Divine Conspiracy

8/6/2019 Divine Conspiracy

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KIERKEGAARD,

RELIGION AND THE

NINETEENTH-CENTURY

CRISIS OF CULTURE

GEORGE PATTISON

University of Aarhus


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Contents

Preface page ixAcknowledgements xiList of abbreviations xiv

The sublime, the city and the present age

Kierkegaard and the world of the feuilletons

The present age: the age of the city

Cosmopolitan faces

Food for thought

A literary scandal

The reception ofEither/Or

New Years Day

Kierkegaard and the nineteenth century() Manet

Kierkegaard and the nineteenth century() Dostoevsky

Learning to read the signs of the times

Bibliography Index

vii


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C H A P T E R


I

The concept of the sublime is, perhaps necessarily, elusive, a con-cept that resists incorporation into the domain of clear and distinctideas, if concept there is or can be at all in this case. What is sub-lime is what unsettles, what cannot settle or be settled: a realm ofexperiences,representations and ideas that is turbulent and unman-ageable. Such a realm may be figured in the Alpine landscape thatthe eighteenth and early nineteenth century saw as the wreckageof an earlier creation, or in storm and battle, perennial paradigms

of sublime experience. Equally, if paradoxically, the sublime res-onates with the daily life-experience of the modern city-dweller.Indeed, it has been argued that there is an intrinsic connectionbetween the rise of the modern city and the aesthetics of the sub-lime that developed in the latter part of the eighteenth century.For the city irreversibly redefined the individuals relation to theenvironment. This had to do not only with the way in which thenew, expanding cities (beginning with London) overran their me-dieval walls, were reconstructed in an architecture that reflectedthe scale and style of imperial ambitions, and so overwhelmed theindividual by virtue of their size (and magnitude, to anticipate, pro-vided Kant with one of the foci of his discussion of the sublime).

It also had to do with the simultaneous expansion and intensifi-cation of the individuals visual interaction with the urban envi-ronment, reflected in such diverse phenomena as the innovativeart of window-dressing (together with the beginnings of modernadvertising) and the multiplication of new visual and spatial expe-riences (magic lanterns, dioramas, stereoscopy, photography, etc.).


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Kierkegaard, religion and culture

Martin Zerlang, the Danish critic who has done much to explorethe connections between urbanity and sublimity, also draws atten-tion in this connection to the diseases of urbanity first diagnosed inthe nineteenth century: vertigo, agoraphobia, claustrophobia andneurasthenia. His description of neurasthenia as a dysfunction inmental life characterized by an overstimulation of the senses andan underdeveloped capacity for motoric reaction, in other wordsa kind of blocked mental circulation could be read as an account

of someone chronically overexposed to sublime experiences, some-one paralysed by the sublime unmasterability of his environment.

If the neurasthenic cannot be regarded as normative, he is nonethe less symptomatic of the new stresses placed upon the individualconsciousness as it seeks to make sense of its world. He is the man ofthe crowd stripped of his functional normality. The neurasthenicsblocked mental circulation manifests itself in the continuousdestabilization and disorientation of representation resulting fromurban cultures characteristic drive to package experience as image,whilst the scale, complexity and speed of that culture continuallymilitates against the process of reduction. If the public face of mod-ern urban culture becomes (or aims at becoming) the continuous

transformation of a complex and even discordant reality into therepresented unity of the spectacle (the modern city, as Mumfordsaid of its Hellenistic precursor, offering itself as a containerfor spectacles), this is only possible by virtue of the simultane-ous suppression of whatever proves resistant to spectacularization.Neurasthenia, vertigo, agoraphobia and claustrophobia reveal thetraumas of a spatially disorientated urban self having to sustain arepresentation of its environment that is sufficiently simple not tobe overwhelming while, at the same time, experiencing the unrep-resentable reality of the city in all its vast complexity. The tendencyof the new urban culture of the nineteenth century towards anever-accelerating banal and superficial over-simplification is thus

matched by a counter-movement of the sublime, or, more pre-cisely, a counter-movement of resistance and disruption that may

M. Zerlang, The City Spectacular of the Nineteenth Century, Copenhagen, Center for Urbanitetog stetik, Arbejdspapir, , p.. Seealso M. Zerlang, Aesthetics andthe Emergenceofthe ModernCity:On theSublimeandthe Spectacular, in R.Linnet (ed.),AestheticTheoryand Artistic Expression, Copenhagen, Museum Tusculanum, forthcoming.


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indicate a stirring of the sublime or may simply reflect the contin-uous displacement of the self in an environment that appears to bedominated by the ephemeral. How can one distinguish betweenthese responses, between sublimity and bathos? Need one? Canone?

Such questions, I suggest, take us to the heart of Kierkegaardscritique of modernity, refining and extending his either/or of theaesthetic or the religious: how, in Kierkegaards terms,to distinguish

between the merely reactive protest of the Romantic rebel or thecontemporary art of shock for shocks sake and the radical depthof Christian existence? The answer, as Kierkegaard develops it, isnot the formulation of a theoretical apparatus that can be appliedacross the board. Kierkegaard, indeed, has his theoretical appara-tus, but, as he might say, what matters is how to apply it. Theoryis nothing unless actualized in the process of concrete judgement.Kierkegaards answer, then (which, since it belongs to his time andplace, cannot immediately be our answer), is the answer that getsworked out in the totality of his published and unpublished writ-ings and that takes the form of a close reading of his contemporaryculture the culture of the early modern city in all its detail.

And it is precisely his eye for this detail that makes Kierkegaard socontemporary to us. Again: not what he sees, but howhe sees andhow he renders what he sees as literature.

Reading Kierkegaard along the plane opened up by the intersec-tion of theory and culture means no longer reading Kierkegaardin the role of philosopher, or as a theologian, or even as a figureof literature. Kierkegaard as critic of the age draws on and speaksof philosophy, theology and literature, but none of these providesan a priori limit on the way in which the age manifests itself in itsown singular identity. The line of criticism can only be governedby the exigencies imposed by that identity itself, an identity thatincorporates the whole lived world of urban culture, inclusive of its

most popular and ephemeral forms no less than of its high art.Yet, at the same time, the direction of the line is determined by thequestion that guides it. Why, then, have I formulated that questionin terms of the sublime? If the sublime belongs to Kierkegaards ageas the age of the modern urban experience, do we have any rea-son to believe that Kierkegaard himself articulated his own critical


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question as a question about the sublime? Isnt the evidence ratherthe other way? Arent Kierkegaards own aesthetics determinedlythe aesthetics of beauty? Isnt the sublime singularly lacking fromhis whole literary output? In any case, wont putting it like thisimmediately draw the discussion back into the sphere of abstractphilosophizing and block our access to the plane of lived culturalexperience? In view of these questions, shouldnt the reader nurturea suspicion that the sublime is being taken as a point of departure

simply because of its currency in our own recent debates about phi-losophy and culture? Arent we running the risk of imposing ourquestions and our theorizing of the sublime onto Kierkegaardswork?

Such questions cannot, of course, be completely answered inadvance of the work of interpretation itself. The intuition guidingthis study, however, is that the focus on the sublime is of especialvalue in relation to Kierkegaards critique of culture because ofthe way in which it enables us to draw out the necessary inter-connection between, on the one side, his philosophical and reli-gious orientation and, on the other, his characteristic critique ofthe age. That is to say, it is precisely an appropriate awakening

and mobilizing of the concept of the sublime that enables us to seewhy and how Kierkegaards peculiar philosophical and religiousperspectives got worked out as a critical reading of contempo-rary culture in the terms just set out. Furthermore, it also helpsus to revisit the characteristically Kierkegaardian pairing of theaesthetic and the religious, and to redraw the relationship betweenthem in such a way as to avoid both a simplistic conflation anda too zealous diremption. The resulting reconfiguration of the aes-thetic and the religious will also serve to locate the crucial thirdterm of Kierkegaardian thought, the ethical although this willnot become a theme in this book until the final chapter. The firststep, however, is, starting at the theoretical end of the spectrum,

to see what a Kierkegaardian concept of the sublime might looklike.

There are only two uses ofdet Sublimein the published work, and only one of these can bedirectly drawn into connection with contemporary discussions of the sublime. Ophiethedenand related adjectival forms occur frequently. However, its use is mostly such as to makeit only problematically assimilable to the topic of the sublime as discussed here.


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I I

Defining the sublime could, of course, be the work of an extendedphilosophical essay in its own right. I shall not attempt such a def-inition. Whatever its merits or demerits I shall simply take as astarting-point the specific concept of the sublime propounded inKants Critique of Judgement, a concept that therefore belongs to thegeneral horizon of the intellectual world of Kierkegaards own time,

despite the overlay of subsequent Romantic and Hegelian devel-opments. Kierkegaard himself, as has been hinted, never explicitlydiscussed this concept. Nevertheless, one of Kierkegaards centralconcepts, the concept of anxiety, has important analogies to theconcept of the sublime, which we shall now explore.

The first point of analogy concerns the position of the conceptsof the sublime and of anxiety in the overall architectonic structuresof Kants critical philosophy and Kierkegaards pseudonymous au-thorship respectively.

Kants best-known discussion of the sublime is found in TheCritique of Judgement, a critique that, Kant says, is needed in orderto make sense of the relationship between the theoretical under-

standing and the practical or moral reason.

Without the mediatingfunction of judgement, these two primary forms of reason would,in Kants view, become disconnected and we would be left with akind of dualism that Kant (for all the jibes about Kantian dualism)finds unacceptable: a dualism that sets a world of knowable objectsirrelevant to human strivings against a world of values undisci-plined by the requirement of engaging with empirical reality. If the

These connections are also noted in Jrgen Dehs, in Ikke Phantasiens kunstrigeVven, men tankens Gysen: Kierkegaard og bruddet med idealismens stetik, Slagmark,No. , Spring ; also Jrgen Dehs, Den tabte verden, in P. E. Tjner, J. Garff and J. Dehs (eds.), Kierkegaards stetik, Copenhagen, Gyldendal, , esp. pp. . Theyare also discussed in S. Agacinski, We are not Sublime: Love and Sacrifice, Abrahamand ourselves, in Jonathan Ree and Jane Chamberlain (eds.), Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader,Oxford, Blackwell, . It is also striking that Lyotards discussion of Kants Analytic ofthe Sublime links anguish and sublimity at a number of points: cf. J.-F. Lyotard, Lessonson the Analytic of the Sublime, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, , pp. , , ,. Cf. also John Milbank, The Sublime in Kierkegaard, in P. Blond (ed.), Post-SecularPhilosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology, London and New York, Routledge, ,pp. .

The discussion that follows refers to I. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, in Werke, Vol. V, Berlin,Walter de Gruyter, , especially I.ii, .


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sphere of judgement as a whole mediates between these two worlds,the concept of the sublime occupies a pivotal point within the struc-ture of this mediation. Whereas, according to Kant, the beautifulmust always express itself in a material form shaped out of themanifold of appearances (and is thereby limited to the same fieldof objects as the understanding, i.e., the form of reason that is con-cerned with knowledge of the empirical world), the sublime comesinto play at the precise point where appearances resist or escape

being formed into a single, beautiful representation. The reasonsfor this may be various. In the case of what Kant calls the mathe-matical sublime it may be because of a sense of absolute magnitudethat stands outside any scale of comparison (Die Grosse). In the caseof the dynamic sublime encountered in nature (and the sublime,in Kants opinion, is only truly encountered in nature, not in art),it may be because we are unable to circumscribe a seascape or aview of the Alps in the compass of a single image we cant takeit all in. Such experiences are not, however, merely chaotic. It isnot that we make no sense of what we see, since, although we areunable to organize such sights into the unity of an adequate sensu-ous representation, our reason is none the less able to grasp them

as single phenomena: Look at that fine view, we say, judging asone thing (that view) what the eye cannot itselfseeas one.

If judgement in general and theaesthetic, as a part of judgement,are to link the spheres of sensuous representation (the world ofappearances) and reason (the world of ideas), it is in the region ofthe sublime and not in experiences of beauty that thelink is actuallyto be effected: for beauty, as we have seen, is constrained by therequirements of sensuous representation in a way that the sublimeis not.

Features of this account closely parallel elements in the descrip-tion of anxiety in Kierkegaards thought. In The Concept of Anxietyitself, reference is repeatedly made to the way in which anxiety

functions as a border-concept, the point of indifference, as it were,between the realms of nature and freedom, the state at which thesubject is no longer mere nature but not yet fully free either.

In The Concept of Anxiety this is for the most part related to thedisciplines that Kierkegaard calls psychology and dogmatics, but,as I have argued elsewhere, it can readily be activated in other


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contexts such as the relationship between the aesthetic and thereligious, where the aesthetic is construed as involving an externaland visible form of expression, whereas the religious has as itspoint of departure the principle of subjectivity, i.e., what humanbeings are in respect of their freedom, and which, as a matterof inwardness, can never be adequately expressed in an outwardform. The basic definition and the systematic role of the sublimeand of anxiety in Kant and Kierkegaard therefore imply that each

concept marks the problematizing of representation as such.In the case of the sublime, Kant insists that we only improperly

ascribe sublimity to the object, the storm or the mountain range,since it is only in relation to our reason and our freedom that theyare experienced as sublime. When I judge a storm to be sublime,I am able to do so only because, with Pascal, I recognize that evenif it should destroy me physically, there is that in me which is ofanother order than mere physical force and which enables me toconfront even actual danger as marvellous! sublime!. The sublimeis the elevated (Das Erhabene) and true elevation is, for Kant, theelevation of human reason above the realm of objects, no matterhow overwhelming in size, grandeur or danger.

It follows from this that whereas a beautiful landscape will be alandscape that perfectly expresses what belongs to the beautiful, asublime landscape does not express sublimity in itself. The relationof the perceived landscape to its sublime character is oblique andindirect. Indeed, according to Kant, it is little more than the occa-sion for the sublime feelings aroused in the subject. The sublime isless in what we see than in what we bring to the seeing, although itmay be precisely the seeing that makes us aware of what we bring.

Anxiety likewise calls representation into question. Anxiety andnothing always correspond, writes Kierkegaard in The Concept of

Anxiety (CA, p. ), and there can therefore be no adequate form inwhich anxiety can be seen in its essence. Insofar as Kierkegaards

writings about anxiety, in The Concept of Anxiety and elsewhere (forexample, in his upbuilding writings or in aesthetic works such asQuidams Diary in Stages on Lifes Way), do provide what has been

See G. Pattison, Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious, London, SCM, . Again, this is something I have argued for in Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious: see

pp. .


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called a phenomenology of anxiety, this cannot be thought of as ifit offered a direct representation. The phenomena in which anxietymakes itself known require interpretation if anxiety is to be seen inthem since anxiety, like the sublime, is not a characteristic of anyperceived object but essentially concerns the subject whose owncapacity for freedom is the stake in anxiety.

Mediating between sense and spirit and marking a crisis in repre-sentation, Kantian sublimity and Kierkegaardian anxiety are also

analogous with respect to the complex relation that each has tofear.

Kant argues that fear is a highly characteristic feature of sublimeexperiences. None the less, the fear that belongs to the sublime is notmere fright. If I am to experience a storm as sublime, I must allowmyself to sense its fearful aspect, whilst simultaneously keeping thefear in check. This may have to do with my not being immediatelythreatened in my own person (I may be on dry land watchinga storm several miles out at sea), or it may be because althoughI am myself exposed to physical danger, I sense myself to be aboveor beyond it in the moral sense of the superiority of personalityto brute nature (as, perhaps, in the case of heroism in war, when

the hero ignores or rises above the real and present danger: Kantdoes in fact cite war in these terms as providing an example of thesublime).

Anxiety too is a kind of fear, but again it is fear of a peculiarkind. Heidegger certainly interprets Kierkegaard correctly herewhen he says that anxiety, as opposed to fear in the everyday sense,has no object, or, if it does seize on an object, this is precisely amanifestation of the subject fleeing what is revealed in anxiety: itsown capacity for freedom and its responsibility towards itself (whatKierkegaard calls grasping at finitude (CA, p. , amended) toescape the vertigo of anxiety). What the subject fears in anxietyis itself. However, although this can also be said of religious fear,

there is a distinction between anxiety and religious fear in the fullsense of the word. We may approach this distinction through Frater

See, for example,Arne Grn, Subjektivitet og Negativitet: Kierkegaard, Copenhagen, Gyldendal,, pp. ff.

See M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Tubingen, Niemeyer, , esp. pp. ff. ( pagination asper st edition).


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Taciturnus discussion of aesthetic and religious fear in the closingsection ofStages on Lifes Way. Religious fear, he says, is to be distin-guished from the kind of fear of which Aristotle speaks in discussingthe nature of tragedy. The spectator of a tragedy fears for the hero,but the person gripped by religious fear fears for himself, fearingto be found in his sin, cut off from grace and excluded from theblessedness of the saints. Such fear motivates the religious person,through repentance, to resolve upon renewed obedience to Gods

will. Here, it would seem, fear has acquired an object. Yet thisobject is actually the subject himself in his concern for an eter-nal happiness, so (given that anxiety is also orientated towards thesubject) what distinguishes religious fear and anxiety? The answerto this question has to do with the status of anxiety as a border-concept in the sense already discussed. Anxiety as such stops shortof making any religious resolutions. It is, as Kierkegaard puts it, thepreceding state out of which either good or evil action can proceed,but it is not itself either. It is a state of suspense, in which actionis present as possibility, not as fact. Its characteristic fear cannottherefore achieve a clearly defined focus: it has no object as such.

Yet fear is not the only emotive element in the experience of sub-

limity. As an aesthetic concept the sublime must, according to Kant,be able to elicit a feeling of pleasure. If there is displeasure in thetroubling awareness of our inability to find a form of representationadequate to an experience of the sublime and the consequent senseof a constraint placed upon our sense of freedom, there is none theless a more-than-compensatory pleasure in the ability of reason tograsp the experience as a unitary, sublime experience. Similarly, ifthere is displeasure in the threat posed by the object of a sublimeexperience (the tumult of the storm or the onrush of the enemyforces), there is none the less a more-than-compensatory pleasurein the sense of moral elevation by which I understand myself assublimely elevated above mere natural fear, as in the joy of battle.

Anxiety, however, would seem entirely to preclude pleasure.What could be pleasurable about anxiety? But, in an importantformulation, Kierkegaard speaks of anxiety as a sympathetic antipa-thy and an antipathetic sympathy (CA, p. Kierkegaards italics).Anxiety is not just a negative response, not just fear of freedom.Anxiety is also attracted, spellbound even, by what arouses it. It is


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worth reflecting that sympathy was a key term in Romantic aes-thetics: the universal sympathy of animate life being understoodas a condition of all artistic communication. We might also thinkof the imagery of the pietistic hymnody that Kierkegaard valued,imagery in which sorrow for sin and a sweet longing for God melttogether into an eroticized anxiety that, again, cannot perhaps becalled pleasurable in an everyday sense, but that in Kants techni-cal sense is nevertheless a kind of pleasure. Even when Kierkegaard

portrays a character such as the Quidam of Stages on Lifes Way,whose experience of anxiety is depicted as a kind of suffering, anx-iety has a mesmerizing quality that entices its victim and makeshim consent to his thralldom.

Mediating between nature and freedom, bringing representa-tion into crisis and arousing a fear that does not preclude an an-tipathetic sympathy, the analogies between Kantian sublimity andKierkegaardian anxiety go to the heart of each concept. Neverthe-less, they would also seem to diverge significantly in other, no lessimportant respects. This is particularly evident with regard to whatlies on the far side of the sublime moment.

For Kant the sublime involves an anticipation of the infinite,

rational, free activity of the moral subject. In fulfilling the free-dom to which the sublime points, such a subject will understandhimself as acting in accord with the final teleology of nature andhistory: acting rationally in a rational universe. Kant specificallyand pointedly rejects the view that the religious attitude towardswhich the sublime points is one in which God is depicted as rid-ing on the storm clouds of wrath and imposing His heteronomouswill on His quivering human subjects. Instead, he says, religionshould be grounded on the individuals tranquil sense of moral in-dependence and elevation of mind, and it is to such religion thatthe sublime in fact directs us. The religious life that Kierkegaardenvisages arising on the far side of anxiety would seem to be of

a very different character. Fear and trembling are not just char-acteristics of the passage to religion; they are abiding character-istics of the religious life. However, it would be a caricature ofKierkegaards position to say that he sought to promote fear in themanner of a hell-fire preacher. In a text such as Purity of Heart heis at pains to argue that the good must be done solely because it


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is good and not in order to escape punishment or gain eternal lifeas some sort of extrinsic reward. Again and again he exposes arewards-and-punishments kind of religiosity as, in his expression,double-mindedness. The Kantian resonances have not been loston commentators.

There are complex interpretative issues here, but no matter howmuch we manage to close the gap between Kant and Kierkegaardthere would seem to be an important and perhaps decisive differ-

ence. Even if it is unjust to accuse Kierkegaard of the kind of sado-masochistic understanding of religion that Kant so vehementlyrejects, his conception of the religious life does have a dimension ofpassivity, and envisages the subject more as the recipient of gracethan as a fully autonomous moral agent in a way to which Kantcould scarcely have acceded. Although Kierkegaard, no less thanKant, insists that freedom is the goal of anxiety (CA, p. ), his con-ception of freedom is never simply autonomous but belongs in atwo-termed relationship in which Gods view of my life has a kindof priority over my own view over myself and an inscrutability thatI can never penetrate rationally. The freedom of faith, accordingto Kierkegaard, is not something I do: it is something I must wait

upon, and acquire in patient submission to Gods will, receiving itas a gift from the giver of every good and perfect gift. Even thoughthis does not necessarily or immediately mean that such freedomis antipathetic to autonomy (we might think of it, as Tillich did, interms of theonomy, i.e., an autonomy that is no longer sufficientunto itself but that is open to its divine depths), there is a real pointof distinction from the Kantian ideal in this area. Furthermore, ifKierkegaardian faith can be said to be essentially communicative,demanding and facilitating revelation, it would also seem to callfor a kind of individuation that concentrates itself into what is sin-gular, unique and essentially secret in the life of each individual.Faith therefore sets a limit both to autonomy and to the rational

universality of Kants practical reason.

Cf. George Connell, To be One Thing: Personal Unity in Kierkegaards Thought, Macon, GA,Mercer University Press, ; Ronald M. Green, Kierkegaard and Kant: The Hidden Debt,Albany, Suny Press,; Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul,, especially Chapter .

See, for example, P. Tillich, Perspectives on Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Theology, London,SCM, , especially Chapter , The Enlightenment and its Problems.


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If, then, we are to speak of Kierkegaardian anxiety as a kindof sublimity, we cannot simply transfer the Kantian concept intoKierkegaards thought-world. The point is, rather, to expand theconception of anxiety as the boundary between the aesthetic andthe religious in a manner that is essentially conformable to theshape of Kierkegaards thought, although such an expansion isnot specifically thematized by Kierkegaard himself. To be morespecific: by speaking of anxiety as sublime, and by drawing the

analogy with Kant, I seek to reconceive that boundary so that it isno longer merely privative but is expanded to enfold a Janus-likedoubling by which the-religious-or-the-aesthetic is at the same timethe-religious-and-the-aesthetic, enabling us to articulate a presenceof the aesthetic in the religious and the religious in the aesthetic.

The fittingness of an aesthetic term such as the sublime in re-lation to Kierkegaard receives an indirect and even paradoxicaltestimony from Hegel. Although it is never safe to assume thatHegels thought is adequately summarized in the kind of aphorismsexcerpted from his texts by less than sympathetic critics (such asKierkegaard himself !), the correspondence of inner and outer, or ofappearance and idea, would seem to be a basic and non-negotiable

aspiration of the system. If this is so, then we shall hardly expectHegel to be enthusiastic about a concept such as the sublime that, inHegels own expression, involves the mutual non-correspondence(Sichnichtentsprechen) of these polarities. Moreover, when Hegel doesget round to discussing the sublime in his lectures on aesthetics, it isalmost exclusively in the context of the poetry of the Hebrew Bible.Given the awkward marginality of Hebrew religion in Hegels over-all view of history, this is itself a pointer to the difficulty he has withthe concept.

The principle of the sublime, he says, is that of Gods transcen-dence over the world, a transcendence by which the creature isreduced to evanescence and powerlessness and God alone ac-

counted just. As opposed to the realm of the beautiful and theworld of symbolic art, the external form is little more than acci-dental with regard to that which is to be expressed in and throughit. Whereas symbolic religious art, like that of India or Egypt, seeksan appropriate form in which to clothe its religious idea, sublimereligious art is concerned only with meaning (Bedeutung), not form.


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Following from the absolute transcendence of God, the world isde-divinized and experienced in its finitude. No longer the do-main of demi-gods or spirits of innumerable kinds, it has becomethe stage of human history, finite, limited, neither self-sustainingnor self-supporting. The human being whose existence comes toexpression in sublime psalmody is consequently one who keenlyfeels his finitude and the insuperable distance that separates himfrom God. He believes himself to be mortal, without worth and

sinful.If Kant spoke of pleasure in connection with the intertwining of

rational capacity and sensuous incapacity, there would seem to belittle pleasure in such sublime art. It would seem far more appro-priate to speak of it as a form of unhappy consciousness. A life livedwithin these sublime categories demands of the individual a recog-nition of human finitude and separation from God, a confrontationwith mortality, worthlessness and, in the last account, sin. Hegel,like Kant, understands this confrontation quite differently fromKierkegaard. None the less, by connecting the concept of the sub-lime with the spirit of the psalms he helps to fill in the picture of whatmight be involved in the aesthetic-and-religious concept of anxious

sublimity. One aspect of what this mutual non-correspondence ofinner and outer, appearance and idea, meaning and representa-tion might mean is suggested by the well-known Kierkegaardianmelancholy.

The comparison with Kant and Hegel provides us with a firstformulation of a Kierkegaardian concept of the sublime that mightbe called the anxious sublime or anxious sublimity. There are,though, further features to which we must be attentive if we are tounderstand the value of this concept in interpreting Kierkegaard.The first of these concerns the way in which the concept of timeis illuminated by being brought into conjunction with the sublime.

G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen uber die Asthetik, in Werke in Zwanzig Bande, Vol. XIII, Frankfurt,Suhrkamp, , p. .

Again Kant would scarcely have wanted to see anything sublime in melancholy, sincehe would regard melancholy as derogating from freedom rather than leading towards it.Yet Kierkegaard for his part would not have accepted Kants view that melancholy is akind of weakness. He would acknowledge that melancholy can be a cowardly evasion ofthe ethical, but he would also claim that, under certain circumstances, it can itself be asummons to an ethically serious view of life.


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Considering this will gradually bring us down from the abstractlevel on which the discussion has been operating up to now, andreturn us to the very specific location of Kierkegaards authorshipin the dynamics of the early modern spectacular city. In doing soit will also move us into what might seem like a very different con-ceptual and experiential world from that of the psalms. For timedoes not only engage Kierkegaard as a category of metaphysical,anthropological or psychological thought it also concerns him as

a category of cultural life. Our experience and understanding oftime are, for Kierkegaard, inseparable from our lived experienceand understanding of the times in which we live.

I I I

Kierkegaard shared the assumption, widespread amongst aesthetictheorists of his period, that the internal structure of the sphere ofthe aesthetic as well as its overall place in the economy of spiritwas determined by the interrelationship between space and timeexemplified in the various forms and stages of aesthetic production

and experience. Following Lessing, it became customary to dividethe arts into the plastic (architecture, sculpture and painting) andthe musical (music itself, dance, poetry and drama), according towhether space or time had a larger or smaller role in the formalconstitution of the particular form of art concerned. It was furtherassumed thatit was possibleto correlate spatiality withsensuousnessand temporality with spirit, although it was also believed that all art,qua art, was marked by some vestige of spatiality or sensuousness.Naturally, judgements varied as to what should be made of allthis. For a Romantic philosopher of art such as Schelling it meantthat art was pre-eminently suited to be the organon of philosophybecause of its capacity to embrace both sense and spirit and to

represent their unity in aesthetic form. For Hegel, on the otherhand, it meant that art could neverbe more than a stage on the waytowards the realization of spirit. Art, he taught, no longer fulfils ourhighest needs, which are better served by thought and reflection.In this respect at least Kierkegaard would appear to be closer toHegel than to Schelling. It is typical of his critique of the aestheticthat arts inability to express the truth of temporality is one of the


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characteristics that makes it ineligible to serve the articulation ofreligious faith.

The territory which we are penetrating is, as will be obvious,one that is criss-crossed by a sequence of disputed boundaries.There are, for example, the boundaries between the aesthetic andthe religious, appearance and idea, sense and spirit, and time andspace, and, as the reference to Hegel and Schelling might alsosuggest, there are further complexities arising from philosophys

claims to define and regulate what these boundaries are. As thisstudy is directed towards one aspect of the cultural implications ofKierkegaards critical aesthetics, it would not be appropriate, evenif it was feasible, to attempt to settle the multitude of claims andcounter-claims besetting those who venture into such regions. Myaim is simply to show how the co-implication of the aesthetic andthe religious in the anxious sublime manifests itself in the mode ofour experience of time.

The point we are seeking would seem to be provided byKierkegaards discussion of the moment of vision (ieblikket). Thismoment of vision is intimately bound up with the awakening ofanxiety. Also, as Kierkegaard says (perhaps introducing yet an-

other boundary into an already overcrowded map), it marks theintersection and interpenetration of time and eternity. Now, inso-far as the moment of vision is regarded as the revelation of eternity,it would seem to constitute the point at which the uneasy alliancebetween time and representation, an alliance that is normative forthe whole sphere of the aesthetic, is dissolved. Thereby it also be-comes the boundary uniting and dividing, dividing and uniting between representation and the unrepresentable.

In his arguably epochal discussion of time in Chapter ofThe Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard addresses himself to the questionas to how we can think time according to its truth, since, typically,we think of it by means of a spatialized schema of past, present

and future. Why does Kierkegaard call this schema spatialized?Because, he says, it presupposes an understanding of the present asa fixed point in relation to which past and future are represented.But such a geometrical projection cannot help us to think time

For a finediscussion of this seeJanPatocka, Die Lehrevon derVergangenheit der Kunst,in Kunst und Zeit, Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, , pp. .


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according to its temporality. To do this we would need to face upto the situation that there are no fixed points in the endless flux oftime. No moment is ever really present, because even the presentitself is in flux, and without the presence of a present, past andfuture likewise dissolve into unrepresentable flux.

Is time, then, simply unrepresentable?No, because if the moment as the mathematically conceived

atom of time proves insubstantial, the moment of vision provides

a way of thinking time that does not falsify times temporality, whileallowing time to give itself to representation after a manner. It is im-portant to note that Kierkegaard has been ill-served by translationhere not that anyone can envy thetranslators task of providing anEnglish equivalent to a style that depends on rich overlays of poetic,religious and philosophical connotations and makes much play ofthe resulting possibilities of ambiguity, irony and humour. Thus,we need to notice that when Kierkegaard speaks of the momentas the geometrical point from which the schema of past, presentand future is projected, he consistently uses the Latin-derived termmoment, and it is noticeable that he also makes unusual use ofanother Latin-derived term, spatiere, for to spatialize. In contrast

to this, the term I have rendered moment of vision (followingHeideggers translators in their translation of the cognate Germanterm) is the Danish term ieblikket, paraphrased in the most recentEnglish version as the blink of an eye, but better rendered theglance or even gaze of an/the eye. Given this figurative chargeit therefore seems peculiar that Kierkegaard has chosen just thisterm, since the emphasis on visuality would seem to lock it into thesphere of the spatial and, therefore, the aesthetic. What makes it

The term is itself derived from the technical printing use of the term spatium, and it isvery possible that Kierkegaard was the first to make it the basis of a verb, since such ausage is only acknowledged by dictionaries of loan-words subsequent to Kierkegaardstime.

The earlier English translation by Lowrie did give glance rather than blink in expli-cation of the term. Hong and Hong draw a distinction between the Latin and Danishterms by enclosing the latter in quotation marks. The point being made is not, however,going to be obvious to the reader. Gaze would seem to take away from the momentarycharacter of what is being talked about, although there are contexts where this wouldbe a more appropriate translation of the term Blik, as in art-historical discussions of thegaze. Cf. R. Linnet, Kierkegaard og blikkets koder, Copenhagen, Center for Urbanitet ogstetik, Arbejdspapir , .


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appropriate to use it of the coming-to-consciousness of the divisionbetween time and eternity?

Kierkegaard is acutely aware of the problem. The glance ofthe eye is a figurative expression and therefore it is not easy to dealwith, he acknowledges. However, he continues, it is a beautifulword to consider. Nothing is as swift as a glance of the eye, andyet it is commensurate with the content of the eternal. Thus whenIngeborg looks out over the sea after Frithiof, this is a picture of

what is expressed in the figurative word (CA, p. ).Still, we might be uneasy. We might, for instance, recall the

constant emphasis on the visual quality of aesthetic existence epit-omized in the role of the eye in The Seducers Diary, and theSeducers pride in his side-glance, as he calls it, and his use of theeye both to capture interesting images and to impress his own im-age onto the consciousness of others. We might also recall that thepreoccupation with seeing and being seen in contemporary societyis, for Kierkegaard, indicative of its inherent vacuity and triviality.

Like many Christian moralists since Augustine, Kierkegaard read-ily identifies the glance or gaze as the lust of theeye, theepitomeof those seductive powers that chain us to the realm of sense.

Kierkegaards example of Ingeborgs glance, however, points toanother way of understanding things. In the first instance, as thetext tells us, her glance looks across the sea, after her departing loverFrithiof. What she is looking at is a vanishing object, somethingin the process of disappearing from her field of vision. Moreover,Ingeborg knows that while Frithiof is away, she will be forciblymarried by her brothers to another, a situation of which Frithiof isunaware. She is therefore in possession of knowledge that, for var-ious reasons, she cannot communicate to him, i.e., the knowledgethat their separation is final and irrevocable.

In The Concept of Anxiety Kierkegaard goes on to say that the in-stant she expresses her feelings in a sigh or a word the moment

of vision in the strong sense is essentially past, because a sigh or a

See, for example, JP V: , IV: . For a further discussion of this aspect ofKierkegaards contemporary culture, see Chapter below.

For the interpretation of Ingeborgs glance that follows I am essentially indebted toN. N. Eriksen, Kierkegaards Category of Repetition: A Reconstruction, Kierkegaard MonographSeries , Berlin and New York, Walter de Gruyter, , esp. pp. ff.


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word would be an attempt to articulate what she feels within therelativistic web of language and temporally determined commu-nication. The pure moment of vision, however, is the unqualified,because unarticulated, apprehension of the eternal in, with andunder the incognito of a temporal moment: the apprehension, inthis case, that the parting is for ever.

In a couple of later journal entries Kierkegaard raises the ques-tion of what he calls an eternal image. The examples he gives

suggest that what he means by this is an image that would capturea single moment that was both unique and expressive. Its eternalquality would arise from the infinite internal reciprocity betweenform and content, no matter how insignificant the content mightbe in itself. (One example he gives is of a man fishing for eels froma boat.) There is no fissure in its internal consistency. The conjunc-tion of eternity and time called the moment of vision, however,is very different. What the image of Ingeborgs glance gives us isprecisely that which cannot come to expression within the imagewe are given: the eternal separation of the lovers.

The metaphor of the moment of vision will not and cannottherefore allow us to think of the eternal as the object of a particular

kind of experience. It is not a special sort of moment within aconcatenation of moments. If we are to understand it as a temporalterm at all (and, especially, as a term that provides the key to themeaning of time), we have to renounce what Heidegger would calltheeverydayconception of time,the conception of time that thinksit more geometrico. In its strong sense it is the fullness of time, thekairos of the New Testament, the moment that yields a visionof the meaning of life as lived before the face of the eternal. Inits most decisive application it is understood by Kierkegaard ina Christological sense, as the moment of the incarnation, themoment in which the eternal comes into time and makes timemeaningful.

The moment of vision is, potentially, all this. More to ourpresent purpose it also indicates the possibility that the visible mightshow forth the invisible, the figurative figure the unfigurable, andthe metaphorical name what withdraws from all expression and

JP I: and Pap. VIII A . See also my article Aesthetics and the Aesthetic, BritishJournal of Aesthetics, No. , , pp. .


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naming. By choosing, with deliberation, precisely this metaphor ofthe glance of the eye, Kierkegaard thus lays open the whole fieldof the seeable to a double interpretation, according to whether wedirect our gaze spectator-wise towards the seen (and nothing more)or see the seen itself as bearing an unseen and unseeable surplusof meaning that can never be stabilized or regulated within theparameters of the seeable. It is notable in this respect that in anetymological aside, Kierkegaard brings the moment of vision into

connection with the Greek term exaiphantes, which he understandsas the invisible and which he regards as more pregnant than theLatin-derived moment, which he connects with motion and thesimple evanescence of time (CA, p. ).

However, and this moves us closer to what will be the mainfocus of the present enquiry, the moment of vision is, in anotheraspect, indistinguishable from the moment in the sense of the mo-mentary, the succession of figured experiences, the moving picturesthat make up the content of everyday consciousness.

I V

To see how this is so, and what the cultural implications of thisambiguity might be, let us turn to the work Kierkegaard called,simply, A Literary Review and that dealt with Madame ThomasineGyllembourgs novel Two Ages. This review is of particular interestbecause Kierkegaard used it to make his most sustained critiqueof modernity as the age of reflection. However, if this critiqueprovides the climax of Kierkegaards book, it opens with a consid-eration of the literary character of the author of Two Ages that isalso full of important insights into Kierkegaards understanding ofmodernity. The author is said by Kierkegaard to have contributedfaithfully to the Danish literary scene for twenty years and through-out that time to have produced works that reflect a consistent life-view. She has been faithful to her public, but also faithful to herself,and this has been rewarded by her readers faithfulness to her.Her novels are said to inspire confidence in life and in the essen-tial goodness of human relationships, despite the passage of timeand the disappointments and reversals that time brings in its train.Her qualities are said to be very much those of an older generation,


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and they are qualities with corresponding values and achievementsthat Kierkegaard claims should be respected and preserved. Theyounger generation, however, has a very different outlook. It doesnot value continuity with the past but, instead, the momentary(Det ieblikkelige ), a brilliant beginning, and a new era dating fromthis are the little that is understood, that is, if it is indeed possibleto understand the momentary and the beginning, inasmuch as themomentary, after all, lacks the eternal and the beginning lacks the

conclusion (TA, p. ).The slogan of the younger generation is What the Age requires.

However, Kierkegaards own expression here contains an ambigu-ity that, once more, English loses. The term for the Age is, simply,Tiden, a word that could, in other contexts, be translated time.In the expression what the Age requires it is therefore possiblealso to hear what time requires. The Age, heard like this, mightbe interpreted as what a life lived in time without any perspectiveon eternity might give itself over to and what such a life in factgives itself over to is the momentary. This may (in the form leastrespected by Kierkegaard) express itself as jumping on politicalbandwagons, or it may appear as the dedicated following of fash-

ion in music, clothes, art, the whole merry-go-round of seeing andbeing-seen, the world of the eye, the gaze, in which people keep acareful eye on each other (passe paa hinanden med inene) (TA, p. ),but not in such a way as to allow the otherness of the other to beseen for what it is. Nevertheless, in all of this, at every moment, themoment may become, may be seen as, the moment of vision. Everytime and every triviality is equally near and equally far from theeternal. The culture of modernity, as described by Kierkegaard, isprecisely the culture of those whose horizons are completely filledby the-time-that-now-is, the momentary, the shock of the new. Itis therefore a culture that systematically excludes the fearful fas-cination of anxiety and sublimity yet the temporal structure of

even the most fleeting and ephemeral novelty means that it has thepossibility of revealing the interlacing of the two meanings of themoment in their mutual non-correspondence, and this revelationis, to reiterate, the revelation of the anxious sublime. It cannot besurprising that the affective correlate of this moment often takesthe form of melancholy, a sense of loss, emptiness or absence in the


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midst of the density of a purely momentary life, an unfocussed,unnameable and ungraspable sense of something missing from thepressure of the present age, the time that is too much with us, earlyand late and melancholy, of course, is not what the age requires!It is, however, an affliction that has insinuated itself deeply intothe culture of modernity, permeating the art, literature and musicof Romanticism and being raised to a fine art in the ennui of theBaudelairean dandy. Melancholy is the shadow permanently ac-

companying the forward rush of the age: yet in fleeing this shadowit flees that which would give it the possibility of deeper insight intoits own truths, limitations and possibilities. And behind such melan-choly lurks the omnipresent but systematically ignored spectre ofdeath ignored by the dazzling culture of the ephemeral, but thechosen dancing partner of Kierkegaards most urbane pseudonym,Johannes Climacus (see PF, p. ).

Mention of the Baudelairean dandy suggests a further aspectof the interrelationship between the sublime, the moment andthe momentary in the context of the present age. This presentage (Nutiden: the now-time, the time-that-now-is), also known asmodernity, is not simply a conceptual construct, although the

conceptual analysis and modelling of modernity are both possibleand important. Nor is it sufficient to add a historical periodization,for modernity hasnot only a time, but also a quite specific place: themodern city. Modernity, in an essential sense, is urbanity. But, as we haveseen, the city was the site in which the modern discourse of the sub-lime originated. The undecidability of the sublime experience an experience that in every case is equally readable as sublimeor banal mirrors and is mirrored in the ambivalence of the mo-ment that in every case is equally readable as a potential momentof vision, as a paradoxical conjunction of time and eternity, and asthe merely momentary. Analogously the city itself is simultaneouslyexperienceable as the heightening and the levelling of experience,

relationships, values. The city brings into the compass of a single

The critical role of Kierkegaardian melancholy in relation to the culture of modernityhas been explored by Harvie Ferguson in his Melancholy and the Critique of Modernity: SrenKierkegaards Religious Psychology, London, Routledge, . Cf. Julia Kristevas study of theplace of melancholy in the culture of modernity in her Soleil noir: depression et melancol ie,Paris, Gallimard, .


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human space the highest achievements of human political, culturaland intellectual life and, as the ultimate triumph over what Marxcalled the idiocy of rural life, is the epitome of the sublime: butit is again and again experienced and decried by its inhabitantsas no more than the swarm, the anthill of man of the masses, abanal realization of the mathematical sublime in all its endlesslyrepeatable meaninglessness.

It might be objected that the world of the spectacularized city was

alien to Kierkegaard. His Copenhagen was, after all, still a walledcity, a market town even. Adornos comment that Kierkegaard didnot inhabit the hour of the metropolis is well known, although,as so often, Adorno offers no evidence in support of his assertion.In reality the evidence is that although Kierkegaards Copenhagenwas clearly not Baudelaires Paris, the same dynamics that createdthe Paris of the s were already active in the Copenhagen of thes, and were, perhaps, all the clearer because of the smaller scaleand relative backwardness of the latter. In Copenhagens provincialatmosphere any significant change was immediately and strikinglyvisible, no matter how small it might appear in comparison withthe Parisian antitype. The shape of things to come was already

manifesting itself in a variety of ways to those who had eyes to see,and I believe that it is not only possible but illuminating to thinkof Kierkegaard as a man of the spectacular city of the nineteenthcentury. It was precisely and even literally the city (his city ofCopenhagen) that provided the site on whichthe ambiguous dramaof the moment was enacted.

A quotation from the pamphlets attacking the Church thatKierkegaard published in the last year of his life pamphlets col-lectively entitled The Moment of Vision pulls together the threadswe have been attempting to disentangle and demonstrates their in-terconnectedness more eloquently than any secondary comment:

On these assumptions [that we are all Christians], the New Testament,considered as a guide for the Christian, becomes a historical curiosity,somewhat like a handbook for travellers in some country when everything

For a full defence of this claim seemy study Poor Paris! Kierkegaards Critique of the SpectacularCity, Kierkegaard Monograph Series , Berlin and New York, Walter de Gruyter, ,especially Chapter , Kierkegaard Enters the Spectacular City. For a discussion ofAdornos comment see p. .


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in that country is completely changed. Such a handbook is of no moreserious use to travellers in that land, but is of great value in light reading.While one is comfortably riding along in the train, one reads in the hand-book that Here is the frightful Wolf Ravine, where one plunges ,fathoms down under the earth; while one is sitting and smoking a cigarin a welcoming cafe, one reads in the handbook that Here is the hideoutof a robber band that attacks and beats up travellers here it is, that is,here it was, since now (how amusing to imagine how it was), now it is notthe Wolf s Ravine but a railway, and not a robber band but a welcoming

cafe. (M, p. , amended)

In thesubstitution of the railway and the cafe for the Wolf Ravineand the badlands as in the substitution of the travellers guide-bookfor the New Testament we see the epitome of how, for Kierkegaard,the sublime and the everyday modern life of the city, the eternal andthe merely momentary, are so folded together that each place andeach time retains the memory or the possibility of the other, whilst,at the same time,theiressential difference is all themore highlightedby their very juxtaposition. Kierkegaard finds in the surface worldof modern urbanitys ephemeral culture of diversion, spectacular-ity and commodified exchange a text capable of disclosing a very

different field of possibilities aesthetically: the sublimity of the, fathoms, religiously: the choice of the eternal in the livedsingularity of the moment of vision. The vacuity of the present agebecomes the figure under which the desert and mountain of thepsalmist become, once more, an existential possibility.

It is the main task of this book to open up and to begin to exploresome of the moments of Kierkegaards authorship in which thisambiguous intertwining of seemingly incommensurable discoursescomes most clearly to view. It means reading Kierkegaard pre-cisely as a writer of his place and time in an utterly prosaic sense,whilst simultaneously reading him as a religious commentator onand critic of that same place and time. Humanly and as a writer

Kierkegaard, rejecting the escapism of Romantic exoticism andmedievalism, sought to discover how to practise Christianity herein Copenhagen, in Amager Square, in the everyday hustle and bus-tle of weekday life (PC, p. , amended). Insisting on maintainingthe perspective of the extraordinary in the midst of a culture oflevelling, he wanted to believe that every ordinary occasion can be


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the extraordinary. As another poet of the early modern city put it,every grain of sand can reveal infinity, and every hour eternity (butthey dont have to, and it is always a kind of grace when they do).Whether in any particular case we are to read the cultural text inthis way or in that, or to read in it the co-present yet contradictoryentwining of both, the sublime judgement is precisely a judgementthat can never be assimilated into a technical discourse, turned intoa law or norm or cultivated as a habit. It always bursts out with an

element of surprise, and to articulate it is to put oneself at risk ofmaking the most appalling errors of judgement, calling sublimewhat is merely nugatory, and honouring with the term religiouswhat is mere ostentation.

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