshipful submission. The essay on Scribe’s “The First Love” is according to Brandes written with a bitter heart and is far chillier than the analysis of Don Juan, because it is founded upon Kierkegaard’s contempt for women – a contempt that shines through again later when he acts as a religious reformer – and the reason Kierkegaard makes so much of Scribe’s trivial work (which, according to Brandes, has given rise to widespread bewilderment) can first be understood when the essay is seen in the light of the subsequent authorship. The essay, exaggerately witty as it is, and possessed of a disavowing and sneering enthusiasm, is then, as Brandes puts it, “The satyr play which corresponds to the triple tragedy consisting of Repetition, Guilty-Not Guilty and Fear and Trembling.”6 Here, Brandes also finds the engagement recurring, because Kierkegaard, during the play’s performance was able to experience his favorite comedic set-piece: the young girl who states with assurance that she cannot live without her first love, Peer, and ten minutes later reaches out to his successor, Poul, with the assurance that Peer was a mistake and that Poul is her first love. As mentioned earlier, Kierkegaard’s view of the passions is, according to Brandes, that they are “unbaptized,” (as opposed to Émil Littré, George Sand, Goethe and Hegel, Shelley and Stuart Mill) which gives his description of the aesthetic sphere its special character. This is particularly true when he presents the life of pleasure and women as objects of man’s desire, which he does most clearly in “The Seducer’s Diary” from Either/Or and “In Vino Veritas” from Stages on Life’s Way. According to Brandes, the latter clarifies the former and he has a extensive exposition of the two works, both described as masterpieces, albeit ghastly and disturbing. As literature, “The Seducer’s Diary” is in Brandes’ opinion the best Kierkegaard ever wrote. The theme was taken, as noted earlier, from Schegel’s Lucinde, but when one compares the two works, one feels the injustice Kierkegaard has suffered by not being born in a larger country, where immediate fame would have been assured. It is in the exposition of these two works that Brandes’ book contains sketches of proper aesthetic analyses and he describes the peculiar style of the two works as pinnacles in Danish 6

Ibid., p. 305.

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literature – and does it in a way that represents a stylistic pinnacle in his own book. Concerning the style in “The Seducer’s Diary” and “In Vino Veritas” he writes: The style here is a style that is rarely, properly speaking, spoken, like a short remark and it is rarely, properly speaking, written, like a book; it is a style in between, rather like the style of a letter that has something of the spoken word’s intimacy and pithiness and something of the convoluted sentence structure and order of prose. It is a purely virtuoso-style that plays with the language, does arabesques with words, ties them in knots or makes them into bows. It appeals – in contrast to the newer European prose style – more to the ear than the eye; it covets a certain chanting rhythm which flatters the hearing. Kierkegaard does not carve his language into statues, [rather] he transforms it into an unending panorama which, under musical accompaniment, goes almost too quickly past the eye.7

To explain why these works have reached a rather modest number of readers, Brandes draws attention to yet another stylistic peculiarity: “The lecture’s heterogeneity. The purest lyricism is mixed together with a philosophical language’s expression of the most detached-fromreality metaphysics. Pictures so warm and corporeal that Christian Winther might have conceived them share space with jargon so dry it may as well have been taken from one or another North German Hegelian chair.”8 The empathic description is soon after replaced by a somewhat different tone. Making the leap from Part 1 to Part 2 of Either/Or is, according to Brandes, like going from a magic garden to an expanse of heath. It is not in vain that Part 2 concludes with a sermon on the Jutland heath. He writes: “The whole thing is a gust from the heath.” 9 As noted earlier, Part 2 also has, according to Brandes, its model in Kierkegaard’s dissertation, as the idea of being revealed to oneself and to others in one’s unconditioned and eternal validity is already present in the book on irony and is developed in Either/Or, Part 2. The first essay on “The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage” also corresponds closely to the second section of Stages. Its apology for marriage is “a bachelor’s ventriloquism.” But even this essay is buoyed by “enthusiasm,” a word that above all characterizes Brandes’ exposition of Either/Or. According to this doctrine, there are three stages of existence: the aesthetic (in which a man is immediately what he is); the ethical (in which he becomes that which he is); the religious (the complete transformation of existence through renunciation, suffering and faith with the goal of 7 8 9

Ibid., p. 310. Ibid., pp. 311 f. Ibid., p. 313.

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achieving an eternal blessedness). As noted earlier, Brandes’ criticism is that morality (the ethical) is for Kierkegaard just a transitional stage that culminates in repentance, which is the transition to the religious. The worst of it is that the ethical stage can never stand on its own, but must always seek support from an alien authority. Kierkegaard always presents proofs for the validity of marriage based on Christian perspectives, dogmas, etc., and continually loses sight of a morality based on reason. Kierkegaard is also entirely unaffected by the progress of modern European science and morality is only moral when it is borne by revealed religion. Brandes believes this essay is the weakest thing Kierkegaard has ever authored. The bourgeois nature of marriage is never mentioned; he engages solely in a glorifying apology for the marriage ritual of a particular confession. The objections to a church-sanctioned marriage that is attributed to the young friend (the aesthete) are not serious enough to be taken seriously. The Judge’s opinion of women is also outdated; she exists for her husband’s and children’s sake; her emancipation is an “unattractive” thing and cites the apostle Paul’s command that women shall receive doctrine in silence. Kierkegaard’s investigations and descriptions of marriage are more effective on the strength of their pictoral aspect than as proofs – a proof is never as strong as an example. This criticism does not affect Brandes’ opinion that this essay has merely historical interest, even though it has strongly influenced contemporary society, namely on the strength on its opposition to the wild, flighty aesthetic part. In the second essay in Part 2, “Equilibrium Between the Aesthetic and the Ethical in the Development of Personality,” the thesis is that all human beings are obligated to reveal their true selves. According to Brandes, however, Kierkegaard was opaque from birth and even after his spiritual breakthrough with Either/Or he is opaque and has no friend, desires no wife, shows no interest in his native land, social issues or matters of state. That is the reason Kierkegaard, at the close of his moral treatises (on actualizing the universal, for example), would always leave room for the exception, one who was precisely not obligated to follow the rule, the way and the life given to all others. Brandes concludes his analysis of Either/Or thusly: He managed to get himself, with all his mysterious and opaque nature, spirited over into the third stage from the first. That which was sinful in the first stage – the mysterious, the hidden that had nothing in common with the moral law – and what in the second stage was forbidden and condemned, it became once again allowed in the last and highest stage, even becoming the higher inwardness and incomprehensibility to soci-

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ety, which in his construction is the foundation of the life of the religious exception; to this paradoxical inwardness the unconditional paradox corresponds as an object.10

Harald Høffding There are several similarities between Georg Brandes and Harald Høffding (1843-1931) like their polemic against Kierkegaard’s inclination to asceticism and his view of women and in their rejection of the Christian world view, which for Høffding is exclusively eschatological – determined by the expectation that the world will soon be destroyed. What fundamentally separates Høffding and Kierkegaard is therefore largely the principal difference between a monistic and a dualistic world view, running like a red thread through Høffding’s account: If Kierkegaard had not been hindered by his Christian dogmatism, his thought would have had a more direct effect upon the world. Against this, Høffding believes Kierkegaard’s thought must be translated or winnowed before they can play the role for humanity they deserve.11 The longest and most characteristic section in Høffding’s book, Søren Kierkegaard som Filosof (Søren Kierkegaard as a Philosopher) from 1892, is the exposition of Kierkegaard’s ethics, which is treated in close connection with Kierkegaard’s psychology. This parallel treatment of ethics and psychology, according to Høffding, brings out in an exemplary way the special qualities of a thinker. The section begins with a typological division of thinkers into two fundamental categories: those thinkers that strive after unity, continuity and connectedness and those that emphasize the sudden transitions, differences and the sharp divisions between various fields. The former stress “quantitative relations,” (the successive transitions, degrees of difference), while the latter focus on “qualitative difference” (distinctions and disjunctions). Kierkegaard clearly falls in the latter category, with his idea of “the leap” and the “qualitative dialectic.” Following this, the long section on Kierkegaard’s ethics contains a philosopical critique of the stages doctrine that (similar to Brandes) concludes that Kierkegaard’s ethical stage has no independent value, but is in fact religious and ascetic. Høffding, in doing this, not only criticizes Kierkegaard, but also places himself in the contrary category of thinkers. Either/Or is therefore according to Høffding more than just the title of Kierkegaard’s first significant work, it is his battle cry, his declara10 11

Ibid., pp. 321 f. Cf. Harald Høffding Søren Kierkegaard som Filosof, Copenhagen 1892, p. 70.

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tion of war on continuity and successive transitions. In his treatment of Either/Or, which is at all times bound to his exposition of Kierkegaard’s theory of stages, Høffding points to the little essay from Part 1, “Rotation of Crops,” possibly in order to complement or even distinguish himself from Brandes, who actually does not mention it. According to Høffding, we find the aesthetic world view most clearly expressed in “Rotation of Crops,” which he also calls “The Kaleidoscope.” Everything here is seen as arbitrary, which is the secret to making actuality into possibilities and objects of pleasure. Høffding uses an analogy taken from geometry, that of the aesthetic worldview as a tangent to life’s circle. Kierkegaard describes forms of the aesthetic that have progressed much further than the immediate, involuntary existence and have taken on a kind of art of the arbitrary. But this is not a position that occurs naturally to human beings and it is a good deal further along in reflection than, for example, ancient hedonism. Therefore, writes Høffding, the objection arises from the perspective of comparative philosophy of life that we are not told how this stage comes into being: how does this halting occur, this deflecting movement that makes the individual follow the tangent instead of continuing to move around a natural center? Høffding claims here that the genetic or evolutionary perspective is entirely lacking in Kierkegaard’s theory of stages. Consequentially – and in good agreement with the theory of the leap – every stage stands entirely finished; nothing points either forward or backward. Kierkegaard depicts finished forms and Høffding sums up by saying: The psychological thought experiment here has produced such extreme forms that probably do not occur in life. Kierkegaard uses a name that poorly suits what he depicts: stages – because by stages one thinks in terms of stages in a development. Rather, his depiction resembles Dante’s Divine Comedy with its three parts – and the aesthetic stage corresponds to Hell, over whose entrance it is written: “Abandon hope, ye who enter.”12

As mentioned earlier, Høffding is entirely in agreement with Brandes concerning the ethical world view. According to Høffding, marriage for Kierkegaard is an expression of the ethical which is brought about such that along with infatuation there is a decision in which, ethically speaking, the whole person’s ideality lies. Infatuation is assumed to constitute marriage, while the decision comes in as a protective power that defends against dangers from within and without. While the implications of this train of thought (most successfully brought out 12

Ibid, p. 90.

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in Stages, hazier in Either/Or) are beautiful and fruitful, according to Høffding, several psychological definitions are unconvincing, e. g., Kierkegaard’s concept of “decision” is too dogmatic and seems rather like a foreign element in relation to infatuation. He skips too lightly over marriage partners’ mutual development, which can easily evolve tragically, such that their paths separate. His concept of marriage is thus also too dogmatic. He sees it only fully developed, declaring “all or nothing” and it is treated too much as a religious institution. Also, for the woman, decision does not exist, so for her the ethical stage is not applicable. Neither is it applicable to the man, because “the decision” cannot be thought of outside religious assumptions. Høffding speaks further of Kierkegaard’s rejection of all social ethics, which is linked to Kierkegaard’s conservative bent and absolute respect for all authorities. In sum, Kierkegaard’s ethics exists only in the instant it is repudiated – the ethical is a transitional sphere and only receives its content under religious assumptions. He does not recognize the existence of the ethical, only the ethical-religious. Vilhelm Andersen The literary historian Vilhelm Andersen (1864-1953) deals with Kierkegaard in the second part of Part 1 of his magnum opus, Tider og Typer af dansk Aands Historie (Times and Types of Danish Intellectual History) from 1916. The work is not a classic history of literature or culture, rather it is an attempt to present certain individuals as types of a particular period. It is centered on the ancient idea of humanity (Menneskelighedstanke) and its continued existence in European culture and includes works of Danish literature in this area. Kierkegaard is dealt with here, together with J. L. Heiberg, whose “Platonic” period follows the so-called “Homeric” period of Oehlenschläger og Thorvaldsen. Vilhelm Andersen is a master of the broad brush and his view of Either/Or is woven into the fabric of what for him is the central polarity in Kierkegaard’s authorship: Christianity and the Greek mentality. According to Andersen, there are two paths into Kierkegaard’s soul: where he ended up – with Christ – and where he began – with Socrates and the Greeks. His development is thus the opposite of Goethe’s, for whom the entirety of Part 1 of Andersen’s work is named. Kierkegaard, according to Andersen, with his Socratic dissertation, with the aesthetic essays in Either/Or and Stages and their many references to and invocations of ancient Greece, with the Grecian tone in which the

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whole of the pseudonymous authorship is held, founded in the Copenhagen of the 1840s a kind of Greek school among the youth who felt themselves alienated from the political, literary and philosophical parties. Andersen names Goldschmidt’s enthusiasm for Either/Or and the little Greek society he wanted to form with P. L. Møller and Victor Eremita’s animating spirit. He also points to Goldschmidt’s Hjemløs (Homeless) (1853-1857), in which youths greet one another in Greek. Only traces remain of Kierkegaard’s at first supremely humanistic business of finding a phenomenology or a typology that could express the “stages of life” (his Middle Ages studies, etc.), resulting in the types Don Juan, Faust and Ahasverus. Andersen characterizes, for example, Either/Or’s essays on Sophocles’ Antigone and Mozart’s Don Juan as “typological fragments.” A modern reconstruction of the phenomenological type is the protagonist in “The Seducer’s Diary,” Johannes, who is related to Don Juan in about the same way as Poul Martin Møller’s Ahasverus (1836-1837) relates to the Wandering Jew of popular tradition. There is no similar modern reconstruction of Faust apart, possibly, from the “doubters” that are crushed by the knight of faith in Fear and Trembling, but throughout all the stages of Kierkegaard’s authorship there is, according to Andersen, to an even greater degree than Paludan-Müller’s Adam Homo (1839-1848), a radically rewritten Faust with a new Gretchen: the engagement; a new Helen: his relation to “the Greeks;” and most important, a new actuality: inwardness.13 Andersen characterizes Johannes the Seducer as a Don Juan with a dose of Socrates’ irony – the sexual seduction is a mask for the intellectual and Kierkegaard’s Don Juan and Johannes the Seducer are therefore quite “un-Greek.” According to Andersen, this can be explained by Kierkegaard’s own weak physical form which can also explain why Kierkegaard’s aesthetic stage is populated by disembodied aesthetes rather than by Aladdins and Jasons.14 The ethical writings, on the other hand, are founded on the positive picture of Socrates, on the concept of humanity as human equality, the true humanity, as expressed in, for example, “On the Aesthetic Validity of Marriage.” 13

14

On the question of Faust and the presence of this type in the authorship, including Either/Or, see Tonny Aagaard Olesen “Kierkegaards Faust” in Fønix, no. 2, Copenhagen 2002, pp. 75-90. This perspective reappears – albeit in a somewhat different guise – in recent scholarship. See, for example, Lars Henrik Schmidt “Den fortænkte sanselighed – eller Kierkegaard som æstetiker uden kropslighed og etiker uden åndelighed” in Sanseligheder, ed. by Christa Lykke Christensen, Århus 1993, pp. 157-184.

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Andersen also undertakes a thorough comparison of Kierkegaard and Plato and expresses the pithy difference between them as Plato’s concentric and Kierkegaard’s eccentric view of life. The logical in Plato’s style is found in its purest form in Philosophical Fragments, while the musical is found in the aesthetic writings, particularly those of the aesthete A in Either/Or. The evocative execution of natural scenes recalls Plato in a style that reveals the Danish thinker-poet not imitating his Greek counterpart, but striving to best him. Vilhelm Andersen denies here that Kierkegaard is truly a poet: he is too reflective and lacking in primitivity and his poetic instincts are a subservient, rather than a creative element in his art – just like Plato, who was a “poet in reverse,” going as he did from rhetoric to dialogue because of his associating with Socrates. Finally, Vilhelm Andersen rejects the usual motives for the authorship (the earthquake, the broken engagement, the Corsair-affair, etc.) and believes that at the bottom of it all lies Kierkegaard’s melancholy or anxiety which suffocates his humanistic authorship at birth and puts the Christian confession in its place. Instead of the humanistic “know yourself,” he puts the religious “choose yourself;” instead of striving, repentance; instead of transition, leap; instead of unfolding, repetition. Kierkegaard has pathetically expressed his relation to the Greek world view in his barbaric re-imagining in Either/Or of Sophocles’ Antigone to an outsider that in anxiety and repentance cannot find equilibrium in the humane sphere or “realize the universal” and for whom, as one who has lost the sense of the mournfulness of tragedy, there is no other way than to the religious.

II. 1920-1950 Eduard Geismar Eduard Geismar (1871-1939) was in large part a theologian of mediation dedicated to meet the evolutionary, biological naturalism of his day in order to build bridges between the individual, the church and Brandes’ “modern breakthrough” which he only thought possible on a foundation of Christianity with Kierkegaard as reference point. His Søren Kierkegaard. Hans Livsudvikling og Forfattervirksomhed (Søren Kierkegaard: His Life and Authorship) (1926-1928) was by far the most popular book on Kierkegaard in the 1920s and ’30s and the subtitle is an indication of the biographical method that forms the basis of Geismar’s understanding of Kierkegaard.

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The biographical method is also clearly visible in his treatment of Either/Or, where Geismar is first and foremost interested in investigating Kierkegaard’s own relation to the various agents in the book. Attention is given especially to Kierkegaard’s relation to Judge William and the ethical stage generally. This is closely connected to Geismar’s biographism: Part 2 of Either/Or is read as Kierkegaard’s attempt to become transparent to himself in his suffering. The relation between Kierkegaard, Judge William and Victor Eremita is decisive in this regard.15 In addition, Geismar is very interested in Kierkegaard’s thoughts on marriage and he gives special attention to Kierkegaard’s argument for the union of the erotic and the aesthetic (and the religious) in marriage, while at the same time accounting for the exceptions, the melancholics who cannot achieve this union. Geismar starts with the first essay in Part 2, “The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage,” because his thesis is that one is reminded in Part 2 of what one should particularly have noticed in Part 1. The most important thing in this essay, according to Geismar, is not the extension of the ethical to include one’s calling in life and work, rather it is the deeply personal relationship between the Judge, whom Geismar assumes is modelled on Poul Martin Møller, and his young friend A and thus the conflict between the ethical and the aesthetic way of life. As far as the aesthetic way of life as it is expressed in the form of Johannes the Seducer is concerned, Geismar is also interested in how the personal relationship is presented. He is convinced that Johannes the Seducer is Kierkegaard as he would have been, if he had not from childhood been given his unique religious and moral grounding. Another main theme in Geismar’s work is the question of the indirect communication and Either/Or’s ideal reader. He assumes Kierkegaard’s own claim that it was the relationship to Regine that caused him to use indirect communication and he argues Kierkegaard meant this quite seriously and that the work is written to her and that she is the proper reader.16 The indirect communication to Regine is clearest 15

16

Geismar deals with this in detail in “Det etiske Stadium hos Søren Kierkegaard,” in Teologisk Tidsskrift for den danske Folkekirke, 4. sequence, 4. vol., Copenhagen 1923, pp. 1-47. He goes to some lengths to refute P. P. Jørgensen’s claim (in H P Kofoed-Hansen med særligt Henblik til Søren Kierkegaard. Bidrag til Belysning af aandskulturelle Strømninger i det 19. Aarhundredes Danmark, Copenhagen and Kristiania 1920) that Kierkegaard was a mystic. Geismar’s argumentation involves Kierkegaard’s original plan to write a companion to “The Seducer’s Diary” called “Unhappy Love,” a revised re-telling of Kierkegaard’s suffering during the engagement and he quotes a verbal claim made by the German scholar Emanuel Hirsch, who believes this plan is a question put to

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in the three essays on suffering, which the young aesthete reads aloud for a circle of like-minded, the fellowship of the dead (“The Reflection of the Ancient Tragic in the Modern Tragic,” “Silhouettes” and “The Unhappiest One”). Here, Kierkegaard gets an opportunity to show how the aesthete relates to his own suffering, but also to force Regine into a thorough review, most clearly in “Silhouettes.” In “The Reflection of the Ancient Tragic in the Modern Tragic,” Kierkegaard’s own deepest conflict is given voice in Antigone. In this essay, pain outweighs sorrow; the aesthete equips the daughter of sorrows with a dowry of pain. The most difficult of the lectures is “The Unhappiest One,” which illustrates melancholy’s infatuation with unhappiness whereby Kierkegaard at the same time reveals the theoretical foundation of his suffering (e. g., never having a youth; for when he was young, he was already old). Finally, “Diapsalmata” ’s tone of melancholy is likewise an expression of the melancholy in Kierkegaard’s own mind. The whole structure of Either/Or, according to Geismar, forces Regine into a state of reflective sorrow. In his closing review of the Judge’s point-for-point rebuttal of A, he concludes that the two layers that form a union in the figure of the Judge are differentiated in the writings after Either/Or: the pain of repentance leads to the Christian-religious and to a religious understanding, in which the paradoxical and the hidden that Geismar also found in the aesthetic position17 reappears in a different manner. One of Geismar’s main points is that it is only later in Kierkegaard’s writings (and first in Fragments is it stated directly) that the ethical perspective is broken by sin, but in his own life (in his journals) he has long since reached the conclusion that sin consciousness cannot be avoided. Geismar can say, therefore, that Kierkegaard is not the master of irony, but rather the master of deep humor, because he himself is something qualitatively different than what he has put into the early books.

17

Regine: “Which of the two possibilities, seducer or “unhappy love,” do you choose?” Cf. Søren Kierkegaard. Hans Livsudvikling og Forfattervirksomhed, Copenhagen 1926-28, Part 2, p. 32. The aesthete’s problem is, according to Geismar, that he is both a man of moods and a man of reason. There are two irreconcilable powers in him, the dominance of passion and the reality of time. The fragmentary striving, the lack of unity, makes the aesthete’s world view paradoxical. He cannot make a coherent statement of his world view, but he can make clear what it is in “Diapsalmata” (Geismar refers here to Victor Kuhr’s little, but significant work Modsigelsens Grundsætning, Copenhagen 1915). The either/or that is expressed here (wed, do not wed, etc.) is just the opposite of the ethical either/or. By simply allowing the contradictions to stand unresolved, the aesthete life becomes paradoxical, ibid., pp. 49 f.

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Frithiof Brandt Philosophy professor Frithiof Brandt (1892-1968) was primus motor for a quite extensive literature concerning Kierkegaard’s appearance and its significance for his mental constitution, culminating in Rikard Magnussen’s two-volume work Søren Kierkegaard set udefra (Søren Kierkegaard seen from the Outside) (dedicated to Brandt) and Det særlige Kors (The Exceptional Cross) from 1942. Brandt’s contribution to this free-floating genre of scholarship is Den unge Søren Kierkegaard (The Young Søren Kierkegaard) from 1929 that has as its point of departure the “discovery” that Henrik Hertz’ Stemninger og Tilstande (Moods and Frames of Mind) (1839) is a roman á clef, whose characters are modeled on contemporary persons. Kierkegaard is determined to be “The Translator” in that book as well as the model for Poul Martin Møller’s Ahasverus Fragments (1836-1837). In connection with Either/Or, Brandt also claims that the model for Judge William is a certain P. V. Jacobsen and that Johannes the Seducer is the critic P. L. Møller. Vilhelm Andersen did not believe there was a living person behind Judge William, while Geismar, as noted earlier, thought it possible (i. e., Poul Martin Møller). Brandt, on the other hand, is convinced it is Judge Peter Vilhelm Jacobsen (1799-1848). Brandt finds the first bit of evidence for this in Henriette Lund’s Erindringer fra Hjemmet (Memories from Home) (1909), while in Hertz’ aforementioned book the relationship between Harriet (P. V. Jacobsen) and “The Translator” (Kierkegaard) exactly describes the relationship between Judge William and his young friend A in Either/Or. Insight into this relationship – and into the identity of Johannes the Seducer as P. L. Møller – is according to Brandt interesting in relation to understanding Kierkegaard’s way of producing text, his structuring of Either/Or and his own personal relation to this work. The identity of P. V. Jacobsen, Harriet and Judge William is supported by a presentation of P. V. Jacobsen’s biography and the few books he wrote together with a review of Hertz’ book and Either/Or. Brandt is quite aware of the fact that the historical sources are insufficient regarding a possibly mutual aquaintanceship between Kierkegaard and the real life Judge, but he nonetheless goes on to fantasize about the impression they made on each other. A major bit of his argumentation, his explanation of the link to P. V. Jacobsen, seems rather strange: For Kierkegaard, the choice was not between the aesthetic and the ethical, but between the aesthetic and the religious. The ethical was not Kierkegaard’s category and thus an

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explanation for his excellent description of it is needed – this explanation is rendered by the relationship to P. V. Jacobsen. The longest chapter of the book is entitled, “P. L. Møller: The Model for Johannes the Seducer?” Brandt begins here by detecting a similarity between the protagonist Schiøtt in Goldschmidt’s Homeless and Johannes the Seducer in Either/Or. If this is correct, that P. L. Møller (1814-65) is Johannes the Seducer, then the structure of Either/Or and the various drafts Kierkegaard wrote of it are, according to Brandt, significantly illuminated from a new angle. In relation to the material on P. V. Jacobsen as Judge William, the material on P. L. Møller is much greater. Kierkegaard has not only used him as a model, but also used themes from Møller’s literary works. The actual foundation for “The Seducer’s Diary” that was talked about at the time was 1) that one had pointed to certain small traces of Kierkegaard’s own engagement in it and 2) that since the time of Brandes, Julius in Schegel’s Lucinde had been regarded as the model for Johannes. The former is correct while the latter is entirely wrong-headed, according to Brandt, because Julius is the “dullest mollusc” while Johannes is energy incarnate. Yet these are trivialities that do not get to the core of Johannes’ person and his aesthetic-erotic philosophy. Rather, Kierkegaard has put the engagement into Repetition and “Guilty-Not Guilty” from Stages. Brandt analyzes the structure of Either/Or by comparing the tables of contents of its two parts. It is evident from the book that aesthete A knows of Johannes and thus it was important for Kierkegaard that there are two aesthetes in Part 1 of Either/Or, A and Johannes. Scholarship has always downplayed this division, says Brandt. One speaks of the aesthete as if he were one person that is set up opposite the ethicist. For Brandt, the decisive point is that the aesthete is split into two figures, so what it means to be in the aesthetic stage becomes problematic. The concentration of scholarly attention on Don Juan and “The Seducer’s Diary” has resulted in an overemphasis on the importance of pleasure in this stage. What about “Diapsalmata” and “The Unhappiest One” asks Brandt. Both are expressions of the blackest despair. Brandt also wonders how one could overlook that “Unhappy Love” should also have been included and he thus reveals that he cannot have read Geismar’s account (c. f., note 16). According to Brandt, “Unhappy Love” belongs clearly in Part 1 (and is a counterpoint to “The Seducer’s Diary”). If it had done so, the plan of Part 1 would have been much more obvious, because the two aesthetes would have been clearly distinguished from each other as two formations with-

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in the same stage (representing despair/melancholy and pleasure). Brandt expresses his thought thusly: My belief is that the aesthete A’s relation to the ethicist, Judge William, reflects Kierkegaard’s relation to Judge Jacobsen in the same way broadly speaking that A’s relation to Johannes reflects Kierkegaard’s relation to and concept of P. L. Møller. They were both aesthetes and independent, outside the obligations of society and outside the Church, but one stood for despair and the other, pleasure. That is how I understand Either/Or to be structured and thus how I understand the actual circumstances.18

This perspective is developed subsequently by drawing on e. g., Goldschmidt’s recollection of P. L. Møller and Kierkegaard, P. L. Møller’s biographical data, Hertz’ description of him, his published works and posthumous papers, his “Lyrical Poems” and their relation to “The Seducer’s Diary,” his letters, Heiberg’s opinion of “The Seducer’s Diary,” emphasis on the “dark spot” in Møller’s life, various accounts of his decadent lifestyle, his last years in Germany and France and his death from general paresis (insanity), a late stage of syphilis.19 “The Seducer’s Diary” is, according to Brandt, Kierkegaard’s “thought experiment,” an attempt to put himself in Møller’s place and write from that perspective. Møller’s poems may have provided him with themes here and there, just as Kierkegaard has possibly known of Møller’s unpublished erotic writings – without his psychological familiarity with Møller, “The Seducer’s Diary” could scarcely have been written. Heiberg’s wonderment at the time that Kierkegaard would have wanted to adopt the mindset of a person like Johannes and the reason Goldschmidt repeated the feat in Homeless is, according to Brandt, that they were both strongly under the influence of Møller’s personality, the staunch aesthete, he who embodied the aesthetic-erotic view of life that one talked so much about and flirted with in this period. Brandt does not deny that episodes and the character of Kierkegaard’s own life appear here and there in “The Seducer’s Diary,” but he claims these are trivial and irrelevant. This is a good example of how Brandt always manages to clear a space for his thesis. A last reservation that Brandt has is that P. V. Jacobsen and P. L. Møller are merely representative of what Kierkegaard wanted to describe and it is this (the ethical and the seducer) that was his primary interest and not the real life individuals themselves.

18 19

Frithiof Brandt Den unge Søren Kierkegaard, Copenhagen 1929, p. 168. Concerning P. L. Møller as a model for Johannes the Seducer, see also Henning Fenger Kierkegaard-Myter og Kierkegaard-Kilder, Odense 1976, pp. 184-191.

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In Chapter Six, Brandt argues that aesthete A is a slightly edited version of Kierkegaard himself, which in part had already been acknowledged by Kierkegaard scholarship. This occurs in an analysis of Judge William’s characterization of aesthete A (which had received scant scholarly attention), “Diapsalmata,” “Rotation of Crops,” “The Unhappiest One” and in an analysis of the outline of “Unhappy Love,” altogether corralled into supporting Brandt’s coupling to Poul Martin Møller’s Ahasverus fragment, which Brandt claims is a sly portrait of the young Kierkegaard. According to Brandt, Kierkegaard has simply understood the whole of his aesthetic youth as “Ahasverusistic” and this understanding is the key to a deeper understanding of his poetic self portrait in the aesthetic authorship. Brandt credits Vilhelm Andersen for having drawn scholarly attention to a striking similarity between precisely the Ahasverus fragment and Kierkegaard’s “Diapsalmata,” but Brandt adds that the similarity between the Ahasverus fragment and Judge William’s description of A is even more striking. Brandt also agrees with Høffding that “Rotation of Crops” is very important to understanding the aesthetic stage, but he points out that it is no accident the essay is attributed to A and not Johannes; they are quite different psychologically (despair, as opposed to pleasure). Brandt floats the idea that this essay was the first written and the parallel to Poul Martin Møller’s fragment is also obvious here. Brandt summarizes his exposition of the Ahasverus theme with the words, “It is assuredly true that Kierkegaard has understood his aesthetic formation as despair and all evidence suggests that he – face to face with himself – has understood this form to be that of Ahasverus, in an almost literal sense.”20 In making his concluding remarks, Brandt rebuts the prior conception (from Brandes onward) that Kierkegaard was a sort of isolationist, a Simon Stylites, a desk-bound author. P. A. Heiberg’s Kierkegaard commentary is praised for its far richer understanding and truth than Brandes’, but not even he rejected this conception. Brandt does, however, and he airs his particular literary standpoint: where once one said that literature springs from life, now one says that literature springs from literature. Brandt attributes significance to both perspectives and writes that lesser literature, e. g., that which, like Hertz’ book, merely makes a carbon copy of reality, are the easiest to “explain,” likewise with literature that imitates prior art (literature-literature). The greatest literature, on the contrary, bears the marks of personality, but how 20

Den unge Søren Kierkegaard, op.cit., p. 412.

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much personality exists in a work can only be seen when the other methods are exhausted. Again, Brandt declares that aesthete A and Johannes the Seducer would not have come into existence if they had not existed already. Frithiof Brandt has also written a long article on “Søren Kierkegaard and Mozart’s Don Juan” from 1935.21 The article’s main thesis is that Kierkegaard puts Mozarts opera in direct connection with his period of youthful dissipation, the period that for the rest of his life caused him to live in penance (after he was 25). In an extension of the project of Brandt’s book mentioned above, the article also seeks to demonstrate the degree to which there lies a lived life and experience behind the authorship. Brandt not only finds support here in P. A. Heiberg’s books, he also considers the results of his own essay to support Heiberg’s controversial hypothesis of an “episode” in Kierkegaard’s life (i. e., a brothel visit). The essay here deals only with aesthete A as it is he who comments on Mozart’s Don Juan in “Diapsalmata” and “The Immediate Erotic Stages” and as it is he who is Kierkegaard himself in his period of dissipation. Brandt rails against Brandes, who allegedly did not understand “Diapsalmata” very deeply because he did not know the details of Kierkegaard’s aesthetic period and therefore “Diapsalmata” ’s foundation in reality – even though Brandes saw that several of the entries were lifted from Kierkegaard’s journals. Brandt notices that a couple of the entries, as exceptions to the rule, have a lighter tone, those that deal with Mozart’s Don Juan. If one looks at Kierkegaard as literature, these entries strike one as evoking quite accurately the mood of the music. But Brandt believes, as mentioned, that Kierkegaard is much more life than he is literature and there must be some unspoken foundation for it. When Kierkegaard, for example, is about to “lose his mind” at the sound of Don Juan, it must be because the opera is associated with some memorable experiences and Brandt finds support in Kierkegaard’s claim that Don Juan “drove him out of the cloister’s quiet night.” 22 Anxiety is assumed by Brandt to be the key to Kierkegaard’s innermost being, deeper than melancholy, and he brings this insight to bear on his analysis of Don Juan, where anxiety in the form of a demonic lust for life is mentioned several times. It was anxiety and Mozart’s Don Juan that caused Kierkegaard to run 21

22

Frithiof Brandt “Søren Kierkegaard og Mozarts Don Juan” in Theoria, Göteborg 1935, pp. 83-120. Also published in Syv Kierkegaard-Studier, Copenhagen 1962, pp. 1-57. Cf. SKS 18, 46 / JP 2:2789.

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wild; the experience of the opera awakened the part of him that anxiously partakes of pleasure and it hurled his mind into an overpowering sense of dizziness. In other words, the analysis of Don Juan is a slice of life. Brandt also puts a date on this Don Juan experience. Based on a listing of the Royal Theater’s opera productions, he pounces on November, 1835 as the date for the performance that led to Kierkegaard’s period of dissipation, that is, after the “great earthquake” in September, 1835 (according to Hans Ellekilde and P. A. Heiberg). Brandt admits that his examination of the journals does not yield positive evidence for when Kierkegaard became diabolically possessed by Don Juan – but he concludes that everything fits anyhow. P. A. Heiberg’s thesis concerning Kierkegaard’s visit to a woman of ill repute is in all probability correct and Brandt’s point is that Kierkegaard’s experience of “lust for life” in his youth reached its highest expression in Mozart’s Don Juan – which opened the way to “the horror.” Brandt finishes this “logical” connection between Kierkegaard’s life and work in a hymn of praise: What I have brought forth is a further example of how solid and well thought out Kierkegaard’s psychology is. Kierkegaard’s thought is like a majestic psychological mosaic that one can only know in bits and pieces. But the pattern is there and it can be found. Each little stone has its place and just that particular place. It is therefore material one can work with. 23

Johannes Hohlenberg, Sven Clausen and Peter P. Rohde The painter, writer and Buddhist Johannes Hohlenberg’s second book on Kierkegaard, Den Ensommes Vej (The Path of the Lonely) (1948) was written as a supplement to his first book the prize-winning biography Søren Kierkegaard (1940). The Path of the Lonely contains material the biography could not contain. The biography concentrated on the works of Kierkegaard that were necessary for understanding his life, while the new book presents a good deal of the biographical material necessary for understanding the works. The book fills, according to Hohlenberg, a gap in Danish Kierkegaard literature, which until then lacked a presentation of the ideas and context of his works and concentrated on peripheral issues such as whether or not Kierkegaard was a boozer in his youth, his relation to his family and to money and

23

Brandt Den unge Søren Kierkegaard, p. 120.

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whether or not he was schizophrenic or manic-depressive24 or had a hunchback, a crooked spine or rounded shoulders. Considering that Hohlenberg was himself an author and had written on more or less exotic subjects like the pyramid of Cheops, Nostradamus, Casper Hauser, Faust and yoga, it is rather surprizing to read his introductory assessment of Either/Or – very nearly the opposite of Brandes’: For those of us who know Kierkegaard’s later writings, our judgement of his first large work must be different from that of his contemporaries. For them, it had the effect of a clubbing blow. One was too impressed to criticize it and too disoriented to do a proper appraisal. Things are different for us. We can see, in light of what he later wrote, that much of this all-too-virtuoso style cannot conceal a content that does not measure up to the splendid form. It is as if one is walking on thin ice above an inner emptiness. The instrumentation is blinding, but the individual themes are too thin. The dialectics work properly, but it is as if it does not have enough substance to work with, as if there were not enough flour between the millstones. Kierkegaard has collected material from all sides and strewn about with thoughts and ideas without worrying very much about their connection to the matter at hand. Therefore, it often creaks and screeches. 25

In addition, Hohlenberg believes the book bears the marks of something an experienced author will remember from his own first forays into print, the horror vacui that Kierkegaard, like all beginners must have felt, the fear of not being able to fill up the many pages so a book might come of it! Either/Or is too broad in scope and its subject is just not interesting enough. Reading Either/Or is like listening to a virtuoso who plays musical scales or an orchestra that is tuning up – one hears individual instruments run through chords, a riff here or a difficult passage there, all without a cohesive musical work emerging from it. On the whole, Hohlenberg’s exposition is characterized by opinions and to a far lesser extent, analyses. When he finally gets around to it, he generally uses biographism’s toolset. For example, “The Unhappiest One” and “Rotation of Crops” are both believed to be remembrances of Kierkegaard’s melancholy youth and “Silhouettes” is supposed to be addressed directly to Regine. The work’s peculiar character stands out most sharply in “The Seducer’s Diary.” Here, 24

25

The claim that Kierkegaard may have been manic-depressive had been made by one of the most important and influential psychiatrists of the day, Hjalmar Helweg (1886-1960) in Søren Kierkegaard: en psychiatrisk-psykologisk studie, Copenhagen 1933. The course of the disease is claimed to determine the work and thus also the genesis of Either/Or (pp. 175-188). Johannes Hohlenberg Den Ensommes Vej, Copenhagen 1948, pp. 45 f.

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Kierkegaard’s ambiguousness (both to be believed and not believed) is most on display and he has placed more of himself here than in any other place in Either/Or, but it is still a result of abstraction and will. It is a mistake, which Brandes and others are guilty of, to regard the diary as an ordinary love story and complain about the “bloodlessness” of Johannes the Seducer. That is a narrow-minded and philistine view and one might as well demand Shakespeare had made Richard III lovable or Othello indifferent. It is not about describing love as a drive, rather it is about how this drive is represented in reflection and understanding.26 According to Hohlenberg, form and content correspond perfectly in “The Seducer’s Diary” and one can therefore call it a classic work. But the mistake is that one is always glimpsing Kierkegaard’s own story behind the words, which had quite another course. This odd criticism is followed by a characterization of the manner in which this error, according to Hohlenberg, is revealed in writing style and he compares it to a particular way of painting (Hohlenberg was, as mentioned earlier, also a painter) where the painting reaches a kind of mathematical conclusion or intellectual balance that hinders it in growing in the viewers fantasy and continuing its life there. Only after one becomes well acquainted with “The Seducer’s Diary” (after more than a single reading) can one leisurely admire its refinement and take pleasure in its supreme artistry. Hohlenberg ends his work making a few remarks on the wheres and hows of Kierkegaard’s place in intellectual history. Hohlenberg believes the frequent characterization of Kierkegaard as a romantic in his form and way of thinking is not accurate. Certainly the stylistic details in his early works can be traced back to the romantic period in which he lived, but in the development of his literary gift he belongs to the grand tradition that always has considered form to be fundamental and has allowed content to lag behind. The difference is just that Kierkegaard had no tradition to adopt and did not, as in the great ages of art in the past, have a teacher whose style he could explore and transform from within according to his own needs. He had to create for himself the convention he would follow. He got a bit from Hegel, but not enough that he could be called a disciple in the same way that Raphael was a disciple of Perugino or Beethoven a disciple of Haydn. At most, one can say Kiekegaard took Hegel as his starting point 26

Johannes the Seducer’s final remark about wishing he were in Alectrion’s shoes causes Hohlenberg to assume Kierkegaard means Amphtrion, because he has never heard of Alectrion. In other words, Hohlenberg does not know that Alectrion is the friend of Ares, cf. SKS K2-3, 432,5.

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because Hegel was his only contemporary great enough to be used as a model. In all the essentials of his craft, Kierkegaard himself created his form and did it so perfectly that we find it already fully developed in his first large work. But something like that can only be done by one who is born to be a writer and artist in grand style and we must therefore, despite some misgivings, call Either/Or a work of genius, – not because of its content, but because of its form. Kierkegaard has built himself an instrument of sufficiently large size and rich modulation to be able to say the things he desired, concludes Hohlenberg. One is undeniably confused by the increased appreciation evident in Hohlenberg’s concluding remarks and the ambiguousness he attributes to Kierkegaard could with even stronger justification be attributed to himself. Hohlenberg’s reservations regarding Either/ Or are perhaps colored by a general scepticism toward the work that dominated in the 1930s and ’40s. This is most clearly demonstrated by the law professor and author Sven Clausen (1893-1961) who in a series of articles in the 1930s (later republished in the book Udvalgte Tvangstanker (Selected Obssessions) (1945)) makes much of cutting Kierkegaard down to size. Special attention is given to Either/Or in “A Delayed Review of Either/Or,” a screed published as featured articles in Politiken on January 15 and 16, 1936. His criticisms will not be addressed here except to say that he is far harsher than Hohlenberg, who as mentioned conceded the work possessed considerable qualities regarding form. In Clausen’s rendition, Either/Or is in terms of composition beyond all hope; everything is jumbled up to a degree that one can, according to Clausen, say with confidence that Kierkegaard has never composed a song to a confirmation because if he had, it would surely have wound up in Either/Or. Clausen’s featured articles created a bit of a stir and in Politiken from that period one can read several letters and articles that reference them. One of these responses comes from the publisher-to-be of the third edition of Kierkegaard’s collected works (SV3), the author Peter P. Rohde (1902-1978). In an article dated January 28, 1936 on another subject – namely “Buchmanism,” i. e., the so-called Oxford movement – Rohde takes exception to Clausen’s sarcastic tone. Surprizingly enough, Rohde casually admits Clausen is basically correct as far as Either/Or is concerned; the work does not find much favor with Rohde either, he in fact believes it to be one of Kierkegaard’s weakest works. Kierkegaard himself has also had this feeling, according to Rohde, as is evident from his re-writing the whole thing and publishing it under the title Stages on Life’s Way! In contrast, he holds

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up Fear and Trembling, Repetition, The Concept of Anxiety, The Sickness Unto Death, a few upbuilding discourses and The Instant as Kierkegaard’s immortal works.

III. 1950-1980 F. J. Billeskov Jansen F. J. Billeskov Jansen (1907-2002) in Studier i Søren Kierkegaards litterære Kunst (Essays on Søren Kierkegaard’s Literary Art) from 1951 is engaged in shedding some light on Kierkegaard as a literary artist, which is not the same as “snipping quotations out of his writings so one can order them according to rhetorical or stylistic categories,” 27 but to take his books one at a time, discern its meaning and then determine the form of literary expression in which this meaning is expressed. The investigation dwells on compositional forms and styles within Kierkegaard’s various genres. Beginning with the aesthetic works (Either/ Or and Stages on Life’s Way), he continues with the major works of philosophy and theology (Repetition, Fear and Trembling, The Concept of Anxiety, as well as the Climacus and Anti-Climacus writings) and concludes with the upbuilding authorship and writings from the attack on the Church. It is thus an attempt to “roll up the authorship in a new way”28 and Billeskov Jansen does this in an extension of the German interpreters’ (e. g., Walther Rehm) placement of Kierkegaard in the tradition of Jena romanticism and Hegelianism, as well as making an effort to track down Kierkegaard’s literary sources. Billeskov Jansen’s second chapter bears the title “The Great Novels,” in which he catalogues the aesthetic works within the novel genre in the tradition of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister novels and the German romantics numerous Bildungsromane with Goethe as their prototype.29 Either/Or and Stages on Life’s Way are listed here as “view of life” novels; the types in the two books are to a certain degree the same and in the internals and externals the books are so alike that they can be analyzed as one. The first juxtaposes two viewpoints, while the second repeats these and adds a third viewpoint. A number of main 27 28 29

F. J. Billeskov Jansen Søren Kierkegaards litterære Kunst, Copenhagen 1951, p. 10. Ibid., p. 11. See also Ellen Vedel Goethes Clavigo og Enten – Eller. Et bidrag til studiet af Goethes betydning for Søren Kierkegaard, Copenhagen 1978.

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characters in the first book reappear in the second and both books are composed of parts that belong to various literary genres. Billeskov Jansen begins his treatment of Either/Or by scolding Sven Clausen, but the criticism could also be directed at Hohlenberg. Clausen has overlooked the clear and profound account of the work’s composition in the preface and he has therefore misunderstood it as “jumbled up:” “Victor Eremita’s words clearly express the artistic will behind the arrangement. They show of course, rewritten in our literary jargon, that content and form are closely aligned; composition and style correspond completely to A’s and B’s character in their (respective) papers.”30 Thus, Kierkegaard has made Part 1 jump around compositionally just as chaotically as Part 2 is simple, well ordered and flowing. This corresponds to A and B as types; a literary contrast mirrors the philosophical contrast and can be demonstrated in almost all details. 31 The weakest pieces in A’s papers are those in which there is the most order, e. g., the essay on the musical-erotic and the theater reviews that Kierkegaard, with Goethe’s essay on Hamlet in Wilhelm Meister as a model, forces on A. The best ones are the short bits in “Silhouettes,” the worst is the review of “First Love” (cf. also Brandes’ opinion). The entries in “Diapsalmata” are partly unintelligible and their stylistic shape is tightened up in comparison to the drafts in Kierkegaard’s journals because it is the style’s monotony that is emphasized, corresponding to the aesthete’s mental constitution and self-surrender. The entries are, according to Billeskov Jansen, to be conceived of as anecdotal aphorisms that are patterned after Ecclesiastes and also Lichtenberg’s Ideen, Maximen und Einfälle (1827-1829). Their skepticism, subjective attitude and varied content can easily be thought of as a counterpoint to Lichtenberg’s Bemerkungen.

30 31

Billeskov Jansen Søren Kierkegaards litterære Kunst, p. 26. Joakim Garff makes this comment: “I believe Billeskov Jansen will have difficulty demonstrating the so-called literary contrast in almost all its detail, because Either/ Or’s Part 2 is anything but “simple, well-ordered and flowing.” It is rather just as “chaotic” as Part 1, if not more so. While A at least divides his little aesthetic treatises into a number of subsections, the Judge has drawn up his writings without so much as a single title and often gets lost in long digressions of more or less narrative exemplifying character, now and then associates freely and can therefore easily lose track of his subject and what’s more, he is the first to admit it. If one wishes to conclude from the work’s skip and jump and shift in writing to the narrator’s psychological constitution, then the ethicist must be many times more despairing than the aesthete.” See Joakim Garff “Den Søvnløse.” Kierkegaard læst æstetisk/biografisk, Copenhagen 1995, note 26, pp. 84 f.

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Billeskov Jansen labels the aesthete’s style as “cynical realism,” a style that emphasizes clarity in the details. Along with the flaccid helplessness and the harsh satire, the aesthete knows lyrical desire. This lyrical drive toward the limits of language expresses itself in the address to the “company of the dead” in “The Unhappiest One,” and also when Mozart’s Don Juan is dealt with. Praise of the music in Don Juan has frequently been cited, but according to Billeskov Jansen it has been done without the full literary understanding. This bit of matchless prosical lyric is an excellent example of Kierkegaard’s ability to both draw and make music with the Danish language and there is in his performance something for both the eye and the ear. For the eye: Despite the author declaring that Don Juan cannot be described, he does precisely that in three clear and vividly sketched situations; these are not scenes from the opera, but they are seemingly inspired by ballet steps or engravings from the romantic period and there is something tableau-like about them. For the ear: The author insists that Don Juan ought not be seen, but heard – after which he himself shifts to a musical style using the rhythm of the words and sentences. Finally, Billeskov Jansen quotes, like so many interpreters, the famous and inspired words about the opera, “Hear, hear, hear, Mozart’s Don Juan”32 and writes that the Danish in these passages is handled with the greatest mastery and that Kierkegaard’s stylistic craftsmanship has torn down the barriers between artistic disciplines. Billeskov Jansen then turns his attention to Either/Or’s counterpoint to Don Juan: Johannes, the reflective seducer. He deals here with the cunning that Johannes employs to steal into the girl’s heart – the lovely, meticulously planned, step-by-step seduction, i. e., the artfulness and thoroughness of his conquest. The style, the art of the novel itself in the calculated seduction is illuminated by a simple description of the relation between diary, dialogue and letter writing. Billeskov Jansen notes that epistolary novels and diaristic novels were popular from the latter half of the 18th century and that both of these literary devices were used in Wilhelm Meister. Kierkegaard also combined the two devices, but gave the diary and the letters each their distinct function within the whole. “The Seducer’s Diary” reminds Billeskov Jansen here of a notorious epistolary novel from 1782, Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liaisons dangereuse (Dangerous Acquaintances). There are many points of contact, but Billeskov Jansen had, at the time of writing, been disinclined to believe that Kierkegaard had read Laclos’ 32

SKS 2, 107 / KW III, 103.

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book. Paul Rubow has made him aware, however, that the book, entitled Farlige Bekjendtskaber, had been translated into Danish in 1832, that is, while Kierkegaard was studying at the University of Copenhagen. In addition, Walther Rehm has drawn attention to an important line of typological descent in intellectual history: Valmont (from Dangerous Acquaintances) is in his view the spiritual father of both Father Roquariols (from Jean Paul’s Titan, 1800-1803) and of Kierkegaard’s seducer. Billeskov Jansen, in his subsequent scrutiny of Stages on Life’s Way also touches upon the figure of Judge William. The ethicist’s solid and coherent style is compared to the contemporary or slightly later romantic genre paintings of Wilhelm Bendz, Vilhelm Marstrand, Christen Dalsgaard, Fr. Vermehren and others. The Judge often seeks to depict the idea of motherhood, as part of his soporific defense of woman, wife and mother – roles the aesthete despises – but the worthy and eloquent William surprizes us just once with a gripping analysis of a historical example of the ruin a life of pleasure-seeking brings: Nero, the aesthete on the emperor’s throne.33 Nero’s cruelty is depicted here as anxiety, anticipating psychological research nearly a century later. The fact that Judge William could unflinchingly produce such a portrait is a testimony to his ethical foundation. 34 Aage Henriksen In his dissertation Kierkegaard’s Novels (1954), Aage Henriksen (1921- ) adopts Billeskov Jansen’s placement of Either/Or and Stages on Life’s Way into the novel genre. The book acknowledges its debt to the new criticism, which claims the unity and independence of a poetic work vis-à-vis the associating research, but it is first and foremost a product of the lack of studies into the overarching aesthetic contours in Kierkegaard’s work, which Henriksen determined was the case a few years previously in his review of Kierkegaard scholarship, Methods and Results of Kierkegaard Studies in Scandinavia: A Historical and Critical Survey (1951). Henriksen raises in large part the problem of Kierkegaard’s use of pseudonyms and he contributes to its solu33 34

SKS 3, 179 ff. Knud Hansen believes B’s analysis of Nero as the quintessential disjointed human being matches precisely a type of person that was particularly widespread among the Nazis – people who at one moment would commit murder and the next moment sobbed at the sound of a Mozart symphony. See Knud Hansen Søren Kierkegaard. Ideens digter, Copenhagen 1954, pp. 68 f.

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tion by “temporarily putting it aside; by respecting the integrity of the pseudonyms while some of their books are being analyzed, one ought to be able to create a body of material upon which one can judge their independence and their familial relations.”35 To this end he looks at “The Seducer’s Diary,” Repetition and “Guilty – Not Guilty” (from Stages), all of which according to Henriksen occupy a special place in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works by virtue of their epic form. Henriksen begins by scrutinizing Heinrich von Kleist’s famous essay Über das Marionettentheater (1810), the doctrines of which are compared to those of the pseudonyms. Their common foundation is the following template: The grace human beings must have possessed when they lived in immediacy was lost in the Fall; in their current condition of finite reflection, they can only hope for and strive after a repetition of the lost grace; they will only achieve this when they have acquired infinite reflection. This is supplemented with an interpretation of the history of philosophy that conceives of the human race as on a path through darkness from a Golden Age long past to a new one. The corollary ideas on culture and ethics form, according to Henriksen, the fundamental equation for constructing Kierkegaard’s philosophy of stages. The three books (or novels) mentioned above all deal, according to Henriksen, with existence types whose attitude toward life and particular fate can be determined by where they are on the evolutionary line that stretches from immediacy to infinite reflection as seen in ethical-psychological terms. When seen in the light of the problem of freedom, the main characters in this view are lightly individualized masks over existential types. Henriksen’s analysis of “The Seducer’s Diary” draws on the concept in aesthetics theory known as “the interesting” and he also makes room for a thorough illumination of the sex- and author problem complexes. According to Henriksen, “The Seducer’s Diary” does not have its center of gravity in the word love (elskov), but in “the interesting.” Henriksen opens here a new path in (Danish) Kierkegaard scholarship, one that has received much attention recently (see section IV). There is a current of reflection throughout the whole erotic relationship in “The Seducer’s Diary” which forms the book’s inner context that casts off toward the end a little anthropological essay in which the seducer converts his ambiguous nature into ambiguous philosophy. As a prelude to this, the two series of meditations in “The Immediate Erotic Stage or the Musical-Erotic” (on Don Juan) and “Silhouettes” 35

Aage Henriksen Kierkegaards Romaner, Copenhagen 1954, pp. 7 f.

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on erotic extremes together give a detailed description of the two fundamentally different ways in which seduction can occur: the immediate and the reflected. These have characteristic effects – in the former a will to erotic pleasure and in the latter in faithlessness, since faithlessness assumes consciousness. According to Henriksen, Johannes’ seduction plan and the entire relationship to Cordelia is forced premeditatedly and unsparingly to conform to the concept of “the interesting” and Johannes has hereby turned his idea into reality. “The interesting” is mentioned more than 30 times in “The Seducer’s Diary,” often with a rough definition and Henriksen devotes a lengthy digression to it. The concept was influenced by Friedrich Schlegel in Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie (1795-1796), in which he argues against Kant’s definition of beauty – that it awakens disinterested pleasure. The problem is that it only fits Grecian art and cannot be used with the new poetry that not only addresses the emotions, but the will and the intellect as well, making the reader implicit in it. Beautiful and serene works like the Greek are certainly the goal, but interesting poetry is defensible in an interregnum and is necessary as a transitional form. The interesting is therefore a testimony to a culture in crisis, which is again a consequence of the lack of cultural self-consciousness. The fundamental reason for the existence of the interesting is the unconscious battle between nature and freedom. Schlegel calls therefore Kant’s Greek ideal the objectively beautiful while the special qualities of modern poetry are called the subjectively beautiful. In Hamlet he finds the interesting poetry’s most interesting hero. The interesting became more or less identified with a refined and reflected style, with material innovations and exciting performances. This corresponds to a new type of human being: one who is conflicted and enigmatic. The best known analysis in Danish of the concept is found in Heiberg’s review of Oehlenschläger’s Dina (1842). For Heiberg (and for Schlegel), the interesting has its habitat on the border between nature and freedom. Heiberg finds the psychological reflection that through external signs like paling, trembling, stuttering or similar signs of unconscious affect can bore into a person’s soul and observe there the struggle between passion and plan, instinct and will, to be “precisely interesting.” Johannes the Seducer uses the word in its special sense that from Schlegel’s essay was adopted by the aesthetic jargon of the day. Johannes is, according to himself, merely the interesting human being, while Cordelia is the most interesting object, a juxtaposition that corresponds to “the person that is interesting in himself” and “the person in whom the inter-

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esting reveals itself.” Johannes’ plan with Cordelia is to progressively uncover her rich, untouched nature and penetrate it with consciousness. But the meristem of this development is to be her pride, her defiance of convention. By nourishing and supporting this peculiarity, he can imperceptibly guide her development, ensnare her free spirit in invisible bonds. In practice, the plan seeks to on the one hand begin a harmonious erotic development and on the other hand stimulate her propensity to the unconventional by turning her critical sense toward the engagement. To do this, letters are used to inflame her and conversation to cool her off. In his analysis, Henriksen links “the interesting” together with anxiety and shows that anxiety is the goal-directing power and motive energy in the reflected Seducer as well as in the immediate (Don Juan). But the line from Either/Or to The Concept of Anxiety is drawn out even further. According to the Seducer’s “anthropology,” woman does not exist in her isolated virginity, but only in relation to the erotic, to man, to spirit, by whom she can come to be and be rescued from nature. She is defined as “being for another.”36 Henriksen finds the line argument that supports this thesis not just objectionable, but also of a peculiar, ambiguous nature and he goes off on a long digression on the anthropological concepts in The Concept of Anxiety (soul, spirit, vegetative spirit, the instant) that he considers necessary for understanding Johannes’ theory and his own central problem. Seen against the background of J. E. Erdmann’s Leib und Seele (1837), which (with reservations) substitutes for The Concept of Anxiety and its deduced anthropology, Johannes’ meditations on the category of woman becomes transparent. His theory is thus called a “Karikatur des Heiligsten” and is, as are the speeches in “In Vino Veritas,” the truth as seen in a magic mirror. Johannes makes the split into sexes (which in Vigilius Hafniensis’ view first becomes significant in the sphere of quantitative change) penetrate to the root of his view of humanness, such that even the word “human” is broken in two. Spirit is attributed to woman, but only in a vegetative sense, the same sense in which Vigilius says that spirit is dreaming. She is lead toward her defining condition, spirit, but not by herself but by man. Henriksen reminds the reader here that in the chapter on the interesting the distinction was made between being interesting in itself and being interesting for others. The former is apparently the case for man and the latter the case for woman. It is now clear how deeply this distinction is bound up 36

SKS 2, 417.

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in the Seducer’s world view. Woman, who has her essence in nature, as substance, can only be interesting for others, because spirit comes to her as a foreign element that slowly permeates her soul and dissolves the kernel of her essence. But for man, whose proper element is reflection and freedom, it is nature that is the foreign element and the contact of their elements need not be interesting for others than himself. It lies in his essence to have the possibility of controlling his urges and present a false front to the world. Even though the interesting springs from the same meeting for man and woman, the experience does not bring the two sexes closer together, because they are fundamentally oriented in opposite directions. No likeness or equality exists between man and woman in the realm of the interesting. Johannes’ method and his praxis as a seducer generally is to make the difference in the sexes into the dualistic principle of existence, but his foreknowledge of the truth hinders him in being fully consistent – he forces the principle beyond its limits. But his words about the vegetative presence of spirit in woman are evidence of the insight that comes to fruition in Vigilius: that man and woman are both created to be spirit and are equally obligated to become it. As mentioned earlier, Henriksen also deals with the authorship problem, but this will not be given further attention here. 37 He also draws interesting parallels to modern literature when he determines that it is in the contrast between philistinism and hyperindividualism that creates part of “The Seducer’s Diary’s” mysterious, gothic atmosphere. Henriksen mentions Thomas Mann’s Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus (1949). In this “novel about a novel,” the compositional principle is to let the gentle and moderate humanist Zeitblom tell the life story of his friend, the brilliant and obsessed musician, Adrian Leverkühn. This principle with fictional narrators is also used in reverse by Martin A. Hansen in the novel Lykkelige Kristoffer (Happy Kristoffer) (1945), in which the smart and ironic Brother Martin, who is too clever to take life too seriously, tells the story of the 37

The contradiction between thinking of “The Seducer’s Diary” as a work exclusively from Johannes’ hand and as a published work, brought about by aesthete A and finally (as suggested by Victor Eremita) as written by a single person – this web of contradictions compared to the preface’s realistic stories of its genesis makes a unifying perspective possible, according to Henriksen. In the same way aesthete A has a passive-active relation to the diary, it can be shown that Victor Eremita has a similar passive-active relation to the whole of Either/Or. In this unity, according to Henriksen, the contradiction between the title of the book and the tale of finding the manuscripts is dissolved. See Henriksen Kierkegaards Romaner, Copenhagen 1954, p. 86.

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strict and simple Kristoffer whom he himself has annoyed and provoked into the exhausting fate of a hero. Just as the tension between Kristoffer and Martin is the life blood in Martin A. Hansen’s novel, so also is the tension between hero and clerk the life blood of the pseudonymous novels. The aesthete A, Constantin Constantius and Frater Taciturnus are all observers and commentators on the spectacle of life. They are too smart and reflective to live, but they have many ideas on what it is like to do so. As passionless compatriots and passionate psychologists, they use all their mental dynamism and that of others as fodder for their all-consuming desire to observe. They have no strong desires, only vexing problems and they concentrate all their energies on them. Each one from his particular place in this abstract existence sends candidate human beings into actuality equipped with their own logic, but at the same time with a straightforward intensity, an ability to will and to find life meaningful, which is yet again an intellectual limitation. The hero and observer forever supplement and contrast each other, according to Henriksen. The hero’s life and the observer’s theories complement each other elegantly and Kierkegaard’s indirect communication separates ethical passion from systematic ethics and lets them each fall apart, bound in a negative unity. Hero and observer complete each other psychologically, but their difference is the necessary condition for the fictional coming into existence of the work. Behind the pseudonymous book’s reflections there is hidden a layer, Henriksen writes, a common perspective, an intellectual construction on par with a system of coordinates – a sign of the cross on whose horizontal axis is marked the various degrees of stages, the principle ideas on the nature and possibility of freedom and on whose vertical axis is marked the various degrees of existential inwardness. This sign of the cross is the unity behind the pseudonymous works, the simple bond of systematics and existence, on which both hero and thinker can be judged and it is the cross’s horizontal axis that is examined in Henriksen’s book. Villy Sørensen In his trail-blazing philosophical aesthetics (and more) Digtere og dæmoner (Poets and Demons) from 1959, Villy Sørensen (1929-2001) refutes Aage Henriksen’s description of the epic lines in Kierkegaard’s work as constituting novels. According to Sørensen, the epic lines are instead illustrations of the philosophical evolution of con-

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cepts and Sørensen’s book differentiates itself from Billeskov Jansen’s and Aage Henriksen’s books by using Kierkegaard to formulate his own aesthetics rather than expounding on Kierkegaard’s. His criticism of Kierkegaard’s sharp distinction between the ethical and the aesthetic (between realizing oneself and formulating oneself) forms the basis of the comprehensive aesthetic, philosophical and cultural analyses in Poets and Demons and this criticism is a red thread that runs through Sørensen’s authorship. It is already evident in the title of his subsequent work, Hverken – eller (Neither – Nor) (1961) that he is indebted to, but is also critical of, the fundamental theme in Kierkegaard’s ground-breaking work. In Neither – Nor, Sørensen unfolds his understanding of art and its opposition to Kierkegaard’s in an essay entitled “Søren Kierkegaard and the Magic Flute.” Here he deals with the essay on Don Juan, “The Immediate Erotic Stages or the Musical-Erotic,” beginning by expressing his fundamental wonderment at Kierkegaard’s opposition of the aesthetic and the ethical. Because Kierkegaard does not regard the aesthetic attitude to life as being the most valuable, one could assume, according to Sørensen, that Kierkegaard himself would have reservations about the philosophy of music in aesthete A’s essay. But there is much evidence that Kierkegaard in fact agrees with A, because art is for Kierkegaard a matter for aesthetics in the sense that the object of its meditations is “the beautiful,” which stimulates pleasure and as such an aesthete would presumably be the most suited to write about it. A work of art cannot capture an ethical development, in Kierkegaard’s opinion, and attempts to do this fail – aesthetically. Stated differently, Sørensen continues, art cannot then – especially the most immediate of the arts, music – express according to Kierkegaard the ethical and the spiritual, but must be content with the aesthetic and the sensible (as in Don Juan). But this is where A errs, according to Sørensen – or Kierkegaard does, in as much as he himself is an aesthete in his view of art. In order to experience that ethical love can well be expressed in music, one needs only, according to Sørensen, listen to The Magic Flute, which Kierkegaard sets lower than Don Juan, precisely because it expresses human development. The high priest Sarastro, for example, first shows himself to be a scoundrel only to become a particularly good person and the Queen of the Night, who in her first aria expresses sorrow because her daughter Pamina has been abducted by Sarastro, then goes on in her second aria to express unjust indignation at Pamina’s evasion of her authority. The figures of Papageno and Tamino develop

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likewise and according to Sørensen if one wishes to use Kierkegaardian categories, then Papageno represents the aesthetic love, which does not admit of any development proper, while Tamino represents the ethical – and the latter is, please note, expressed just as well in music as the former. Villy Sørensen finishes by offering his own ideas on art’s potential, in that art, according to him, is able to express the development that each human being goes through, namely the striving after becoming entirely oneself, which only few are able to complete. In The Magic Flute, the fundamental conflict in human nature is traced through all its perilous phases to a happy ending. If only Schikaneder’s text were available, one would not, Sørensen admits, have any confidence in it, but one can easily put one’s trust in Mozart. Thus, based on his philosophy of art, Kierkegaard’s aesthete, who placed Mozart higher than all other artists, paradoxically enough came to place Mozart too low. Sørensen has also published a pedagogical introduction to Either/ Or that was used as an afterword to the Gyldendal publishers edition of the work from 1988. 38 Here it is characteristic of Sørensen to interpret the ethical in the direction of mental hygiene. He notes how novel Kierkegaard’s use of the word “energy” was at the time, especially in its psychological sense, and the high degree to which Kierkegaard anticipated psychoanalysis’ dynamic conception of the life of the soul. When it comes to “choice” in B’s (or Judge William’s) version, Sørensen points out that the degree to which one can choose oneself is still debatable. One can scarcely choose oneself once and for all, not even according to B’s conception: rather it is a process and his “inner teleology” has a certain kinship with what C. G. Jung called the “process of individuation,” a striving toward a psychical wholeness (cf. above). Either one is allied with oneself or one is pitted against oneself – or as it says in the Bible, “He who does not gather, scatters.” Either ethical gathering or aesthetic dissipation. Further on, Sørensen repeats his criticism of Kierkegaard’s philosophy of art, but he is at the same time of the opinion that the aesthete’s essay contains an original aesthetic theory. He notes that the aesthete has far more affinity with the religious than the ethical. It is precisely not one and the same thing for the aesthete, as is nearly the case for the ethicist. Additionally, Sørensen (like Brandes) contextualizes Either/Or with concrete examples by pointing out how Kierkegaard’s 38

Villy Sørensen “Efterskrift” til Enten – Eller, Copenhagen 1988, vol. 2, pp. 343358.

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aesthetes rises above the flock of depressives and nihilists typical of the day and how B’s letters to A in their criticism of the type also contain a criticism of the period, the spirit of the time or precisely the time’s lack thereof. The “modern development” that B speaks of has, according to Sørensen, since intensified the problem of the individual’s lack of a foundation in a community of faith and that is the reason Kierkegaard’s works first became widely known in the twentieth century: what in his time was a problem for the individual became in the age of the welfare state a problem for the many. Finally, Sørensen calls Either/Or the greatest erotic work in Danish literature: in its two parts a multiplicity of erotic moods stands opposite the one erotic passion that gives life meaning, “history.” Even though Kierkegaard gradually pushed the poetical more and more off to the side, he never did it completely: it is impossible to imagine Kierkegaard’s thought and its effects without the supreme poetic form of presentation. This may indicate, according to Sørensen, that the poetical is not just “aesthetic,” (cf. his overarching point), even though the aesthetic part of the authorship is also the most poetic. Knud Hansen Theologian and folk high school principal Knud Hansen (1898-1996) published Ideens Digter (Poet of the Idea) in 1954, where the overarching thesis is that there are progressive “stages of inwardness” in Kierkegaard’s authorship: as the authorship draws close to the accentuated paradoxical religiousness, the external world retreats more and more from view. In Hansen’s rendition, freedom or blessedness is for Kierkegaard bound up with the extreme suffering of renouncing relations with other human beings and by implication the whole sensible world. Knud Hansen considers this an expression of ascetic religiousness and the last and most consistent form of Western, especially medieval, retreat from reality from which there is no way back. On the other hand, Kierkegaard’s greatness consists in his drawing the logical conclusion of his ideal of humanness (an ideal that was also expressed e. g., by Bernhard of Clairvaux in his purification of the mental states) and thus – certainly without willing it himself – taking it ad absurdum. Kierkegaard therefore has, like no other before or after, the possibility – even if indirectly – to help the age to knowledge of itself, namely the knowledge that the path upon which he trod can no one tread farther. Its stopping point is the renunciation of any possibility for existence with other human beings and the absolute isolation of the outstanding

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person in self-absorbed self activity. The much discussed European “crisis of culture” does not, according to Knud Hansen, have its roots in the realm of the politics or economics, but in the “spiritual,” namely in that Europe for centuries has been ruled by precisely the ideal of humanness that in Kierkegaard reaches its apex. In line with this basic thought, Knud Hansen places Either/Or in his table of increasing inwardness. The various stages in Kierkegaard are not, as they are sometimes presented, roughly drawn sketches of loosely connected attitudes toward life, pseudonymously authored so as to set the reader free to choose between possibilities; they are not just possibilities for thought, rather they are, as it is expressly stated, stages on life’s way and by this Kierkegaard means: stages in inwardness. There is a rise in inwardness from the aesthetic to the ethical and the universal religious stage to the Christian. In the aesthetic stage, inwardness is very imperfect. Neither is it perfect in the ethical stage and yet more so than in the aesthetic. Hansen subsequently reviews the various incarnations of the “idea” – the aesthetic as idea, the ethical as idea and the religious as idea – and for example orders the relation between Don Juan and Johannes the Seducer such that Johannes represents a higher degree of inwardness than Don Juan, even though he also represents its mere beginnings. It is in this connection that Hansen remarks that there is something to “what someone once said about reading the whole of Kierkegaard’s theology out of ‘The Seducer’s Diary.’”39 Everything that is later said about inwardness in the theological works, according to Hansen, is only an extension of definitions that are already present in the mention of eroticist’s passionate relation to the idea. The bulk of Hansen’s analysis of Either/Or deals, however, with the ethical stage, with particular weight put on the significance of marriage, which he treats with an attention to detail that can only compare to Eduard Geismar’s (it is perhaps no coincidence, since they were both theologians). Accordingly, the ethicist is in particular characterized by a higher degree of independence from the external world than the aesthete. As regards woman, he does not require ever newer impulses to be in association with ever newer women in order to keep infatuation alive, as does the aesthete. For him, infatuation is not just romantic immediacy alone, but yet again an ethical task which is – as soon as infatuation makes its presence known – to 39

Knud Hansen Søren Kierkegaard. Ideens digter, Copenhagen 1954, p. 43. I have not been able to find Knud Hansen’s source for this claim.

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transform it into duty. For the ethicist, the crux of the matter is not the relation to human beings but the relation to duty. In the depiction of Judge William’s marriage, it is not the relationship between the judge and his wife that, according to Hansen, is the ethicist’s proper subject and interest, rather it is the relation between the judge and duty. The ethicist differentiates further between one’s duty and one’s tasks in society and thus cannot be thought of as a representative of Hegel’s ethics (as some scholars have argued), because duty for him is something interior that cannot be separated into duties – even though he speaks sternly of the duty to take on ordinary tasks, it is not the authority of society or the necessity of living together, rather it is his own personal development, the refinement of his personality that is the goal proper. He sees in the energy of the consciousness of duty a proof for the immortality of the soul and Hansen’s conclusion is that the ethicist is not determined by anything outside of him; only the idea determines him, the idea of the freedom of the free personality. The ethicist is, in Knud Hansen’s rendition, somewhat of a stoic and Hansen makes a good deal of the Judges critique of the mystic’s abstract choice of himself by defining himself in opposition to the world. Niels Barfoed The purpose of author and journalist Niels Barfoed’s dissertation Don Juan. En studie i dansk litteratur (Don Juan: A Study in Danish Literature) from 1978 is to perform a general reinterpretation of what constitutes the material on Don Juan based on the twin suppositions that it serves as a tool to preserve a world order and that it expresses a structure of male sexual drive. His focus is on the period 1828-1843 in Danish literature which in terms of the material on Don Juan appears particularly intense and homogeneous. The essay is thus an attempt to characterize the period based on its use of the Don Juan motif by such cultural icons as Moliére, Mozart, Carsten Hauch, Fr. Paludan-Müller and Kierkegaard.40 According to Barfoed (1931- ), Kierkegaard represents a high point in the romantic’s attempts to give Don Juan an inner life and to 40

Barfoed makes clear from the beginning that it is not a classic comparative study that seeks to account for the forms and paths of literary influence within a defined area, as is the case in his own essay “Hotho und Kierkegaard” in Orbis Litterarum, vol. XXII, Copenhagen 1967, pp. 378-386. Barfoed’s dissertation has its origin in precisely this essay, as it was a task given to him by his teacher Billeskov Jansen.

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reveal and dissect his secrets. One should not be misled into thinking that Kierkegaard is interested in the peculiarities of the type – he de-individualizes his types like no one before or after him in order to present a universally valid psychology and Kierkegaard likewise develops from the Mozart material a Christian history of sensuality and a whole philosophy of art concerning what language and music each can express. Barfoed also believes the opera was Kierkegaard’s greatest exprerience of art (he refuses to follow Frithiof Brandt, however, in speculating on whether Mozart can be blamed for an alleged Kierkegaard visit to a brothel), but where e. g., Carsten Hauch continued the original theatrical tradition, Kierkegaard pulls Don Juan away from the stage and constructs his own interpretation in the first extensive meta-treatment in Don Juan literature: “The Immediate Erotic Stages or The Musical-Erotic.” Even if someone had been able to offer Kierkegaard a non-idealistic concept of drama, according to Barfoed, he would scarcely have been interested. Cutting a long story short, Kierkegaard – in agreement with the subtitle of Knud Hansen’s book (see above) – is the poet of the idea. In contrast to Moliére’s libertine and methodical seducer (and also his own Johannes the Seducer), in contrast to romanticism’s endowment of the type with a divided and eloquent inner life, Kierkegaard, if anyone, has distilled the idea of Don Juan. In this he was on the same wavelength as his contemporaries, who on the whole had the idea firmly implanted in their collective brain. But he plays through an extraordinary personal drama that is far more varied in perspective than any of his contemporaries achieve with the material. In addition, the essay on Mozart’s Don Juan is, according to Barfoed, the pinnacle of Kierkegaard’s mastery of the language. Barfoed’s treatment of Kierkegaard’s essay confirms his thesis that Don Juan functions as a phantasm that the Law conjures up and in a ritualized act uses for self-affirmation, that is, as an object and a tool in the service of a higher goal rather than as a subject. In several places Barfoed calls Don Juan an “intransitive myth.” From both the research into the history of Christianity told through Don Juan and from the lyrical metaphorizing that the essay ventures into, it is evident in Barfoed’s interpretation that Kierkegaard’s work with Don Juan casts a revealing light on that Christian metaphysical system that the concept of Don Juan was otherwise supposed to serve. Christendom takes on the character of a “historical” religion rather than a dogmatic “eternal validity” in the essay and, in addition, the penalties that the spirit metes out are declared “a far too vengeful Nemesis.”

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But also in other ways – e. g. by comparing the Faust and Don Juan themes – Barfoed opens Pandora’s box, claiming that the imbueing of Don Juan with anxiety can be read as spirit’s decisive trick on him. Don Juan is therefore a greater threat to spirit than Faust, because it is a threat against the very logic of the metaphysical assumptions. The warning that Kierkegaard wanted directed at the “exuberant joviality” is shown to generate criticism of Kierkegaard’s dogmatic standpoint. Thus Kierkegaard’s Don Juan material contains a potential threat to Christian idealism rather than the Faustian nihilism: a much more unmanageable and surprizing threat, namely, the threat of innocence. Kierkegaard’s laborings with the Don Juan material radiates symptoms of the difficulties of spirit in trying to justify itself and its primate and through these symptoms one glimpes a mind-stretching power structure. Like power’s own bad dream, Don Juan operates for a short time as a spy in the enemy camp, gathering intelligence about the positive principle’s inner workings and just before he is cut down he manages to paint the words, “Hereditary sin is a paper tiger!” on the wall behind him.41 Barfoed’s second goal is, as mentioned earlier, to better grasp the seducer problem’s testimony to a special male sexuality. He shows that whereas anxiety in service to the Law is related to hereditary sin and the whole Christian world view, it has another meaning when looked at from the perspective of male sexual drive. Here, it is an expression of an extreme binding to the father and the whole world of impressions that the father stands for. Thus an Oedipal conflict takes shape and is lived through in a highly “abnormal” way,42 a way 41 42

See Niels Barfoed Don Juan. En studie i dansk litteratur, Copenhagen 1978, p. 226. Barfoed draws on Kresten Nordentoft’s Kierkegaard’s psykologi, Copenhagen 1972 and notes that Nordentoft succeeds (pp. 66 ff.) in showing that the figure complex consisting of Cherubino – Papageno – Don Juan reappears as an inner-psychological model of development in the character of Cordelia from “The Seducer’s Diary.” Nordentoft does not concern himself with what Barfoed calls Don Juan’s other, non-problematizing representation, that is, Don Juan as an expression of the structure of the male sexual drive. Nordentoft has made a detailed study of the arresting agreement between Kierkegaard’s description of immediacy (through the three Mozartian figures) and Freud’s theory of the earliest sexual stages, but he points out here that Kierkegaard does not anticipate the decisive factor in Freud’s “theory of development:” “The assumption that the object of the page’s devotion is his mother – or expressed more carefully – the motherly, can look like an interpolation when one wishes to make Kierkegaard more “psychoanalytic” than he is. He is not setting the stage for the theory of the Oedipus complex here.” Kierkegaards psykologi, op. cit., p. 55. Barfoed adds, “No, probably not, but it may be a stage he’s been set on!” Don Juan, op.cit., p. 236.

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that should remind us, according to Barfoed, that sons, just as much as daughters, can have their wings clipped and rendered impotent under the Christian-authorized paternalism. On the other hand, sons have had the possibility of sublimating their desire for love, a syndrome of which Kierkegaard is a prime example: the price of his colossal productivity was quite certainly paid in the ability to give of himself sexually. According to Barfoed, he also imbues his use of the language with a corresponding eroticism (cf. Villy Sørensen’s view above). Barfoed’s concluding remarks extend his hard-won insights into the Don Juan material forward to the rest of Kierkegaard’s authorship. Here he uses Adorno’s claim that lovelessness is the result of the unfolding of the command to love in Works of Love, as here love is something to be practiced for its own sake and not for the sake of the neighbor and that it relates to other human beings as if they were dead. The fact that the immediate erotic stage reproduces itself in the religious doctrine of love means, when translated and extended to suit Barfoed’s purposes, that Don Juan and his choiceless, distinctionless eroticism rises from the grave in Kierkegaard’s command to love without affection. Despite his reservations, Barfoed throws out the idea that as a result of the fate he suffered, Don Juan, or the immediate erotic, returns with a vengeance in the misanthropic doctrine of Christian love. You shall love, says the commandment in Works of Love. According to Barfoed, this has the fatal chill in common with the Devil’s demand of Faust: “You must not love.”

IV. 1980-2005 In postmodernism’s literary and aesthetic readings of Kierkegaard, the rhetorical, majeutic and seductive strategy employed in the text is treated straightaway and often without any propaedeutic philosophical discussion. It focuses sharply on how Kierkegaard says something and not just what he says and the role of the reader is examined in an entirely different way than previously. It was also typical of 1980s and 1990s Kierkegaard scholarship to strip the aesthetic and the ethical from the theory of stages, which until then had almost completely dominated the understanding of these Kierkegaardian categories. This is especially important for expositions of Either/Or, which in literary research is likely the most thoroughly treated of Kierkegaard’s works and here it is namely “The Seducer’s Diary” that is subjected

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to intense and penetrating analyses.43 Beyond the literary readings, the gender studies readings announce their presence in the wake of the feminist movements in the 1970s. Few authors or philosophers have dealt so comprehensively and intensely with infatuation, seduction, marriage, the ways and wrong ways of desire and the contrast between man and woman as Kierkegaard has done and here too Either/Or is a work of cardinal importance.44 Finn Hauberg Mortensen and Carl Henrik Koch Before the central literary readings are reviewed, I will follow a couple of lines of thought in Danish scholarship on Either/Or. Niels Thulstrup’s doctoral dissertation (1967) has as its thesis that Kierkegaard and Hegel have nothing in common as thinkers, neither in terms of object, goal, method or assumptions.45 Further, Thulstrup (1924-1988) understands Kierkegaard’s early position, as noted in his journals, regarding Hegel’s philosophy as a process of clarification that was completed around the time Either/Or was published. Henning Fenger 43

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“The Seducer’s Diary” and more broadly understood, the theme of seduction – be it actual or textual – is a dominant topic in the Kierkegaard articles of the period, cf. e. g., Karin Sanders “Blik og forførelse – om Søren Kierkegaards ‘Forførerens Dagbog’ ” in Kritik, no. 86, Copenhagen 1988, pp. 54-62; Kathrine Lilleør Petri “ ‘Din Cordelia’. Om fantasi og forførelse hos Søren Kierkegaard” in Fønix, no. 3, Copenhagen 1995, pp. 28-40; Jørgen Bonde Jensen “København som refleksions-spejl – for Søren Kierkegaard i Forførerens Dagbog” in Jeg er kun en digter. Om Søren Kierkegaard som skribent, Copenhagen 1996, pp. 122-147; Michael Juul Therkelsen “Forførelse, bedrag og erkendelse hos Søren Kierkegaard” in K&K, 83, Copenhagen 1997, pp. 69-92; Johannes Fibiger “Fortælling og forførelse” in Alt skal med. Et festskrift til Aage Jørgensen på 60-års dagen den 5. juni 1998, Horsens 1998, pp. 87-107; Steen Beck “Forføreren. Søren Kierkegaards Forførerens Dagbog” in Mesterværker. Europæisk litteratur fra Sofokles til Strindberg, Copenhagen 1999, pp. 229-243; Bo Kampmann Walther “Hvad elsker elskov? Søren Kierkegaard ‘Forførerens Dagbog’ ” in Læsninger i Dansk Litteratur 1-5, vol. 2: 1820-1900, Odense 1998, pp. 118-134, and Jacob Bøggild “Forførerens fald – om en detalje i Kierkegaards Forførerens Dagbog” in Detaljen – tekstanalysen og dens grænser I (eds. Anne Sejten og Erik Svendsen), Roskilde 1999, pp. 211-222. Birgit Bertung in particular has dealt with this aspect of the authorship, see for example, Om Kierkegaard, kvinder og kærlighed – en studie i Søren Kierkegaards kvindesyn, Copenhagen 1987. See also Anne Margrethe Zacher Carlsen “Æstetik og kvindelighed – brudstykker af kvindelighedens ideologi” in Læs. Litteratur Æstetik Sprog. Skriftserie fra Nordisk Institut, Aarhus Universitet, Aarhus 1984, especially pp. 55 ff on “The Seducer’s Diary.” See also Peter Thielst Søren og Regine. Kierkegaard, kærlighed og kønspolitik, Copenhagen 1980. Cf. Niels Thulstrup Kierkegaards forhold til Hegel og til den spekulative idealisme indtil 1846, Copenhagen 1967, p. 21.

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(1921-1985), on the other hand, conceives of the years 1835-1843 as one long period of fermentation and does not accept a date for settling accounts earlier than the publication of Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Fenger claims that even though Kierkegaard was certainly not Hegelian, he is up to his neck in Heibergianism up to and including Either/Or.46 Finn Hauberg Mortensen (1946- ) picks up this thread (via Mark C. Taylor’s Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard) in a couple of articles from the 1980s that illuminate the relation between the two thinkers by analyzing their style of composition. Hauberg Mortensen accentuates the under-emphasized fact that “Kierkegaard was also a poet. His texts can be conceived in philosophical and theological analyses as an arsenal of concepts and out-of-context quotations, while the structure, metaphors and style, etc. are ignored. Thus my attempt to come at the problem from a literary direction.”47 Hauberg Mortensen then shows in his compositional analysis of Either/Or that the aesthetician’s heterogeneous texts can be united in Hegelian triads. Either/Or and many other texts from that period are constructed according to a triadic logic which is reflected in both the details and in the larger context. Hauberg Mortensen claims thusly that there are two triadic movements in the six aesthetic essays by A, that is, the essays in Part 1, excluding “Diapsalmata” and “The Seducer’s Diary.” The starting point for one triad is an aesthetic description of the relation between immediacy and reflection. The analysis of Don Juan is the thesis and “The Tragic in Ancient Drama Reflected in the Tragic in Modern Drama” is the anthesis and these become the synthesis in “Silhouettes.” The second triad deals with psychology: “The Unhappiest One” (thesis), the reading of Scribe “The First Love” (antithesis) and finally “Rotation of Crops” (synthesis). These triads are even found repeated in the individual texts so one can look at A’s essays from a level one step deeper as consisting of yet again two triangles. Finally, Hauberg Mortensen suggests that Either/Or’s third element, 46

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Fenger cites his conclusion that the sources, including the Gilleleje entries, are fictional. It just will not do, he says, to give fiction the same weight as real letters and journal entries. In Fenger’s book, there is an account of the genesis of Either/Or with a polemic view to P. A. Heiberg’s Nogle Bidrag til Enten – Eller’s Tilblivelseshistorie, Copenhagen 1910; see Kierkegaard-Myter og Kierkegaard-Kilder, Odense 1976, pp. 16-21. For philological studies of Either/Or see J. L. Heiberg “Textkritiske Bemærkninger til Enten – Eller” in Danske Studier, Copenhagen 1911, pp. 46-50, and Johnny Kondrup “Tekstkritisk konservatisme, belyst ved eksempler fra Søren Kierkegaards Enten – Eller” in Danske Studier, Copenhagen 1997, pp. 84-104. Finn Hauberg Mortensen “Kierkegaard og Hegel – en kompositionsanalytisk tilgang” in Scandinavian Literature in a Transcultural Context, Seattle 1984, p. 105.

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its synthesis, has been placed outside it, in the form of the three volume Upbuilding Discourses from 1843.48 In Carl Henrik Koch’s Kierkegaard og “Det interessante.” En studie i en æstetisk kategori (Kierkegaard and “The Interesting:” A Study of an Aesthetic Category) from 1992, the aesthetic category “the interesting” is sifted and weighed with a thoroughness not seen since Aage Henriksen. According to Koch (1938- ), to understand Kierkegaard’s use of the term we must distinguish between “the interesting” as a material category and as a category of the aesthetics of reception. This distinction is formally the same one Aage Henriksen formulated in his analysis of “The Seducer’s Diary” when he distinguished between that which is interesting in itself and that which is interesting for others, but Koch notes that “the interesting” as a category of reception aesthetics encompasses that which is interesting for others and that which is interesting for oneself, which Henriksen overlooks. “The interesting” as material category can be exemplified, but the category of reception aesthetics need not be and the two reception aesthetic subcategories “interesting for others” and “interesting in itself” are likewise independent of each other. Koch then makes a connection between the interesting and reflection, since the thesis is that the concept of reflection is fundamental to Kierkegaard’s use of the category “the interesting.” He uses these distinctions in an analysis of “The Seducer’s Diary” and concludes that the reception aesthetics category and the material category become identical, which according to Koch is important to understanding Kierkegaard’s further use in his authorship of the concept “the interesting,” e. g., Johannes de silentio’s description of “the interesting” as a category of “turning point.” The point of it all according to Koch is to observe how Kierkegaard juggles with Hegelian concepts and those concepts that can only be understood in the context of Hegelianism; the Hegelian concepts are in a way turned against Hegel himself in order to demonstrate that his philosophy ends in emptiness. Chapter Six in Koch’s book is according to Koch himself proof that “The Seducer’s Diary” can be read as a satire of Hegelianism as Kierkegaard understood it.49

48

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Cf. also Finn Hauberg Mortensen Søren Kierkegaard’s Either-/Or. Its Composition and Appropriation of Folk Literature, Minneapolis 1989. Concerning Either/Or, Carl Henrik Koch has also written “I anledning af…Om anledningens kategori i ‘Enten – Eller’ ” in Filosofiske studier, vol. 15, Copenhagen 1995, pp. 136-146.

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Joakim Garff In the last decade Kierkegaard has if anything been subjected to literary readings, which is a shift in focus from the epistemological to the rhetorical or, shall we say, from the categorical to the discursive (from what to how). One of the chief examples of this shift is Joakim Garff’s “Den Søvnløse” (“The Insomniac”) from 1995 that wants to “show the authorship’s inner contradictions on the basis of its own assumptions and reveal the intended contradiction’s unintended collapse” – a deconstructive reading that is supplemented by a reconstructive, diachronic movement, since the authorship is read as one coherent text “across and in spite of the directions Kierkegaard himself has given for the correct reading.”50 In this way, Garff (1960- ) manages to combine a text-immanent reading of the individual works with an overall grasp of the flow of the authorship. Garff is particularly interested in demonstrating the presence of the aesthetic in the religious and also the divergence between the inner and the outer, the fluctuation between the majeutic and action as well as the (mis)relation between picture and depicted. Garff begins his review of Either/Or by examining the work’s prologues and all the issues related to the authorship problem, which he suspends, however, by pointing out the starting point of the text itself is the lack of agreement between the inner and the outer. There is much evidence, according to Garff, that Victor Eremita is an author that presents himself as a publisher. The two prologues, Victor’s preface and the unattributed one, do everything to conceal one another, rather than to reveal. The construct is symbolized by the secretary desk, which points etymologically not only to the secret space where the manuscripts are hidden, but also to “the secret” itself. The violent attempt to open the secretary’s “last hiding place” – in which “The Seducer’s Diary” and other manuscripts were placed – anticipates in Garff’s presentation Johannes’ way of forcing his way into Cordelia’s “last hiding place.” Further, the secretary desk allegorizes the seduction to which the reader is subjected by the text. Garff concludes that the author’s true name is Søren Kierkegaard, because just as Victor Eremita points demonstratively to himself as a possible author by

50

Joakim Garff “Den Søvnløse”: Kierkegaard læst æstetisk/biografisk, Copenhagen 1995, p. 11.

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pointing to A, in the same way the fictionalized text points demonstratively to the author behind the text. 51 After this propaedeutic work, Garff’s begins his analysis saying that Either/Or must be thought of as a stage with two performers and he treats the work in the order it is written, namely, Part 2 and Judge William first and then Part 1 and esthetist A. According to Garff, Judge William’s problem is the relation between temporality and art, a problem that William manages to turn into an argument in his favor. He does much to refute what he sees as an aesthetic fallacy – everything he talks about can be presented aesthetically, not in poetic reproduction, but in the sense that one lives it, i. e., brings it about in actuality. It is just not posssible for art to capture and control the temporal: the diffence between the aesthetic reproduction and the existential reduplication of the aesthetic is not a difference in the aesthetic itself, rather it is a difference in the meaning attributed to the temporal. The judge thus argues for a realization of the aesthetic existentially in the medium of time; he argues for extension, not concentration, and he unfolds it in a theory of the individual as an amorphous passion, who by choosing himself is endowed with continuity and contour in relation to the socio-cultural system. Garff credits Judge William for making the “narratologically visionary point”52 that human beings do not simply have a history, but purely and simply are their history and to identify oneself with this history is to have an identity. William’s theology here is hard to describe, e. g., he scarcely mentions Christ, while God or “the eternal power” is above all identified as the transcendental instance that brings the conditions of the choice into operation and thereby making possible the production of the self’s authentic modus. According to Garff, William’s God is not a historical caesura, rather God is a guarantee for continuity and by extension the guarantee that one not only remains who one is, but also where one is. Garff’s reading of esthetist A’s papers reveals William’s criticisms of the aesthetic as too simple and that A, both psychologically and in his 51

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Garff names Karin Pulmer in several notes. In her work Die dementierte Alternative (1982), Either/Or is read in the light of Gadamer’s hermeneutics and Iser’s reception aesthetics. Garff does not share her interest in tracking down and pinning the authorship proper on a particular person (Victor Eremita, in this case). The great effort Victor has made – graphologically, psychologically and legally – in an attempt to find the true authors is not a contribution to bring the deception to an end, rather it is a linchpin in the deception itself, which is why the reader is doubly deceived, according to Garff, in trying to follow Victor’s various sketches to a resolution of the problem of the author. Garff “Den Søvnløse,” p. 89.

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diagnoses of the epoch demonstrates a mental acuteness that greatly exceeds the Judge’s. If there is something that separates the two, it is the consciousness of the history they separately and collectively find themselves in. Where William sees A in terms of an individual-based psychology, A (in “The Tragic in Ancient Drama Reflected in the Tragic in Modern Drama”) describes how the symptoms William correctly reads, apply not just to A as a type, but they spread out and attach themselves to the epoch, i. e., modernity. Thus, A’s problem is not that he does not, as William wrongly presumes, want to be a self, rather the problem lies in his consciousness of how problematic it is to become a self in an epoch that has left human beings to trade in a system of arbitrary signs that do no more than refer to each other and thus never represent, but only simulate the presence of meaning. Things are not just no longer what they were, they are not even where they were – one wishes to be upbuilt in the theater, moved aesthetically in church, converted by novels, take pleasure in upbuilding literature, etc. A points to the critical place in William’s ethical theory: William is certainly neither comical nor laughable, but his project hinges on the transhistorical assumption that the individual can choose “the absolute” and by this choose himself in his eternal validity. It is this assumption A makes problematic by revealing the transhistorical as an illusion that dangles before the individual the possibility of taking possession of one’s origin. Such an origin has once and for all been lost in the interpersonal and socio-cultural relations. Thus A renders the premisses upon which William builds his ethical-existential conclusions problematic. Further, Garff shows that the either/or that the book posits corresponds to the Kantian distinction between the beautiful and the sublime. William knows that the sublime cannot be lived, but A desires the radically Other: God as the narrator from without who can poeticize him and imbue his life with a narrative identity. This is exemplified by A’s flight from the contemporary passionlessness to the Old Testament and Shakespeare, where, according to him, one meets real people. According to Garff, A has realized that identity is not, as William assumed, the result of the individual’s identifying itself with its own history, but on the contrary dependent on a narrative from without. Finally, Garff’s reading proves that Either/Or (by the author’s disappearance into a system of Chinese boxes) both in composition and structure is an unfolding of the consciousness that occasioned A’s conflict. The mystification itself is repeated in the techniques A employs when he needs to re-enchant an existence that has lost its natural

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enchantment. The preface’s staging of the missing authors is thus a reflection of A’s consciousness of the narrator’s absence and both the preface and the work become in themselves a “fragmentary striving.” Not only is the mystification that Victor Eremita has arranged with his preface repeated deep within the work’s own concept, it also shows that the work has established an ordering of the two narrators and only simulates a choice that already has been made in favor of the aesthete. If William sometimes appears theologically naïve, it is because Kierkegaard has inserted blind spots in the ethicists discourse. In this perspective, Victor Eremita can, according to Garff, be read as another name for the implicit narrator’s hidden victory in the text. Isak Winkel Holm Isak Winkel Holm (1965- ) distinguishes himself from the most recent tradition of aesthetic Kierkegaard readings in his use of the concept of aesthetics in its theoretical sense. 53 The search for the authorship’s statements of theoretical aesthetics that he makes in Tanken i billedet. Kierkegaards poetik (The Idea in the Image: Kierkegaard’s Poetics) from 1998 brings him to the result that Kierkegaard did not really have an aesthetics or more precisely, the aesthetics Kierkegaard had was a copy of the idealistic aesthetics of the day. The interesting part is that under the traditional statements of art theory a second and more independent theory of aesthetics is hidden, which is the essay’s discovery and concern. “Kierkegaard’s poetics” refers thus to the concrete experiences Kierkegaard had as an author, a poetics that does not consist of an “explicit theoretical structure,” rather there is an “implicit poetological layer in the text that must be laid bare by painstaking hermeneutical excavation.”54 Central to the investigation is “the collision of the warm images and the dry concepts” and Winkel Holm distinguishes between four positions in the conception of 53

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Joakim Garff, Poul Erik Tøjner and Jørgen Dehs make a conscious effort to dissociate themselves from the abstract “theory of the beautiful” in their book Kierkegaards æstetik, Copenhagen 1995, which at the start makes clear that they deal with the aesthetics Kierkegaard unfolds “with his work and in his work.” It is not therefore “a review of the mentions of art and questions of aesthetics that one finds scattered about in the authorship and the posthumous papers.” Cf. Joakim Garff, Poul Erik Tøjner, Jørgen Dehs Kierkegaards æstetik, Copenhagen 1995, pp. 7 f. One must make an exception for Jørgen Dehs here, since in several articles he puts Kierkegaard’s criticism of the aesthetics of the beautiful in the context of Kant’s theory of the sublime. Isak Winkel Holm Tanken i billedet. Kierkegaards poetik, Copenhagen 1998, p. 12.

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Kierkegaard’s literary images: the reductive (Villy Sørensen), the harmonizing (Billeskov Jansen), the contextualizing (Jørgen Dehs and George Pattison) and finally the problematizing (Garff and Adorno). Winkel Holm describes his own approach as akin to the contextualizing and the problematizing readings, without belonging fully to either of them. 55 Winkel Holm uses the concept of “aesthetic negativity” (cf. Adorno and Blanchot, among others) describing the tense relation between the meaning of a work of art and its material. It is defined as the “uncompleted and uncompletable aesthetic process in which meaning is continually sabotaged by art’s meaningless material.”56 One of the texual figures Holm analyses is brought forth by Don Juan in “The Immediate Erotic Stages or the Musical-Erotic” from Part 1 of Either/Or. Don Juan comes out looking like “a picture that is continually coming into view but does not attain form and consistency, an individual who is continually being formed but is never finished, about whose history one cannot learn except by listening to the noise of the waves.”57 The image of Don Juan as breaking waves is designated in the essay as “a transcendental poetic image,” i. e., an image that depicts its own coming into being and it is in these images the “poetics” under discussion are found. In addition to the wave image, the transcendental poetic images include two other appearances of Don Juan (from the “The Immediate Erotic Stages or the Musical-Erotic” and a journal entry and a corresponding passage from “Diapsalmata”) as well as the invocation of Socrates in The Concept of Irony and the invocation of Cordelia in “The Seducer’s Diary.” In other words, Kierkegaard’s poetics does not present itself in conceptual forms but in textual figures, which is one of the explanations for the essay’s title, The Idea in the Image. In his treatment of “The Seducer’s Diary,” Winkel Holm imparts a new aspect to the concept of “the interesting.” He reads the story of Johannes and Cordelia as a pas de deux between the power of the imagination and reason. The diary’s central concept of “the interesting” stands out in this perspective as not just a concept in the philosophy of existence or a psychological concept, but as precisely a poetological concept. “The interesting” designates in this sense a special form of aesthetic production in which the finished form is continually 55 56 57

Ibid., pp. 41 ff. Ibid., p. 30. SKS 2, 97 / KW III, 92.

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split apart by aesthetic negativity. When Johannes describes his strategy of seduction as a “double movement” of ecstacy and cool irony, he means irony’s double movement of self-creation and self-limitation, according to Winkel Holm. His conclusion is not, however, that the poetological reflection in “The Seducer’s Diary” is a simple staging of the romantic concept of irony, because in Johannes the ironic double movement is transformed into a historical problem. Cordelia’s silent comprehensibility which supplies the starting point for the painstaking work of seduction, does not consist only of imagination’s intertwined forms, but also consists of the historical context’s diffuse “more” of meanings that tend to get themselves mixed up in the subject’s intended meaning. The starting point of aesthetic production is not simply the natural form of the arabesque, but also the symbol’s historically formed material. Seen in this Hegelian light, the double movement of production becomes, according to Winkel Holm, a testimony that reason is not supreme in its aesthetic work, on the contrary it is dependent on a contingent and temporalized material. The treatise also seeks to document a number of “analogies” between the poetics and various philosophical problems posed by Kierkegaard, i. e., “the anthropological problem of hereditary sin,” which is compared to the poetics based on the aesthete’s discussion of Antigone in “The Tragic in Ancient Drama Reflected in the Tragic in Modern Drama.” The short passage here on the genesis of the figure of Antigone demonstrates, according to Winkel Holm, that there are also other experiences than the autobiographical (which scholars have concentrated on, to the exclusion of almost all else) that are worked through in Kierkegaard’s theory of hereditary sin. By attaching a poetological theme to the Antigone essay’s fundamentally anthropological discussion, the aesthete is able to draw a parallel between the modern Antigone’s ambivalent anxiety and his own ambivalent process of production. Both of these ambivalent states are placed in the gray area between subject and its context. According to Winkel Holm, the poetological argument, which the aesthete articulates in the lecture on Antigone, is that the literary production’s non-supremacy should not only be understood as the gift of divine inspiration, but also as a very earthly dependancy on the final context. Winkel Holm shows here how the struggle between the Augustinian (i. e., the deterministic explanation for the individual human being’s fall from grace) and the Pelagian (i. e., volitionistic explanation that puts the guilt and responsibility on the individual) perspectives on what the aesthete calls Antigone’s “hereditary guilt,” can be compared to the

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struggle between production and reproduction in his invocation of the figure of Antigone. The oscillation here between the two perspectives is so clear that Winkel Holm can break the invocational passage into an explanatory diagram with Augustinism and reproduction on the one hand and Pelagianism and production on the other. 58 As an interesting perspective on the analogy in “The Tragic in Ancient Drama Reflected in the Tragic in Modern Drama,” Winkel Holm shows how the aesthete’s discussion of the tragic can be seen as an offshoot of the debate concerning human freedom and sanity that took place during the so-called Howitz feud in 1824. 59 Bo Kampmann Walther, Jacob Bøggild and Lasse Horne Kjældgaard The remaining studies in literary scholarship shall be reviewed in more abbreviated form. Bo Kampmann Walther (1967- ) in Øjeblik og tavshed (Instant and Silence) (2002) investigates parts of Kierkegaard’s authorship, including “The Seducer’s Diary,” primarily via a deconstructive reading, but the book rests on the premise that it is possible to fruitfully combine a deconstructive reading of Kierkegaard, as Joakim Garff and Lars Erslev Andersen have done,60 with a more “traditionalist” reading as seen in Anders Kingo who places himself in the tradition of Tidehverv and Kristoffer Olesen Larsen (see below, the section on Pia Søltoft). According to Kampmann Walther, Kierkegaard thematizes the relation between the aesthetic and the religious and creates a kind of authorship-spanning meta- or subtext, in which the epistemological value of language itself is up for debate. But at the same time, he points toward the limits of language, i. e., a place or point where aesthetics must give up in favor of religiousness. It is in the meeting between the signs and images of the text where meaning can no longer be preserved in either a discursive or figurative sense and in the openness of the reading to the insufficiency of language that faith comes into play. The rhetorical correlate of faith is therefore silence and the instant. The paradoxical is that faith also comes into play in language and has to be passed on from 58 59

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Winkel Holm Tanken i billedet, pp. 271 f. See also Lasse Horne Kjældgaard’s review of Winkel Holm’s book in the journal Det ny Reception, no. 36, Copenhagen 1999. Cf. Lars Erslev Andersen Hinsides ironi, Aalborg 1995. Here, Kierkegaard is placed in the context of modern text theory, which makes his texts into a kind of forerunner of Derrida’s critiques.

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there. The unreconcilability and therefore the undecidability that has set up camp in Kierkegaard’s texts is a testimony to their ability, in a negative way, to encompass what the positions of the texts otherwise reject. According to Kampmann Walther, this means that i. e., “The Seducer’s Diary,” in spite of its arch-aesthetic views, encompasses a religious problem complex that has further connections to related problem complexes in i. e., Repetition, Fear and Trembling, and “Guilty – Not Guilty” (from Stages), and in his research he dwells on what he calls “stopped images,” which refers to Johannes the Seducer’s special pictoral technique in which events seem to be fast frozen at interesting moments and at the same time are imbued with a kind of flexibility or affect. Jacob Bøggild (1963- ) in Ironiens tænker. Tænkningens ironi. Kierkegaard læst retorisk (The Thinker of Irony: The Irony of Thought: A Rhetorical Reading of Kierkegaard) (2002) makes an in-depth study of Kierkegaard’s dissertation The Concept of Irony in an attempt to demonstrate that the dissertation on irony is not a triviality or simply a draft or preparatory work in relation to the later authorship, rather it is the fundament on which the rest is built. On the whole, Bøggild demonstrates how Kierkegaard constantly keeps himself outside his texts and he makes a case for the idea that Kierkegaard in Either/ Or establishes a structured relation between the traditional and the romantic conception of the fragment. To this end, he investigates in particular the essay on tragedy, “The Tragic in Ancient Drama Reflected in the Tragic in Modern Drama,” which according to Bøggild thematizes “the art of writing posthumous papers,” i. e., precisely the art necessary to place oneself on the periphery of one’s works (also called the aesthetic marginalization). Bøggild also investigates in what sense Kierkegaard, a declared arch-enemy of romantic free phantasy and flights from reality, is himself a romantic and reminds us that the essay genre, perspectivizing and experimental as it is, is an important forerunner of the romantic fragment. He notes that the essay on tragedy does not immediately appear to be a genuine fragment in the romantic sense; the text is too long and in places too academic. Other texts in Part 1 of Either/Or resemble romantic fragments much more, especially the introductory “Diapsalmata” and several entries in “The Seducer’s Diary.” The latter is examined with the idea of determining what fate woman is alloted and the diary is compared to the analysis of Don Juan. His conclusion is that the unreflective seducer lurks behind the reflective seducer just as much as the reverse; neither of the two figures is presented in “pure” form, which according to Bøggild

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allows one to take that as an admission that every form of seduction requires a certain measure of reciprocity.61 Lasse Horne Kjældgaard (1974- ) in Mellemhverandre (Between One Another) (2001) investigates the relation between tableau and narrative in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings, but Kjældgaard’s interest is not just in aesthetics, since he insists that aesthetic readings of Kierkegaard must go hand in hand with historical readings. With this twin focus, he determines that there exists a cultural and historical connection between the tableaus in the pseudonymous writings and the fascination for tableaus in contemporary culture. The investigation is done on the background of Lessing’s famous essay Laocoon in particular and the expression “between one another” is taken precisely from Lessing (Nebeneinander), where it signifies static figures of the sort painters and sculptors are wont to produce. But it can also be used, according to Kjældgaard, in regard to Kierkegaard’s literary art and he is inspired here by some insights gleaned from Billeskov Jansen. For Kjældgaard, the phenomenon encompasses the silent figures one stumbles upon in the pseudonymous writings like Socrates, Don Juan, Antigone, Niobe, Job and many more that are described in fixed position, as if they were statues or unmoving figures in a picture. In the case of Don Juan, Kjældgaard shows how Kierkegaard in practice (but not in theory) undermines Lessing’s sharp distinction between poetry and the possibilities of production in the visual arts and sets up a paradoxical union of “the animate” and “the inanimate.” In addition, the foothold the tableau secured in culture could be seen, according to Kjældgaard, in the tableau form that was embedded in the visual technologies of the day – the daguerrotype, the diorama, the panorama, etc. – that not only could be experienced in the entertainment industry, but also in literature, where it was quickly absorbed by e. g., H. C. Andersen and Kierkegaard, who both used 61

Bøggild has also written a digression concerning the interesting. The biography as well as the fragment as a literary genre appears in the Romantic period and this involves a connection to the interesting. If one goes after the interesting, then one cannot look around at main lines and universals, rather one must go out into the secondary circumstances and the individual peculiarities. The shift from occupying oneself with the transcendental “I” of the artist to the empirical self (which Adorno finds as early as in Schiller) is precisely “the interesting” development that Bøggild seeks to grasp. Kierkegaard was aware of the danger in being read biographically (the scandalous engagement), but he seeks to protect himself by using irony and thereby turning the situation to his own advantage. Bøggild devotes a chapter to how Kierkegaard demonstrates this with his essay on the tragic, cf. Ironiens tænker. Tænkningens ironi, Copenhagen 2002, pp. 98-103.

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these tcchniques as metaphors for the highly diverse literary forms that flowed from their hands. Andersen’s Skyggebilleder af en Reise til Harzen, det sachsiske Schweitz etc. etc., i Sommeren 1831 (Silhouettes of a Journey to Harzen, the Switzerland of Saxony, etc, etc, in the Summer of 1831) (1831) and Kierkegaard’s “Silhouettes” from Either/ Or thus both refer to the same technique in which one, with the aid of a light projector or “magic lamp,” creates shadow figures on a wall or canvas. Turning to the relation between the aesthete and the ethicist, Kjældgaard does not read these two as expressions of two different life views, but as contributors to a common aesthetic debate: Where “Silhouettes” is an exercise that yet again demonstrates the inner cannot be expressed in the outer, the Judge is interested in the repetition of identicals rather than the differences. The Judge, according to Kjældgaard, does the same with Lessing’s ethics as Kierkegaard does with the category “Between one another:” he conflates precisely those two forms of production, poetry and the visual arts, that Lessing labored so hard to distinguish. Pia Søltoft As mentioned earlier, it is typical of the past two decades’ approach to Kierkegaard to take the concept of the aesthetical and ethical out of the otherwise indomitable theory of stages. After the re-orientation of the aesthetic dimension of the authorship, it seems time to make a similar attempt with the ethical. In Pia Søltoft’s thesis Svimmelhedens etik – om forholdet mellem den enkelte og den anden (The Ethics of Dizziness: On the Relation Between the Individual and the Other) (2000), the challenge from dialogical philosophy in the form of Martin Buber (I and Thou, 1923) and Emmanuel Lévinas (Totality and Infinity, 1961) is dealt with critically and serves as a preface to the charting of Kierkegaard’s various approaches to and determination of the relation between subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Søltoft (1963- ) in her dissertation takes up the problem of the first and second ethics, but does not believe there is a linear development from the first ethics to the second.62 Her starting point is a thematic reading of Part 2 of the work and what is called the Judge’s “mixed ethics,” which Søltoft considers ambiguous. On the one hand, he proclaims love as a 62

Jørgen Husted Wilhelms brev – Det etiske ifølge Kierkegaard, Copenhagen 1999, is a more traditional introduction to Kierkegaard’s concept of the ethical that suspends the problem of the relation between the first and second ethics in the authorship.

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power that simultaneously binds and separates, a view that is later in the authorship inseparably bound to the concept of the ethical. Thus the ground is prepared for an understanding of subjectivity as a task in time, a continual coming into being that is conditioned by the relation to other human beings. On the other hand, in certain places the Judge’s ethics threatens to run off into a radical formalism comparable to Kant’s, while in other places social relations are referred to in a way that resembles the Hegelian understanding of morality. The positive role forgiveness receives in the second ethics – because it takes away the paralyzing effect of repentance – is not touched on at all by the Judge, according to Søltoft. For him, repentance is already mooted in the intention. He has thereby a mixed ethics in two senses. First, he conflates the ethical and the eternal and the universal altogether with morality as the relative and therefore changeable element. Second, an ambiguity crops up in his view of the possibility of becoming transparent to oneself. The latter implies he entrusts more to the human will than he actually does. This can be formulated in another way (and thus the title of Søltoft’s book): the Judge lacks a sense of dizziness. He does not wish to look into the dizzying emptiness that opens up in and with the failure of the will and whereby the foundation for the first ethics disappears. He looks away from the problems his mixed ethics creates, precisely because he does not want to be dizzied. His strong resistance to dizziness shows itself when he throws himself at the easiest and closest solution to the problem: he quite simply closes his eyes, a solution that according to Søltoft is self-evidently untenable in the long run. According to the conservative (tidehvervske) theologian Anders Kingo (1955- ), Either/Or could be called “the book of the choice,”63 a perspective that is evident from his dissertation Analogiens teologi (The Theology of Analogy) (1995), which Søltoft polemicizes against. Kingo believes Either/Or’s closing “Ultimatum” must be taken literally, in the sense that it actually removes the choice and presents Christianity as the only true existential possibility – when confronted with an ultimatum, there is really only one possibility. Søltoft, on the other hand, believes this thesis implies a takeover of the Kierkegaardian authorship by the theory of stages, which Kingo otherwise strongly denounces. Kingo is entirely lacking in a sense for the Judge’s ambiguousness, according to Søltoft, and therefore he overlooks the 63

Anders Kingo Analogiens teologi. En dogmatisk studie over dialektikken i Søren Kierkegaards opbyggelige og pseudonyme forfatterskab, Copenhagen 1995, p. 102.

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Judge’s unproblematic coupling of Christianity and the human sphere. Anders Kingo adopts, paradoxically enough, the theory of the ethical as a stage that must be left in favor of the religious, all without noticing that he perpetuates the theory of stages he wishes to tear down.64 Søltoft also leaves out the theory of stages from her exposition of Either/Or in Den udødelige (The Immortal) (2005), since an interpretation of the aesthetic and the ethical through the lens of a theory of stages reduces, according to her, the significance of the individual spheres of existence. In this approach, the one sphere is rendered superfluous and Søltoft chooses instead to focus on a more continuous character in the relation between the aesthetic and the ethical, namely the question of continuity, which in her version is what fundamentally separates the aesthete from the ethicist. In the Judge’s first letter, it is the continuity of the self-relation, its constancy in time, bound to the continuity of love – a continuity of which marriage is a symbol – which the aesthete of life therefore rejects. In the second letter, continuity lies in continually becoming oneself, which is also foreign to A, who neither believes in nor wishes for the transparency in choice that William argues for. Further, the aforementioned continuity in both letters is inextricably bound up in the relation to other human beings, which is why William also makes a strong coupling between continuity and ethics.

V. Either/Or and the Poets In a 1999 article, Heinrich Anz puts in a request for a more systematic study of the reception Kierkegaard has received among fiction writers in Scandinavia. This will not in any way be attempted her, as the topic would exceed the space available, but some examples will be brought forth that to some degree might give an answer to Anz’ closing question, “Für welchen Dichter […] ist die Kierkegaardlektüre ‘in direkter Betroffenheit’ wirklich zum entscheidenden Lebens- und Schaffensimpuls geworden, wie etwa die Kantlektüre für Heinrich von Kleist oder die Goethelektüre für Gottfried Keller; wer ist gar durch Kierkegaard zum Dichter geworden?”65 Anz himself examines the influence Kierkegaard had on Henrik Ibsen and Karen Blixen 64 65

Cf. Svimmelhedens etik, op.cit., pp. 159 f. Heinrich Anz “‘Seinerzeit eine Art makabre Modefigur’. Aspekte der Wirkungsgeschichte Søren Kierkegaards in der skandinavischen Literatur” in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1999, Berlin / New York 2003, p. 219.

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and shows, in the latter case, how Either/Or and especially “The Seducer’s Diary” is an important part of Blixen’s literary baggage and gives examples from Karneval (Carnival) and Den unge Mand med Nelliken (The Young Man with the Carnation), as well as from Den uendelige Historie (The Neverending Story) and Ehrengaard.66 In the following, I will give a brief description of how Kierkegaard in general and Either/Or in particular have inspired and colored the creative drive and manner of thought of a handful of Danish poets: Ernesto Dalgas (1871-1899), Villy Sørensen (1929-2001), Benny Andersen (1929- ) and Suzanne Brøgger (1944- ). A few others deserve mention, e. g., Martin A. Hansen, (1909-1955) and Henrik Stangerup (1937-1998),67 but I will limit myself to the authors for whom I have found explicit expressions of their (initial) experience of reading Either/Or. In the case of Ernesto Dalgas, one can speak of a quite comprehensive identification with Kierkegaard that stems partly from his devotion to Brandes’ passionate biography from 1877, but his more or less conscious imitation of and identification with Kierkegaard seems to have its basis in the union of an intense search for truth and sexual anxiety that occurs early in his life. Just a few days before his suicide, he wrote in a brief survey of his twenty-seven years of life: “At seventeen years of age I was influenced by Kierkegaard’s 66

67

Concerning Kierkegaard’s influence on Ehrengaard, see Karen Gemal Forførelsens æstetik i Forførerens Dagbog og Ehrengaard in Skrifter. Center for Litteraturvidenskab og Semiotik, Institut for Litteratur, Kultur og Medier, Syddansk Universitet, Odense 1999, pp. 1-18. Concerning Martin A. Hansen and Kierkegaard, see for example Thorkild Bjørnvig Kains Alter: Martin A. Hansens Digtning og Tænkning, Copenhagen 1964; passim, Anders Thyrring Andersen “Forførelse, tavshed og uret. Kierkegaardinspirationen i Martin A. Hansens Løgneren” in Spring, no. 14, Hellerup 1999, pp. 186-210; Gitte Wernaa Butin “Lindormens Skrig – Dæmoni og Skrift hos Martin A. Hansen og Søren Kierkegaard” in Arvesyndens skønne Rose: Punktnedslag i Martin A. Hansens digtning, Copenhagen 2002, pp. 53-71, and the articles by Joakim Garff, Anders Kingo og Hans Vium Mikkelsen in PS. Om Martin A. Hansens korrespondance med kredsen omkring Heretica, ed. by Anders Thyrring Andersen, Copenhagen 2005, pp. 148-198. See also the section on Aage Henriksen in this article. Regarding Henrik Stangerup, see “Kierkegaard hed han. Parodisk bidrag til halvfjerdsernes ideologikritik” and “Roger Poole: Kierkegaard er vor tids filosof” in Fangelejrens frie halvdel, Copenhagen 1979, pp. 51-59 and 61-73, Roger Poole and Henrik Stangerup Dansemesteren. Sider af Søren Kierkegaard, Copenhagen 1985, especially pp. 225-30, as well as Søren Peter Hansen “Kærlighed, identitet og skæbne. Kierkegaard og Stangerup” in Denne slyngelagtige eftertid. Tekster om Søren Kierkegaard, I-III, ed. by Finn Frandsen and Ole Morsing, Århus 1995, pp. 513-540.

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way of thinking through my acquaintance with Either/Or and from that time on my way of thinking has had an ascetic tinge.”68 In the Bildungsroman Lidelsens Vej. En Selvbiografi af en Afdød (The Path of Suffering: An Autobiography by A Deceased) (published posthumously in 1903), there are traces of Dalgas’ own life, but also that of Kierkegaard in the protagonist Salomon Simonsen. The government functionary that takes care of Salomon upon his arrival in Copenhagen has also borrowed some characteristics from Johannes the Seducer, among others. Villy Sørensen, in an article entitled “Either/Or?” from 1988, has written a cheery and personal counterpart to Either/Or’s postscript, which has been treated earlier. He describes the division that occurred early in his life between his poetic and philosophical urges and how Either/Or came crashing in to fill that emptiness. The occasion was some lectures in 1948 by Billeskov Jansen, who was the first to point out to Sørensen that Kierkegaard could also be funny. He also relates the story of how he in the winter of ’47-’48 had busied himself by writing aphorisms and gives a couple of examples of these youthful attempts, whereupon he remarks, “One might have thought that I had learned something from the aesthete and his diapsalmata, but it was not Søren Kierkegaard that got me to writing aphorisms, it was rather he who got me to stop; it had been done – better before.”69 The meeting with Kierkegaard in the guise of Either/Or that both confuses and inspires Sørensen does not cause him in the long run to put poetry aside, but to supplement it with a thorough study of philosophy. For him, the book left no choice: “There was no getting around philosophy and no getting around Kierkegaard.” 70 The lyricist and prose writer Benny Andersen also reveals a significant degree of inspiration from Kierkegaard, which he relates in his article “My Relation to Søren Kierkegaard and The Deer Park.” In a little, but thick notebook dating from 1949 to a bit past the midfifties, Andersen documents his Kierkegaard reading in the form of long excerpts. His encounter with Kierkegaard is reminiscent of Villy Sørensen’s: “It’s not that Kierkegaard made me a writer, quite the contrary. In order to describe what happened, I have to speak in a 68

69

70

“Mit Livs Eksperiment,” dated May 9, 1899, cited according to Henrik Schovsbo’s postscript to Lidelsens Vej. En selvbiografi af en Afdød, Copenhagen 1993, p. 283; this is also the source of the remainder of the information on Dalgas. Villy Sørensen “Enten – Eller?” in En bog om kunst der forløste. Det danske akademi 1981-1988, Copenhagen 1988, p. 45. Ibid., p. 52.

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rather Kierkegaardian way – by getting me to stop writing, Kierkegaard got me really started writing.”71 Benny Andersen follows this comment by saying how his sense of language was sharpened after the encounter and how it turned all his acquired knowledge upside down. Beyond this, he was also inspired by Kierkegaard’s humor, and Either/Or caused him to choose Both/And: “Both to become a social and ethical individual, And to become a poet. A poet in existence, thanks to Søren Kierkegaard, even though he likely would say ‘No thanks.’ ”72 Suzanne Brøgger’s essay “Kierkegaard adieu” is first and foremost a description of how difficult it is to grow old with Kierkegaard, but she makes the even more credible concession that he has a central place in her work as an author. Brøgger hints at being inspired by Kierkegaard in several of her books. In the beginning, her works criticize one of the institutions that (the later) Kierkegaard also opposed, i. e., marriage, but as time goes on they acquire more the character of a fundamental affirmation of family life. The change corresponds to the series she herself names in her essay: Fri os fra kærligheden (Spare Us Love), Kærlighedens Veje & Vildveje (The Ways and Wrong Ways of Love), Crème Fraiche and Ja (Yes). Further, she says somewhere, “When I was 15 years old I borrowed Either/Or in Nelson Hayes’ Library on Suriwong Road in Bangkok. And here it was, finally … whuzzat? Real life . . . if this was the indirect communication, it truly had a direct effect. If Søren Kierkegaard was a midwife, then I was a newborn baby.” 73 A very preliminary result derived from Anz’ question that began this section might thus be that Kierkegaard has not only given these authors a decisive push, he has also held them back – for a while. They have in common that their receptions of Kierkegaard and Either/Or occurred while they were quite young and thus in the critical transition period when so much comes to an end – and so much begins: George Brandes was 18, Ernesto Dalgas 17, Villy Sørensen 19 and Benny Andersen about the same age and Suzanne Brøgger was just 15 when she first dipped her toes into Either/Or. The fact that most of them moved away from Kierkegaard and his universe does not make 71

72 73

Benny Andersen “Mit forhold til Søren Kierkegaard og Dyrehaven” in Kierkegaardiana XIV, Copenhagen 1988, p. 7. Ibid., p. 11. Suzanne Brøgger “Kierkegaard adieu” in Den pebrede susen. Flydende fragmenter og fixeringer, Copenhagen 1986, p. 222.

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his designation, “The author’s author” 74 less relevant, rather it should be the subject of a larger study.75

74 75

See SKS 7, 571 and SKS 22, 386 / JP 6547. Jens Staubrand has drawn up a catalogue of the appearance of Kierkegaardian themes in both Danish and foreign music and plays. The vast majority of these are inspired by Either/Or, in particular “Diapsalmata” and “The Seducer’s Diary,” cf. Søren Kierkegaard. International bibliografi/International bibliography. Musikværker & skuespil/Music works & plays, Copenhagen 1998.

“The Great Unknown” – Kierkegaard in Christiania The Reception of Either/Or in Norway By Thor Arvid Dyrerud “Read Kierkegaard, and you’ll regret it, don’t read him, and you’ll also regret it.”1

On Wednesday, March 29, 1843, the Tottrupske Book and Music Store in Norway published an advertisement in Norway’s Morgenbladet in which Victor Eremita’s Either/Or was being sold for 2 rix dollars and 73 schillings. Either/Or had left the Reitzel printing house in Copenhagen only about a month earlier. The delay between the publication of Kierkegaard’s books in Copenhagen and their availability in Christiana, Norway’s capitol at the time, was relatively short. Although Denmark lost Norway to Sweden after the Napoleon war of 1814, breaking a 400-year-old union and radically changing the political climate, intellectual and cultural bonds between Denmark and Norway remained strong. References to a Dano-Norwegian “common literature” ultimately died out in the late 19 th century, but in Kierkegaard’s time Danish and Norwegian language and literature were shared. After all, Norway relied on Denmark – every publisher of significance was then based in Copenhagen. It is difficult to ascertain how popular Kierkegaard’s works were at the time. There are no traces of reviews of his books in papers or journals, and libraries obtained his works shortly after publication and issued them freely to students and professors (The Concept of Irony (1841) and Fear and Trembling (1843) both appear in the catalogue of 1

Kristian Gløersen Sigurd, Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel 1887, p. 181. The editors would like to add special thanks to Sam Skarstad for his editorial assistance with this article.

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Christiania Cathedral School’s library). 2 In spite of the obvious interest in Kierkegaard’s books from very early on, there is no trace of any kind of reviews of his books in the papers or journals. The closest thing to a review is from the same paper, Morgenbladet, published on March 17, 1846, and the matter at hand is the publication of the Postscript twenty days before. The newspaper cites Kierkegaard’s one and only disclosure, published at the end of the book, wherein he admits to his authorship of the pseudonymous works. Morgenbladet concludes: “And thus it is now that the common opinion is publicly confirmed, by ascribing to one author all those remarkable writings published over the space of 8 years, arousing surprise concerning authorial fertility, the likes of which has until now never been seen.” The discussion reveals no knowledge of the remarkable publications per se but witnesses instead a curiosity and fascination with the phenomenon Kierkegaard, the provocative and interesting literary comet from Copenhagen. It is only in 1855, with Kierkegaard’s attack on official Christianity, that a wider public becomes familiar with his writings. In this essay I shall try to narrow it down to the reception of Either/Or, even though the reception of Kierkegaard in Norway is tainted by the rhetoric from The Moment. I shall do this by tracing three sources that might say something about how Either/Or was read at the time and in the generations that followed shortly after: First, with a general glance into the student life from this period, then by looking at a school book for advanced learners, and finally with a short reading of the first theological study of Kierkegaard ever published. This last text will be compared with a novel written at the same time.

1. Erotic Science It is commonly accepted that Kierkegaard attained a Norwegian readership with the publication of Either/Or. Many contemporary sources support this notion, including Edvard Mørch’s book, Kristiania-Memories, where we get an impression of how the students of the capital regarded Kierkegaard, all of which are mainly anecdotal in character. Mørch describes this period as a philosophical and aesthetic time, when the young men of the coming generation smoked pipes and con2

Katalog over Christiania Kathedralskoles bibliothek, Christiania: Bentzen og Søn 1883, p. 271.

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versed with one another in a lofty manner. Some went so far in their admiration of Kierkegaard, Mørch writes, that they ‘…began in small ways to use what they thought was a Kierkegaardian mode of expression – one didn’t say ‘that one’s eyes hurt,’ but rather ‘that one had a sickly malady of the eyes.’ ’3 At student flats, works like Either/Or or Stages on Life’s Way were debated, but without anyone actually being well-versed in the content of these writings. It was nonetheless important that “an ideally equipped student should be infatuated with Hostrup and know his Kierkegaard.”4 On certain formal occasions, such as when a comrade was leaving to travel, a party would be arranged in a larger student flat. All paid “12 schillings per head,” which then went to the purchase of cognac and “powdered sugar,” with the attendant boiling of water at the host’s and punch in the wash basin. Initially, things would go respectably: the young students – who were often from the countryside – chatted about the city’s ladies with whom they had occasionally talked, “comparing them with Cordelia in Johannes’ Seducer’s Diary or Alma in ‘Adam Homo’ etc.”5 The most concrete traces of Kierkegaard from this early stage can be found in Henning Junghans Thue’s A Reader in the Mother-tongue for Norwegians and Danes, from 1846. This is a collection of model texts for use at the advanced school levels, and here Kierkegaard is represented by three small pieces: “Kvinden” from Either/Or (1843), “Den Huslige Censur” from Prefaces (1844), and finally “Den Lykkeligste Existens” from Stages on Life’s Way (1845), the latter of which was only seven months old when Thue’s book went to press. Even though these do not represent any great body of text, it is still worth noting that the book was also used for teaching the mother tongue in Norway. A later professor of history, Yngvar Nielsen, wrote in his memoirs of his student days at the Latin School in Christiania, “Our literary and aesthetic norm was to be taken from H. J. Thue’s Læsebog, big and thick as it was.”6 Nielsen was a student from about the mid-1850s, so Thue’s reader had been in use for at least ten years by that time.

3

4 5 6

Edvard Mørch Kristianiaminder, Kristiania: H. Aschehoug & Co. (W. Nygaard) 1904, p. 20. Ibid. Ibid. Yngvar Nielsen En Christianesers Erindringer fra 1850- og 60-Aarene, Kristiania and Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel / Nordisk Forlag 1910, p. 77.

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Thue, who was Head Teacher and Headmaster of Arendal’s Middel- og Realskole,7 was well qualified as a broker of Kierkegaard since he had, during a period of study in Copenhagen, been an ex-auditorio opponent at the public defence of Kierkegaard’s thesis on irony in 1841. In Thue’s introduction to his selection of texts, he added a short biography of Kierkegaard, where he, on the basis of common opinion, dared to claim that Kierkegaard was in fact “the Great Unknown.” One should here remember that Kierkegaard’s name was at that point in time only found on a handful of edifying discourses. Additionally, Thue praises Kierkegaard for his productivity, his psychological powers of observation, and his exemplary use of his native tongue even in the most difficult mental exercises. But it is, Thue writes, “especially on the erotic themes that he directs his intense investigations into the deepest corners of the human heart.”8 It is, in other words, as a sublime eroticist that Kierkegaard is first presented to the Norwegian public. In the table of contents at the beginning of his reader, Thue has categorized Kierkegaard’s texts according to their genres, something that provides yet another indication of how he was read at the time. Thue classified Kierkegaard’s text from Either/Or with “Epic Poetry,” in the subcategory “Poetic Narrative,” while the other two pieces fall under “Didactic Prose.” It does not take a very long look at Thue’s attempt to place Kierkegaard into his own literary categories before it becomes apparent that he must have been in a quandary about how to categorize them; for one find a mixture of high and low style, philosophical concepts in neat union with a literary presentation, teasing irony, etc. Thue chose the obvious solution: to place the texts partly under poetry, partly under narrative, partly under philosophy, and partly under science. However, it is no easy task to determine how the three texts can thus be separated. They have in common a sort of training in higher eroticism, where Woman, with her immediate genius in the direction of the sensual and her innocent delightfulness, creates the reflective man holding on to his worldly existence. That Kierkegaard is primarily identified by Thue as a sharp psychologist and expert eroticist is interesting with regard to the reception that would later come to dominate the entire field of study: Kierkeg7

8

At the time, a type of school beyond primary levels teaching the “practical” subjects of mathematics, modern languages, etc., as opposed to the classically-oriented traditional middle school. Henning Junghans Thue Læsebog i Modersmaalet for Norske og Danske, Kristiania: A. D. Wulfsberg & Co 1846, p. 487.

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aard as the individual’s passionate advocate, with the weight on a personal dedication to Christianity’s totally overshadowing claim on human life. At this early point, however, there was no real theological reception – it is the poet Kierkegaard whom Thue finds interesting. Something that also pleased with the young students already mentioned, who, in philosophical-aesthetic intoxication and apparently without qualms, celebrated the fate that had so kindly placed literature of Greco-Dionysian-Byronic format within their own linguistic sphere.

2. The Need for Theology and the Lust for Life From various contemporary sources we get the impression that it is Kierkegaard’s abilities as a psychologist that are widely recognized. In the memoirs of priest J. J. Jansen, Kierkegaard is given his own chapter, and here he recalls the advice of one of his teachers when Jansen was a young student in the beginning of the 1860s: “If you want to learn about psychology, and especially if you want to be informed about the psychology of faith, then you must read Kierkegaard. He is a psychologist. Come to me four o’clock this afternoon, and I shall lend you Either/Or; here you will read the second part.”9 In the following, I will argue that the second part of Either/Or is the most important to the contemporary reader, or at least to the young men at the time who tried to combine studies of theology with the challenges of a modern and secularized world. Fredrik Petersen (183-1903) was such a young man in the 1860s, and he had read Kierkegaard since the age of 17 or 18. Later in life Petersen took on the thankless job of bringing theological order to Kierkegaard’s relationship with Christianity. It was a task which, seen afterwards, was only the first in a career of apologetics while he was professor of systematic theology at Kristiania University. In 1874, he emerged as the spokesman for a new apologetics with the lecture “How Should the Church Respond to the Present Lack of Faith?” – a lecture that introduced modern theology to Norway. His book Dr. Søren Kierkegaard’s Preaching of Christianity (1877) is almost 900 pages long, and represents the first systematic reading of Kierkegaard’s authorship, not only in Norway, but anywhere. The 9

J. J. Jansen Oplævet og Tænkt, Kristiania: Forlagt af H. Aschehoug & Co. (W. Nygaard) 1909, p. 90.

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book places itself somewhere at the intersection of contemporary history and reception history, and in spite of its enormous scope, the text is a rather precise locus for finding those special aspects of Kierkegaard’s authorship that captured attention and – not least – those characteristics or properties one did not bother with – in any case from a theological point of view. The publication of the book had a polemic motivation. The text had developed mainly as a series of articles in Theologiske Tidskrift from the spring of 1868 and onward. In late 1876, however, the freethinker and the radical hero at the time, Georg Brandes, visited Kristiania with his Kierkegaard lecture. His radical drawing of Kierkegaard’s intellectual profile made it precarious to take the step into a full and authoritative publication, a point made in the afterword, where it is stated that Kierkegaard was so obscure that not only “Christ’s friends but also his enemies” might be able to use the Dane for their own purposes.10 Petersen’s study contains three parts: the book’s first part locates Kierkegaard’s authorship within the cultural and political contexts of his times; part two presents Kierkegaard’s production work by work, with extensive and thorough analyses of Kierkegaard’s text. The third and final part weighs the value and significance of each work for culture generally and for theology in particular. Petersen supports Kierkegaard’s critique of Biedermeier culture’s banality and spiritual decline, but at the same time, he rejects the medicine Kierkegaard has prescribed as the cure. Kierkegaard’s absolutism and heaven-storming subjectivity represent a superhuman position to Petersen: too eccentric and perhaps even a bit too elitist. Christianity stresses reconciliation and is a gift for those ordinary people who struggle, and as far as that goes, it is not a special tournament ground for heralds and knights of faith with clever paradoxes and cunning dialectic. Here, Petersen is at one with his theological contemporaries in their general evaluation of Kierkegaard. In spite of this understandable stance of Petersen – in his role as the responsible theologian – his study also at times leaves the reader somewhat confused. This is primarily because his text seems surprisingly insensitive towards Kierkegaard’s fundamental characteristics and originality. Petersen points out, by way of example, that Hegel and speculative philosophy are Kierkegaard’s main enemies, but at the 10

Fredrik Petersen Dr. Søren Kierkegaards Christendomsforkyndelse, Christiania: P. T. Mallings Boghandel 1877, p. 897.

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same time he rejects Kierkegaard’s critique of Hans Lassen Martensen’s dogmatics on the following ground: “Martensen’s speculation is not heathen, but Christian speculation.”11 The apologetic tour de force now and then threatens to totally eradicate its own object of study. Fredrik Petersen regarded Either/Or as Kierkegaard’s main work, and his basis for such a claim was that he found a harmony and a balance in the presentation that he had otherwise missed in the pseudonymous works. “We perceive this work in every aspect as Kierkegaard’s magnum opus.”12 According to Petersen, Kierkegaard had, with this work, stated more clearly than anywhere else a principle of freedom, a spiritual fulcrum that has “obliterated philosophy’s and aesthetics’ power over life.”13 More strongly than anywhere else in Kierkegaard’s work, Either/Or bears witness to a personal conversion: from the pursuit of pleasure and philosophy, to life’s ethical and practical demands. During the year Petersen’s dissertation was published (1877), a novel was published, that, in spite of its obvious differences from Petersen, also identifies Wilhelm as the bearer of a truth that survives in a new and insecure world. The novel was entitled Sigurd, written by Petersens’s contemporary, Kristian Gløersen (1838-1916). We find here a description of the effect Kierkegaard had on a young man shaped by the strong Pietistic revival in the country, the so called “Johnsonian movement.”14 The main character, Sigurd, is a priest’s son from Norway’s Vestland district; he came to age in a little hamlet that, in his childhood, was visited by the revival. The parish priest, his father, suffers acute religious scruples, and the family home is gradually turned into a joyless Christian educational institute. Play is for the most part forbidden – in any case, on Sundays – and Sigurd spends most of his time being “edified” at church, in morning and evening prayer services at home, and Bible and psalm reading. Sigurd is a pious, believing lad, but he experiences hatred and an inner conflict between an ascetic denial of the worldly and a need for life and beauty. He breaks with his home and journeys to Kristiania to study, developing thereafter into an erudite dandy and hairsplitter, after the pattern of Kierkegaard’s aesthete – and with an open wound 11 12 13 14

Petersen Dr. Søren Kierkegaards Christendomsforkyndelse, p. 519. Petersen Dr. Søren Kierkegaards Christendomsforkyndelse, p. 881. Ibid. See Svein Aage Christophersen “– som en Fugl i angstfull flukt foran det kommende Uveir. Det pietistiske hos Søren Kierkegaard og Gisle Johson” in Kirke og kultur, no. 107, 2002, pp. 191-206.

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in the centre of his being. From this point on, the novel’s structure changes from straightforward narrative to Sigurd’s dairy. A little way into “From Sigurd’s Dairy I” we meet Kierkegaard for the first time. Sigurd has borrowed Either/Or from the university library, and at four o’clock in the afternoon, he sits down to read. He does not put the book down until four o’clock the next morning. In the diary, we read how he has been cast out into a sea of feeling and thought so strong that he nearly has to hold onto his chair. His almost step-by-step reaction is given here: There was a powerful feeling of envy, or actually jealousy. After all, it was what had moved within my own soul, what I have felt, what I have thought, dark, unclear perhaps, but even so, my thoughts. Why has he taken the words from me? The third and permanent impression was joy, expectant joy: Here you will find the solution to the great mystery, the answer to the great question, the apothegm that opens the door to life’s, to beauty’s, to the spirit’s, innermost sanctum.15

Sigurd has found the doors to heaven, a philosophy that had been given voice by a Christian thinker, and one of an intellectual calibre and power shining light-years beyond any of those domestic sons of darkness who killed the joy of life in young people. Moreover, he also becomes more comfortable meeting the contemptuous representatives of evolutionary teaching and progress since it was Kierkegaard’s ethicist, Wilhelm, who had sketched the most precise picture of the time’s leveling powers, and with that, the deep despair of which the aesthete A was a symptom. Most important of all is that Sigurd found in Either/Or the necessary intermediary between Christianity and life’s mundane pleasures, something that he had painfully missed. The ethicist’s simple style of living, his rich inner life, his aesthetically and, not least of all, ethically “legitimate” desire for his wife while living at the same time in eternity – solves Sigurds existential dilemma and makes life complete. At the end of the book, the student and aesthete Sigurd proposes and marries his loved one. In this respect, the novel is close to a pastiche over Either/Or. The interesting difference between Petersen and Gløersen is that the first sees the spiritual problem of his time as consisting of a decreasing religious feeling and respect, while the character Sigurd, on the contrary, is tormented by an overdose of religious piety and duty. These two different readings of Kierkegaard’s book, this paradox, is of course not a paradox, it’s the conflict that Either/Or is made up of. 15

Gløersen Sigurd, p. 182.

The Philosopher of the Heart – Who Did Not Dance A Swedish History of Reception of Either/Or By Camilla Brudin Borg Abstract The article will examine the literary reception of Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or in Sweden during the nineteenth and twentieth century. Since there already are several reliable studies concerning the general influence of Kierkegaard in Sweden, the article wants to draw attention to some important historical patterns and contexts that have been overlooked. It begins with an essay written as early as 1851 by A. T. Lysander. This unique and early reception of Either/Or dates from Kierkegaard’s time, and he very likely read and approved of the characterisation. The article will thereafter trace the important reception of Either/Or in the great moral debate of the 1880s. The complete history of the translations Either/Or to Swedish will also be treated. Finally this article will examine Lars Gyllensten’s writings and ideas, which present Either/Or to a Swedish audience.

1. Introduction Swedish author Fredrika Bremer did not send a note to Søren Kierkegaard in May, 1849. It is actually addressed to Victor Eremita, the fictitious publisher of Either/Or: “A recluse like yourself, … [I] heartily wished to … see you, partly to thank you for the divine words of your writing, partly to talk with you about “the stages of life.”” 1 She received no answer, but tried again later, this time addressing “Theologie Candidaten Herr Sören Kierkegaard, Gammel Torv.” Neither try was successful. 1

Fredrika Bremer stayed in Copenhagen from autumn of 1848 to June 1849. See SKS 22, 176 and B&A, 201, 203, 204. All translations from Swedish and Danish in this article are mine, if not otherwise stated.

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In 1849 Kierkegaard had already published most of his pseudonymous works, but Bremer explicitly made a petition to see the pseudonym that conquers in loneliness. But Kierkegaard, or Eremita, defended his right to remain alone. Shortly after the incident, Bremer’s Life in the Nordic Countries (Lif i Norden) was published as a serial story in the Swedish newspaper Götheborgs Handels- och SjöfartsTidning and was later also published in Danish. She portrays famous Danes, among others Søren Kierkegaard, whom she introduces to the Swedish readers as a “Simon Stylites”: lonely, sitting on his pillar, continuously staring at one single thing, namely, the secrets of the human heart. 2 Kierkegaard is also described as an inaccessible, introverted character whose books had caught the attention of female readers. Kierkegaard was apparently rather upset and blames Bremer’s picture on Martensen and his influence on her. 3 Kierkegaard wrote that he had been “virtuous” when he refrained from meeting Bremer. He also kept his virtue when Mrs. Camilla Wergeland-Colett tried to make his acquaintance. Colette had described how she could see him peeking out behind the curtains when she called.4 Kierkegaard did not want to grant those two intellectual women an audience; but ironically, his writings have historically attracted many female readers. Some will be mentioned here. Traces of Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or (1843) are detectable as an undercurrent in Sweden during the 19th and 20th centuries. Themes related to ethics are associated with Either/Or, and the book is used as a source of argument during the nineteenth century. Kierkegaard’s method of communication was also important for modernist aesthetic experimentation in the 1940s, and Either/Or has also been a constant influence on Swedish fictional writers. 5 2

3 4

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Published in Götheborgs Handels- och Sjöfarts-Tidning, July 31, and August 1, 6, 7, 15, 1849 (the portrait of Kierkegaard was published August 15, 1849). The Danish translation of Lif i Norden was published September 12, 1849; See SKS 22, 176. See SKS K22, 176. Paulus Svendsen “Norwegian Literature” in The Legacy and Interpretation of Kierkegaard (Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 8), ed. by Niels Thulstrup & M. Mikulová Thulstrup, Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel 1981, p. 12. In the field of historical literary criticism, Nils-Åke Sjöstedt has given a picture of the reception between 1850-1900 in Sören Kierkegaard and Swedish Literature (Søren Kierkegaard och svensk litteratur: Från Fredrika Bremer till Hjalmar Söderberg, 1950) and in “Swedish literature” printed in The Legacy and Interpretation of Kierkegaard (1981). There will also soon be an article available by Lars and Jonna Hjertström-Lappalainen that will deal with the topic of the Swedish reception: “Kierkegaard reception in Swedish Philosophy, Theology and Contemporary Literary Theory,” Kierkegaard’s

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The first translation of a short part of Either/Or – “The Seducer’s Diary” – was not published until 1902. It was not possible to read the entire Either/Or translated into Swedish until 2002. But the literary authors as well as the critics, theologians and the philosophers of Sweden early knew the book. It can particularly be noticed that during the 1880th, the ethical discussion of Either/Or, in a striking way, conflated with the great Nordic moral debate and its most important themes, such as marriage, ethics and the antagonism between the aesthetical and the ethical positions. The new literary techniques used by the writers of the modern breakthrough, was at times discussed in relationship with the pseudonymous literary writings of Kierkegaard. These writers could have been acquainted with Kierkegaard through secondary sources, for example three important lectures taking place in Uppsala held by Lorentz Dietrichson (1860), Georg Brandes (1876) and Waldemar Rudin (1880). These lectures were printed and published shortly afterwards, but there are several more examples of articles and essays where Kierkegaard and his masterpiece Either/Or were discussed during nineteenth century as well. There is a certain conclusion to draw out of this: when Either/Or was read in the nineteenth century, it was read in Danish, as natural as the educated people of the Scandinavian countries, at this time were very well able to read a common debate or each others literature. The knowledge of and the reception of Either/Or before the first translation 1902, has thus to be looked for in debates, articles and in the literary reception.

2. The First Reception The first introduction to Søren Kierkegaard, which also presents a close analysis of Either/Or, is probably also the first deeper examination of the authorship made on foreign ground. The article was published in the Swedish Literary Journal (Tidskrift för Litteratur) as early as 1851 by docent Albert Theodor Lysander, who was later professor of Latin rhetoric at the University of Lund. Lysander often referred to Kierkegaard in his historical literary critiques; he was entirely absorbed by the religious writings of

International Reception (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources Series, vol. 8, Tome I), ed. by Jon Stewart, Hampshire: Ashgate, (forthcoming).

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Kierkegaard.6 His article holds a unique position in the reception of Kierkegaard and establishes a natural point of departure for future reception on Swedish ground. It was written before the publication of Synspunktet for min Forfatter-Virksomhed (1859), which would later be employed as the key to interpreting the pseudonymous authorship. But Lysander is direct and wholly acquainted with Kierkegaard’s writings; he had also read Rasmus Nielsen’s “Mag. S. Kierkegaards ‘Johannes Climacus’ og Dr. H. Martensens ‘Christelige Dogmatic.’ En undersøgende Anmeldelse” (1849). Kierkegaard probably read Lysander’s article himself and was pleased with the introduction.7 A. T. Lysander’s “Søren Kierkegaard. Literary–historical picture” (“Sören Kierkegaard Litterär-historisk teckning: Indövelse i Christendom Af Anti-Climacus. Utg. af S. Kierkegaard, Kjöbenhavn, 1850”), is an impressive attempt to give an overall view of the authorship.8 Lysander himself was polemical against Hegelian influences on his contemporaries and was of the opinion that people were deceived and had lost themselves and their morals. For these reasons, Lysander admired Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegelian thought and characterizes him as “a border-guard of Christian life.”9 Hegelianism is also criticized for making the external the internal, and the internal to the external; for treating the ethical and the religious as esthetic ideas. Even if Hegel draws a distinction between the internal and the external, Lysander criticizes him for only giving credit to intention and thereby seeing the action as indifferent. What is thought becomes reality, and ethics is swallowed up by speculation. Because of this, Hegel has no answer when a man asks questions of the future.10 As a point of departure in his understanding of Kierkegaard, Lysander chooses Anti-Climacus’ desire to “shed light on the human truth and the human good” and “if possible, draw attention to the divine.”11 6

7

8

9 10 11

Nils-Åke Sjöstedt “Swedish literature” in The Leagacy and Interpretation of Kierkegaard (Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 8), pp. 44 f. C. Cavallin & A. T. Lysander Smärre skrifter i urval, Stockholm 1881, p. 5 according to the note of Lysander; see Nils-Åke Sjöstedt Søren Kierkegaard och svensk litteratur. Från Fredrika Bremer till Hjalmar Söderberg, Göteborg: Wettergren & Kerbers förlag 1950, p. 21. Albert Theodor Lysander “Sören Kierkegaard Litterär-historisk teckning: Indövelse i Christendom Af Anti-Climacus. Utg. af S. Kierkegaard, Kjöbenhavn, 1850,” Tidskrift för Litteratur (abbreviated TFL), ed. by C. F. Bergstedt, Upsala 1851, pp. 227-252. TFL, p. 229. TFL, p. 237. TFL, pp. 232 f.

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He divides Kierkegaard’s works into three categories: a) books published in Kierkegaard’s own name; b) a single anonymous publication, namely, From the Papers of One Still Living; c) pseudonymous writings. Through these, Kierkegaard communicated his “knowledge of the secrets of existence,” assuredly in very many different ways, but always “entirely according to a plan,” and the purpose was to wake the contemporaries from their false thought-existences.12 Lysander reads Either/Or as a polemical analysis of the fundamental errors of Hegelianism and interprets the book as an expression of three stages of life: the aesthetical, the moral and religious. He considers the first part of Either/Or to be an interpretation of the aesthete, who lives his life in imitation, as one in the crowd who selfishly has forgotten all striving for real aesthetical life. The first part then pictures the sorrow, the suffering and the resignation inherent in the aesthetical point of view. A is trying to gain existence, but is impotent compared to the ethical person, even though he has imagination. But he has not yet come to an ethical decision and will stay in despair because he has not chosen himself. Lysander, who without reservation supports what he considers to be Kierkegaard’s righteous critique, concludes that most of his contemporaries are aesthetes. Few are considered to have opened their eyes to ethics. If A represents shadows from the aesthetical life, B shows a picture of moral life, according to Lysander. B is a man who stands on “the stable ground of reality, because he has built his life on a moral choice. He has chosen himself and his personality has appeared from this choice, as a clear reality.”13 It is not a coincidence that B is pictured as a married man, according to Lysander, because that makes him into a single, individual human being and is thereby sharply opposed to A. Imagination and despair have been transformed to “sincere existence in its moral determination” through a decision to embrace the duties of existence. Part 2 is about an edifying truth, and the edifying truth that concludes Either/Or is also, according to Lysander, the same truth that Kierkegaard has developed in a number of Edifying Discourses. The article also deals with indirect communication. It arises when wit and seriousness are put together in the manner of an indissoluble knot, and the communicator has vanished. “If anyone likes to take part of the message, he has to untie the knot for himself.”14 This is 12 13 14

TFL, p. 233. TFL, p. 241. TFL, p. 249.

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what the pseudonyms are calling “meddelelsens dobbelt-reflexion” and the activities of the pseudonyms take place in this doubleness. This makes Kierkegaard a inconceivable Proteus. Lysander admits he has just done the impossible: he has tried to explain “the teachings of Kierkegaard” for the purpose of introducing him to a Swedish audience.15 Kierkegaard wants to wake his contemporaries to life, if possible, the highest form of life: the religious. Lysander ends with the conclusion that no one should pass over the existential thought of Kierkegaard. He is a Socrates of the time and his moral message is needed. Either/Or is treated as a critique of the uncritical reception of Hegel. Lysander strongly emphases the literary technique which Kierkegaard uses to communicate his calling to his sleepy contemporaries; but he is at the same time convinced that the collected works of Kierkegaard cannot straightforwardly communicate a teaching or an extractable system. The Norwegian literary historian, Lorentz Dietrichson, had the opposite opinion. He gave a number of lectures on “Danish literature in 19th Century” (1860) – which included lectures on Kierkegaard – in Uppsala. A substantial part deals with Either/Or and Kierkegaard’s three stages of life. Kierkegaard had to talk to his contemporaries in a language they could understand, according to Dietrichson, and the collected writings had the aim of wakening his time through the method of irony. He also describes how Kierkegaard published Either/Or together with the first Edifying Discourses. The real dialectic is thus not taken to be between the aesthetical and the ethical stages, but between Either/Or on the one hand and the religious writings on the other. Dietrichson notes that the pseudonymous Either/ Or was written in contrast to the Edifying Discourses, published in Kierkegaard’s own name. Dietrichson’s interpretation is probably the first lecture relating Either/Or to Kierkegaard’s The Point of View for my Work as an Author (1859), a book Lysander obviously did not have the opportunity to read.16

15 16

TFL, p. 250. Lorentz Dietrichson Inledning i studiet af Danmarks literatur i vort Aarhundrede (Literaerhistoriske forelaesninger holdne i Upsala vaarterminen 1860), Upsala 1860, pp. 135-156.

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3. Either Rudin or Brandes “Either-or? Rudin or Brandes?” is the title of an unpublished essay written by the Swedish author Ann-Charlotte Leffler.17 This title points at two strong, but opposite interpretations of Kierkegaard which were well known during the modern breakthrough. The background is two famous series of lectures held in Uppsala by Georg Brandes (1876) and Waldemar Rudin (1877) respectively. They became available to the Swedish public as printed books shortly afterwards. Brandes’ Sören Kierkegaard was also immediately translated and could be read in Swedish the same year. Brandes’ book is a critical account of the person Kierkegaard as well as his writings. Brandes’ liberal thinking conflicts with the religious side of Kierkegaard’s authorship, but nonetheless strongly confirms the idea of the individual. Kierkegaard virtually invented, according to Brandes, the individual (hin enkelte), the free human being for-himself, distanced from dogmatism and decrees.18 Brandes reads Kierkegaard from a biographical point of view and states that the young Søren had to learn to conceal his real thoughts. At the same time, he was very influenced by a severe, religious father. He therefore became caught between a sense of reverence and a natural contempt. He developed an unnatural pride but, at the same time, also an inner space for imagination.19 Brandes’ interpretation assumes a close connection between life and letter, but it is often lead astray in speculations about Kierkegaard’s feelings and the purpose behind Either/Or. His proof is collected in biographical episodes that preceded the writing of Either/Or, especially the story of Kierkegaard’s relationship to his father and his engagement to Regine Olsen. Kierkegaard is said to have “lived through” Either/Or, and the interpretation is thereby taken to be correct. But his biographical story is really the starting point of the interpretation. Brandes also critiques the defense of the conservative morality of marriage in Either/Or, a standpoint later refuted by 17

18

19

Anne-Charlotte Leffler was inspired by Kierkegaard and also wrote the short story “Tvivel” Edda, 1938, see Nils-Åke Sjöstedt Søren Kierkegaard och svensk litteratur. Från Fredrika Bremer till Hjalmar Söderberg, p. 296. Georg Brandes Sören Kierkegaard, trans. by O. A. Strindberg, Stockholm: Jos. Seligmanns förlag 1877, pp. 78 f. Aage Henriksen Methods and Results of Kierkegaard Studies in Scandinavia. A Historical and Critical Survey, Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard 1951, pp. 22-30; Steen Tullberg Søren Kierkegaard i Danmark. En receptionshistorie, Copenhagen: Søren Kierkegaard Forskningscenteret & C. A. Reitzel 2006, pp. 19-26.

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Sophie Adlersparre. She, on the contrary, seeks Assessor Wilhelm’s support in her defense of ethical responsibility in marriage. Waldemar Rudin also answered Brandes with a series of lectures (1877). He accused Brandes of not understanding the real, religious, purposes of Kierkegaard. Rudin was a clergyman and professor of theology who had defended a Kierkegaardian dissertation: On the Importance of the Personal in Preaching the Words of God (Om det personligas betydelse vid förkunnelsen av Guds ord, 1869). Rudin’s book on the religious Kierkegaard, Søren Kierkegaard. Person and Authorship. An Experiment (Sören Kierkegaard. Person och författarskap. Ett försök, 1880)20 has had the greatest influence on the religious interpretations on Kierkegaard. According to Rudin, Either/Or was written as the first strategic step in a plan that would lead the reader to a Christian life. He regards its literary form as a disguise, a hyper-reflective shelter that conceals its opposite: the true Christian point of view. The narrative in Kierkegaard writings develops from the aesthetic dreaming life, through defiance, despair and irony, to the ethical and the religious. The story ideally ends in the Christian life. Every book thus introduces specific concepts, depending on its place in the chain of development. Either/Or pictures the individual’s point of departure in the aesthetical and immediate stage, which is followed by the ethical, where concepts as “duty,” “choice,” “will,” and “the individual” are introduced. Higher and more important concepts such as “sin” and “faith” were presented in later published books. The reason was said to be that Kierkegaard wanted to keep every level and point of view separated from and unaffected by the others. The explicit religious point of view that supports Rudin’s interpretation makes it thus quite instrumentalistic. The literary form of the complex publication Either/Or is seen as a rhetorical veneer that reveals the opposite meaning. Lysander denied, as previously noted, a communicable hidden doctrine in Kierkegaard, and instead said the purpose was a moral awakening of his contemporaries. Rudin’s understanding of indirect communication is, in this sense, diametrically opposed to Lysander’s.

20

Waldemar Rudin Sören Kierkegaard. Person och författarskap. Ett försök, Stockholm 1880.

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4. Either/Or and the Great Moral Debate21 Everybody could if necessary agree that there should be equal rights between the sexes. But how? Should women become like men, or men become like women? Either-or; it has to be chosen (Elisabeth Gruntvig , 1887).22 “When Kierkegaard wants to draw a distinction between aesthetical and ethical views of life, he uses the relationship between man and woman,” Sjöstedt writes, and is driving at Either/Or.23 Aesthete A develops a philosophy of pleasure and B recommends marriage – at a time when the novels usually ended at church. Either/Or thus heralds the literary treatment of marriage and the topics of the great moral debate about marriage and the relationship between the sexes (ca. 1882-88). The themes included the ethical and aesthetical validity of marriage, the will, duty, and the choice of men and women. Many liberal and radical authors of the time opposed the conservative conventions and double standard of morality. The first critic was Georg Brandes. The liberal authors were opposed by conservatives such as Björnstierne Björnson, who published a conservative manifest in the shape of a play: A Glove (En handske, 1883). But Sjöstedt was also of the opinion that Kierkegaard’s writings were of the greatest importance for “the moral seriousness of the Nordic naturalism.” One of the famous literary critics of the time, Urban von Feilitzen (pseud. Robinson), who wrote several reviews of Ibsen’s plays, often delivered Kierkegaardian statements in debates on morality and sexuality. 24 21

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A few studies specifically treat the significance of Kierkegaard’s writings in the 1880s, the time of the Swedish modernist breakthrough. Sten Linder has treated the subject in Ernst Ahlgren in her Novels (Ernst Ahlgren i hennes romaner, 1930) and Nils-Åke Sjöstedt completed Linder’s results in Søren Kierkegaard and Swedish Literature – from Fredrika Bremer to Hjalmar Söderberg (Søren Kierkegaard och svensk litteratur – från Fredrika Bremer till Hjalmar Söderberg, 1950). Thure Stenström has also analysed the mutual dependent themes of solitude and the sense of community during the end of 1900th century in his study The Solitaire (Den ensamme, 1961) and also deals with the legacy of romanticism and Kierkegaard. See Thure Stenström Den ensamme. En motivstudie i det moderna genombrottets litteratur, Stockholm: Natur & Kultur 1961. Elisabeth Gruntvig “Erotik & Kvinder,” Kvinden og Samfundet, Copenhagen 1887 and Elias Bredsdorff Den Store Nordiske Krig om Seksualmoralen. En dokumentaristisk fremstilling af sædelighedsdebatten i nordisk litteratur i 1880’erne, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1973, pp. 161 ff. Nils-Åke Sjöstedt Søren Kierkegaard och svensk litteratur. Från Fredrika Bremer till Hjalmar Söderberg, p. 100. Nils-Åke Sjöstedt Søren Kierkegaard och svensk litteratur. Från Fredrika Bremer till Hjalmar Söderberg, pp. 296-304.

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To shed light on how Either/Or was used in this debate, the first public speech, “Ibsen’s Ghosts from an ethical point of view” (“Ibsens Gengangere ur etisk synpunkt,” 1882), held by Sophie Adlersparre, is helpful. The topic of the speech was Ibsen’s play, Ghosts (Gengangere, 1881); the speech’s main question was: “What is the ethical condition for marriage?”25 Sophie Adlersparre (pseudonym: Esselde or SL. d.) was one of the most creative early advocates of the Swedish emancipation movement. She started, together with Rosalie Olivecrona, the first journal for female readers, (Tidskrift för hemmet, 1859). They opposed prejudice and laws that hindered women, but they also wanted to stimulate women to take interest in educational and didactic reading.26 Adlersparre recounts the different positions taken in the debate about Ibsen’s drama Ghosts. She investigates the female principal character, Mrs. Alving, and her guilt in relation to the disastrous events of the tragedy. She also discusses the dramas method of representation and finally gives her evaluative judgement. She focuses on two different topics: first issues about what were to be considered moral and ethical conduct in a “true marriage.” Adlersparre wants to make it clear that even women are responsible for their actions and ethical choices. Secondly, she discusses how literature should be interpreted and what the function of literature could or should be in a personal or a communal context. Adlersparre is clearly using Either/Or to structure the discussion of these topics. Judge Wilhelm rejects marriage for money or reasons other than “for love.” Adlersparre states that when Mrs. Alving entered her marriage for money, she was unfaithful to herself. By bringing out Mrs. Alving’s guilt, Adlersparre starts with making a subtle twist on Judge Wilhelm’s discussion. She states that the woman is equally responsible to herself and to others. The vast majority of opinions in the Swedish moral debate asserted that Mrs. Alving was a victim of circumstances. Adlersparre uses Kierkegaardian arguments, but calls special attention to female responsibility and equality in ethical and marital matters. The drama becomes, according to Adlersparre, a means for female self-inquiry. 25

26

S.L-s (Sofie) Adlersparre Ibsens Gengangere ur etisk synpunkt (Föredrag hållet i Stockholm våren 1882) (abbreviated Adlersparre), Stockholm: J & S Seligmann & co 1882. (My translations). Anna Nordenstam Begynnelser. Litteraturforskningens pionjärkvinnor 1850-1930, Stockholm & Stehag: Symposion 2001.

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Adlersparre is also arguing that the promise between wife and husband in marriage is of great import. Marriage is seen as a process in which the couple develops together, explicitly referring to Either/Or and Judge Wilhelm’s long description about marriage as a “history.” He says: “marital love has the possibility of inner history and distinguishes itself from first love as the historical from the non-historical.” 27 Like Judge Wilhelm, Adlersparre promotes total openness between husband and wife. But Adlersparre also says: “If Kierkegaard is right when he defines the modern tragic as the individual carrying his own guilt together with the guilt of the race, then Ibsen, in Ghosts, has fulfilled the condition for a modern tragedy.” In this case, she is thinking of the first part of Either/Or and A’s speech, “Ancient Tragedy’s Reflection in the Modern.”28 She is defending a way of reading Ibsen (and Kierkegaard) that can be characterized as co-creative: the reader is made responsible for his or her interpretation of the play. Adlersparre attaches great importance to the reader’s own activity and her reflective interpretation of the text. She opposes a view of literature that makes the author solely responsible for the opinions represented in a work, which is often done by interpreting a main character as the author’s official spokesperson. Adlersparre argues instead that Ghosts shows a problem and leaves to the reader to apply it on his or her own life. She emphasizes literary method as crucial to the interpretation of Ibsen’s drama, adding that Ibsen, like Kierkegaard, wants to “Socratically deceive man into truth.”29 She also points to a person in Ghosts, whose task it is to unlock the special method of representation: “But this person is mute, and she changes in appearance and opinion every time the piece is read; she is, in a word, no one else but the reader herself.” 30 Even though the “implied reader” is a term coined in the 1970s, Adlersparre is clearly

27 28

29 30

EOP, 432. Adlersparre, p. 30. This characterisation is made in opposition to Lawrence Heap Åberg, who defined Ghosts as an antic tragedy. For more information on the debate: Lisbeth Stenberg “Mellan reformistisk etik och revolutionär utopi. Ibsenstriden inom den svenska kvinnorörelsen 1898” in “bunden af en takskyld uden lige”: om svenskspråkig Ibsen-formidling 1857-1906, ed. by Vigdis Ystad, Knut Brynhildsvoll, Roland Lysell, Oslo: Aschehoug 2005, pp. 315-346, and Elias Bredsdorff Den Store Nordiske Krig om Seksualmoralen. En dokumentaristisk fremstilling af sædelighedsdebatten i nordisk litteratur i 1880’erne, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1973, pp. 11-39. Adlersparre, p. 34. Adlersparre, p. 31.

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referring to Ibsen’s construction of the reader, and she judges it to be similar to the method used by Kierkegaard. This also means that Adlersparre supports an ethical and creative way of reading Ibsen that doesn’t presuppose identification with a character; the author is not held responsible for the characters’ actions or opinions. She explicitly refers to Kierkegaard’s method, implicitly arguing that no single character speaks Kierkegaard’s truth. Adlersparre emphasizes ethical arguments, but does not mention that Either/Or also offers an aesthetical point of view. On the other hand, she turns to the first part of Either/Or when she calls Ibsen’s play “a modern tragedy.” Her reading is thus quite selective – she uses some parts, not paying attention to others. But when it comes to the topic of reading and the discussion of literary method, Adlersparre is actually taking Eremita’s advice to the (male) reader in the “Preface” ad notam, which lets the reader decide for himself how to use the book. Adlersparre recommends a didactic way of reading and using literature. Literature is seen as a tool for a (wo)man’s self-inquiry, and a means for molding one’s character (Bildung). Her view of Kierkegaard is close to the reading of Lysander. This way of evaluating Kierkegaard forms an analogy to Adlersparre’s standpoint concerning marriage: through a person’s promise to and faithfulness to oneself and one’s partner, marriage (like literature) can become a place for growth and development. This echoes Judge Wilhelm’s words in Either/Or: “marriage is a good school for character.”31 Writers of the modern breakthrough did not just question or defend conservative values. At the end of the nineteenth century, they also searched for new and true aesthetic expressions. Some were also influenced by Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms, and the distinction between the aesthetic and the ethical. August Strindberg read Kierkegaard during his entire productive period, and he experienced an early crisis where Either/Or played a decisive role for his future way of writing. Strindberg also wholeheartedly adopted the difference between aesthetic and ethical ways of writing. 32 Sten Linder also shows that there is strong connection between Victoria Benedictsson’s (pseud. Ernst Ahlgren) writings and Either/ Or. But Linder’s early comparative method, which is lacking gender theoretical tools, cannot truly detect the fact that Either/Or is the most important model behind Benedictsson’s novel Mrs. Marianne 31 32

EOP, 416 / SKS 3, 69. Nils-Åke Sjöstedt Søren Kierkegaard och svensk litteratur. Från Fredrika Bremer till Hjalmar Söderberg, pp. 126-291

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(Fru Marianne, 1887). The novel transforms the tension between the aesthetic and the ethical into a development, from a female point of view. It is true that Linder shows the two male protagonists, Pål and Börje, to be representatives of aesthetic and ethical personalities respectively, but he does not notice that Marianne herself is living the transformation from the aesthetically naive and immediate stage to an ethical way of living. 33 The novel is probably the most consistent literary adoption of Either/Or in the nineteenth century and it contains a number of allusions to Either/Or.

5. Translations of Either/Or At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new phase in the reception of Either/Or takes place when fragmentary translations into Swedish began to appear, often accompanied with explanatory prefaces and commentaries. These prefaces often tried to explain Either/ Or in relationship to the complex authorship and usually reflected the general state of Kierkegaardian research. The first piece to be translated into Swedish was “The Seducer’s Diary.” It was published in the series “Masterpieces of World Literature” (1902), and was accompanied by an introduction by David Sprengel. 34 “The Seducer’s Diary” has thereafter been translated and published five times, but the entire book was not translated until 2002. “The Seducer’s Diary” was also published in Bonnier’s popular series, The Best (Det Bästa), together with Gustave Flaubert’s A Simple Heart (Ett enkelt hjärta). 35 There has been a Swedish market for Kierkegaard in his original language too; “The Seducer’s Diary” was published in Danish with a postscript by Niels Kofoed and a short Danish-Swedish dictionary (1959). 36 New translations of “The Seducer’s Diary” were also carried out by Per Sörbom (1969) and Nils Tengdahl (1995). 37 33

34

35

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37

Sten Linder Ernst Ahlgren i hennes romaner. Ett bidrag till det litterära åttiotalets karaktäristik, Stockholm 1930, pp. 344 ff; 354 f. Søren Kierkegaard Förförarens dagbok, introduction and translation by D. Sprengel, (Mästerverk ur världslitteraturen, vol. 2), Stockholm 1902. Søren Kierkegaard’s Förförarens dagbok & Gustave Flaubert’s Ett enkelt hjärta (Det bästa, vol. 6), Stockholm: Bonniers 1919. Søren Kierkegaard Forførarens dagbog (Levande litteratur Mästerverk ur världshistorien), Stockholm: Bonniers 1959. Søren Kierkegaard Förförarens dagbok, trans. by Per Sörbom, Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand 1969; Søren Kierkegaard Förförarens dagbok, trans. by Nils Tengdahl, Göteborg: Vinga Press 1995.

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Translation of other parts from Either/Or has mainly consisted of a few selected aphorisms from “Diapsalmata” and parts of “Crop Rotation.” Only short and fragmentary pieces have been chosen for translation from the second part of the book. Richard Hejll’s Selected Parts from Søren Kierkegaards World of Thought (Valda stycken ur Sören Kierkegaards tankevärld, 1912) consists, in part, of translations of Either/Or. They include commentary and interpretation by Hejll, but there are no typological differences made between quotations and interpretation, and no references to the original texts. Hejll has composed the book as a reproduction of “the teachings of Kierkegaard,” but does not separate pseudonymous works from edifying discourses. The whole book is structured in three parts and three stages: the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. Part 1 takes pieces from “Diapsalmata” and “Crop Rotation”; Part 2 treats “The Ethical Stage of Life: Excerpts from the Ethics World of Thought,” including passages from the second part of Either/Or that are collected and ordered under thematic titles such as “Either-Or,” “On the Untrue in a Mystic’s Life,” and “Man and Woman”; (here Hejll has made an great effort to make Kierkegaard appear quite misogynous). The third part is subdivided into “The Religious Stage of Life,” “The History and Christ,” “Christianity as the Absolute,” “Despair,” “Doubt and Faith” and so on. It is worth noting that later translations of Either/Or often took the same selections as Richard Hejll did, which means that the Swedish readers were introduced to the same selected material from Either/Or, even though new translations were published over the years. An interesting, similar project that also tried to translate, interpret and revise selected parts of Kierkegaard’s writings was comprised of three books: A Small Selection of Søren Kierkegaard’s Works. An Effort by Karolina Lindström (Axplockning ur Sören Kierkegaards skrifter. Försök av Karolina Lindström). 38 Karolina Lindström studied Kierkegaard with Waldemar Rudin, but also used the writings of Torsten Bohlin. In the preface, she notes that she has made good use of the translations of The Sickness Unto Death (trans. by Z. Göransson) and Training in Christianity (trans. by O. A. Stridsberg). The project consists of three books with the titles: 1. Spheres of Life; 2. Marriage; 3. The Life of Faith. Together with the translations, Lindström also displays an independent interpretation of Kierkegaard, even if she 38

Karolina Lindström Axplockning ur Sören Kierkegaards skrifter. Försök av Karolina Lindström, Stockholm: Seelig & co (Örebro Dagblad distr.) 1934-37.

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hides it beneath humble headings such as “a small selection” and “an effort.” During the 1950s, Stig Ahlgren made an important selection and translation of Either/Or in Søren Kierkegaard Selected Works I-II (Søren Kierkegaard Skrifter i urval I-II), with a rich preface written by Danish professor Billeskov-Jansen. It consisted of a selection similar to Hejll’s: selected aphorisms, “Crop Rotation,” and a short part of “Equilibrium between the Aesthetic and the Ethical in the Development of the Personality,” but this time lacking a commentator’s voice. Billeskov-Jansen describes the two parts of Either/Or as two different attitudes towards life: an aesthete, a despairing, egocentric bon vivant on the one hand, and an ethicist, a representative of duty, who’s faith is trust and who’s attitude towards life also presupposes a relationship to God, on the other hand. The preface shifts the focus of Either/Or from the ethical interpretations of the nineteenth century to a more existentialistic interpretation in the 1950s: The teaching of Kierkegaard is about a choice. He puts his reader before an alternative. His philosophy targets every attempt to annihilate any opposition. It is a philosophy of choice. The masterpiece of Kierkegaard was called Either/Or. That title is the device of his authorship. Choose! That is Kierkegaard’s message to the people.39

The volume by Stig Ahlgren mentioned above was also published in an abbreviated edition several times during 1964-86.40 Either/Or in abridgement, including parts from “Diapsalmata” and “Equilibrium between the Aesthetic and the Ethical in the Development of Personality,” was as well translated by Lars Göransson (1956), and was presented together with pieces from Stages of Life’s way, Repetition and Concluding Unscientific Postscript.41 The entire Either/Or was not translated to Swedish, however, until as a part of Stefan Borg’s important project that intends to translate the complete works of Kierkegaard. The translation is based on Søren Kierkegaard Skrifter, volume 2 and 3, and is presented with a preface

39

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Søren Kierkegaard Skrifter i urval. Med inledningar och textförklaringar av Billeskov Jansen I-II, translation and selection by Stig Ahlgren, Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand 1954-57, (reprinted 1977), p. 25. Søren Kierkegard Antingen-eller, Selections and comments by F. J. Billeskov Jansen, trans. by Stig Ahlgren & Nils Kjellström, Stockholm: Wahlstöm & Widstrand, 1964, (reprinted 1967, 1977, 1986). Kierkegaard. I urval, trans. by Lars Göransson, Stockholm: Forumbiblioteket 1956.

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by Roy Wikander. The edition is also commented like the rest of the published translations of Stefan Borg.42 To sum up, Either/Or has not been available in Swedish to Swedish readers in any substantial way during the twentieth century. Aside from “The Seducer’s Diary,” “Diapsalmata,” “Crop Rotation” and fragmentary parts from part two, readers have had to turn to Kierkegaards Samlede Værker, and, after 1997, to Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter.

6. 100-year Anniversary Some voices from the Swedish forties will be used to give an idea of the state of the reception of Either/Or one hundred years after it was published in Denmark. Ingemar Hedenius considered the book to be a masterpiece, one of the finest in world literature (though it was produced by a mentally ill, demonic, anti-intellectual religious writer).43 Klara Johanson, the famous critic and essayist, wrote six appreciative essays on Kierkegaard in the omnibus volume The Rich Estate (Det rika stärbhuset), which introduce and defend the romantic genius of Kierkegaard and his legitimate position as an exception. These essays were originally planned as part of a book on Kierkegaard, which had the working title Sören and I (Sören och jag).44 She fiercely turned against the seeking of “the secret note” that would explain the paradox of the person and authorship of Kierkegaard.45 The background for this study is probably psychoanalytic research such as Hjalmar Helweg’s, which was quite strong at the time. Between 1945 and the mid-fifties, existentialism attracted much attention in Sweden, as elsewhere. Kierkegaard is seen as a father figure and was highly credited for his philosophy of existence. Thure Stenström offered two surveys of existentialism: Existentialism (Existentialismen. Studier i dess idétradition och litterära yttringar), that treats the movement in general, and Existentialism in Sweden (Existentialismen i Sverige. Mottagande och inflytande 1900-1950), that focuses on how the ideas were spread among Swedish writers and intellectuals. He emphasizes the kind of ethics and choice presented in Either/Or, 42

43 44 45

Søren Kierkegaard Antingen-eller, trans. by Stefan Borg, Guldsmedshyttan: Nimrod 2002. Ingemar Hedenius “Om Sören Kierkegaard” in Tiden, vol. 7, 1944. Klara Johanson & Greger Eman Ur dagböckerna, Lund: Elleströms 1989. Klara Johanson Det rika stärbhuset, Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand 1946.

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and takes it to be of fundamental importance to the development of existentialist theories of choice, anxiety and freedom.46 The indirect “negative” method, understood as an aesthetic model with ethical consequences, is rediscovered by writers in the forties, namely, Karl Vennberg, Lars Ahlin, Lars Gyllensten, and Gösta Oswald.47 The conscience of the individual is given more confidence than ecclesiastical dogmas, and these intellectuals of the post-war period sought a literary method that could express a critical but uncommitted, sometimes skeptical standpoint. In the late forties, it was no longer possible or reliable to try to represent an objective reality, and when modernist authors tried to problemitize the experience of reality, the pseudonymous authorship of Kierkegaard once again became interesting. One sign of the new interest in indirect communication during the post-war period is the philosophical dissertation The Dialectics of Communication (Meddelelsens dialektik) written by Lars Bejerholm. Studying “language,” “communication,” and “pseudonymity” in Kierkegaard’s writings, Bejerholm states that with “ ‘indirect communication,’ the author or the speaker manages to make the reader or listener interpret the communication as something which he himself must act on,” and that one feature of this method is the use of pseudonyms. But Bejerholm also concludes that the actual reason for using pseudonyms in Either/Or was to hide Kierkegaard’s identity, not “to point out a distinction between his ‘aesthetic’ and ‘religious’ production.” The book “was concerned with delicate matters,” he says, including the scandal of breaking the engagement. Bejerholm has shown that Kierkegaard’s own statements about communication were written at 1848 in what became The Point of View of my Work as an Author (published in 1859). Analyzing Kierkegaard’s arguments, Bejerholm comes to the conclusion that he was afraid that his reputation as an aesthetic author was fading in the fashionable literary circles of Copenhagen. By defining the boundaries of his authorship, Kierkegaard wanted to prove that he had been a religious writer form 46

47

Thure Stenström Existentialismen. Studier i dess idétradition och litterära yttringar, Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell International 1984 [1966], and Existentialismen i Sverige. Mottagande och inflytande 1900-1950, Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell International 1984. Nils-Åke Sjöstedt “Swedish literature” in The Legacy and Interpretation of Kierkegaard (Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 8), pp. 51 f. Also Gösta Oswald (pseudonym Peter Sergius), is alluding at Either/Or in En privatmans vedermödor (1949) and Nils-Åke Sjöstedt is drawing attention to that Lars Ahlin’s novel Tåbb med manifestet (1943), is closely inspired by the engagementstory of Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen.

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the beginning, but also that he was still able to write aesthetic works. His aesthetic works thus proved to have a special function from the beginning: to “betray” readers into the “truth” and to lead them to his religious works. But Kierkegaard did not plan it from the beginning, according to Bejerholm. Rather, he discovered afterwards a “meaning” and “plan” that was not his own.48 Bejerholm thus makes a strict distinction between the reason Kierkegaard writes under pseudonyms and the function of his psedonymous writings.

7. An Iconoclast of the Forties During the twentieth century, a number of single literary works have, with varying depth, alluded to Either/Or: the seducer, the ethical discussion, or the dialectical tension between two point of views. This article will not list them all, but instead treat the study of Lars Gyllensten, who shows the most intense interest in Kierkegaard and especially Either/Or. He was active as an author and critic from 1946-2004. He stated that he was not writing “single books” but wanted to “create an authorship.” His method is deeply influenced by the pseudonym technique of Kierkegaard, but contains very personal adjustments to fit the time and the aims of Gyllensten. Gyllensten’s explicit interpretations of Kierkegaard are presented in a series of essays written during the sixties; but in his first book, Modern Myths (Moderna myter), Gyllensten mimics an aesthetic, distanced point of view of reality, similar to A in Either/Or. The book is a collection of short stories and essays. The novels The Blue Ship (Det blå skeppet) and A Children’s Book (Barnabok) was constructed in a triad together with Modern Myths and these were supposed to demonstrate a thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis in a modernistic, experimental way. Language is taken to be the basic condition for the human ability to reach and understand outside reality. Gyllensten thus remodels Kierkegaard’s “stages of life” or “writing in stages” in a pragmatist manner where every stage is formed by a coherent language-world or language-game.49 Even if Gyllensten often recycled Kierkegaardian 48

49

Lars Bejerholm Meddelelsens dialektik. Studier i Søren Kierkegaards teorier om språk, kommunikation och pseudonymitet, Copenhagen: Munksgaard 1962, pp. 305 and 316 ff. Hans-Erik Johannesson Studier i Lars Gyllenstens estetik, Göteborg: Skrifter utgivna av Litteraturvetenskapliga institutionen vid Göteborgs universitet 1978, pp. 116-120.

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motifs and themes, he constructed point of views relevant to his own time. He does not repeat the romantic hierarchic idea of the stages of life, or treat it as a development inherent in man himself; he rather experimented with the idea of an infinite number of possible worlds. He was of the opinion that Kierkegaard was a poet of ideas and his stages were purified, brutal, but consistent constructions of ideas, without autobiographical content. 50 In “Viewpoint Sören Kierkegaard” (Synpunkt Sören Kierkegaard) published in Nihilistic Credo (Nihilistiskt Credo), Gyllensten defines “viewpoint” an excuse for “coming in view of” something, and aims at an almost ideological and performative function concerning the literarily communicative statement. In his original meta-aesthetic interpretation of Kierkegaard that possibly says more about his own authorship than Kierkegaard’s, Gyllensten writes that Kierkegaard always brought the artifact to the fore: His [Kierkegaard’s] poetry is ritual; it is interwoven in a falling that becomes possible by the word. The religious will not sublate the aesthetic and the ethical. The tension in his writing does not just lie in the synthesis, but in the totality of thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis: in the form, the triad. The seductive lies in the fact that he always will be the Seducer. 51

In Readings of Nothingness (Läsningar av intet), Anders Olsson recently criticized Gyllensten. Olsson traces different manifestations of “nothingness,” which is defined: “a relative concept that occasionally becomes ‘conjuring’ and takes on the character of a rhetorical figure.”52 He studies the demonic character of the writings of Kierkegaard. The demonic assuredly was a common romantic theme. It was often present in a demonic hero, a troublemaker, or an iconoclast who revolted against the idealism of the time. It was understood as something that appeared when the demarcation between God and the humanly created image of God collapsed during romanticism. According to Olsson, Kierkegaard uses a demonic form to communicate the “system” and his concepts. The form is a kind of demonic feature that Olsson relates to the seducer, and which is the center point from which the theory emanates. Olsson concludes that Gyllensten “transforms the negative theology of Kierkegaard into a nihilistic searching that, in its structure, undermines the actual existence of God. What is left of 50

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Lars Gyllensten “Tidlöst jubileum,” (originally published in DN November 11, 1955), Nihilistiskt credo, Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag 1964, pp. 41-46. Lars Gyllensten “Synpunkt Sören Kierkegaard,” (originally published in Prisma, vol. 2, 1950), Nihilistiskt credo, Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag 1964, pp. 23-27. Anders Olsson Läsningar av intet, Stockholm: Bonniers 2000, p. 11.

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Kierkegaard’s faith is a romantic creation of myths; God becomes an artistic artifact, and thus it will be impossible to keep the concept of God intact against the distrust of nihilism. God is a demon; the border between heaven and abyss has abolished.”53 The books of Gyllensten often carry a forcible struggle with an absent God. Thure Stenström has, as an example, shown that The Cave in the Desert (Grottan i öknen) has themes close to Eckehart’s mysticism. 54 But it would be a misunderstanding to take the “credo” of Gyllensten, or his novelistic art, as “negative” in a pessimistic or nihilistic sense. His novels are positive, moralistic, and critical in an analytical way, aiming at destroying the “false Gods” of the time. He constantly played the role of the iconoclast in debates and tried to expose and analyze unethical or egoistic aims behind political or cultural rhetoric. His authorship is freely created on the model of the Kierkegaardian “stages of life,” but Gyllensten wrote of the stages of his time, always keeping a distant, analytical posture towards contemporary ideas and movements. 55 Kierkegaardian themes and motifs, chiefly from Either/Or, reappear trough his authorship, always subordinated to new and actual point of views. There are direct allusions to the essay on Mozart woven into Lotus in Hades (Lotus i Hades) and the Don Juan-theme is an important inter-textual part of In the Shadow of Don Juan (I skuggan av Don Juan) and The Return of the Shadow (Skuggans återkomst). The seducer and iconoclast Don Juan has the function of being an analytical and critical model that targets individualism and the exaggerated worship of the western self. Lars Gyllensten also creates a close adaptation of Either/Or in Seven Wise Masters on Love (Sju vise mästare om kärlek). The gender roles in “The Seducer’s Diary” are turned upside down and the seduced Cordelia reappears in the shape of a seduced, male artist. In seven incarnations, composed as seven short stories, gender perspective is turned upside down and many of the points of views are derived from “Shadowgraphs” and its suffering women. The short story “The Melancholy of the Spoonbill” uses “Crop Rotation” and its restless, despairing aesthetic as an inter-textual source. The book is struc53 54

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Anders Olsson Läsningar av intet, p. 112. Thure Stenström Gyllensten i hjärtats öken. Strövtåg i Lars Gyllenstens författarskap, särskilt Grottan i öknen, (Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Historia litterarum, vol. 19), Uppsala 1996, pp. 311-313. Camilla Brudin Borg Skuggspel. Mellan bildkritik och ikonestetik i Lars Gyllenstens författarskap, Skellefteå: Artos/Norma Bokförlag 2005.

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tured as a continuous changing of stages of life, but not in accordance with a rising developmental chain of events, but playfully pictured as incarnations between humans and animals, wakefulness and dreaming. Gyllensten has most likely continued his radical examination of western individualism and its autocratic drawbacks in this book, but the “seduction” is interpreted in a post-modern way, focusing on different languages at work and on the artificial character of the written word. 56

Postscript In the last few years, different ways of studying and reading Kierkegaard, inspired by the new critical schools and research in the field of literary studies, has come forward. Anders Olsson’s study on nothingness mentioned above is one. In two chapters of The Self in the Text (Jaget i texten), Jan Holmgaard examines how a textual “self” is created in “The Seducer’s Diary.” Holmgaard’s meta-critical project is an investigation of how Kierkegaard looks at “the possibilities of a self within the fiction,” that is, how Kierkegaard stages the possibilities of an aesthetic self, trying to poetize himself. The idea of reading Either/Or as regards language has, as explained above, been anticipated by Gyllensten in his literary inter-textual treatment of Kierkegaard’s writings. But Holmgaard’s study brings a new angle to the Swedish literary research on Kierkegaard, which traditionally has been dominated by comparative and existentialistic studies. Holmgaard rejects stage-theoretical and existentialistic interpretations of Kierkegaard and starts his reading in On My Activity As A Writer (1851), where Kierkegaard describes his attitude towards his writings as being “without authority.” Kierkegaard’s strategy to make himself a reader “without authority” of his own text is taken to refute the idea of a developing line that starts in the aesthetic, moves thorough the ethical, and ends up in the religious. 57 This article has tried to show a few important authorships that have seldom been mentioned in Swedish reception-studies on Kierkegaard. Many female authors have, for example, taken a deep interest in the books written by Kierkegaard, regardless of what he might have thought 56

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Camilla Brudin Borg “Lust och lärdom. Gyllenstens Sju vise mästare om kärlek och erotiska motiv hos Kierkegaard” in TFL, vol. 1, 1999, pp. 86-104. Jan Holmgaard “Självdiktandet (Kierkegaard)” in Jaget i texten, Stockholm: Aiolos 1998, pp. 69-110; En ironisk historia, Stockolm: Aiolos 2003.

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about it. In relationship to Either/Or, Fredrika Bremer, Sophie Adlersparre, Ann-Charlotte Leffler, Vicoria Benedictsson, Klara Johanson and Karolina Lindström has been named here. But it is impossible to sort out a common feature or a special kind of interest among these women. Their points of view and their inclinations to interpret Either/ Or in a special way have rather to do with the cultural situation and the historical time inhabited by the interpreter – which holds for male interpreters as well. The ways of reading Either/Or have in general followed the cultural debates and the new perspectives and paradigms of the humanities. This easily qualifies Kierkegaard’s extensive and rich masterpiece Either/Or for a secure place in the heaven of classics – if the criterion for belonging there is the characteristic of reappearing with new meanings for new readers.

On the Reception History of Either/Or in the Anglo-Saxon World1 By Leonardo F. Lisi

To synthesize the reception history of a work as protean as Either/Or is a daunting task indeed.2 Moreover, to seek to restrict the field of inquiry by means of such classifications as “Anglo-Saxon,” may well seem futile at a time when – as Steen Tullberg has recently pointed out in his excellent study of Kierkegaard’s reception in Denmark – such national and cultural boundaries have begun to lose their meaning. 3 An attempt at organizing the material must nevertheless be made if 1

2

3

Much of the work for this article was conducted during my time as a Summer Fellow at the Howard and Edna Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College in 2007. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the library in general and to Ms. Cynthia Lund in particular for the kindness and help extended to me during my stay. A previous attempt to do so in English has been provided by David Gouwens with respect to Part 1 of Either/Or. See his “Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, Part One: Patterns of Interpretation” in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Either/Or, Part I, vol. 3, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 1995. While unquestionably courageous in its attempt and useful in its scope, the organizational difficulty at stake is laid bare in the sheer complexity of Gouwens’ suggested twelve classes of critical responses to Kierkegaard’s text: “(1) New Critical, (2) biographical-genetic, (3) philosophical-poetic (reader’s response), (4) literary-historical, (5) comparative literary… (6) studies of Kierkegaard’s own understanding of his literary criticism.… (7) the Frankfurt School and after, (8) psychological, (9) structural, (10) computer analytical, (11) ‘neopositive’ source critical, and (12) postmodernist approaches” (p. 6). Although admirable in its ambition, such a list threatens to call to mind Borges’ famed Chinese encyclopedia (see “El idioma analítico de John Wilkins” in Obras Completas, vols. 1-4, Barcelona: Emecé Editores 1996 [1952]; vol. 2, p. 86), and Foucault’s no less famed response to the same: “In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap [is] the stark impossibility of thinking that” (Michel Foucault The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Vintage Books 1994 [1966], p. xv). Steen Tullberg Søren Kierkegaard i Danmark. En receptionshistorie, Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel 2006, p. 116.

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the sequence of its presentation is not to be completely accidental. Hence, in the following, the widely varying responses to Either/Or are grouped according to three methodological principles that can be discerned to underlie the diversity of studies in the field: 1) the literary approach; 2) the contextualizing approach; and 3) the analytic approach.4 While none of these is restricted to a specific historical moment, it nevertheless seems to be the case that each arises and has its heyday at a specific point in time. Thus, the literary approach, which covers both analyses of Either/Or as primarily a work of literature, artistic responses to it, and the derivation of principles for literary criticism from it, appears to have its time of glory in the period prior to the publication of the first full-length translation of Kierkegaard’s text by David and Lillian Swenson and Walter Lowrie in 1944. Likewise, the contextual approach, which seeks to find the meaning of Kierkegaard’s work primarily in texts other than Either/Or itself (whether from Kierkegaard’s own Journals and Papers or those of other disciplines, such as psychology), arises in the late 1930’s, finding its dominating formulation in Lowrie’s 1938 landmark study, Kierkegaard. 5 Finally, the analytic approach, which focuses on an immanent examination of the arguments in Kierkegaard’s work, can be seen to find its first self-conscious expression in the posthumous publication of David Swenson’s work in 1941,6 and rapidly becomes the dominant methodology in the academically established discipline of Kierkegaard studies. Naturally, no work can embody such methodological principles in a pure form, and each is classified here simply according to the approach that seems to take priority in it. Doing so has three advantages: 1) it makes possible the organization of otherwise ungovernable material along fairly simple criteria; 2) it allows a qualitatively representative picture to emerge without taking into account what would constitute a quantitatively adequate amount of evidence (something impossible to do in a paper of this size); and 3) it permits a historical perspective on the reception of this specific work to emerge.

4

5 6

Throughout this paper I use the term “analytic” in its non-technical sense of “pertaining to analysis,” understood as the “Separation of anything into constituent parts or elements; also, an examination of anything to distinguish its component parts or elements, separately or in their relation to the whole” (Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary). Walter Lowrie Kierkegaard, London/New York/Toronto 1938. David F. Swenson Something About Kierkegaard, ed. by Lillian Marvin Swenson, Minneapolis 1941.

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1. Literary Approaches At first sight, it would seem as though Either/Or played a surprisingly insignificant role in the rise to prominence of Kierkegaard’s works in the Anglo-Saxon world. While its impact on the Danish public at the time of publication is well-known and habitually credited with bringing Kierkegaard his fame,7 its first full-length appearance in English in 1944, as part of the influential Oxford-Princeton edition of Kierkegaard’s texts overseen by Walter Lowrie, was preceded by no less than twelve other titles in that same series.8 Thus, in 1943 when the Partisan Review launched a two-issue discussion on the pervasive “intellectual panic” of the times,9 in which notable figures such as John Dewey and Ernest Nagel, the folklorist Richard V. Chase, and the anthropologist Ruth Benedict participated, Kierkegaard had become prominent enough a thinker to have one of the contributions to the debate dedicated fully to his thought – without, however, any mention at all of Either/Or.10 Moreover, when the Swenson-Lowrie translation finally 7

8

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On the contemporary Danish reception of Either/Or, see George Pattison “The Initial Reception of Either/Or” in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Either/ Or, Part II, volume 4, ed. by Robert L. Perkins. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 1995, as well as the recent excellent book-long study by Andrea Scaramuccia L’ironista nella botte. Søren Kierkegaard e la ricezione di Enten-Eller, Pisa: Edizioni ETS 2006. These are: Philosophical Fragments (1936), The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard (1937), The Point of View for My Work as an Author (1939), Christian Discourses, The Lilies of the Field, The Birds of the Air, and Three Discourses at the Communion on Fridays (1939), Stages on Life’s Way (1940), The Present Age and Two Minor Ethico-Religious Treaties (1940), Fear and Trembling (1941), For Self-Examination, Judge For Yourselves! (1941), Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments (1941), Repetition (1941), The Sickness Unto Death (1941), Training in Christianity and The Edifying Discourses (1941). For an extensive, though incomplete, list of publications on, and translations of, Kierkegaard in the period 1875-1955, see Peter A. Schilling Søren Kierkegaard and Anglo-American Literary Culture of the Thirties and Forties, unpublished PhD Dissertation, The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University 1994, pp. 239-242. The debate was launched by Sidney Hook and conducted under the general heading of “The New Failure of Nerve,” which Hook defines as an “intellectual panic,” visible in, amongst other things, “the recrudescence of beliefs in the original depravity of human nature; prophecies of doom for western culture, no matter who wins the war or peace, dressed up as laws of social-dynamics; the frenzied search for a center of value that transcends human interests” (Sidney Hook “The New Failure of Nerve” in Partisan Review, vol. X, no. 1, January-February, 1943, pp. 2 f.). See Norbert Guterman “Neither-Nor” in Partisan Review, vol. X, no. 2, MarchApril, 1943.

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made the work generally accessible, the reading public was warned by its translator that, a great discrepancy [exists] between this work [Either/Or] and the works of S. K.’s maturity, with respect not only to the felicity and exactness of his expression, but also to the sheer weight and value of his thought.… I go even so far as to say that the book would be improved by leaving out many passages, which not only are badly expressed but often are examples, and tedious examples, of argument for argument’s sake, which is the essence of sophistry.… But I protest here that, if in some instances the translation appears stupid or even incomprehensible, the original is no better.11

With such an unfavorable introduction, it is no wonder that, two years later, when Kierkegaard had accumulated sufficient cultural capital to make his appearance in Time magazine – sandwiched between advertisements for “Zeus Filter Cigarette Holders,” the “Chateau Lejon,” and sunny Southern California –no mention of Either/Or could be found.12 With a closer look, however, it becomes apparent that there not only was a significant reception of Either/Or prior to 1944, but also that this reception had a specifically literary focus.13 While it might seem obvious that a work which is as self-consciously and brilliantly literary as Either/Or should be studied from this perspective, it nevertheless appears that this approach all but fell into abeyance in the Anglo-Saxon world with the appearance of the Swenson-Lowrie translation. Indeed, the hypothesis suggests that the pre-1944 prominence of Either/Or in the Anglo-Saxon world goes hand in hand with the general emphasis on literary aspects of Kierkegaard’s authorship. The perceived centrality of a work with such overt stylistic accomplishments may well have been the reason that the attention of early scholarship was directed to this aspect of Kierkegaard’s oeuvre. Conversely, the disappearance of a focus on Kierkegaard’s literary qualities in the 1930’s also spelled the notable decline in attention paid to Either/Or.

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Walter Lowrie “Translator’s Preface” in Søren Kierkegaard Either/Or, vol. two, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton 1946 [1944], pp. vf. See “Great Dane” in Time, December 16, 1946, pp. 63 f. The claim that there is a largely neglected literary reception of Kierkegaard’s work in the Anglo-Saxon world of the early twentieth century has also been argued by Barbara Graham Barker in her His becoming popular: Establishing Søren Kierkegaard in the English-speaking world, unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Washington 1989, pp. 48 f., 71, 247.

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1.1 Literary Appreciations of Either/Or Prior to 1944, Lowrie’s assessment of Either/Or as one of Kierkegaard’s minor works was far from being commonplace in the AngloSaxon world. This much is seen in first-known discussion of Kierkegaard in English, where Andrew Hamilton only mentions Either/Or, Works of Love and The Sickness Unto Death.14 Similarly, in the first entry on Kierkegaard to be found in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, only “Either-Or,” “Papers of a Still Living Man,” and “On Irony” are named, and the first of these specifically is described as “his greatest work…on which his reputation mainly rests.”15 In the condensed version of the same entry for the New Americanised Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1904, moreover, only the reference to Either/Or is retained, together with the description of it as Kierkegaard’s major work.16 The entry on Kierkegaard in the legendary eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica likewise singles out only “Enten-Eller” (sic), together with “Papers of a Still Living Man,” and “Syns punktetfor [sic] min Forfattervirksomhed [sic],” and again retains the description of Either/Or as the most famous of Kierkegaard’s texts.17 Echoing this pattern of early emphasis on Either/Or, is a 1902 article by M. A. Stobart, possibly the first extensive discussion of Kierkegaard found in English, focused exclusively on the text.18 Further still, Stobart’s article indicates the tone for much of the initial response to Kierkegaard’s work by discussing the purely literary aspects of Either/ Or at length. Focusing on the “Diary of a Seducer” as “the literary gem of Kirkegaard’s [sic] masterpiece,”19 Stobart also goes on to offer 14

15 16 17

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Andrew Hamilton Sixteen Months in The Danish Isles, 2 vols., London 1852; vol. 2, p. 269. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, ninth ed., 24 vols., Boston 1875-1889; vol. 14, p. 72. New Americanised Encyclopaedia Britannica, 12 vols., Ohio 1904; vol. 5, p. 3722. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, eleventh ed., 28 vols. Cambridge, England 1911; vol. 15, p. 788. The same entry is repeated in the thirteenth edition (The Encyclopædia Britannica, thirteenth ed., 31 vols., London and New York 1926; vol. 15, p. 788), and condensed for the fourteenth (The Encyclopædia Britannica, fourteenth ed., 24 vols., London and New York 1929; vol. 13, p. 374), where Either/Or is referred to as “his chief work.” M. A. Stobart “The Either-Or of Sören Kierkegaard” in Fortnightly Review, LXXI, 1902. To my knowledge, the only possible exception to this chronological priority might be Stobart’s own previous article on Ibsen’s Brand (M. A. Stobart “New Lights on Ibsen’s Brand” in Fortnightly Review, LXVI, 1899), which, as will be shown below, also contains a substantial discussion of Kierkegaard. M. A. Stobart “The Either-Or of Sören Kierkegaard,” p. 57.

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translations as proof of “Kirkegaard’s [sic] charming simplicity of style.”20 A similar enthusiastic response to the formal sides of Kierkegaard’s work can be found four years later in the first book published on Kierkegaard in English, Adolf Hult’s Soren [sic] Kierkegaard. His Life and Literature.21 Hult’s study is an extraordinary document that, among other things, clearly divides Kierkegaard’s authorship into different stages, according not to philosophical content, but to stylistic features. Hult thus proposes four different phases corresponding to the four different stylistic modes of Kierkegaard’s writings, separating the first “preparatory” period from the “esthetic-philosophical” (to which Either/Or pertains) on the grounds that the latter’s style is “brilliant, profound, glittering, romantic, ironical, enigmatical and often lusciously lyrical.”22 The following, “religious” period is in turn defined by a “deep, rich, sober and organ-like character,”23 while the final “ecclesiastical denunciatory” phase is marked by a style that “has become inflammatory.”24 The extremely suggestive nature of such a taxonomy becomes clear in Hult’s summary of this progression as one from “the esthetic,” through “the religious,” to the final “ethical 20 21

22

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Ibid., p. 58. Adolf Hult Soren Kierkegaard. His Life and Literature, Chicago, Il., 1906. Hult’s book is ignored by nearly all reception histories of Kierkegaard, and I am indebted to Eric Pons’ study for drawing my attention to it (Eric Pons La réception de Kierkegaard dans le pays anglo-saxons, unpublished PhD dissertation, Université de Paris 1 2004, p. 21). Hult Soren Kierkegaard, pp. 5 f. Hult offers an extensive encomium of the stylistic beauty of the period to which Either/Or belongs: “His command of language surprises. The miniature delicacy, facile aptitude for quaint turns of thought and tricky suggestions, talkative familiarity and the power of easily expressing large discourse, united to a beautiful Northern lyrical richness, which in Swedish reaches its classical climax, all these native traits of the Danish language Kierkegaard understands, loves and embodies in his literature. His style can not be called popular except in a refined sense, though, in spite of frequent admixture of foreign words and philosophical terms, it possesses a peculiarly insistent character. The Kierkegaard cadence once caught rings on forever….Sometimes he makes difficult reading. There are stretches so taxing as the ascent of one of the steep faints in our American Rockies. But patience is rewarded at last by a glimpse of enrapturing beauty and splendor. The ingenious allusions to fairy stories, to old sagas and classic myths, to popular proverbs, to novel and witty situations in the drama of life and in the drama on the stage, characteristic of the Romantic period in European thought and belles-lettres, we find in this second stage of authorship, nor did it wholly desert him in his later labors” (pp. 6 f.). Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., p. 8.

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emphasis.”25 The inversion of the habitual sequence of the religious and ethical here is striking and motivated solely by stylistic considerations, which merit further attention. This clear rhetorical focus of Hult’s approach to Kierkegaard may in turn be explained by his extensive attention to Either/Or, which Hult pronounces “a landmark in Danish literature both as to matter and to manner,” 26 and which constitutes the work most frequently cited, discussed and referred by far the book. The initial, literary interest in Kierkegaard in general, and in Either/Or specifically, is further testified to in the first anthology of Kierkegaard’s writings in English in 1923, edited and translated by L. M. Hollander. 27 Significantly, the selection was issued as part of the “Comparative Literature Series” of the University of Texas,28 and the passages translated by Hollander point to a strong stylistic interest in Kierkegaard: from Either/Or, only the Diapsalmata are represented, followed by nearly eighty pages from “The Banquet” in Stages on Life’s Way. The edition, moreover, was reviewed by Louis Bredvold two years later, who again gives most attention to a discussion of Either/Or – in spite of it being the work which, among those selected by Hollander, receives the least space in the anthology under review. Like his predecessors, however, Bredvold pronounces Either/ Or Kierkegaard’s “greatest work,”29 and again focuses extensively on the literary aspects of Kierkegaard’s texts, their inseparable fusion of art and philosophy. 30 25 26 27

28 29

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Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., p. 8; see also p. 3. Selections from the Writings of Kierkegaard, trans. by L. M. Hollander, Austin, Texas 1923. Ibid., title page. Louis I. Bredvol’s review of Selections from the Writings of Kierkegaard in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, XXIV, 1925, p. 162. Bredvol thus for example writes: “…Kierkegaard combined the skill in characterization and the psychological penetration of the great novelist, with the dialectical powers of a great philosopher.… His works are a series of philosophical tales and philosophical biographies. Hence their manifold and inexhaustible interest. Perhaps the reader is attracted first by Kierkegaard as a philosopher, by his acute discrimination, his profundity, or the audacity of his philosophical speculation; but the method of Kierkegaard is to present these philosophical conceptions artistically and concretely, as an integral part of experience, whereby their content is enriched and their significance enhanced. Another reader is perhaps first attracted by the brilliant portraits and character studies, the psychological narratives, and the consummate art with which Kierkegaard portrays the spiritual milieu of his characters; but such a reader, again, finds that all these studies of a novelist are essentially

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The fascination with Either/Or as a work of literature finds its principal expression in the 1932 translation into English of The Diary of a Seducer, by Knud Fick. 31 As is made clear from Fick’s letter to Lowrie years later, the primary motivation for such a venture was the purely literary marketability of the text: Sometime in 1932 or so a chap by the name of Angel Flores, having started a more or less esoteric publishing business at Ithaca, N. Y. (“The Dragon Press,” no less), asked his friend Professor J. V. McGill, of Hunter College, for suggestions on what to publish. McGill bethought himself of Kierkegaard in general and a mutual friend of McGill’s and mine, Arne Fisher, suggested the reputedly Rabelaisian Seducer’s Diary as a promising venture and myself as a possible translator. I agreed…although I must confess to small a personal regard for S. K.’s lucubrations and a college-bred detestation for his literary style. It soon became apparent, and I was told in so many words, that they really intended to publish the book as a contemporary work, by insinuation at least, so they slashed away at the manuscript to eliminate everything which might smack of 1843 (was it?). To this I was quite indifferent. My only interest in the book, as far as translator’s pride is concerned, was my attempt to eliminate outlandish phrases and usages (the “thee” and “thou” business, “counting houses” of Tolstoy ill-fame, and that sort of thing) and to solve the problem of what to do with puns. Well, we were successful in having Ernest Boyd single the book out for a dishonourable mention as “The Worst Book of the Week” – a charming and utterly characteristic example of abysmal ignorance and singularly poor taste. 32

In spite of Fick’s personal dislike of Kierkegaard’s style, it is clear that the general assumption was that, granted minor adjustments, The Diary was a modern enough work of literature to arouse interest, independent of whatever role it might play within Kierkegaard’s philosophical project. In the period since the consecration of Kierkegaard as an academic field of inquiry in the Anglo-Saxon world, few explicitly literary approaches to Either/Or have been attempted. A notable exception is Louis Mackey’s Kierkegaard. A Kind of Poet, from 1971. 33 In the preface to that work, Mackey states that Kierkegaard “must be studied not merely or principally with the instruments of philosophic and theological analysis, but also and chiefly with the tools of literary criticism.” 34 Unfortunately, however, it is unclear exactly what Mackey takes “tools

31 32

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philosophical, and that the philosophical conclusion grows as organically out of the art of the novelist as the flower from the stem that bears it” (ibid., pp. 161 f.). Søren Kierkegaard The Diary of a Seducer, trans. by Knud Fick, Ithaca 1932. Quoted in Graham Barker His becoming popular, pp. 69 f. Significantly, having read Fick’s account, Lowrie refused to meet him. Louis Mackey Kierkegaard. A Kind of Poet, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1971. Ibid., p. x.

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of literary criticism” to be, since the remainder of his study offers no evidence of the such, and instead almost exclusively engages in the kind of “survey and summary” that he himself rejects as invalid.35 This method nevertheless permits Mackey to draw an interpretative conclusion about Either/Or that seeks to grant the poetic primacy. Through a number of summaries, Mackey lays bare analogies of formulation between various pseudonyms within and beyond Either/Or, and proposes that all must accordingly be seen as variations of the same pen. The latter, in turn, is identified with the figure of “the poet,” whose essence is defined as “the everlasting equivocator who wears an infinite number of masks but never appears in propia persona.”36 This simultaneity of multiplicity (the poet is everyone) and nothingness (the poet is no one) at work in the play of pseudonyms, is thus taken to figure the essence of the aesthetic itself. 37 A more promising attempt at a literary approach has been provided by George Pattison in his, Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious. Pattison begins his study of Either/Or by pointing out that Kierkegaard’s own literary criticism falls into two groups: on the one hand that which is based solely on aesthetic criteria, which concerns itself with dramatic art, and, on the other, that in which Kierkegaard “brings ethical criteria into play” (the presence or absence of a “life-view” in a given work), which deals with “works of novelistic literature.”38 By mapping this distinction onto the difference between the aesthetic and the ethical in Either/Or, Pattison is thus able to reformulate the conceptual problem of how to conduct an ethical life in an aesthetic age in terms of the problem of how to write a novel in a modern world: However, as we have repeatedly seen, Kierkegaard’s writings raise the question as to whether the kind of life-view which the Assessor here commends…is in fact sustainable in the context of modernity. For such a life-view presupposes a deep grounding in communally-shared ethical and religious values and the recognition of a common religious vocabulary. But such objectively ‘given’ cultural and linguistic resources are no longer available – or not available in any direct way – in an ‘age of reflection.’ Whither, then, the novel?39 35

36 37 38

39

Ibid., p. ix. As such, it is difficult to see why Mackey’s study should constitute a “turning-point,” as Gouwens claims (“Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, Part One,” p. 13), although it is true that the merely rhetorical invocation of a “literary” approach in Mackey’s preface seems to have stirred significant outrage in Anglo-Saxon scholarship. Mackey Kierkegaard. A Kind of Poet, pp. 32 f. Ibid., p. 38. George Pattison Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious. From the Magic Theatre to the Crucifixion of the Image, London: Macmillan 1992, pp. 125 f. Ibid., pp. 139 f.

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This question is of utmost interest from a perspective of literary history and would place Either/Or in a fascinating position in the nineteenth century evolution and transformation of the novelistic genre. Unfortunately, however, having raised the question through an analysis of Either/Or, Pattison goes on to provide an answer in terms of Stages on Life’s Way, which places it beyond the focus of the present study.40 While studies such as Pattison’s open interesting avenues for further investigation of the literary nature of Either/Or, relatively few attempts at such readings have been made in the Anglo-Saxon world since the early years of the twentieth century. No doubt the gradual loss of an adequate knowledge of Danish amongst immigrant communities in the United States is the primary cause for this decline, and given that much work in this direction still remains to be done, it is doubtful that such will be undertaken on any notable scale. 1.2 Artistic Adaptations of Either/Or While it is generally acknowledged that Kierkegaard influenced a number of Anglo-Saxon artists in the twentieth century,41 there is seemingly no well-known work that draws specifically on Either/Or to any significant degree. An interesting suggestion to the contrary has nevertheless been offered by Peter Schilling, who claims that Henry Miller’s notorious Tropic of Cancer (1934) might have been influenced by the publication of Fick’s translation of The Diary of a Seducer two years prior.42 In spite of certain formal similarities (the first person, diary narration, the fascination with sexuality and desire), this seems doubtful, given that, first, Miller lived in Paris throughout the 1930’s, and is thus unlikely to have had access to the limited edition of Fick’s translation, and second, that in his 1943 review of Lowrie’s A Short Life of Kierkegaard, Miller clearly accepts Lowrie’s fallacious claim that “up until 1938 nothing of Kierkegaard had been translated into English.”43 Nevertheless, as Schilling also points out, it is of course 40

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However, see Pattison’s remarks on Stages on Life’s Way, ibid., pp. 151-154, which could presumably be applied to Either/Or in modified form. Most of these again seem to be found in the early years of the twentieth century. For an interesting analysis of the socio-historical reasons behind Kierkegaard’s importance for the American literary scene of the 1930’s and 40’s, see Schilling Søren Kierkegaard and Anglo-American Literary Culture. Ibid., pp. 10, 70 f. Arthur Miller “Prince of Denmark” in The New Republic, May 10, 1943, p. 642.

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possible that Miller might have had access to the French, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish translations of The Diary (published in 1929, 1910, 1911 and 1922 respectively),44 and, while Schilling does not elaborate his claim in any way, it is true that suggestive parallels between Miller’s and Kierkegaard’s works could be traced.45 In the absence of any sustained evidence of direct influence, such similarities, however, might be more fruitfully explored in terms of a general historical thesis on the gradual evolution of modern art from what the young Friedrich Schlegel called “the interesting” to “the piquant.”46 Karsten Harries has shown that Kierkegaard’s Either/Or would play a central role in a historical narrative of this kind in his lucid The Meaning of Modern Art. Here, Harries traces the gradual decline of the Platonic-Christian world view and its conception of the analogy between the finite and infinite worlds,47 which leads to an increasing interest in the sublime, understood as an expression of man’s essential homelessness in the realm of finitude.48 In the modern age, this sublime primarily takes a negative form, which in modern art manifests itself in the search for the interesting.49 The latter in turn finds seminal consideration not least in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, where the interesting emerges as a means for escaping a finitude that has become essentially meaningless. 50 Yet art based on a such a perception of the world’s intrinsic lack of meaning continually threatens to decline into kitsch, which Harries masterfully elucidates in terms of Kierkegaard’s analysis of Scribe’s First Love in Part 1 of Either/Or. 51 Against this background, the trajectory from the interesting to the piquant, from The Seducer’s Diary to Tropic of Cancer could be seen as part of a logic inherent in modern art at large. 52 44 45

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48 49 50 51 52

Schilling Søren Kierkegaard and Anglo-American Literary Culture, pp. 70 f. For example, some of the ennui about the modern world expressed by Henry Miller in Tropic of Cancer (London: Flamingo, 1993 [1934], pp. 101-104), or Van Norden’s solipsism in the same (ibid., pp. 135 f.), sound very similar to A and Johannes in Either/Or. See Friedrich Schlegel Über das Studium der Griechischen Poesie in Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, vols. 1-35, Padeborn: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh 1958-2006; vol. 1, p. 254. Karsten Harries The Meaning of Modern Art. A Philosophical Interpretation, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1968, pp. xiii, 11-14. Ibid., p. 44. Ibid., p. 45. Ibid., pp. 53, 56. Ibid., pp. 80 f. In this respect, see also Harries’ observations on the nature of the obscene, ibid., pp. 90 f.

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As Harries’ focus is primarily on pictorial art, such a connection between Kierkegaard’s meditations on the interesting and the praxis of twentieth century artists would be particularly fruitful in relation to the forty paintings based on Either/Or produced by Elsa de Brun (also known as “Nuala”). 53 Twenty-five of these were presented at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York in 1972, as part of the exhibition, “Either/Or. A Valentine to Søren Kierkegaard,” which the flier for the exhibit goes on to describe as, “Statement in Line and Color a correspondence in appreciation of Søren Kierkegaard and his existential successors in music and literature.”54 The titles of some of the works exhibited clearly suggest the link to their source of inspiration: “the immediate is really the indeterminate”; “do not check your soul’s flight”; “the idea is bound up with the medium”; “grief is my castle.” Another interesting suggestion of the influence of Either/Or on a central twentieth century artist is provided by Thornton Wilder’s marginalia to his copy of the 1946 edition of the Swenson-Lowrie translation. 55 While noting that Wilder has not made any underlining or notes in volume two, and volume one is often heavily highlighted, what is more interesting still are these annotations center almost exclusively on the opening section of “The Immediate Stages of the Erotic or Musical Erotic,”56 and “The Ancient Tragical Motive as Reflected in the Modern.”57 Given the nature of these passages, combined with Wilder’s repeated highlighting of Kierkegaard’s allusions and references to classical texts, 58 a clear pattern emerges, which suggests that Wilder’s primary interest lay in Kierkegaard’s distinction between the ancient and modern worlds. While it cannot be determined precisely when Wilder acquired his copy, it is nevertheless significant that at the time of its publication he was working on his historical novel The Ides of March (1948), which provides a “historical reconstruction” of the time of Caesar’s assassination. 59 As such, it is possible that some of Wilder’s notions concerning the nature of antiquity and its implicit 53

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57 58 59

Although born in Sweden, Elsa de Brun moved to New York at the age of 19 and practiced in that city for the rest of her life. She died in 1987, aged 91. Elsa de Brun Either/Or. A Valentine to Søren Kierkegaard, no bibliographical data; copy available at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The copy is available at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Søren Kierkegaard Either/Or. A Fragment of Life, vol. one, trans. by David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson, Princeton 1946 [1944], pp. 37-60. Ibid., pp. 113-133. Ibid., pp. 38, 40, 47, 50 f., 164. Thornton Wilder The Ides of March, New York and London 1948, p. vii.

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relevance for the twentieth century, might have been derived from his study of Either/Or.60 Amongst the more well-known cases of Kierkegaard’s influence on Anglo-Saxon writers, however, Either/Or seems to have played only a minor role. Thus, W. H. Auden, who read Kierkegaard extensively around the time of his conversion in 1940, nevertheless seems to have been influenced primarily by the Dane’s explicitly religious works. In his 1944 review of the Swenson and Lowrie translation, Auden thus has little of interest to say about Kierkegaard’s text and agrees with Lowrie that Either/Or “is one of the less important books of a very important author,” furthermore warning that “those to whom his works are still unfamiliar, should not begin with this one.”61 The same seems to be the case for John Updike, who has likewise repeatedly pronounced himself on the importance of Kierkegaard’s work for his spiritual development.62 Again, however, it seems to be primarily the more clearly religious and philosophical works that have captivated Updike,63 and, as with Auden’s earlier review, his most direct pronouncement on Either/Or – in his preface to the 1997 Princeton edition of The Diary of a Seducer64 – is characterized by a stunning absence of any literary appreciation of the work. Instead, Updike simply provides an extensive biographical sketch of Kierkegaard’s relation to Regine, followed by a number of commonplaces 60

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Echoes of Either/Or in The Ides of March might also be discerned in, for example, the contrast between Clodia and Caesar, taken as a version of that between the aesthetic and the ethical (see, e. g. ibid., pp. 15 f.). W. H. Auden “A Preface to Kierkegaard” in The New Republic, May, 1944, p. 683. Some of Updike’s statements on Kierkegaard can be found in Jeff Campbell “Interview with John Updike”; Charlie Reilly “A Conversation with John Updike”; Jean-Pierre Salgas “A Conversation with John Updike”; Katherine Stephen “John Updike Still Finds Things to Say about Life, Sex, and Religion”; and Jan Nunley “Thoughts of Faith Infuse Updike’s Novels,” all in Conversations with John Updike, ed. by James Plath, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi 1994. In none of these, however, does Updike mention Either/Or. Marshall Boswell cites Updike as having read Philosophical Fragments, The Sickness Unto Death, The Concept of Dread, Fear and Trembling, and “parts of” Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Marshall Boswell John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy. Mastered Irony in Motion, Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press 2001, pp. 6 f.). Moreover, in Jean-Pierre Salgas “A Conversation with John Updike,” Updike expressly states that “I read Kierkegaard for theological reasons” (p. 180). However, see also the below discussion of Boswell’s claim for a deeper affinity between Updike’s form and that of Either/Or. John Updike “Foreword” in Søren Kierkegaard The Seducer’s Diary, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997.

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on Romantic literature, with no apparent awareness of Kierkegaard’s specific artistry. 1.3 Derivations of Principles for Literary Criticism from Either/Or The practice of analyzing literary works on the basis of principles derived from Either/Or is again amongst the earliest uses of Kierkegaard’s text. Already in 1899, M. A. Stobart had published a study of Ibsen’s Brand, which aims “to suggest that in his poem Brand Ibsen has, with artistic genius, clothed in dramatic drapery some of the tenets propounded in the neglected works of Kirkegaard [sic].”65 While reading Ibsen’s famous poem in terms of Kierkegaard’s philosophy has been a favorite exercise in literary scholarship since its first appearance in 1866, Stobart nevertheless distinguishes herself from most of critics by seeking to do so specifically in terms of the theory of modern tragedy put forth in Either/Or.66 Seeking to debunk Bernard Shaw’s interpretation of Brand as a heartless murderer in his influential The Quintessence of Ibsenism,67 Stobart draws on textual evidence to show that Brand can only be properly understood as caught in the conflict between aesthetic and ethical guilt described in Either/Or. From this perspective, “what distinguishes Brand’s acts of sacrifice form deeds of murder is precisely Ibsen’s artistic adjustment between the amount of personal responsibility ethically incurred by Brand – in his acquiescence in the deaths of his wife and child – and the extent of his compulsory subjection to the predetermined decrees of an inherited destiny.”68 The formal vacillation between aesthetic and ethical perspectives found in Either/Or, which Stobart draws on for her understanding of Ibsen’s work, has also been put to use in relation to subsequent authors. Ann T. Salvatore, for example, has singled out Either/Or as the principal example of Kierkegaard’s method of indirect communication, which she also takes Graham Greene to be applying in his

65 66

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Stobart “New Lights on Ibsen’s Brand,” p. 227. A similar, if somewhat less successful, attempt has been mad by John A Norris in his “The Validity of A’s View of Tragedy with Particular Reference to Ibsen’s Brand” in International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 3. See Bernard Shaw “The Quintessence of Ibsenism” in The Major Critical Essays, London: Penguin Books, 1986 [1891], pp. 64-66. Stobart “New Lights on Ibsen’s Brand,” p. 233.

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novels.69 To Salvatore, indirect communication consists in the presentation of an unresolved confrontation between opposed points of view in a text (that of the aesthetic and the ethical, in the case of Either/ Or), which aims to force the reader into an interpretative decision that will develop his or her “ethical/religious capability.” 70 While Salvatore draws interesting analogies between the method of indirect communication so understood and the reader-response theory of Wolfgang Iser,71 the radical undecidability of the text as she describes it seems to presuppose a reader so devoid of all hermeneutic prejudices as to be unable to form an independent opinion of A without having read B, and vice-versa.72 In this way, however, it remains unclear – and Salvatore offers no explanation – precisely how it can be assured that such a reader will in fact develop the specifically “ethical/religious capability,” as opposed to any other kind, once awakened from dogmatic slumber through the necessity of choice. A similar difficulty is presented by Marshal Boswell’s study of the relation between Kierkegaard and John Updike. As the subtitle indicates, “Mastered Irony in Motion,” Boswell also focuses on Kierkegaard’s method of ironic juxtaposition, and takes Either/Or to provide the principal example of this form.73 Like Salvatore, Boswell seeks to distinguish Kierkegaard’s method from the purely ironic mode of Socrates: “For all its potential power to unsettle and inspire, however, the Socratic method was not without its risks, and that is why Kierkegaard insisted that an ironic author must “master” his irony, which is to say he must deliberately organize all his contradictory material so that the intended meaning emerges as a product of the differential play of that contradictory material.” 74 Having thus defined “mastered irony” in terms of its communication of a determinate meaning (Salvatore’s “ethical/religious capability”) by means of the interplay between opposed perspectives, however, Boswell surprisingly goes on to distinguish between Kierkegaard and Updike precisely in terms of the absence of any such resolution in the works of the latter.75 As such, 69

70 71

72 73 74 75

Ann T. Salvatore Greene and Kierkegaard. The Discourse of Belief, Tuscaloosa and London: The University of Alabama Press 1988, pp. 21, 27. Ibid., pp. 26 f.; see also p. 42. Ibid., pp. 20-21, 26-27. See Wolfgang Iser Der Akt des Lesens. Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung, München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag 1976. Salvatore Greene and Kierkegaard, pp. 22, 23, 25. Boswell John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy, p. 5. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 10.

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it is difficult to see what justifies the application of the label of “mastered irony” to Updike’s work in the first place, which instead seems to fall into the Socratic mode. Moreover, the confusion even influences Boswell’s presentation of Either/Or itself. On the one hand, we are thus told that in the latter work, “part two does not simply ‘refute’ part one: rather [Kierkegaard] sets the two sections against one another in an act of sustained irresolution,”76 only to read, four pages later, that Either/Or, “does establish a hierarchy of values, if only because the second volume is allowed to refute the first without having to contend with a contrasting third volume….”77 George Bedell’s study of Kierkegaard and William Faulkner can provide a final example of this group of approaches. Instead of focusing on the structural interaction of different points of view, Bedell looks to the various characterizations of “modalities of existence” provided by Kierkegaard’s works, in order to use them as blueprints for an understanding of Faulkner’s characters.78 Thus, the aesthetic existence described in Either/Or is matched with Horace Benbow from Faulkner’s Sartoris (1929) and Sanctuary (1931),79 while the ethical is mapped onto the love affair between Charlotte Rittenmeyer and Henry Wilbourne in The Wild Palms (1939).80 However, insofar as Bedell’s methodology consists in summarizing the various attributes of the aesthetic and ethical life provided by Kierkegaard, and then tracing the same in Faulkner’s novels, he effectively belongs to the second, contextualizing group, even if the external frame of reference employed is derived from literature.

2. Contextualizing Approaches The end of the period of hegemony of the literary approaches to Either/Or discussed in section I.1, finds its symbolic expression in Walter Lowrie’s preface to his 1938 Kierkegaard: My translations from Danish are more literal than literary. I am inclined to boast of this rather than to apologize. For I have too great a reverence for the author to presume that I could improve upon his style; and I am mindful of a remark of Nietzsche’s 76 77 78

79 80

Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 10. George C. Bedell Kierkegaard and Faulkner. Modalities of Existence, Kingsport, Tennessee: Louisiana State University Press 1972, p. 5. Ibid., pp. 115-137. Ibid., pp. 161-173.

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to the effect that a translation is not faithful if it alters the tempo of the original. The style is the man. The Danish idiom is for the most part not so remote from English that a translator is compelled to paraphrase S. K.; and in so far as the reader is limited to my quotations as the basis for his own independent study, I feel bound to provide a translation as faithful as Haecker and Hirsch have made in the German tongue.81

The statement is striking. At first sight, Lowrie seems to employ the word “style” in the third sentence in the sense of a mode of expression of particular excellence (as in the phrase, “his writing lacks style”), or one in agreement with current standards of taste or fashion (as in, “to celebrate in style,” or “a woman of style”), given that he presents it as something that is in principle improvable – even if he should not presume to be able to improve it himself. As such, “style” is clearly related to the literary rather than the literal, and it even seems as though Lowrie is accordingly claiming that his translation is not faithful since, being literal rather than literary, it is opposed to style and therefore necessarily involves an alteration of “tempo.” It is only at the end of the passage, when it becomes unmistakable that Lowrie does indeed claim faithfulness for his translation, that it emerges that he in fact intends “style” to mean a mode of expression characteristic of a particular individual, irrespective of its aesthetic qualities and by definition not subject to improvement. “The style is the man,” accordingly means that Kierkegaard’s personality finds expression in a literal, not literary form; so literal, in fact, that the supra-individual features of the Danish language as such sufficiently guarantee its representation: “The Danish idiom is for the most part not so remote from English that the translator is compelled to paraphrase S. K.”82 Nothing could be further from the rapturous celebration of Kierkegaard’s literary abilities by Stobart, Hult, Bredvol, or even Hamilton.83 2.1 Contextual-Biographical Approaches The larger paradigm shift that underlies Lowrie’s reassessment of the essence of Kierkegaard’s character can be found in a general move from a literary to a specifically biographical-contextual analysis, which, 81 82

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Lowrie Kierkegaard, p. x. A reader equipped with the slightest knowledge of Danish might well be weary of Lowrie’s claim of faithfulness even to such general linguistic features, given that in the only six Danish words he writes in the preface, he manages to make two spelling mistakes (ibid., p. xv). See Hamilton’s remark that Kierkegaard “writes at times with an unearthly beauty” (Sixteen Months, p. 269.)

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ironically, precisely in its pursuit of the “person” Kierkegaard, tends to lose sight of his textual particularities. The transition between the two paradigms is captured in John A. Bain’s 1935 Sören Kierkegaard. His Life and Religious Teaching. While Bain begins his discussion of Either/Or with the claim that, “there can be no question” concerning “the importance of the publication of Enten-Eller (Either-Or) in the history of Danish literature,” he immediately concedes that, “A foreigner is not in a position to give an authoritative judgment on a point of this kind.” Bain accordingly cedes the stage to a long quotation from Georg Brandes, “who writes in the most enthusiastic way of the splendour of Kierkegaard’s style.”84 On the one hand, Bain is clearly still convinced of the importance of a consideration of Kierkegaard’s literary qualities, but unlike his critical predecessors, no longer feels qualified to pass a direct judgment on the matter. When he turns to his own discussion of Either/Or in Chapter V, Bain’s focus accordingly becomes almost exclusively biographical, explicating the meaning of the work in terms of the narrative of Kierkegaard’s engagement to Regine. More significantly still, in spite of Bain’s long quotation from Brandes and his reference to Either/Or as Kierkegaard’s “best-known work,”85 not a single line from it is included in the thirty-six pages of selected passages from Kierkegaard’s authorship that conclude the book. In a further book-long study on Kierkegaard, published the same year as Bain’s, E. L. Allen’s Kierkegaard: His Life and Thought, considerations of a literary nature have completely disappeared, and the two features of biographical contextualization and gradual marginalization of Either/Or are further accentuated. In the first part of his study, Allen thus focuses on an exclusively biographical exegesis of Kierkegaard’s works, in which we are told, first, that Either/Or was written as a message to Regine, intended to “set her before a choice”: “How would she judge him?”86 And second, that it constituted “a challenge to himself. How would he order his life after this catastrophe?”87 What is significant about this assumption is that it dictates that only those aspects of Either/Or which can be related to such purposes mentioned. In the former case, these consist in the two different versions of love represented by Johannes the Seducer and Judge William, inso84

85 86

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John A. Bain Søren Kierkegaard. His Life and Religious Teaching, London 1935, p. 41 f. Ibid., p. 44. A. L. Allen Kierkegaard: His Life and Thought, New York and London 1935, p. 46. Ibid., p. 47.

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far as they constitute the two alternatives set up for Regine.88 In the latter case, it is the distinction between the “despair” of the Diapsalmata and the “utter submission to God” in the “Ultimatum,” which are presented as the two different directions open to Kierkegaard in his personal life.89 Given Allen’s perception of the subjective nature of the motivation for the different categories displayed in Either/Or it is unsurprising that he should seemingly consider it unnecessary to provide any deeper analysis of their possible conceptual validity or implication. In the second part of his book, which focuses on a description of the three stages of existence and deliberately disregards the biographical context, Allen simply states the different attributes of each stage as apparently self-explicatory facts.90 More importantly still for the present purpose, however, is the clear disproportion, in the second part of Allen’s book, of attention paid to the aesthetic and ethical stages associated with Either/Or on the one hand, and the religious stage perceived to dominate Kierkegaard’s later authorship, on the other. In striking contrast to the prominence of Either/Or in earlier accounts of Kierkegaard, Allen prefigures Lowrie’s judgment in the above quoted 1944 “Preface,” by granting only thirteen pages to the first two stages,91 over and against the seventyone dedicated to the third.92 As already suggested, it is as if the disappearance of the consideration of stylistic features in general brings with it the sidelining of Either/Or in particular. As noted earlier, the biographical reading of Either/Or reaches its apex in Lowrie’s 1938 study. Throughout, Lowrie makes clear that it is only after the publication of his journals that Kierkegaard’s works can be properly understood,93 even going so far as to reveal a striking disdain for Kierkegaard’s thought in and of itself: 88 89 90

91 92 93

Ibid., pp. 48-51. Ibid., pp. 51 f. Allen thus for example presents the aesthetic stage in the following unproblematized way: “All efforts to make reality minister to hedonism are self-defeating in the end. ‘If you marry, you will repent of it. If you do not marry, you will repent of it. Whether you marry or not, you will repent of it.’ So runs the philosophy of the aesthete. What does it mean? It means that the quest for the ‘interesting’ as such is a pursuit of mere emptiness. Life has its inevitable reckoning with those whose aim is to take what it offers but not to give what it requires. Their punishment may be just that they succeed, that they whittle away the content of life, till when then their hand goes to grasp it, it closes over the air!” (Ibid., p. 126.) Ibid., pp. 121-134. Ibid., pp. 135-206. Thus, with respect to Either/Or, Lowrie for example states: “When we take account of all these passages [“the descriptions of ‘the young friend’ to whom the letters of

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Any one who reads Either/Or without having any acquaintance with S. K.’s life will very naturally conclude that the subtle distinctions made by Judge William are merely an exhibition of dialectical gymnastics. Thus were S. K.’s contemporaries condemned to read it. But now we understand that it is all a passionate analysis of his own poignant experience, all of it drawn from his very entrails, that it is existential philosophy, at the farthest remove from speculation. Knowing this, one will not dismiss it petulantly because it contains terms strange and new; and one will not count it too laborious a task to study and scrutinize every definition, in this and in the other works where S. K. reveals himself.94

The opposition is telling in itself: either dialectical gymnastics, justifiably dismissed, or biographical documents. The former can seemingly only have value in terms of the latter, and Either/Or accordingly receives copious glosses from Kierkegaard’s journals, which constitute the true source of interest. 2.2 Psychoanalytic and Cultural Contextualizations It is questionable whether Either/Or can be said to have ever fully recovered its initial prominence in the Anglo-Saxon world after the systematic downgrading it received during the decline of the literary paradigm and the rise of the biographical approach in the 1930’s.95 Nevertheless, those versions of the contextualizing approach that have

94 95

Judge William are addressed”] it is astonishing to find that there are nearly two hundred pages which may be taken to describe the young S. K.” (Lowrie Kierkegaard, p. 78); “The Diapsalmata…give us a deep insight into the spiritual emptiness and essential despair of the aesthetical life, that is, of S. K.’s own life as a student – just at the time when he appeared to be merriest of all” (ibid., p. 101); “Unless one has a closer acquaintance with S. K. than his contemporaries had, one will not be able to understand these works better than they did. Either/Or established S. K.’s fame as a writer…And yet no one understood it” (ibid., 237). In spite of such repeated rejections of any more general dimension to Kierkegaard’s work, Lowrie does at times seem to suspect that there might be more at stake after all. Thus, for example, he perceptively notes that, “The philosophical character of the book [Either/Or] is sometimes plainly enough hinted at in the text” (ibid., p. 244). He nevertheless goes on to admit that, “I have no space – and perhaps no talent – for following further the philosophical implications of Either/Or” (ibid., p. 246). Ibid., p. 120. The continuing neglect of Either/Or in the Anglo-Saxon world is testified to by the fact that, over sixty years after the first appearance of the Lowrie-Swenson translation, still no monograph dedicated to that work exists in English. Similarly, while the widely distributed Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, which appeared in 1998, offers contributions on Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Fear and Trembling, Repetition and The Concept of Anxiety, it contains no comparable entry on Either/Or. See The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. by Alastair Hannay and Gordon Marino, Cambridge: Cambrigde University Press 1998.

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survived into the age of established academic study of Kierkegaard, have tended to be more generous toward Either/Or. By and large discarding the journals as the sole authority in their prooftexting, contemporary contextualizations instead focused on, for example, psychoanalytic or cultural explications of Kierkegaard’s work. Thus, while such approaches are still characterized by a predominantly unproblematized representation of Kierkegaard’s texts (what Mackey, as mentioned above, called the “survey and summary” method), 96 the frames of reference in which Kierkegaard’s meanings are located have evolved significantly. Thus, for example, Vincent McCarthy, in his contribution to the International Kierkegaard Commentary volume on Either/Or, Part 1,97 frames Kierkegaard’s text in psychoanalytical terms.98 For the larger part of his article, McCarthy considers A’s attributes as symptoms of Freud’s theory of melancholia. The relation between these is one in which “Freud theorized and Kierkegaard demonstrates,” to the extent that the latter provides “almost a classic description of what Freud means by ‘melancholia’…: libido withdrawn from an external object and cathected onto the ego, combined with a sense of deflation.”99 Towards the end of his article, however, McCarthy moves beyond Freudian concepts and turns instead to Lacan’s theory of desire for a frame of reference. Doing so leads McCarthy to conclude that the object of desire is not in fact the aesthete himself, as Freud’s formulation might lead one to believe, let alone Cordelia, but an irretrievable and always already “lost object.”100 With the notion of such an infinite 96

Mackey Kierkegaard. A Kind of Poet, p. ix. Vincent A. McCarthy “Narcissism and Desire in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, Part One” in International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 3. 98 McCarthy is in fact anticipated in this approach by one of the central contributors to the early phase of the contextualizing approach, the Dane Eduard Geismar, who toured the U. S. in 1936, under the patronage of Swenson and Lowrie. Geismar, an avid practitioner of the biographical method, also frequently draws on psychoanalysis for an external frame of reference (see Eduard Geismar Lectures on the Religious Thought of Søren Kierkegaard. Stone Foundation Lectures at Princeton University, with an Introduction by David Swenson, Minneapolis, 1938 [1937], e. g., p. 33). On the seminal importance of Geismar’s U. S. tour for the reception of Kierkegaard in America, see Graham Barker His becoming popular, p. 188, and Schilling Søren Kierkegaard and Anglo-American Literary Culture, pp. 83 f., 90 f. 99 McCarthy “Narcissism and Desire,” p. 58. 100 Ibid., p. 70. That the motivation for this reading is not derived from a text-immanent analysis of Either/Or but from external criteria applied to the text, is clear from McCarthy’s own comment: “There is no suggestion in Either/Or proper that A recognizes a lost object in the background of his search or as in any perceptible 97

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deferral of desire, McCarthy suggests, we find “yet another term and category in which Kierkegaard anticipates postmodernism.”101 Such similarity is qualified by McCarthy, however, insofar as he claims that Kierkegaard does not share the “resignation” supposedly embraced by postmodernists as the solution to this predicament, but rather, as the works following Either/Or make clear, seeks to surmount it in a positive relationship to God.102 Two studies of Either/Or that seek to place it in relation to Kierkegaard’s own rather than our cultural context have been provided by Michael Plekon103 and Julia Watkin.104 In the former, Plekon seeks to show “that there is, ‘in, with, under and through’ the Judge’s most mundane, practical, even bourgeois existence, the presence of God.”105 Doing so means, to Plekon, drawing forth those sides of the Judge’s character that are subversive of conventional Biedermeier society. In this vein, Plekon claims that: “The Judge is definitely nonconventional in criticizing what might be called the “cult” of family life”; “The Judge also repeatedly opposes the view of women as inferior to men and weaker by nature”;106 and “Quite astonishing for so apparently mundane a man as Judge William is his ultimate description of choosing as repentance.”107 Unfortunately, however, while these claims depend on a contrasting conception of bourgeois life, Plekon does not provide any historically informed description of Kierkegaard’s own cultural context, and the reader is accordingly forced to take the unconventionality of the Judge’s opinions as self-evident facts. A more historically grounded study is provided by Julia Watkin’s contextualization of Judge William’s views with Nikolai Edinger Balle’s Lærebog i den Evangelisk-christelige Religion. Doing so permits Watkin not only to point to the possible source of the Judge’s

101 102 103

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way setting his desire in motion. Nor is this contained in Part Two, where Judge William will urge A to choose himself and to choose himself in relation to another, to rise above selfish individualism to the ethically fulfilled self of married relationship” (ibid.). Whether McCarthy is correct in claiming such absence of textual evidence for his reading is, of course, a different question. Ibid., p. 62. Ibid., pp. 71 f. Michael Plekon “Judge William: Bourgeois Moralist, Knight of Faith, Teacher?” in International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 4. Julia Watkin “Judge William, A Christian?” in International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 4. Plekon “Judge William,” p. 137. Ibid., p. 132. Ibid., p. 133.

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conception of God,108 but also to the “religious” background of several of the Judge’s seemingly “ethical” pronouncements.109 The central difference between Balle and the Judge, indeed, reveals itself to consist in the latter’s showing what the former merely states.110 Such an analysis does not, of course, solve the problem of what meaning can be attached to, for example, the proclamation of God’s omnipresence (whether in the Judge or in Balle),111 but it does help elucidate the semantic field within which such meaning might be sought. Contextualizing approaches still form a significant part of current scholarly praxis,112 and, as exemplified by Julia Watkin’s study, can serve a crucial function in expanding the interpretative horizon of a scholarly community which – until the recent labors by figures such as Bruce Kirmmse, George Pattison and Jon Stewart113 – had little or no familiarity with Kierkegaard’s own immediate culture. The dominant methodological approach since the 1970s, however, has been of an analytic, text-immanent nature, to which we now turn.

3. Analytic Approaches As the work of John Bain served to exemplify the transition between the first and second paradigm in the reception history of Either/Or in the Anglo-Saxon world, that of David Swenson lays bare the transition from the second to the third. In his “Editor’s Introduction” to 108 109 110 111 112

113

Watkin “Judge William,” p. 120. Ibid., p. 121. Ibid., p. 122. Ibid., p. 120. Alone in volume 3 of the International Kierkegaard Commentary, there are thus at least three more articles that can be classified in this way: Martin Yaffe “An Unsung Appreciation of the Musical-Erotic in Mozart’s Don Giovanni: Hermann Cohen’s Nod towards Kierkegaard’s Either/Or”; Clyde Holler “Tragedy in the Context of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or”; and Ronald L. Hall “Spirit and Presence: A Kierkegaardian Analysis.” See Bruce Kirmmse Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1990; George Pattison ‘Poor Paris!’ Kierkegaard’s Critique of the Spectacular City (Kierkegaard Studies. Monograph Series vol. 2), Berlin / New York: Walter de Gruyter 1999; Jon Stewart (ed.) Kierkegaard and his Contemporaries: The Culture of Golden Age Denmark (Kierkegaard Studies. Monograph Series, vol. 10), Berlin / New York: Walter de Gruyter 2003; Jon Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003; as well as the recent translation and monograph series, ed. by Jon Stewart, Texts from Golden Age Denmark, and Danish Golden Age Studies.

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the published version of Eduard Geismar’s lectures, Swenson still clearly rests within the anti-literary and biographical approach of the 1930’s. Thus Swenson both seeks to distance himself from previous critics who merely “praised [Kierkegaard’s] literary genius,” and reiterates the commonplace that Either/Or “is first of all written for his own instruction, and in the second place for Regine, his beloved.”114 In the opening chapters of the collection of essays and lectures published posthumously by his wife, Swenson similarly provides mere reiterations of the habitual descriptions of the different attributes that make up the aesthetic or ethical life,115 without providing any attempt at analysis. By the fifth article in the collection, however, Swenson seeks to challenge Høffding’s assessment of Kierkegaard and, having reiterated the usual description of the stages, suddenly stops short and states: “This more concrete contrast between the esthetic and the ethical is made to rest upon a more abstract formulation of the contrasts, in terms of what might be called metaphysical categories.” From this higher perspective, distinct from the mere enumeration of concrete attributes, it can be said, Swenson goes on, that the aesthetic “lives statically,” “lives on the basis of that which he already is, taken immediately.” The ethical, “on the contrary, lives dynamically. That is, he lives in and by the enthusiasm, but also by the effort and strain of an essentially and profound becoming.”116 And further, Swenson goes on to provide, “as equivalent to the above, still another abstract formulation of the contrast”: the aesthetic “is bound to postulate an external or uncertain condition,” “a condition which is in principle… always beyond his own control”; “The ethical man, on the contrary, concentrates the meaning of life in that which he himself gives to life, and postulates no external condition for happiness, no condition over which he does not himself exercise full control.”117 What is significant about these formulations is less their specific conceptual import or correctness, as the fact that the turn to more abstract levels of analysis permits Swenson to draw a distinction absent from all previous approaches to Kierkegaard (and not merely from Høffding’s, as Swenson claims): that between the concrete instances of the aesthetic and ethical represented by Kierkegaard in his texts on the one hand (on which all previous “surveys and summaries” 114

115 116 117

David F. Swenson “Editor’s Introduction,” in Geismar Lectures on the Religious Thought of Søren Kierkegaard, pp. xiv, xxx. Swenson Something About Kierkegaard, pp. 17, 61 f. Ibid., p. 127. Ibid., pp. 127 f.

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depend), and the preconditions for the possibility of such concrete instances to occur on the other. As Swenson puts it: With this broad outline of the esthetic sphere, it is comprehensible that it includes much more than these particular esthetic attitudes to which Kierkegaard gives specific literary expression. Høffding has overlooked this, and thus comes to identify the esthetic too narrowly with the theory presented in the Rotation Method in the first part of EitherOr. This theory and the variants of it found in connection with the participating estheticists of The Stages on the Way of Life, constitute merely a super-sophisticated, extraordinarily reflective attempt to formulate an esthetic view of life. But the esthetic sphere also includes those who live for their health, or in the conscious enjoyment of beauty and the distinction of fine physical appearance, those who seek the meaning of life in the successful development of a business talent, a poetic talent, a philosophical talent etc., those few who concentrate upon a life of pleasure in the most abstract sense of that word, a pleasure which abstracts from everything but the enjoyment of the moment; it includes also those cynics who seek to enjoy the power to dispense with enjoyment, who throw away the opportunities for pleasure in order to enjoy this freedom.118

And Swenson’s examples multiply. Having laid bare the conceptual preconditions for the particular manifestations deployed in Kierkegaard’s work, any number of such instances can be generated, shifting the focus, so to speak, from an “empirical” to a “transcendental” level of analysis. The abstract analysis laid bare by Swenson is concerned with the latter, and implies a necessarily analytic approach to Kierkegaard’s texts.119 Before looking closer at some of the consequences of Swenson’s “discovery,” however, it should be noted that the aspects of Either/Or that have been subjected to conceptual scrutiny in the last thirty or so years are too diverse to receive anything resembling adequate representation in a paper of this size. In the following, accordingly, only some of the more prominent discussions are mentioned. 3.1 Feminist Analyses of Either/Or One of the more recent analytic approaches brought to bear on Either/ Or has been to read it through the lens of feminist theory.120 In her 118 119

120

Ibid. It should be noted that Swenson himself rapidly retreats back into the habitual enumeration of concrete attributes. He does, however, seem to be aware of this regress, now terming his procedure one of “characterization” and “brief mention” (ibid., p. 129), rather than the analysis of a more “abstract” or “metaphysical” nature pointed to earlier. The importance of feminist approaches has been highlighted by Robert L. Perkins in his “Introduction” to the International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 3, pp. 1 f.

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article, “The Heterosexual Imagination and Aesthetic Existence in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, Part One,” Wanda Warren Berry thus argues that the aesthetic is based on a “heterosexual” epistemology, understood as “the conscious or unconscious tendency to express dualities, polarities, or dialectics found in human existence in terms of imagery of the two sexes.”121 As such, Berry argues that The Seducer’s Diary is structured around a series of binary relations which systematically place woman in the position of the subjected and excluded other.122 More importantly still, Berry shows how the women represented in Part 1 of Either/Or are shown as themselves having internalized this masculine division of existence: “Stereotyped heterosexuality within patriarchy has often damaged women precisely in the ways pictured here. When this ideology is internalized by women, so that the love of men is the only imaginable meaning of their lives, women tend toward the patterns which recur in Cordelia and the silhouettes.”123 Either/Or itself, however, works to overcome this predicament, insofar as the heterosexual epistemology associated with the aesthetic must be transcended in a higher sphere of existence.124 The way it furthers this aim, according to Berry, is on the one hand precisely by A providing such representations of the female perspective, which, even though determined by an internalized heterosexual imagination, nevertheless “imagine them as sharing human experience with him.”125 On the other hand the very dependency on an Other inherent in the female perspective, while “demonic” in and of itself, is open to “ethicoreligious” “development,” “wherein it culminates in an experience of human equality before a transcendent absolute love.”126 Pointing toward Works of Love as the locus of such a religious vision,127 Berry thus claims that the logic of absolute difference between the 121

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123 124 125 126 127

Wanda Warren Berry “The Heterosexual Imagination and Aesthetic Existence in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, Part One” in International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 3, pp. 201-228, p. 202. Some of the binaries enumerated by Berry include: “Not only is man capable of ‘existence’ whereas woman is only ‘being’ (EO1, 431), but in many more specific ways, woman is characterized as essentially different from man. Thus woman’s development ‘requires isolation,’ whereas man’s ‘requires contact’ (EO1, 339). She is to be characterized by beauty and not by intellect (EO1, 362, 428). Her substance is ‘innocence,’ whereas naivete [sic] is a negative factor in man (EO1, 445)” (ibid., 207). Ibid., p. 213. Ibid., p. 203. Ibid., p. 211. Ibid., p. 215. Ibid., p. 227.

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sexes presupposed by the aesthetic can finally be overcome, in a way which is relevant for gays and lesbians too.128 In a further article, Berry goes on to trace this same conflict between an essentializing heterosexual epistemology and an ethicoreligious conception of equality in regard to Judge William. On the one hand the Judge offers a series of stereotypical statements on women, such as the claim of their inherent association with the temporal and finite,129 or the definition of their nature as that of “love, trust, and humility.”130 On the other he clearly champions a vision of ethicoreligious equality of the sexes before God, and accordingly rejects any definition of woman’s difference.131 The contradiction which this leads to is productive, however, in so far as Berry claims that it forces the reader to transcend the limitations of the Judge’s view and move beyond the essentializing tendencies of social conventions: “The Judge contributes negatively to the existential maieutic as Kierkegaard causes the reader to struggle with the pseudonym’s own limitations, including, for example, his conflicted views of ‘woman.’”132 The objectification of women in Either/Or traced by Berry, is further analyzed by Céline Léon in her, “The No Woman’s Land of Kierkegaardian Seduction.” Pointing to the leveling disregard for “finite differences between individual women” involved in Don Giovanni’s pursuit,133 Léon argues that such an objectification generates an absolute interchangeability of particular women, which corresponds to the structure of commodification in Marxist theory.134 However, the very inability of the Don to perceive a difference between particulars obscures the analogy intended by Léon since, to Marx, the substitution of two identical entities in fact does not constitute an exchange of commodities, but merely a tautology.135 For objects to become commodities, what is required is precisely the possibility of exchanging two 128 129

130 131 132 133

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Ibid., pp. 225 f. Wanda Warren Berry “Judge William Judging Woman: Existentialism and Essentialism in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, Part II” in International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 4, p. 37. Ibid., p. 38. Ibid., p. 40. Ibid., p. 52. Céline Léon “The No Woman’s Land of Kierkegaardian Seduction” in International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 3, p. 230. Ibid., pp. 231-237. It should be noted, however, that Léon herself does not draw on Marx directly, but rather relies on the work of Luce Irigaray. Karl Marx Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, Köln: Parkland Verlag 2005 [1867], p. 60.

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different entities through a mediating third term (for Marx, abstract average labor).136 Instead, although Léon herself does not make this point, the logic of commodification that she invokes in relation to the women of Either/Or, seems to make its appearance in her reading of the relation between its various men. Focusing on a presumed impotence and homoeroticism shared by the different male figures in the text,137 Léon abstracts from any particular difference between them (e. g. the quantitative seduction of the Don as opposed to the qualitative seduction of Johannes, which might be taken to count as the difference in “modes of production” that serves to distinguish objects in a Marxist analysis),138 and thereby generates the pervasive interchangeability of all: This reproduction in sameness can be observed between the Don and Johannes, and between both of them and Don Juan.…Likewise, it can be anticipated that the Young Man will become C(onstantin), that A will grow into B (Judge William), that, combined, the latter two will sire Victor Eremita, that the Young Man and Constantin will merge into Afham and that, in turn, Victor and Afham will reabsorb themselves into the one in whom they originated, to wit, Kierkegaard himself.139

A suggestion of this kind is not without heuristic interest, echoing, as it does, Mackey’s similar claim about “the poet” discussed above. But it remains unclear whether this apparent repetition of the presumed logic of oppression in the ranks of the oppressor (converted thus, into oppressed in turn), is intended by Léon, or whether it is an inadvertent – and disquieting – reproduction of the very order that she seeks to overthrow. 3.2 Either/Or and the Relation to German Idealism One of the most productive areas of investigation for Either/Or has been provided by the attempts to place it in relation to Kierkegaard’s German Idealist predecessors. George Connell, for example, has thus investigated the nature of moral authority and obligation in both Kant and Judge William, in order to show the fundamental difference between the two.140 To Connell, while Kant bases these on the principle of autonomy, the Judge argues for a “theonomous ethic, that 136 137 138 139 140

Ibid., pp. 65, 58. Léon “The No Woman’s Land,” pp. 240 f., 245-249. Marx Das Kapital, p. 52. Léon “The No Woman’s Land,” p. 250. George B. Connell “Judge William’s Theonomous Ethics” in Foundations of Kierkegaard’s Vision of Community. Religion, Ethics, and Politics in Kierke-

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is, an ethic that, while grounding obligation in the agent’s relation to God, is not heteronomous.”141 This theonomous structure is exemplified in the Judge’s conception of marital love, and to that extent grounded on the assumption that the self that is bound only by itself is unfree insofar as it is subject to “its own whims and moods.”142 As such, the act of marriage constitutes a binding of the individual to a duty (Opgave) “as security against itself in its moments of temptation,” which is a source of freedom, given that “Judge William defines freedom as being ‘raised above the moment.’ ”143 To the extent that God is the source of human freedom, then, so Connell, grounding obligation on a God-relationship constitutes neither heteronomy, nor a divine-command notion of ethics.144 Further, this possibility of asking God to hold the lovers responsible for their vows is only possible insofar as that same love is regarded as a gift (Gave) from God: “That is, only under its aspect as a gift of God can first love be chosen before God as task by the lovers. Thus, the pairing of thanksgiving and resolution is essential to Judge William’s understanding and by extension all other ethical projects.”145 A diametrically opposed use of the Judge’s conception of marriage has been made by Ronald Green. Instead of seeing marriage as the source of difference between the Judge and Kant, Green lucidly argues that the Judge’s conception of love in fact constitutes a transcendental deduction, in best Kantian fashion. Placing the aesthete and the Judge over and against each other as representatives of an empiricist and transcendental philosophy respectively,146 Green identifies the notion of “first love” as the assumption shared by both parties necessary for a

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gaard, ed. by George B. Connell and C. Stephen Evans, New Jersey and London: Humanities Press 1992, p. 56. Ibid., p. 57. As such Connell’s account is opposed to that offered by William Dayton Peck, in his excellent and sadly much neglected study, On Autonomy. The Primacy of the Subject in Kant and Kierkegaard, unpublished PhD dissertation, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Yale University 1974, pp. 208-261. To Peck, although the Judge signals a crucial shift away from Kant’s rationalistic ethics and toward a voluntaristic paradigm, the latter nevertheless remains squarely placed within the project of autonomy. Connell “Judge William’s Theonomous Ethics,” p. 63. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 63, 65. Ibid., p. 65. Ronald M. Green “Kierkegaard’s Great Critique: Either/Or as a Kantian Transcendental Deduction” in International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 4, pp. 139, 140 f.

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deduction to be carried through.147 In so far as both aesthete and Judge accept the validity of first love, the latter can show how the former’s empiricism is inadequate to account for that experience and lands him in a contradiction: “Were the aesthete to renounce [first love], as his logic forces him to do, he would have to abandon all hope of fulfillment and give himself over to despair. To affirm first love in all its significance, however, is to avoid what the Judge describes as the contradiction in the aesthete’s “whole being,” he must move beyond aesthetic categories.”148 The negative dimension of the deduction in this way carried out, the Judge goes on to provide the positive by showing how first love in fact not only is not contradicted by the obligations of marriage but indeed requires these.149 To Green, the Judge’s way of doing this follows the structure of the deduction in Kant’s second Critique. In the latter, Green points out, the fact that we feel ourselves obligated by the ethical imperative implies that “we must presume that we posses the freedom to obey the law’s dictates.”150 Analogously, “The Judge’s defense involves three key ideas: that first love undeniably contains an ‘ought’ to its continuance; that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’; and that this implicit ‘can’ is a consummate reason for celebration.”151 Green accordingly concludes, Here, the “ought” of true first love’s undeniable impulse toward constancy and fidelity is shown to be the ground for believing that this constancy can be maintained. Because they feel they ought to do so, the lovers know that they can preserve their love. True first love thus exists “not without” marriage and martial duty. With this deduction, the aesthete’s problem is solved. One need not succumb to the despair that results from seeing life’s peak emotional experience as a snare and deception.152

If Green’s argument largely depends on seeing the aesthete as an empiricist, an excellent recent study by David J. Kangas instead argues that A performs precisely the kind of transcendental deduction that Green places with the Judge. Kangas sets out from the general proposition that the central project of Kierkegaard’s early work is the deconstruction of the egologic of German idealism. The latter, according to Kangas, reduces reality to the constitutive structures of subjectivity, so that “the conditions of self-consciousness show themselves as the

147 148 149 150 151 152

Ibid., p. 142. Ibid., p. 145. Ibid., pp. 146 f. Ibid., p. 151. Ibid. Ibid., p. 152.

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very conditions of being.”153 While Kierkegaard does not deny the idealist postulate of the subject’s positing activity, he nevertheless refuses to grant it the status of absolute ground or beginning.154 Instead, Kierkegaard’s early work focuses on those experiences (such as boredom, melancholy, anxiety, despair) that disclose a transcendent ground of self-consciousness, which, while constitutive of the latter, nevertheless eludes the intentional structure of its organizing activity.155 It is from within this general problematic, says Kangas, that the significance of the particular phenomenon of boredom in Either/Or, Part 1, presents itself in its proper light. Through a powerful reading of the text, Kangas maps the rotation method that the aesthete employs to fend off boredom onto the Kantian transcendental deduction, and shows how the former, like the latter, serves the purpose of domesticating the anarchic alterity of an originary temporality.156 The point of Either/Or, however is to lay bare the conflict between such a “temporality of departures, where a subject projects an end and posits itself as the origin of a temporal process, and a more radical departure that cannot be formulated in temporal, representational, or subjective terms.”157 Thus, boredom reveals the essential incapacity of consciousness to reduce the latter to the former: The transcendental synthesis is apparently incapable of effecting the reduction of time to meaningful time. Boredom, one could say, is nothing other than the excess of the temporal instant, as absolute unity, to its re-organization and re-production by self153

154 155 156 157

David J. Kangas Kierkegaard’s Instant. On Beginnings, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 2007, p. 1. As such, Kangas follows a traditional reading of the trajectory of Idealism, from Kant, through Fichte, to Hegel, as “the effort to regard self-consciousness, ever more radically, as what constitutes the condition for any and all consciousnesses” (ibid.). However, although Kangas does not take this into account, it should be noted that over the last decade both this understanding of the nature of the Idealist project and its historical trajectory have been dramatically complicated and even outright rejected by leading figures in the field (see e. g., Frederick C. Beiser German Idealism. The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781-1801, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 2002; Manfred Frank ‘Unendliche Annäherung’. Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1997; and Dieter Henrich Konstellationen. Probleme und Debatten am Ursprung der idealistischen Philosophie (1789-1795), Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1991, and Grundlegung aus dem Ich. Untersuchungen zur Vorgeschichte des Idealismus. Tübingen–Jena (1790-1794), 2 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2004). The historical dimension of Kangas’ claim would thus seem to be in need of significant revision. Kangas Kierkegaard’s Instant, pp. x, 4. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., pp. 57 f., 60 f. Ibid., p. 46; see also p. 57.

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consciousness. Boredom is a phenomenal indicator of time as resistant to the spontaneous, synthetic activity of self-consciousness. It indicates the temporal instant as absolute, predicateless, contentless, unity: time as nothing. The temporal instant, as such, overflows the sequencing, meaning-generating moves of consciousness. It ruptures representation.158

It is the awareness of this irreducibility of the un-ground of existence, finally, that to Kangas provides the fundamental insight only properly responded to in the religious. A final example of the analysis of Either/Or in terms of its relation to German Idealism can be provided by Jon Stewart’s landmark study, Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered. Whereas Kangas’ book might be taken to suffer somewhat from a reduction of the historical complexity at stake in the issue, Stewart’s stands virtually alone in the Anglo-Saxon world for the meticulousness of its reconstructive work. Challenging the standard conception of Kierkegaard’s purely negative relation to Hegel, Stewart points to several aspects of Either/Or that can in fact be seen to be directly derived from the latter. Thus, for example, Stewart shows how the very title “Either/Or” refers not only to Hegel’s critique of the law of excluded middle in traditional logic,159 but also, more importantly, to the vibrant discussion this led to among leading figures of the Golden Age, such as Sibbern,160 Mynster,161 Martensen,162 and Heiberg.163 Further still, Stewart argues that the Judge’s distinction between a sphere of thought and a sphere of freedom, which has traditionally be seen to provide the ground for Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel, is in fact fully compatible with the latter’s position.164 The Judge’s criticism is thus not leveled at a point in logic, insofar as he fully accepts that mediation is possible and valid in the realm of thought, but rather one in ethics: the tendency of individuals to forget that they exist in the sphere of freedom. As Stewart 158

159 160 161 162 163 164

Ibid., p. 61. The aesthete’s project of self-grounding also receives exemplary treatment from Karsten Harries in his profound “Transformations of the Subjunctive” in Thought. A Review of Culture and Idea, LV, no. 218, September, 1980, esp. pp. 290-294. For related discussions of this question, see also Bradley R. Dewey “Seven Seducers: A Typology of Interpretations of the Aesthetic Stage in Kierkegaard’s “The Seducer’s Diary,” and David S. Stern “The Ties That Bind: The Limits of Aesthetic Reflection,” both in International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 3. Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, p. 185. Ibid., p. 189. Ibid., p. 190. Ibid., p. 191. Ibid., p. 194. Ibid., pp. 199, 202.

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points out, however, this is not in conflict with Hegel’s own position, and the standard picture of Kierkegaard and Hegel as positioned on diametrically opposed poles of the philosophical scale is accordingly mistaken.165 Irrespective of one’s opinion on the controversial question of Kierkegaard’s relation to Hegel, there can be no doubt that Stewart has rendered an invaluable service to Kierkegaard scholarship. By tracing the origin of key Kierkegaardian terms to their technical use in Hegel in particular and the philosophical culture of the Golden Age at large, the analytic apparatus available has been dramatically expanded. Too much scholarship has complacently repeated Kierkegaard’s slogans ad nauseam, as though self-evident in meaning, and without a proper familiarity of their place in the discussion of nineteenth century Danish philosophy. 3.3 Either/Or and After Virtue Either/Or’s greatest prominence in the Anglo-Saxon world since the early years of the twentieth century has interestingly enough been brought about by attention paid to it from outside the field of Kierkegaard scholarship itself. In his influential 1981 work, After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre devotes a few pages to Kierkegaard’s work as part of his general narrative of the decline on the discourse of morality in the Western world.166 According to MacIntyre’s well-known thesis, the present age is one of emotivism,167 understood as, “the doctrine, that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character.”168 The historical development that supposedly lead to this predicament is complex, and it is here sufficient to rehearse merely that, to MacIntyre, the Enlightenment singles out morality as an independent field of inquiry, distinct from theology, jurisprudence and aesthetics. As such, the need for a new means of justifying moral rules of conduct arises, which the Enlightenment nevertheless fails to fulfill. The book

165 166

167 168

Ibid., pp. 204 f., 208. Alasdair MacIntyre After Virtue. A Study in Moral Theory, second edition, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 1984 [1981]. Ibid., p. 22. Ibid., pp. 11 f.

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in which that failure is clearly put forth for the first time, and the emotivist position presented as the inevitable alternative, is Either/Or.169 MacIntyre accordingly presents three points of criticisms of Kierkegaard’s work as part of his aim to retrieve a pre-emotivist morality. First, MacIntyre attacks what he terms the “central thesis” of Either/ Or, the apparent groundlessness of the choice of between rival existential principles, such as the aesthetic and the ethical.170 Second, he argues that Kierkegaard is guilty of an inconsistency between his conception of radical choice and that of the ethical: while the ethical is based on the absolute authority of the law, any law chosen can at best count as arbitrary.171 Third, MacIntyre claims that Kierkegaard mistakenly combines the new, modern conception of the arbitrariness of the choice between rules of conduct with the traditional conception of the ethical, seemingly unaware of the multiplicity of ethics available.172 Such confusion is endemic of modernity’s amnesia of the original context of the moral discourse that it employs.173 The intense rallying in defense of Kierkegaard against MacIntyre’s charge has led to numerous attempts to place Either/Or in dialogue with contemporary moral philosophy, culminating in the 2001 publication of the collection Kierkegaard After MacIntyre.174 For the pres169 170

171 172 173 174

Ibid., p. 39. Ibid., pp. 39-41. MacIntyre’s claim that Kierkegaard’s own criteria make a rationally justifiable choice between the ethical and aesthetic impossible has been the central point of contention in subsequent discussions. MacIntyre’s argument boils down to the following: “Suppose that someone confronts the choice between them having as yet embraced neither. He can be offered no reason for preferring one to the other. For if a given reason offers support for the ethical way of life – to live in that way will serve the demands of duty or to live in that way will be to accept moral perfection as a goal and so give a certain kind of meaning to one’s actions – the person who has not yet embraced either the ethical or the aesthetic still has to choose whether or not to treat this reason as having any force. If it already has force for him, he has already chosen the ethical; which ex hypothesi he has not. And so it is also with reasons supportive of the aesthetic. The man who has not yet chosen has still to choose whether to treat them as having force. He still has to choose his first principles, and just because they are first principles, prior to any others in the chain of reasoning, no more ultimate reason can be adduced to support them” (ibid., p. 40). Ibid., pp. 41 f. Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., pp. 9 f. Kierkegaard After MacIntyre. Essays on Freedom, Narrative and Virtue, ed. by John J. Davenport and Anthony Rudd, with Replies by Alasdair MacIntyre and Philip L Quinn, Chicago and La Salle, Illinois: Open Court 2001. The earlier fourth volume of the International Kierkegaard Commentary also contains sev-

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ent purpose, it is sufficient to briefly mention only two of the contributions that focus on Either/Or at greater length.175 Following a pervasive trend, Anthony Rudd in his article thus argues that far from constituting the historical centerpiece of the emotivism that MacIntyre rejects, Kierkegaard is in fact doing much the same thing as his critic.176 In order to do so, Rudd tries to reject MacIntyre’s charge of the irrationalism of Judge William’s choice by claiming, first, that contrary to MacIntyre’s assumption, the choice of the ethical is not reversible but binding,177 since it is a choice to develop certain dispositions over time.178 Second, Rudd goes on to argue that the initial choice between the aesthetic and the ethical is not unmotivated, but rather necessary, insofar as both share a desire for narrative unity to one’s life as the highest good, which only the ethical can fulfill.179 As such, not only does the choice of the ethical over the aesthetic make sense even from within the aesthetic’s own standards, and therefore cannot be deemed arbitrary, but Kierkegaard even becomes compatible with MacIntyre, who bases his moral theory on a similar claim concerning the centrality of narratives in our lives. Unfortunately, Rudd does not offer any textual evidence in support of his claim that the aesthetic indeed contains a desire for narrative unity, and one is left to wonder how he would explain a passage such as the Rotation of Crops, with its overt anti-narrative stand. Instead, Rudd offers the remarkable statement that if anyone should object that the aesthete in fact is an irrationalist and does not share a desire for narrative unity, then MacIntyre’s moral theory too would have to be deemed irrational.180 How the failure

175

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177 178 179 180

eral contributions concerned explicitly or implicitly with the problems raised by MacIntyre; see e. g., Edward F. Mooney “Kierkegaard on Self-Choice and SelfReception: Judge William’s Admonition”; Charles K. Bellinger “Kierkegaard’s Either/Or and the Parable of the Prodigal Son: Or, Three Rival Versions of Three Rival Versions”; and Norman Lillegard “Judge William in the Dock: MacIntyre on Kierkegaard’s Ethics.” A further contribution to the volume that considers Either/Or at length is John J. Davenport’s “The Meaning of Kierkegaard’s Choice between the Aesthetic and the Ethical: A Response to MacIntyre” in Kierkegaard After MacIntyre. However, as Davenport’s attempted refutation of MacIntyre is placed in the larger project of justifying a general “existential ethics,” his discussion exceeds the present considerations. Anthony Rudd “Reason in Ethics: MacIntyre and Kierkegaard,” in Kierkegaard After MacIntyre. See MacIntyre After Virtue, p. 42. Rudd “Reason in Ethics,” p. 137. Ibid., pp. 138, 140. Ibid., p. 140.

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to prove a similarity between MacIntyre and Kierkegaard can serve to establish it, however, is a somewhat baffling question. The equation of MacIntyre and Judge William is also at the source of Jeffrey S. Turner’s article.181 Yet rather than seek to justify the Judge by showing his essential similarity to MacIntyre, Turner instead aims to discredit the latter by showing his proximity to the former. To do so, Turner argues that the purpose of Either/Or is to reveal the impossibility of ever fully freeing oneself from the aesthetic, and to lay bare the delusion of the Judge in thinking the contrary.182 This is visible, according to Turner, in the fact that the Judge falls victim to repeated aestheticizations of his own marital life.183 The latter, in turn, reveals a deeper despair in the Judge, since, so Turner, “If the Judge feels called upon to speak on behalf of marriage and especially his own marriage, that is because he has already accused or indicted himself: he is in despair about his marriage, however much he might deny it, or even better: precisely because of how much he might deny it.”184 Needless to say, the reasoning here is rather questionable, but it permits Turner to make the further suggestion that insofar as MacIntyre too can be seen to engage in a kind of aestheticization in the narrative he tells of the decline of Western moral philosophy, then, by analogy to the Judge, he too can be suspected of covering up a deeper despair by means of a story “which is nonetheless not true.”185 The collection ends with a generous reply by MacIntyre to his critics, in which he answers Turner’s preceding point with the obvious objection that the mere fact of embellishing a narrative does not qualify it as a lie.186 More importantly, MacIntyre goes on to repeat his claim that from within the Kierkegaardian paradigm itself it is impossible to think or reason oneself from one stage into another.187 As MacIntyre tells us, “So I reiterate the claim that, on Kierkegaard’s view, what can retrospectively be understood as rationally justifiable cannot be thus understood prospectively.”188 181

182 183 184 185 186 187 188

Jeffrey S. Turner “To Tell a Good Tale: Kierkegaardian Reflections on Moral Narrative and Moral Truth” in Kierkegaard After MacIntyre, p. 53. Ibid., p. 54. Ibid. Ibid., p. 50. Ibid., p. 54. MacIntyre “Once More on Kierkegaard,” in Kierkegaard After MacIntyre, p. 349. Ibid., p. 341. Ibid., p. 344; on this prospective / retrospective distinction, see also pp. 342 f., and 346.

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What is striking in this last formulation of MacIntyre’s critique is that it might well offer the best possible defense of Kierkegaard so far. Indeed, the claim that justification can never precede, but only follow an action, is arguably the central point of the “Ultimatum” and its challenge to the project of theodicy.189 Yet if this is the case, then there is a fundamental misconception at work in the very attempt to critique Kierkegaard for not providing what he does not seek to offer. MacIntyre’s initial mistake would be, from this perspective, to class Kierkegaard with an Enlightenment project that seeks to provide a priori grounds for moral action,190 when Kierkegaard’s whole notion of justification aims precisely at subverting any such. As MacIntyre himself has eloquently argued elsewhere, it is fallacious to seek to understand a tradition of thought from within anything but its own standards and rules.191 As such, the meaning associated with the concept of justification in Kierkegaard and MacIntyre’s respective traditions might well, as MacIntyre would probably agree,192 be too distant to allow for direct dialogue. Finally, if MacIntyre is correct and the prospective criterion for choice in Kierkegaard is provided not by reason but passion193 – and, unquestionably, much would point to it being so – then this also suggests the absolute centrality of a consideration of rhetoric for an analysis of the transition between pro- and retrospective understanding that lies at the heart of Kierkegaard’s project. The absence of rational criteria is not identical to the absence of criteria tout court (no matter how much MacIntyre likes to conflate the two), and an investigation of Kierkegaard’s “logic” might therefore well need to seek out the means 189

190 191

192 193

For a reading of the “Ultimatum” that points in this direction, see David J. Kangas’ discussion in his article “The Very Opposite of Beginning with Nothing: Guilt Consciousness in Kierkegaard’s ‘The Gospel of Suffering’ IV” in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, vol. 15, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2005. As will be apparent from its marginality in this paper’s discussion, the “Ultimatum” is interestingly one of the least treated parts of Either/Or, and Kangas’ analysis of it in relation to the Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits unquestionably counts as one of the most illuminating in the Anglo-Saxon field to date. Other readings have been provided by, e. g., Robert L. Perkins “Either/Or/Or: Giving the Parson his Due,” and David R. Law “The Place, Role, and Function of the “Ultimatum” of Either/ Or, Part Two,” both in International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 4. See MacIntyre After Virtue, pp. 49 f. See MacIntyre Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 1988, pp. 370-388. As much is suggested by MacIntyre in “Once More on Kierkegaard,” p. 353. Ibid., pp. 345, 346.

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of persuading that the art of speaking holds. As such, we are pointed once more to the depth of the insight of the early reception of Either/ Or in the Anglo-Saxon world in making the consideration of Kierkegaard’s language central to its approach. And it also points to the loss that it is to the field that so few of its practitioners today possess the knowledge of Danish that Kierkegaard’s work ineluctably demands.

„Ein altes, seltsames Buch kommt uns aus dem Dänischen zu…“ Grundlinien der deutschsprachigen Rezeptionsgeschichte von Entweder/Oder1 Von Philipp Schwab I. Sören Kierkegaards Entweder/Oder, am 20. Februar 1843 in Kopenhagen erschienen, darf als sein weithin bekanntestes Werk gelten. Wollte man allerdings von dem Bekanntheitsgrad der pseudonymen Erstlingsschrift Kierkegaards darauf schließen, Entweder/Oder stehe auch im Mittelpunkt der philosophischen, theologischen und literaturwissenschaftlichen Rezeption seines Gesamtwerkes und habe dessen Aneignung im Wesentlichen bestimmt, so wäre dieser Rückschluss wenigstens für die deutschsprachige Rezeptionsgeschichte unzutreffend. 2 1

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Für wesentliche Hinweise bei der Abfassung des Textes sei herzlich Prof. Dr. Heinrich Anz (Freiburg i. Br.), Dir. Dr. et Dr. theol. h. c. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn (Kopenhagen), Prof. Dr. Dr. theol. h. c. Hermann Deuser (Frankfurt a. M.) und Prof. Dr. Lore Hühn (Freiburg i. Br.) gedankt. Als Indiz darf gelten, dass Kierkegaards Erstlingsschrift in den einschlägigen Übersichten zur Rezeptionsgeschichte eine durchweg randständige Rolle einnimmt, – seien sie eher wirkungs- oder forschungsgeschichtlich, philosophisch oder theologisch orientiert: Vgl. Michael Theunissen „Das Kierkegaardbild in der neueren Forschung und Deutung (1945-1957)“ [1958] in Sören Kierkegaard, hrsg. v. Heinz-Horst Schrey, Darmstadt 1971, S. 324-384; Helmut Fahrenbach „Die gegenwärtige KierkegaardAuslegung in der deutschsprachigen Literatur von 1948 bis 1962“ in Philosophische Rundschau, Beiheft 3, 1962 (Sonderheft Kierkegaard-Literatur), S. 1-82; Michael Theunissen / Wilfried Greve „Einleitung: Kierkegaards Werk und Wirkung“ in Materialien zur Philosophie Søren Kierkegaards, hrsg. v. dens., Frankfurt a. M. 1979, S. 54-104; Helmut Fahrenbach „Kierkegaard und die gegenwärtige Philosophie“ in Kierkegaard und die deutsche Philosophie seiner Zeit: Vorträge des Kolloquiums am 5. und 6. November 1979, hrsg. v. Heinrich Anz u. a., Kopenhagen / München 1980,

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Die Gründe für die Prominenz des Werkes sind verhältnismäßig leicht anzugeben: Kierkegaards Schrift Entweder/Oder enthält insbesondere im ersten, ‚ästhetischen‘ Teil Stücke, die weit über die Grenzen der fachspezifischen Rezeption hinaus Berühmtheit erlangt haben. Neben der Interpretation des Mozartschen Don Giovanni in den Unmittelbaren erotischen Stadien 3 ist allem voran an das Tagebuch des Verführers zu denken, das schon anlässlich der Erstveröffentlichung die Aufmerksamkeit des Kopenhagener Publikums auf sich gezogen hatte,4 – und in der Folge von allen Schriften des Kierkegaardschen Œvre am häufigsten separat publiziert und übersetzt worden ist. Dewey hat bis in die siebziger Jahre 34 Einzelausgaben des ‚Skandalbuches‘ in 13 Sprachen nachgewiesen, darunter allein zehn deutschsprachige Separatdrucke.5 Zudem ist der Werktitel Entweder/Oder nachgerade zum Schlagwort avanciert, das die Person und das Werk Kierkegaards gleichermaßen bezeichnet.6 Die wohl zuerst von Brandes in die deutschsprachige

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S. 149-169; Wolfdietrich von Kloeden „Einfluß und Bedeutung im deutsch-sprachigen Denken“ in Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, hrsg. v. Niels u. M. Mikulová Thulstrup, Bd. 8, Kopenhagen 1981, S. 54-101; Wilhelm Anz „Zur Wirkungsgeschichte Kierkegaards in der deutschen Theologie und Philosophie“ in Die Rezeption Sören Kierkegaards in der deutschen und dänischen Philosophie und Theologie: Vorträge des Kolloquiums am 22. und 23. März 1982, hrsg. v. Heinrich Anz u. a., Kopenhagen / München 1983, S. 11-29; Hermann Deuser Kierkegaard: Die Philosophie des religiösen Schriftstellers, Darmstadt 1985; Wolfdietrich von Kloeden „Die deutschsprachige Forschung“ in Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, hrsg. v. Niels u. M. Mikulová Thulstrup, Bd. 15, Kopenhagen 1987, S. 37-108; Heiko Schulz „Die theologische Rezeption Kierkegaards in Deutschland und Dänemark. Notizen zu einer historischen Typologie“ in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1999, S. 220-244. Vgl. hierzu Peter Tschuggnall Sören Kierkegaards Mozart-Rezeption: Analyse einer philosophisch-literarischen Deutung von Musik im Kontext des Zusammenspiels der Künste, Frankfurt a. M. u. a. 1992; Jörg Zimmermann „Don Juan als philosophisches Paradigma: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus“ in Don Juan – Don Giovanni – Don Zuan: Europäische Deutungen einer theatralen Figur, hrsg. v. Frank Göbler, Tübingen u. a. 2004, S. 55-80. Vgl. hierzu George Pattison „The Initial Reception of Either/Or” in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Either/Or Part II, Bd. 4, hrsg. v. Robert L. Perkins, Macon, GA 1995, S. 291-305. Vgl. Bradley R. Dewey „Søren Kierkegaard’s Diary of the Seducer. A History of its Use and Abuse in International Print“ in Fund og Forskning i Det kongelige Biblioteks Samlinger, XX, 1973, S. 137-157. Vgl. hierzu beispielsweise Peter Schäfer u. Max Bense „Einleitung“ in KierkegaardBrevier, hrsg. v. dens., Leipzig [ca. 1937], S. 3-12, hier S. 10: „Nicht umsonst trägt das Hauptwerk den Titel ‚Entweder–Oder‘. Es könnte der Titel seines Gesamtwerks sein, denn das Entweder–Oder war das Thema seines Denken, die geheime Unruhe seines Lebens.“ Vgl. auch Walter Rest: „Nun, dieser erste Titel ‚Entweder – Oder‘

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Rezeption eingebrachte Anekdote von Kopenhagener Gassenjungen, die dem spazierenden Kierkegaard ein „Entweder – Oder“ nachrufen, gehört zum festen Bestandteil der Kierkegaard-Biographieschreibung.7 Wesentlich größere Schwierigkeiten bereitet es, die Gründe dafür ausfindig zu machen, dass Kierkegaards erster pseudonymer Schrift in der Fachrezeption zwar keine gänzlich marginale, aber eben auch keine dominierende Rolle zukommt. Die Ursachen hierfür lassen sich zum Teil in der Frührezeption des Kierkegaardschen Werkes im deutschsprachigen Raum freilegen. So stehen die ersten Dokumente deutschsprachiger Rezeption – von zwei noch zu Lebzeiten Kierkegaards von Beck verfassten Rezensionen der Ironieschrift und der Brocken einmal abgesehen8 – ganz im Kontext des sogenannten ‚Kirchenkampfes‘.9 Die sich hieran anschließende, langsam einsetzende Rezeption und Übersetzung des Kierkegaardschen Werkes ist beinahe ausschließlich von Theologen betrieben worden und hat sich Kierkegaards Schriften gleichsam ‚von hinten‘ angenährt.10 Es spricht in diesem Zusammenhang Bände, dass die erste11 Übersetzung von

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steht über seinem ganzen Leben und ist die Devise seiner Publikationen.“ (Walter Rest: „Werkbiographie“ in Kierkegaard für Christen: Eine Herausforderung, Einleitung u. Textauswahl v. Walter Rest, Freiburg u. a. 1987, S. 13-58, hier S. 22). Diese Einschätzung stützt sich wohl unter anderem darauf, dass die Figur des „Entweder/Oder“ bzw. „aut – aut“ auch in der Nachschrift eine prominente Stellung einnimmt. Vgl. AUN2, 5-8 / SKS 7, 277-280; vgl. hierzu Lore Hühn Kierkegaard und der Deutsche Idealismus. Konstellationen des Übergangs, Tübingen 2008, Abschn. III.1.3. Vgl. Georg Brandes Søren Kierkegaard. Eine kritische Darstellung, bearb. u. mit Anm. vers. v. Gisela Perlet, Leipzig 1992 [zuerst 1879], S. 8 (zur Übersetzung von Brandes’ Buch vgl. unten, Abschn. 1.II.); vgl. Olaf Peter Monrad Sören Kierkegaard: Sein Leben und seine Werke, Jena 1909, S. 71; vgl. auch „Entweder – oder“: Herausgefordert durch Kierkegaard, hrsg. v. Jörg Splett u. Herbert Frohnhofen, Frankfurt a. M. 1988, S. 4 u. Umschlagsabbildung. Als weiterer Beleg für die Prominenz des Werks darf gelten, das nur zu dieser Schrift Kierkegaards eine ‚LeseEinführung‘ erschienen ist: Asa A. Schillinger-Kind Kierkegaard für Anfänger: Entweder – Oder. Eine Lese-Einführung, 2. Aufl., München 1998. Beide stammen vom dänischen Theologen Andreas Frederik Beck, der auch bei der Verteidigung von Kierkegaards Dissertation zugegen war; vgl. hierzu Habib C. Malik Receiving Søren Kierkegaard: The early Impact and Transmission of his Thought, Washington, DC 1997, S. 18 Anm. 61 u. S. 50 Anm. 33. Vgl. Hans-Joachim Schoeps „Über das Frühecho Sören Kierkegaards in Deutschland“ in Ders. Studien zur unbekannten Religions- und Geistesgeschichte, Göttingen u. a. 1963, S. 285-291. Vgl. hierzu Habib C. Malik Receiving Søren Kierkegaard, S. 220. Aus einem Brief von Chr. K. F. Molbech an Hans Brøchner vom 7. Februar 1856 geht allerdings hervor, dass schon in den 1850er Jahren eine Übersetzung von Entweder/ Oder vorlag, die allerdings nie publiziert worden ist. Grund dafür war wohl, dass kein

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Entweder/Oder nicht vor 1885 erschienen ist – vierundzwanzig Jahre nach der ersten nachweisbaren deutschen Übersetzung Kierkegaards überhaupt.12 Diese verzögerte und gleichsam das Kierkegaardsche Werk ‚von hinten‘ aufrollende Rezeptions- und Übersetzungsgeschichte kann aber noch nicht allein ausschlaggebend für den Stellenwert des Werkes in der im 20. Jahrhundert einsetzenden Phase der ‚produktiven Rezeption‘13 Kierkegaards gewesen sein.14 Im Hinblick auf die ‚Hoch-

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deutscher Verleger sich zur Aufnahme des Buches bereiterklärt hat. In englischer Übersetzung lautet die entsprechende Passage: „I have probably already told you that for a couple of years a translation [into German] of Either/Or has been completed in manuscript form but is still lying about for want of a publisher. The translation was done by an intelligent elderly woman, a sister of Prof. Panum – I still don’t know how she did it. Because of this [presumably, that the translator is Prof. Panum’s sister] it has been difficult for me to avoid promising, for one thing, to look through the manuscript, and for another, to write a general account of Kierkegaard for a German journal in order to call attention to the book and help find a publisher for it.” (Zitiert nach: Encounters with Kierkegaard: A Life as seen by his Contemporaries, collected, edited, and annotated by Bruce H. Kirmmse, translated by Bruce H. Kirmmse and Virginia R. Laursen, Princeton, NJ 1996, S. 250; Erläuterungen v. Hrsg.) Peter Ludvig Panum war einer der berühmtesten dänischen Mediziner und wie Molbech zu dieser Zeit Professor an der Universität Kiel (vgl. ebd., S. 339). Vgl. für den dänischen Textnachweis Søren Kierkegaard truffet. Et liv set af hans samtidige, samlet, udgivet og kommenteret af Bruce H. Kirmmse, Kopenhagen 1996, S. 343 f. In der Antwort Brøchners vom 17. 2. 1856 findet sich die interessante Bemerkung: „God knows if it will do any good if Either/Or comes out in German. If someone wants to translate a single work of Kierkegard, it should be his Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Everything else is a fragment.” (Encounters with Kierkegaard, S. 252 / Søren Kierkegaard truffet, S. 347). Auf die erste Textstelle weist auch hin: Eberhard Harbsmeier „Von der ‚geheimen Freudigkeit des verborgnen Wohlstandes‘. Zum Problem deutscher Kierkegaardübersetzungen“ in Kierkegaardiana, 17, 1994, S. 130-141, hier S. 140 Anm. 2. Christentum und Kirche. „Die Gegenwart“. Ein ernstes Wort an unsere Zeit, insbesondere an die evangelische Geistlichkeit, von S. Kierkegaard, Hamburg 1861; vgl. zu den frühen deutschsprachigen Übertragungen Søren Kierkegaard. International Bibliografi, hrsg. v. Jens Himmelstrup, Kopenhagen 1961, S. 25. Die Erstübersetzung von Zur Selbstprüfung erscheint 1862, bis zur nächsten Übersetzung Kierkegaards durch Bärthold verstreichen dann zehn Jahre. Diese Bezeichnung ist von Heiko Schulz übernommen, der damit die Phase der philosophischen und theologischen Rezeption von 1910-1945 bezeichnet; vgl. Heiko Schulz „Die theologische Rezeption Kierkegaards in Deutschland und Dänemark. Notizen zu einer historischen Typologie“ in Kierkegaard Studies. Yearbook 1999, S. 220-244, hier S. 224-228 u. S. 234 sowie Ders. „Rezeptionsgeschichtliche Brocken oder die Brocken in der deutschen Rezeption. Umrisse einer vorläufigen Bestandsaufnahme“ in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 2004, S. 375-451, hier S. 448 f. So ist Der Begriff Angst, jene für Jaspers und Heidegger so wichtige Schrift, zusammen mit den Brocken erst vier Jahre nach Entweder/Oder erstmals in deutscher Übersetzung erschienen, unter dem Titel Zur Psychologie der Sünde, der Bekeh-

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phase‘ der deutschsprachigen Kierkegaardrezeption in der ‚Existenzphilosophie‘ und ‚dialektischen Theologie‘ ist aber dennoch zunächst einmal zu konstatieren, dass Entweder/Oder nicht in dem Maße im Mittelpunkt der ‚Aneignung‘ Kierkegaards gestanden hat wie etwa der Begriff Angst oder das Paradox der Philosophischen Brocken. Ein möglicher Grund wäre, dass die Erstlingsschriftschrift seit ihrer Aufnahme in Deutschland stets auf die folgenden Werke bezogen und nicht zunächst einmal für sich selbst betrachtet worden ist.15 In diesem Kontext mag insbesondere die verbreitete und von Johannes Climacus in der Nachschrift miteröffnete Interpretation16 von Bedeutung gewesen sein, nach der man es in Entweder/Oder bloß mit der Kontrastierung des Ästhetischen und des Ethischen zu tun habe, die Darstellung des ,eigentlichen‘ Zielpunktes der Stadienlehre, nämlich der Sphäre des Religiösen, aber späteren Werken vorbehalten bleibe. Zudem hat es den Anschein, dass insbesondere die philosophische Rezeption zu den begrifflich dichteren und weniger ‚literarischen‘ Werken, insbesondere der Angstschrift und der Krankheit zum Tode, einen intensiveren Zugang gefunden hat. In jedem Falle lässt sich festhalten, dass Entweder/Oder in der Kierkegaard-Rezeption der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts zwar nie in Vergessenheit geraten ist und auch in keiner Gesamtdarstellung Kierkegaards fehlt, aber weit davon entfernt ist, die Rezeptionsgeschichte zu dominieren. Erst nach 1945 beginnt die Kierkegaardforschung sich langsam dem Erstlingswerk17 in seiner Eigenständigkeit zuzuwenden. Immer stärker rücken einzelne Aspekte des Werks in den Blickpunkt der Forschung, sei es die Auseinandersetzung mit der Romantik, sei es die ethische Perspektive des zweiten Teils. Dennoch erscheint nicht vor 1982 die erste Monographie, die Entweder/Oder ausdrücklich im Titel führt.18

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rung und des Glaubens. Zwei Schriften Søren Kierkegaards, übers. u. eingel. v. Christoph Schrempf, Leipzig 1890. Vgl. dazu wiederum unten, Abschnitt 1.II u. 1.III. Vgl. AUN1, 251 f. / SKS 7, 231. Als ‚Erstlingswerk‘ ist hier in Übereinstimmung mit dem Kierkegaard des Gesichtspunkt stets Entweder/Oder angesprochen, – und nicht etwa die Andersen-Schrift. Kierkegaard selbst spricht allerdings ganz schlicht von „mit Første“. Vgl. G, 21 / SV2 XIII, 551. Karin Pulmer Die dementierte Alternative: Gesellschaft und Geschichte in der ästhetischen Konstruktion von Kierkegaards „Entweder-Oder“, Frankfurt a. M. / Bern 1982; vgl. zur Untersuchung von Pulmer unten, Abschn. 2.IV; zuvor ist schon die Dissertation von Valls publiziert worden, die aber nicht im engeren Sinne als Interpretation von Entweder/Oder gelten kann: Alvaro Valls Der Begriff Geschichte in den Schriften Sören Kierkegaards: Eine Analyse der Dimensionen und Bedeu-

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Seither sind eine Reihe insbesondere literaturwissenschaftlicher und philosophischer Studien erschienen, die ausschließlich oder mit deutlichem Schwerpunkt Entweder/Oder zum Thema haben. II. Die folgenden Überlegungen verstehen sich als ersten Anlauf zu der soeben formal umrissenen deutschsprachigen Rezeptionsgeschichte. Ziel ist es, Grundlinien der Interpretation von Kierkegaards Entweder/Oder nachzuzeichnen; insofern versteht sich die Studie als eine exemplarische und erhebt keinen Anspruch auf Vollständigkeit.19 Der Nachvollzug der Rezeptionsgeschichte von Entweder/Oder sieht sich dabei vor einen spezifischen Problemkomplex gestellt: Erstens vollzieht sich die Interpretation von Entweder/Oder zu einem nicht unbeträchtlichen Anteil in Untersuchungen, die sich dem Kierkegaardschen Werk unter einem sachlichen Gesichtspunkt nähern und die Auslegung der Erstlingsschrift dieser sachlichen Fragestellung naturgemäß ein- und unterordnen. Hier könnte nur eine vorhergehende Darstellung des grundlegenden Ansatzes der Interpretation zur Deutlichkeit bringen, welche Relevanz der jeweils vorgebrachten Auslegung von Entweder/Oder zukommt. Bezüglich der Gesamtuntersuchungen von Kierkegaards Leben und Werk stellt sich – wenn auch in abgeschwächter Form – das gleiche Problem, insofern der jeweils gewählte spezifische Zugang der Interpretation mitzuberücksichtigen wäre. Zweitens findet sich in keiner der neueren Untersuchungen, die ausdrücklich Entweder/Oder zum ausschließlichen oder dominierenden Thema haben, ein umfänglicher Forschungsbericht oder gar eine Aufarbeitung der Frührezeption, an die hier anzuknüpfen wäre. Die Ausweise beschränken sich auf kursorische Übersichten oder selektive Benennung einzelner Forschungstexte.20

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tungen von „Geschichte“ von „Entweder/Oder“ bis zur „Abschließenden unwissenschaftlichen Nachschrift“, Diss. Heidelberg 1980. Die vorgelegte Untersuchung steht daher in Umfang und Detail etwa hinter der rezeptionsgeschichtlichen Studie zu den Philosophischen Brocken von Heiko Schulz zurück. Schulz’ Untersuchung spielt zwar schon im Titel auf das „noble[], aber nichtsdestoweniger kaum erreichbare[]“ Ziel der „Vollständigkeit der rezeptionshistorischen Übersicht“ an, sie darf aber für die Brocken als nahezu umfassend gelten; vgl. Heiko Schulz „Rezeptionsgeschichtliche Brocken oder die Brocken in der deutschen Rezeption. Umrisse einer vorläufigen Bestandsaufnahme“ in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 2004, S. 375-451, Zitat S. 377. Am Umfänglichsten ist noch der Bericht der Forschungslage bei Pulmer, die allerdings nur auf literaturwissenschaftliche Untersuchungen eingeht und sich dann

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Drittens schließlich existiert im deutschsprachigen Raum kein Kommentar- oder Forschungsband allein zu Entweder/Oder, in dem grundlegende Interpretationsperspektiven zusammengestellt wären, wie dies in englischer Sprache durch zwei Bände des International Kierkegaard Commentary21 gewährleistet ist. Auch in dieser Hinsicht betreten die folgenden Ausführungen also Neuland. Angesichts dieser Problemlage war es notwendig, Schwerpunkte zu setzen. Der erste Fokus liegt dabei auf der Frührezeption von Entweder/Oder; der zweite richtet sich auf die philosophische, theologische und literaturwissenschaftliche Forschung nach 1930, wobei zunächst auf die Interpretationen von Hirsch und Adorno eingegangen wird, um sich dann der Forschung nach 1945 zuzuwenden. Diese Schwerpunktsetzung ist in aller Kürze zu begründen. Die Frühphase der Rezeption von Entweder/Oder verdient schon allein deswegen Interesse, weil sei im deutschsprachigen Raum so gut wie gar nicht aufgearbeitet ist.22 Dabei ist die Frührezeption gerade im Falle von Entweder/Oder außergewöhnlich, weil sie der gemeinhin als Erstübersetzung gehandelten Übertragung von Michelsen und Gleiss (1885) vorhergeht. Wenn in den Jahren zwischen 1860 und 1880 neben den oben angeführten Berichten zum ‚Kirchenkampf‘ überhaupt Kun-

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mit der Interpretation Adornos intensiver auseinandersetzt; vgl. Karin Pulmer Die dementierte Alternative, S. 20-36; vgl. auch Erika Deiss Entweder – Oder ? oder: Kierkegaards Rache. Einladung an des Verächter des Ästhetischen, sich fortzubilden oder fortzumachen, Diss. Heidelberg 1984, S. 355-364; Achim Kinter Rezeption und Existenz: Untersuchungen zu Sören Kierkegaards „Entweder-Oder“, Frankfurt a. M. u. a. 1991, S. 6 f. Umfänglich eingearbeitet ist die Forschungsliteratur bei Greve und Rapic (vgl. unten Abschn. 2.V), wird aber nicht in einem gesonderten Forschungsbericht thematisiert. International Kierkegaard Commentary: Either/Or Part I / II, Bd. 4 / 5, hrsg. v. Robert L. Perkins, Macon, Ga 1995; der Band von Splett und Frohnhofen trägt zwar Entweder/Oder im Titel, aber nur einer der Beiträge befasst sich mit dem Erstlingswerk; vgl. Wilfried Greve „Künstler versus Bürger. Kierkegaards Schrift ‚Entweder/Oder‘“ in „Entweder – oder“: Herausgefordert durch Kierkegaard, hrsg. v. Jörg Splett u. Herbert Frohnhofen, Frankfurt a. M. 1988, S. 38-62. In englischer Sprache liegt die äußerst informative Studie von Malik vor, die bei der Aufarbeitung der Frührezeption herangezogen worden ist: Habib C. Malik Receiving Søren Kierkegaard: The early Impact and Transmission of his Thought, Washington, DC 1997. Eine verschwindende, die Leistung Maliks keineswegs schmälernde Unkorrektheit sei hier berichtigt: Die Besprechung des Kierkegaard-Buches von Høffding (in Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, XII, 1899, S. 358-360), stammt nicht von Wilhelm Dilthey sondern von Alfred Heubaum (vgl. ebd., S. VI u. S. 338; die Buchbesprechungen Diltheys stehen ebd., S. 325-338); insofern ist Maliks Zuschreibung, Dilthey „enjoys the distinction of beeing the earliest philosopher of world renown to have known about and studied Kierkegaard’s thought“, zu relativieren (vgl. Habib C. Malik Receiving Søren Kierkegaard, S. 326; vgl. ebd. S. 327 Anm. 128).

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de vom Kierkegaardschen Werk nach Deutschland dringt, so geschieht dies zumeist in Berichten über das skandinavische Geistes- und Kulturleben, – und stets ist der Name Kierkegaards hier mit dem Titel seines Erstlingswerks verbunden. Von Interesse ist in diesem Zusammenhang insbesondere das Buch des Heine-Biographen Adolf Strodtmann mit dem Titel Das geistige Leben in Dänemark (1873), das auf etwa 30 Seiten nicht nur eine umfänglichere Interpretation des Kierkegaardschen Werkes gibt, sondern zudem einige der Diapsalmata und Passagen des Tagebuchs erstmals ins Deutsche überträgt, – und so gleichsam die ‚allererste‘ (publizierte) deutsche Übersetzung von Entweder/Oder enthält. Die Frührezeption im Umkreis der Erstübersetzung(en) von Entweder/Oder ist darüber hinaus nicht uninteressant, weil sie in einer kurzen Debatte gipfelt, in deren Rahmen sich der spätere Herausgeber der ersten deutschsprachigen Gesamtausgabe, Christoph Schrempf, erstmals in schriftlicher Form zu Kierkegaard zu Wort meldet, bezeichnenderweise mit einem „Pamphlet“ gegen „Kierkegaards neueste[n] Beurteiler“. 23 Der zweite Fokus mag nicht so unmittelbar einleuchten, sofern er sich in der Hauptsache auf die Periode nach der eigentlichen Hochphase der produktiven Aneignung Kierkegaards im deutschsprachigen Raum richtet. Begründen lässt sich diese Entscheidung aus dem oben schon erwähnten Umstand, dass gerade in dieser Periode Entweder/Oder keine entscheidende oder zentrale Bedeutung zukommt – jedenfalls nicht in dem Maße, wie dies von anderen Werken Kierkegaards zu konstatieren ist. Jaspers und Heidegger etwa beziehen sich selten ausdrücklich auf Entweder/Oder, und selbst wenn sich explizite Hinweise finden, sind diese entweder unspezifisch, 24 kontextuell abgrenzend, 25 oder sie ste23 24

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Vgl. hierzu inhaltlich und bibliographisch unten, Abschn. 1.IV. So findet sich im Anhang von Heideggers Vorlesung vom Wintersemester 1921/22 unter dem Titel „Motto und zugleich dankbare Anzeige der Quelle“ neben zwei Luther-Zitaten und einer Passage der Einübung auch eine Wendung aus den Diapsalmata: „‚Was dagegen der Philosophie und dem Philosophen schwer fällt, ist das Aufhören.‘ Kierkegaard, Entweder – Oder I, (Diederichs I, 1911), S. 35 (Aufhören beim echten Anfang!)“ Die angesprochene Thematik gehört allerdings inhaltlich eher der Nachschrift als Entweder/Oder zu (Martin Heidegger Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles. Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung, hrsg. v. Walter Bröcker u. Käte Bröcker-Oltmanns, GA Bd. 61, 2., durchges. Aufl., Frankfurt a. M. 1994 [1985], S. 182). Eine unspezifische Hindeutung bei Jaspers findet sich etwa in Vernunft und Existenz, wenn er auf den „existenzlose[n] Ästhetiker“ verweist, „der alles nur immer auf neue Weise interessant genießen will“ (Karl Jaspers Vernunft und Existenz. Fünf Vorlesungen, München 1960 [1935], S. 21). So die ausführlichste nachweisbare Bezugnahme Heideggers auf Entweder/Oder, die allerdings nur durch eine Mitschrift überliefert ist. Sie entstammt der Schiller-

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hen in einem so dichten Verbund mit Verweisen auf andere Werke, dass sich die spezifische Bedeutung von Entweder/Oder nur schwerlich isolieren lässt.26 Komplizierter gestaltet sich die Analyse dort, wo Jaspers und Heidegger ohne ausdrückliche Nennung auf grundlegende Themen von Entweder/Oder zu sprechen kommen, etwa auf die Selbstwahl, 27 die Entscheidung28 oder die Langeweile. 29 In diesen Fällen wäre aber zuerst in eingehender und detailnaher Analyse zu

26

27

28

29

Übung von 1936/37: „Und den ‚ästhetischen Menschen‘ könnte man dann unterscheiden etwa vom ‚Naturmenschen‘, ‚ethischen Menschen‘, ‚religiösen Menschen‘. So hat Kierkegaard unterschieden. Bei ihm ist der ästhetische Mensch der mißverstandene ästhetische Zustand Schillers. Bei Kierkegaard sehen wir sozusagen das Unwesen des Ästhetischen. Stellen aus ‚Entweder-Oder‘, Diapsalmata, Kierkegaards. Der ästhetische Mensch K.s ist derjenige, der für alles Schöne ist, die Bestimmbarkeit für alles hat, aber es doch dabei beläßt, darin versinkt. Für K. ist Ästhetik ein Zustand für sich, was er gerade bei Schiller nicht ist. Zitat: ‚ich mag nicht dies, ich mag nicht das‘. Daß K. dies so ausgedacht hat, ist nicht nur negativ zu nehmen (von Schiller aus), sondern ist eine vollkommene Umkehrung, die sich hier vollzieht, und die sich an verschiedenen Orten u. Zeitpunkten des 19 Jahrh. weiter vollzieht“ (Martin Heidegger Übungen für Anfänger: Schillers Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen. Wintersemester 1936/37, Seminar-Mitschrift v. Wilhelm Hallwachs, hrsg. v. Ulrich von Bülow, mit einem Essay v. Odo Marquard, Marbach a. N. 2005, S. 22). So etwa in der Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, wo Jaspers zwar kurz auf die „ästhetische Einstellung“ verweist (Karl Jaspers Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, München / Zürich 1985, basiert auf d. 6. Aufl. v. 1971 [1919], S. 69-71) und das Ästhetische mit der Wahl kontrastiert (vgl. ebd., S. 103 f. u. S. 107 f.), in seiner umfänglicheren Darstellung Kierkegaards Entweder/Oder aber nur am Rande behandelt (vgl. ebd., S. 419-432; Entweder/Oder wird zitiert S. 421 Anm. 2, S. 423 Anm. 1 u. S. 425, Anm. 3). Vgl. Karl Jaspers Philosophie, Bd. 2, Existenzerhellung, 4., unveränd. Aufl., Berlin u. a. 1973 [1932], S. 179-183. In den Beiträgen denkt Heidegger die Entscheidung als ein „Entweder–Oder“, ohne an diesen Stellen ausdrücklich auf Kierkegaard zu verweisen; vgl. Martin Heidegger Beiträge zur Philosophie. (Vom Ereignis), hrsg. v. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, GA Bd. 65, Frankfurt a. M. 1989, S. 87-80, S. 101 u. S. 267. Vgl. Martin Heidegger Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Welt – Endlichkeit – Einsamkeit, hrsg. v. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, GA Bd. 29/30, 2. Aufl., Frankfurt a. M. 1992 [1983], S. 117-249; auf Kierkegaard wird nur bezüglich des Augenblicks verwiesen (vgl. ebd., S. 224-226); vgl. hierzu Christian Iber Das Andere der Vernunft als ihr Prinzip: Grundzüge der philosophischen Entwicklung Schellings mit einem Ausblick auf die nachidealistischen Philosophiekonzeptionen Heideggers und Adornos, Berlin / New York 1994, S. 340-344 u. Romano Pocai Heideggers Theorie der Befindlichkeit: Sein Denken zwischen 1927 und 1933, Freiburg / München 1996, vgl. zum Augenblick ebd., S. 25 Anm. 31; vgl. zum Verhältnis Kierkegaard – Heidegger auch Günter Figal „Verzweiflung und Uneigentlichkeit. Zum Problem von Selbstbegründung und mißlingender Existenz bei Søren Kierkegaard und Martin Heidegger“ in Die Rezeption Søren Kierkegaards, S. 135-151.

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prüfen, in welcher Form der Gedanke von Entweder/Oder jeweils aufgenommen ist und ob sich nicht der jeweilige Modus produktiver Aneignung wiederum von anderen Werken Kierkegaards herschreibt, und zwar insbesondere vom Begriff Angst, der Nachschrift und der Krankheit zum Tode. Angesichts dieser allenfalls versteckten Wirkungsgeschichte erschien es für den exemplarischen Ansatz dieser Studie sinnvoller, auf diejenige Periode der Rezeption einzugehen, in der ausdrücklich auf Kierkegaards Erstlingswerk Bezug genommen wird, nämlich auf die Fachrezeption vor allem nach 1945. Insofern hat die vorliegende Studie über weite Strecken den Charakter eines Forschungsberichts. 30 Auch in der beinahe unüberschaubaren Forschungsgeschichte nach 1945 war eine Auswahl zu treffen. Zur Darstellung kommen insbesondere Untersuchungen, denen beispielhafter Charakter zugesprochen werden kann, insofern sie entweder erstens eine neue Forschungstradition eröffnen, oder zweitens auf einen der beiden Teile des Werks den Schwerpunkt der Interpretation legen, oder drittens einen zentralen Aspekt des Kierkegaardschen Gesamtwerkes von Entweder/ Oder her erhellen, oder schließlich viertens eine Interpretation der Gesamtstruktur der Erstlingsschrift bieten. Die meisten der hier besprochenen Texte verbinden mehrere der genannten Aspekte; so setzt etwa Wilfried Greve in seiner Untersuchung bei einer Analyse des maieutisch-ethischen Verfahrens von B an, erhellt damit zugleich die Gesamtstruktur von Entweder/Oder und verfolgt diesen Ansatz sodann in den sich anschließenden Schriften. Die zwei Teile der Untersuchungen gliedern sich wie folgt: In der Untersuchung der Frührezeption (1. Teil) werden zunächst anhand der ersten Rezension der Übersetzung von 1885 Grundfragen der Interpretation von Entweder/Oder entwickelt (I.), im Anschluss hieran wird auf das Vorwort der Erstübersetzung und seinen Bezug zur Interpretation von Strodtmann einzugehen sein (II.), von dort aus lässt sich die Rezeption vor Erscheinen der Erstübersetzung rekonstruieren (III.). Sodann wird in groben Zügen die Debatte zwischen Wetzel und Schrempf nachvollzogen (IV.). Von dieser ausgehend lässt sich die Brücke in die Rezeption des 20. Jahrhunderts schlagen. Da die hier 30

Ganz verzichtet werden musste in diesem Rahmen auf die literarhistorische Rezeption, obgleich diese gerade im Falle der ‚ästhetischen‘ Schrift Entweder/Oder vielversprechend erscheint. Für die einschlägige Literatur vgl. Heiko Schulz „Rezeptionsgeschichtliche Brocken oder die Brocken in der deutschen Rezeption“, S. 376 Anm 3.

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verhandelten Texte teilweise schwer zugänglich sind, ist umfänglich zitiert worden, auch um dem Leser einen Eindruck von Ton und Stil der Auseinandersetzung zu vermitteln. Im 2. Teil ist zuerst auf die etwa gleichzeitigen Interpretationen von Hirsch (I.) und Adorno (II.) einzugehen; von Adorno aus lässt sich mit der Studie von Rehm der Übergang in die Forschung nach 1945 machen. Im Anschluss sind die Interpretationen der 50er bis 80er Jahre mit Schwerpunkt auf der Ethik Kierkegaards darzustellen (III.). Seit Beginn der 80er Jahre lässt sich ein verstärkt ästhetisch-literaturwissenschaftliches Interesse an der Text- und Rezeptionsstruktur von Entweder/Oder nachweisen, auf das gesondert Bezug zu nehmen ist (IV.); die Erörterungen schließen mit einer Darstellung der philosophischen Ansätze jüngeren Datums, die wiederum primär die Ethik zum Thema haben, aber zugleich auf die methodische Bedeutung der Maieutik und der Mitteilungsform reflektieren (V.). Der zweite Teil geht chronologisch-typologisch vor: Methodisch und thematisch verwandte Ansätze werden gemeinsam zur Darstellung gebracht; die Chronologie ist dabei bis auf leichte Verschiebungen beibehalten worden, – so wird etwa die Studie von Kinter (1991) vor der Untersuchung Greves von 1990 behandelt, weil sie methodisch unmittelbar an Interpretationen der 80er Jahre anschließt. Da Übersetzungs- und Rezeptionsgeschichte gerade im Falle von Entweder/Oder eng aufeinander bezogen sind, erschien es sinnvoll, die einzelnen Übertragungen am jeweiligen Ort aufzuführen. Separatdrucke und Aufnahmen in Auswahlausgaben sind am Ende des 1. Teils angegeben. 31

1. Zur Frührezeption von Entweder/Oder (1848-1887) I. Noch im Dezember 1885 hat Michael Georg Conrad in seiner Wochenschrift Die Gesellschaft die erste Besprechung der deutschen Erstübersetzung von Entweder/Oder erscheinen lassen, die ihrer Prägnanz wegen hier vollständig zitiert werden soll: 31

Es versteht sich für eine Nachzeichnung der Grundlinien der deutschsprachigen Rezeptionsgeschichte von selbst, dass sie sich auf Texte beschränkt, die zuerst in deutscher Sprache erschienen sind. Wo es sinnvoll und für die Rezeptionsgeschichte bedeutsam erschien – etwa im Falle Brandes’ –, sind auch ursprünglich nichtdeutschsprachige Texte aufgeführt.

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Ein altes, seltsames Buch kommt uns aus dem Dänischen zu: „Entweder – Oder“, ein Lebensfragment, herausgegeben von Viktor Eremita, vortrefflich verdeutscht von Michelsen und Gleiß (Lehmanns Verlag in Leipzig). Das Buch ist vor vierzig Jahren zum erstenmal in Dänemark erschienen und schlug wie ein Donnerwetter in die ästhetische Lebensversumpfung der dänischen Gesellschaft, als deren oberster Schönheitsapostel der Aesthetiker Heiberg damals das große unfehlbare Wort führte. Viktor Eremita, d. i. der inzwischen zu hohem schriftstellerischen Ruhm gelangte S. Kierkegaard, faßte seine Landsleute beim ästhetischen Zipfel, entwarf im ersten Teile seines Buches eine entzückende, bacchantisch schwelgende Genußphilosophie in schönheitstrunkenen Bildern, Arabesken und Aphorismen, um im zweiten Teile eine Pflichtphilosophie zu entwickeln, die in nicht weniger geistreicher Weise mit der ersteren reine Tafel macht und als siegreiche Moral die Grundidee des ganzen Werkes scharf und leuchtend auf den Tron erhebt: die bunte, berauschende Genußlebensweisheit endet in Verderben und Verzweiflung. Die persönlichen orthodoxen Ueberzeugungen des Verfassers, die zuweilen etwas aufdringlich in die philosophische Gedankensymphonie seines Werkes tönen, vermögen demselben kaum etwas von seiner hohen stilistischen Schönheit und seinem großen psychologischen Werte zu rauben. Natürlich ist es so wenig für den großen Haufen der satten Bildungsphilister wie für die Parteifexen ausschließlicher philosophisch-moralischer Simpelei geschrieben. Der bewegliche, geistreiche, unabhängige Weltmann wird am ersten das köstliche Buch zu benützen wissen. Ob diese Menschensorte bei uns zahlreich genug, daß für sie eine deutsche Uebersetzung lohnt?32

Abgesehen von den Bemerkungen zum zeitlichen Abstand der Übersetzung, zur gesellschaftlich-kulturellen Lage, in die die dänische Erstveröffentlichung einerseits wie die deutsche Erstübersetzung andererseits fällt, sowie dem Zweifel hinsichtlich der günstigen Aufnahme des Werks durch das deutsche Publikum ist hier inhaltlich dreierlei festzuhalten: Interessant ist erstens, wie Conrad den Aufbau des Werkes und das Verhältnis der beiden Teile zueinander darstellt. Der Rezensent spricht zwar dem ersten Teil eine gewisse ‚bacchantische‘ Faszinationskraft zu, legt aber den Akzent der Interpretation nachdrücklich auf den zweiten Teil, der „mit de[m] ersteren reine Tafel mache“ und zudem die „Grundidee“ des ganzen Werkes beinhalte; kurz: Er spricht dem Ethiker B eine eindeutige Superiorität gegenüber dem Ästhetiker A zu, und erkennt hierin die Grundstruktur des Werkes. Auffällig ist zweitens die unmittelbar sich anschließende Bemerkung hinsichtlich der „persönlichen orthodoxen Ueberzeugungen des Verfassers“, die, wenigstens für das Ohr des Rezensenten all zu aufdringlich, in das Werk ‚hineintönten‘; – ohne dass Conrad allerdings das Ultimatum und die Predigt anspricht, ebensowenig wie übrigens das ‚Skandal32

Michael Georg Conrad „Kritische Rundschau“ in Die Gesellschaft, hrsg. v. Michael Georg Conrad, Nr. 51, 1885 (19. 12. 1885), S. 955-957, hier S. 956.

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stück‘ des ersten Teils, das Tagebuch des Verführers. Unabhängig von der Wertung Conrads ist die sogleich an die Darstellung des Werks sich anschließende Frage nach dem Verhältnis des ‚eigentlichen‘ Autors zu seiner Schrift festzuhalten, wie auch die darin implizierte Frage nach der Stellung von Entweder/Oder im Gesamtwerk. Drittens schließlich deutet der Verfasser ein auf die Rezeption des Publikums berechnetes – man darf hier schon sagen: maieutisches – Verfahren Kierkegaards an, wenn er ausführt, der Verfasser habe „seine Landsleute beim ästhetischen Zipfel“ fassen wollen. Conrad wirft somit drei Grundfragen auf, mit denen sich – wenn auch auf ungleich reflektierterem Niveau und in umfänglicherer Ausarbeitung – die spätere Forschung und Rezeption immer wieder beschäftigen wird: die Frage nach der Gewichtung der beiden Teile – die im Folgenden durchaus abweichend beantwortet worden ist –, die Frage nach der Verfasserschaft, d. h. nach der Stellung Kierkegaards zu seiner Schrift sowie der Bedeutung von Entweder/Oder im Gesamtwerk, und schließlich die Frage nach der maieutischen bzw. immanent kritischen Funktion des ersten, ästhetischen Teiles. II. Die Rezension Conrads weist aber nicht nur voraus auf die nachfolgende Forschung, sie verweist zugleich, vermittelt über das Vorwort der Übersetzung von Otto Gleiss, zurück auf die der Übertragung vorhergehende deutschsprachige Rezeption. 1. Das Vorwort von Gleiss ist wiederum in mehrfacher Hinsicht von Interesse. Ihm ist zunächst zu entnehmen, dass die Übersetzung von Entweder/Oder nicht eine gemeinschaftliche Produktion von Gleiss und Alexander Michelsen gewesen, sondern zunächst von Michelsen – der zuvor schon etliche Werke dänischer Theologen ins Deutsche übertragen hatte, u. a. Martensens Ethik und Autobiographie33 – allein begonnen worden ist.34 Als Michelsen die Arbeit noch vor seinem Tod 33

34

Hans Martensen Die christliche Ethik, übers. von A. Michelsen, Gotha 1871 / 1878, 3 Bde.; Ders. Aus meinem Leben: Mittheilungen, aus dem Dänischen von A. Michelsen, Karlsruhe / Leipzig 1883 / 1884, 3 Abthn. Vgl. Otto Gleiss „Vorwort des Übersetzers“ in Entweder – Oder. Ein Lebensfragment. Hrsg. von Viktor Eremita, aus dem Dänischen v. Al. Michelsen u. O. Gleiss, Leipzig 1885, S. V-VII, hier S. Vf. 1904 ist die 2. u. 3. Auflage erschienen, die nur noch Gleiss als Übersetzer führt und mit einem neuen Vorwort versehen ist; diese ist dann unverändert bis 1924 (!), also bis weit nach der Übersetzung von Schrempf, in der 4. bis 6. Auflage erschienen. Die unterschiedlichen Seitenzahlen lassen sich gänzlich aus dem jeweiligen Druck-

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am 3. Juni 1885 an Gleiss übertrug, muss schon ein beträchtliches Stück des Textes übersetzt gewesen sein, so dass zwei Lieferungen der Übersetzung vom Verlag vorab veröffentlicht wurden. 35 In Kayser’s Bücherlexikon der Jahre 1883-1886 ist dann auch nur der erste Teil der Schrift als erste und zweite Lieferung mit 248 Seiten aufgeführt.36 Dies hat in der Forschung zu der irrigen Annahme geführt, die Übersetzung von 1885 umfasse im Ganzen nur den ersten Teil, auf den sich auch die oben zitierte Rezension von Conrad allein beziehe, 37 – was im Übrigen schon durch den Text der Rezension widerlegt wird. Diese zunächst bloß philologische Notiz ist inhaltlich deshalb von Interesse, weil die Veröffentlichung in einzelnen Lieferungen von Gleiss als „wesentliche[r] Nachteil“ angesehen wird. Dieser besteht nach Gleiss darin, daß die Leser unmöglich über den Plan des Buches orientiert sein konnten, da dasselbe erst in dem zweiten Bande seinen befriedigenden, ich möchte sagen versöhnlichen Abschluß findet; denn erst hier wird es ganz klar, daß die in den ,Papieren A.’s‘ ausgesprochenen Ansichten über die ästhetische Anschauung von der Liebe, wie sie uns namentlich aus dem ,Tagebuch des Verführers‘ entgegentreten, nur die äußersten Konsequenzen einer rein ästhetischen Auffassung der Liebe ziehen wollen, um dann nachzuweisen, daß die ästhetische Auffassung allein auf die grauenvollsten und verderblichsten Wege führt und erst die ethische das wirklich und in heilsamer Weise realisiert, was jene vergebens sucht. 38

Weiter führt Gleiss aus, der „eigentliche[] Schluß“ von Entweder/Oder sei erst in den – im folgenden Jahr in Übersetzung erscheinenden – „Stadien auf dem Wege des Lebens“ zu finden; erst hier sei nämlich die „religiöse Lebensanschauung“ ausgeführt, die „noch höher als die ethische“39 stehe. Entschiedener noch als Conrad in seiner unmittelbar folgenden Rezension gibt Gleiss dem Ethiker den Vorrang vor dem Ästhetiker, und setzt zugleich den ‚eigentlichen‘ Zielpunkt des