Why Read Kierkegaard

7/29/2019 Why Read Kierkegaard

1/10

Introduction: Why

Read Kierkegaard?

and what of this present book?

Reading Kierkegaard opens out a world. An eclectic and versatile

author, he has much of interest to say on a range of subjects: theology,

the nature of philosophical writing, ethics, the concept of the individ-

ual, politics, and human relations. Employing a variety of genres,

philosophical, pastoral, and lyrical, he can write didactically, mov-

ingly, and not least be hilariously funny. Kierkegaard plumbs the

depths of what it is to be a human being; one who lives with anxiety

and aspiration, and who trusts and rejoices in God, finding in that

relationship the resources that make for wholeness. Often extolled as

the ur-existentialist, possessed of an observant eye for human foibles

and the pathos of existence Kierkegaard delves into the minutiae of

human lives. He will elaborate an intricate understanding of what it is

to be a self that, willing to be itself and grounded in God, comes

into its own; an understanding to which one can well hold in the wider

way in which he first depicts this without necessarily going along with

his specifically Christian twist. His edifying writings extol us to be

strict if also gentle with ourselves while compassionately observant

and thus merciful in our dealings with others; his political judgementsif conservative are strikingly apposite; his prayers sheer poetry.

Returning once and again to these texts one never fails to be struck


2/10

by new insights. Thinkers with whom it is this worthwhile to engage

are few indeed.

Butsurmounting these many merits of the authorshipthere is

a profounder reason to grapple with Kierkegaard. To a greater degree

than any other of whom I am aware, Kierkegaard grasped the chal-

lenge that modernity represents to Christian claims, recasting how

Christianity must present itself in the light of it. For, as he well

understood, Christian contentions are compatible neither with the

epistemology (the understanding as to what is knowledge) nor the

moral axioms of a post-Enlightenment age. However, having

acknowledged the depth of his probing and the imaginative nature

of his response, as one delves deeper one comes to recognize that his

response is undergirded by a whole epistemology which is quite

foreign to how (one must surmise) most of us think today. Kierke-

gaard is surprisingly all of a piece: he holds suppositions that allow

him to think as he does (albeit that he knows Christian claims

paradoxical to reason). It is when one has uncovered this that a debate

can take place with him at the much deeper level of epistemological

presuppositions. We are into fascinating territory; that one who lived

so recently could think so differently. It was largely his Lutheran

context that allowed Kierkegaard in developing Lutheran thought to

make the response that he did to modernity; and that that is the case

will be a major theme of this book. There are other ways too, as for

example his ideas about the origin of humankind or his social and

political presuppositions, in which Kierkegaards position is at odds

with what we now know or hold. Exploring these sheds a shaft of light

on the extraordinary transitions which humanity has negotiated in the

past 170 or so years.What, we may well ask, is it to consider questions of truth and

ethics in relation to the thought of a past yet relatively recent author?

There is a sense in which one must necessarily deliberate in relation to

the thinking of those who have preceded us: one cannot progress in a

vacuum. Quoting the person whose insights were perhaps more

seminal than those of any other for his own work, allowing him to

take up the position that he did, Kierkegaard muses:

Write. For whom? Write for the dead, for those in the past whom you love.

Will they read me? Yes, for they come back as posterity. (Johann Georg

Hamann).

2 j k i e r k e g a a rd : e x p o s i t i o n a n d c r i t i q u e


3/10

Write. For whom? Write for the dead, for those in the past whom you love.

Will they read me? No!1

Meanwhile the past thinker, whether read or not, is always engaged in aone-sided dialogue! No more could Hamann read Kierkegaard

than can Kierkegaard respond to me. But do the dead come back as

posterity? It is conceivable that in considering my critique of Kierke-

gaard there will be those inclined to side with him against me. That

would be a debate that I would that I could enter into. My sense,

however, is that change is fundamental and that such a person would

not express what he or she had to say quite as did Kierkegaard. There are

a range of matters such a discussion would need to take into accountwhich were not fully on the scene at the time that Kierkegaard wrote (or

it must be said, in as much as they were present, Kierkegaard was not

always minded to face). What is so interesting is that although the past

world may be intelligible one can never simply stand in its shoes.

Recognition of such change has inclined some in Arts subjects

(particularly it would seem in North America) to conclude that one

cannot adjudicate on truth, that there are but fashions and opinions.

Now the present author is far from unsympathetic to Continentalphilosophy, if indeed such thinking has been a correct interpretation

of the thought of one like Jacques Derrida, which I doubt. What

strikes me, however, is that on the contrary in a discipline like

theology we cannot evade questions of truth. That discipline is

historical and relative in as much as those statements that (until

very recently) have been held absolute, the great Christological state-

ments of the 4th and 5th centuries, were worked out within a par-

ticular philosophical climate (and, not least, judged politicallyapposite). But otherwise it must be said that it is both that we now

think within a different philosophical milieu and that, in an objective

sense, we have knowledge which undermines or casts in doubt what

was earlier deemed truth. It was after all because with part of himself

Kierkegaard was a modern man that he saw so clearly the challenges

that Christianity was up against. Meanwhile in the field of ethics not

only is it that we have broken through to biological knowledge (such

that notably it is no longer possible to hold the male of the species

1 Sren Kierkegaards Journals and Papers, eds and trans. Howard V. Hong &Edna H. Hong (Bloomington, IN and London, 196778) [henceforth JP], vol. 2,no. 1550 (Pap. X2 A 15), n.d., 1843.

in tro d u ctio n j 3


4/10

normative for humanity), but furthermore we have thought through

the implications of a priori principles first enunciated in the Enlight-

enment as to the humanity and equality of all persons. But none of

this means that, in the field of ethics, Kierkegaard has not much to

teach us; he is astute in his thinking about how one shall treat others.

Of Kierkegaard one might say something similar, though in his case

he chooses to revivify the past in the light of present. In many respects

as I have already indicated (and this could hardly not be the case of a

thinker writing in the 1840s) Kierkegaard was a child of modernity.

Living this side of Hegel, he has a sense of the human being as social,

knows that the self is formed relationally, though he ostentatiously

amends this in contending (together with his Lutheran tradition) that

such a self is formed in the first instance in relation to God. Further-

more, living post-Kant he has a strong sense of the autonomy and

hence also the responsibility and integrity of human beings. The

question becomes how he shall bring together a sense of self with the

foundational nature of the relationship to God. Kierkegaard cannot

simply go back to Luther; though surprisingly modern, Luther did not

have a post-Enlightenment sense of the individual. He cannot even go

back to the time of Lessing, in many ways his hero. A whole revolution

in human self-understanding has intervened with the Enlightenment

and Romanticism. Furthermore, after Kant in particular, there was no

way in which human beings could reason to God, no natural theology

possible. Deeply apprised of these developments, Kierkegaard thinks

humanity to have taken a wrong turning. But Kierkegaard did not

write as though these developments had never taken place: he was

profoundly indebted to them. It was simply that, drawing on his native

Lutheranism, he must take up a novel stance in relation to them.Where there is a real gap between Kierkegaards ways of thinking and

how I surmise most modern Europeans and many North Americans

think today is in the realm of what one might name the epistemology

of history. Kierkegaard seems to have almost no sense of what I shall

call the fact that there is a causal nexus; that is to say that events are

repeatable, that they are one of a type, that there are no interventions.

To employ19th-century terms, Kierkegaard is a supernaturalist not a

naturalist. As we shall see, he seems to have held to a notion somewhatakin to what in the patristic period is known as recapitulation, namely

figuralism, such that God is held to intervene once and again, but in a

cyclical pattern, bringing his purposes to fulfilment. This Kierkegaard

4 j k i e r k e ga a r d : e x p o s i t i o n a n d c r i t i q u e


5/10

combines with a Lutheran structure of thought whereby God (or the

future) is actively present in the moment (to employ Kierkegaards

vocabulary). Could I but debate with Kierkegaard it would be this

whole different sense of things that would perforce be the subject-

matter of our initial conversation! For (much as I believe in the

effectiveness of prayer or quiet loving thought for another) I take for

granted that there can in this sense be no interventions. That we

become ourselves by holding together our future and our present in

the moment is another matter and may well be the case; here it may be

said that (coming out of his Lutheran context) Kierkegaard was the first

modern existentialist. The wholly other sense present in Kierkegaard of

the futures relation to the individual, let alone of God, as compared

with Hegels social and collective thinking wherebyGeist (rather than

God) becomes one with the unfolding of history, is momentous.

But why choose Kierkegaard as the one in the presence of whom to

think through such fundamental matters? Precisely perhaps because

he was in so many ways conservative, if radically conservative. He

wishes to re-situate Christianity in the midst of modernity and also in

the face of modernity. His was a conservative (or traditional) form of

Christianity: not for Kierkegaard the attempt that notably Schleier-

macher had made to accommodate it to the post-Enlightenment

world. It is significant that Kierkegaard did not really want to know

about critical historical analysis of the bible, willing simply to cir-

cumvent its results as not relevant to the issue of faith. The bench-

mark as to what is Christianity which underlies his earlyPhilosophical

Fragments and with which he persists throughout the authorship is

that of the Formula of Chalcedon of451; that the second personaof a

triune God was in two natures, fully divine and fully human. That,for Kierkegaard, is Christianity. Yet it is a radical conservatism as,

drawing on the intrinsic existentialism of his Lutheran heritage, he

seeks to find a way to relate to such a truth in the modern age. Thus

for him faith will stand over against reason. His stance may indeed be

how Christianity must necessarily commend itself today, but if that is

the case it follows that there are profound questions, not only epi-

stemological but also ethical, that must confront Christian belief and

to which Kierkegaard may well have no answer.While I of course consider these issues, in the first instance this

book is intended to enable those who have not as yet read Kierke-

gaard to do so with intelligence. Hence my subtitle Exposition and



6/10

Critique. On the one hand I expound Kierkegaard, setting him in his

intellectual context and historical setting; on the other pursue a far-

flung consideration of the issues that his authorship raises. Of course

there will also be much to appreciate about these texts. Kierkegaard

felt he lacked dialogue partners, writing:

I am neither proud nor self-important nor vaingloriousI am a thinker, an

immensely passionate thinker. And what irritates me is just this, that some

would like to abuse and insult me, others to plague me with distinctions and

honoursbut, help me if possible to go further, be of assistance in under-

standing more than I have understood, none, none, not a single mothers soul

will do that. . . . And it is an agony to have to live in such a way that, in effect,

I have to let them think me mad just to be allowed to thinkotherwise a

great fuss may be made about me, I will have to tap my wine-glass and make

speeches at gatherings, loved and honoured by all those who do not think.2

Even in its golden age, to which Kierkegaard belonged, Copenhagen,

that market town as he was want to call it (Copenhagen = mer-

chants harbour), could not provide the intellectual interchange that

he desired. What I am noting, however, is that today the dialogue

takes place over a time gap.Should one not, however, take on the dead? I am reminded here

of Karl Barths listing of Schleiermacher among those with whom

upon reaching the kingdom of heaven (after paying his respects to

Mozartin this Kierkegaard would not have dissented) he will wish

to converse. That is to say he who Barths life work had been intent on

overthrowing. That fine Schleiermacher scholar Richard R. Niebuhr

once told me that having completed his decidedly non-Barthian book

on Schleiermacher he went with some trepidation to visit Barth. Nowthe Barth family lived in one of those Swiss houses designed in former

days to house cattle on the ground floor, such that a staircase rose to

the living quarters on the first. Beside each step of the staircase there

hung a picture of one of the greats of theology, from Kant and

Schleiermacher forwards (a veritable Protestant theology in the 19th

century). Upon Niebuhrs enquiring whether the order be ascending

or descending, Barth proclaimed it to be descending, that is to say

Kant and Schleiermacher were the greatest and things had steadily

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

6 j k i e r k e g a a r d: e x p o s i t i o n a n d c r i t i q u e


7/10

got worse. And who is it with whom Kierkegaard sought to dialogue;

whom he elevated as worth his attention? Those whose thought stood

in many ways diametrically opposed to his own; Socrates the pagan

and Lessing the sceptic. But they had integrity. It is this thought that

should surely give us licence not simply to report on Kierkegaard but

to think that we may and should take issue with him. It is, after all, to

take him seriously.

Through the manner of his writing Kierkegaard precisely invites

such dialogue. Perhaps it was his love of Socrates that taught him to

engage his reader in this way. Maybe he was also in this respect

attentive to Schleiermacher, whose Vertraute Briefe uber Friedrich

Schlegels Lucinde he much admired. But then Schleiermacher, the

great translator of Plato into German, had himself presumably

absorbed engaged thinking from the ancient world. As did Plato in

his dialogues, Kierkegaard will develop different intellectual (and

existential) positions through depicting different characters. He

may himself take up no one position, though one may well know

what he thinks. Kierkegaards writing is often in tantalizing fashion

open ended. This enables the reader to enter into the writing,

developing his or her own thinking in terms of his categories (though

one may also want to mould a position otherwise than occurred to

Kierkegaard). The use of pseudonyms, moreover, allowed Kierke-

gaard to take some useful distance from his text, giving the reader

space.3

3 I do not believe that one needs to go overboard on the issue of the pseudo-

nymity of Kierkegaards authorship. Undoubtedly, as I have suggested, it served apurpose. There is some tension within the opus as a whole as between differentpseudonymous positions, but this tension would seem to reflect a tension intrin-sic to Lutheran thought. It was scarcely that Kierkegaard was trying to hide hisauthorship, frequently giving his name as editorand everyone knew who hadpenned the works. One should remark that it was a common device in his societyto employ a pseudonym; the Danish primus J. P. Mynster did likewise, equallyallowing his authorship to be instantly recognized. Some commentators makemuch of the fact that, at the conclusion of the Postscript, Kierkegaard commentsthat in the pseudonymous authorship there is not a single word from him. ButI do not think that ones judgement on the pseudonymity should be distorted by asingle, possibly flippant remark made at the time that Kierkegaard was thinking oftaking up a pastorate and it could have been awkward directly to own the work. Ithas to be said that the published work in its development has an inner consistencyand that it is deeply commensurate with the thoughts that Kierkegaard committedto the privacy of his Journal. Furthermore, it has come to light that on not a fewoccasions he only decided at the last moment to publish under a pseudonym.



8/10

The Kierkegaardian texts that I grapple with in this book are those

central to the theological and philosophical themes of the authorship.

(Thus I must notably omit Either/Or and there are other texts to

which I make the odd reference without having the space to consider

them.) My thinking is that, having tackled these texts, the novice

reader can surely make his or her own way. It is difficult to know in

what detail to expound Kierkegaards writing. There may well be

Kierkegaard scholars who on other counts (notably my drawing

attention to the Lutheran context of Kierkegaards work) find it

profitable to read my book for whom such exposition is unnecessary.

(Though it is in the context of expounding the text that I often draw

attention to other matters and not least the Lutheran presuppositions

present.) For the novice reader, however, it is all-important to be able

to comprehend the texts, invariably either unwieldly on the one hand

or dense on the other. One may initially lack a compass as to what

they actually concern, which is frequently none too obvious. (If any

reader thinks I am mistaken in my interpretation I shall be glad to

know.) What has interested me, moreover, is to find that the material

I give in the Introductions to chapters is often not easily available.

Readers desiring to know more of Kierkegaard as a person may wish to

turn to the final chapter at an early stage. The introductory chapter,

Kierkegaards Intellectual Context, is designed to enable those less

informed about modern Continental philosophy or ignorant of

Lutheran thought to get on board.

Behind this authorship lay a human life lived, one may say, ecstat-

ically. Kierkegaard sensed time was short; he had long nursed a

premonition that he would die young and was frequently none too

well. Spending ten years as a student, reading everything except thetheology he was supposed to be studying, he had had a superb

education, in literature, philosophy, and the thought of the ancient

world. That he crammed what must be one of the major authorships

of modern times into little more than a decade was an extraordinary

achievement. Meanwhile he did not fail to live life to the full. As a

young man he had enjoyed an exuberant existencewhich he was

later to regret as he became more religious. He entertained friend-

ships and clearly delighted in children. Nor did he spurn the poor.Kierkegaard was known for the way in which, on his walks around

Copenhagen, he would converse with all and sundry. He comments

on the fact that people would pass by horses that had their nose bags



9/10

tangled such that they could not feed, so one must surmise that he

helped. Highly observant, all he encountered was potentially raw

material for the authorship. It is this that makes his writing so

engaging. Born into advantaged circumstances, for much of his life

he was well-off, feasting on fine food and having a penchant for

fashionable clothes. But he also knew what it was to fear poverty,

leaving at his death almost nothing. This was a very human life,

running the gamut of human emotions. He worked to ward off

depression.

From such a life an authorship emerged that is literature. Kierke-

gaard said of himself that he was the greatest prose writer that the

Danish language had known and his fellow countrymen have not

dissented. It was his fate to write in a minor European language;or

should we say his fortune given that he writes I am proud of my

mother tongue whose secrets I know, the language I treat more

lovingly than a flautist his instrument.4 In this regard I have a striking

memory of sitting in the theatre in Copenhagen at the time of that

citys celebration of its status as that years European City of Culture,

a single actor on the stage under a spotlight reading Kierkegaard. The

audience was spellbound, alternately so silent you could have heard a

pin drop and falling about in laughter. It was an indication of

something often not realized about one who has been given the

epithet the gloomy Dane. Indeed Kierkegaard takes sin seriously

and is no optimist about humankind. He will never let human beings

be self-satisfiedly comfortable, failing to confront ultimate issues. But

a great love of life emerges from his writings. Of course much is

inevitably lost in translation: the alliteration, the play on words. But it

is still the case that more particularly in his edifying or spiritualdiscourses the cadences of his prose in some way comes through in

translation. What is striking is Kierkegaards ability to find the right

tone, style, and structure to suit each of his books, so various in

their subject-matter. The authorship is extraordinarily eclectic. Of his

time, Kierkegaard was also in his writing style before his time; this,

too, contributing to the time lag in his discovery.

We possess few images of Kierkegaard who, decidedly shy about

having his portrait drawn, would fail to turn up for sittings. Nor did

4 JP6:6259 (Pap. IX A 298).



10/10

he deign to have a photograph (or daguerreotype as this new tech-

nique was known) taken, an unfortunate oversight on the part of one

who aspired to be discovered by posterity. In his day an Italian had

already set up his stall in Copenhagen. Fascinated by steam engines

(American, locomotives) and hot-air balloons Kierkegaard was not

entirely averse to modernity, so he had better have availed himself of

this opportunity. The well-known sketch on the front cover of this

book owes to his second cousin, Christian Kierkegaard, by profession

a drawing master. If it was executed in 1840, Kierkegaard was 27. We

have furthermore an interesting sketch from his later years by one

H. P. Hansen, reproduced on the back cover. It appears to have been

drawn from a first-floor window as, with flamboyant hat and spec-

tacles perched on his nose, Kierkegaard marched by. Walking the

streets of Copenhagen today one can still piece together something of

the sights and the world that was his. Would that that citys most

famous son could hear of the waves he has caused (as he half expected

he would) and know of the affection in which today he is held by so

many.


Documents

Why Read Kierkegaard