Insight Editions · No. 50
The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard
Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino (eds.)
Essays by sixteen scholars examine Kierkegaard’s life, writings, and central themes, including irony, faith, anxiety, despair, love, ethics, and the formation of the individual.
A study guide to The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard by Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino (eds.). Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book in Brief
The argument in brief
Each essay makes one central move, and the map chains them.
The argument map: from Kierkegaard's Denmark to the purpose-free passion of faith.
Each essay makes one central move, listed in the table below; the map shows how they chain from context to concepts to the late religious writings.
How the book is built
The book carries a list of twenty-five abbreviations, from C (The Crisis in the Life of an Actress) to UDVS. It cites the Hong Kierkegaard's Writings and, where available, Hannay's Penguin translations (EOh, FTh, SUDh). It is dedicated "To the memory of Edwin Ellis". The contributors span philosophy, theology, history and literary theory: two Kierkegaard translators (Hannay, Kirmmse), the curator of the Hong Kierkegaard Library (Marino), and German systematic theologians (Deuser, Kodalle). The order runs from context through concepts to the late religious writings, and essays answer one another: Evans replies to Poole, Green to Evans, and Jackson to Ferreira's volitionism question.
Who speaks in the authorship: the voices the essays must keep apart.
| Ch | Title (author) | In one line |
|---|---|---|
| Intro. | Introduction (Hannay, Marino) | Against the irrationalist myth; mapping a "vast middle ground" between theology and postmodernism. |
| 1 | "Out with It!" (Kirmmse) | Kierkegaard's coming of age and Denmark's 1848-49 breakthrough are one story. |
| 2 | The unknown Kierkegaard (Poole) | Twentieth-century readers borrowed or flattened him; indirect communication was missed. |
| 3 | Art in an age of reflection (Pattison) | A coherent aesthetic ends in either art or religion. |
| 4 | Kierkegaard and Hegel (Westphal) | An Aufhebung of Hegel aimed at the collapse of human and divine. |
| 5 | Neither either nor or (Cross) | Pure ironic negativity undermines itself; Climacus repairs it. |
| 6 | Realism and antirealism (Evans) | Postscript joins antifoundationalism to realism about truth. |
| 7 | Existence, emotion, and virtue (Roberts) | Character as concern-based emotion makes him a virtue ethicist. |
| 8 | Faith and the leap (Ferreira) | The leap is a passion-driven qualitative transition, not willpower. |
| 9 | Arminian edification (Jackson) | Grace is indispensable but resistible. |
| 10 | "Developing" Fear and Trembling (Green) | Four layers of meaning, the deepest Pauline and Lutheran. |
| 11 | Repetition (Mooney) | Getting the world back as gift, "recollection forward". |
| 12 | Anxiety (Marino) | Anxiety tied to sin, a school for the spirit. |
| 13 | The variety of despair (Hannay) | Despair is unwillingness to be the self one is expected to be. |
| 14 | Christian ethics (Quinn) | Works of Love and Practice in Christianity widen the moral gap; grace bridges it. |
| 15 | Religious dialectics and Christology (Deuser) | Religiousness A presupposed by B; Christology turned poetic. |
| 16 | The utilitarian self (Kodalle) | Faith as purpose-free passion against instrumental religion. |
Myths, receptions and the shape of the authorship
A chameleon reception
The editors argue that Kierkegaard has "suffered" rather than enjoyed his renaissances, because each receiver stamped the work with his own preferences. The list is wide: Emanuel Hirsch wove him into an existence theology adapted to National Socialism; Herbert Marcuse found the makings of a social theory; Theodor Adorno read him as an ally against "the tyranny of the concept over the particular". Theologians made him the source of a radical Christian apologetic, while Max Weber's circle and agnostic and atheist thinkers also welcomed him.
- Lukács. The leading Marxist intellectual of the century held Kierkegaard in esteem "bordering on hero worship" in his youth (Soul and Form), and later attacked his "self-mortifying subjectivism".
- Wittgenstein. He called Kierkegaard the nineteenth century's most profound thinker.
- Heidegger. His debt "is still to be measured".
- Postmodernism. Pseudonymity suggests "no one in particular is at home" behind the writings, which Barthes and Foucault style readers praise rather than regret.
The editors' picture of the reception: each school took one strand and left a middle ground uncharted.
The life in outline
Apart from four visits to Berlin and a trip to his family roots in Jutland, Kierkegaard's life was spent in and around Copenhagen, then a city of little over 100,000 people. He was born on 5 May 1813, the year of Wagner's birth and of Nietzsche's father; Hegel was 43 and died in Kierkegaard's first year as a student. He attended Schelling's Berlin lectures of 1841 alongside Marx and many others. His deeply religious father had retired before Søren, the youngest of seven, was born; his mother and five siblings died before he turned 21.
- 1841. On the Concept of Irony completes ten years at the university; he breaks off his one-year engagement to Regine Olsen and leaves for Berlin.
- 1843. Either/Or, then Repetition and Fear and Trembling (October), both written mostly on a second Berlin visit.
- 1844. Philosophical Fragments and The Concept of Anxiety within days of each other in June.
- 1845-46. Stages on Life's Way; Concluding Unscientific Postscript, meant to "conclude" the authorship; the Corsair feud, provoked under the name Frater Taciturnus.
- 1847-49. Signed Christian works: Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, Works of Love, Christian Discourses (1848), The Lilies of the Field and the Birds of the Air; the Crisis feuilleton.
- 1849-50. Anti-Climacus: The Sickness unto Death and Practice in Christianity.
- 1854-55. Mynster dies; Martensen calls him a "witness to the truth"; nine issues of The Moment; collapse in the street, death six weeks later at 42.
Alongside the pseudonymous works ran twenty-one signed "upbuilding" discourses (opbyggelige), some issued on the same day as a pseudonymous book. The Corsair affair changed his relation to fellow citizens "on all social levels" and, partly so that persecution would not seem to have forced his hand, he gave up plans to stop writing and become a cleric. The 1848 upheavals, the new constitutional monarchy and people's church, ran against his category of the "single individual", rooted in the review of Two Ages. On his deathbed he told Emil Boesen, by then his only friend, that his life had been "a great and to others unknown and incomprehensible suffering", and that he regretted not having married.
The two tracks of the authorship and the turn the editors date to 1846-50.
The sixteen essays
The editors order the essays from life and reception through philosophy and epistemology to psychology, ethics and theology, and each summary names a thread later chapters pick up.
| Ch | Author | Editors' one-line gloss |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Kirmmse | Authority, father, brother and the attack on Christendom |
| 2 | Poole | Receptions; against any "overarching scheme" |
| 3 | Pattison | Heiberg, art and the reflective age |
| 4 | Westphal | Hegel: irony, Abraham, Absolute Knowledge |
| 5 | Cross | Irony undermines itself |
| 6 | Evans | Realism through the "organ" of faith |
| 7 | Roberts | Emotion, character and Christian virtues |
| 8 | Ferreira | The leap as qualitative transition |
| 9 | Jackson | Grace offered to all, freely accepted |
| 10 | Green | Five layers in Fear and Trembling |
| 11 | Mooney | Repetition as receiving the world back |
| 12 | Marino | Anxiety, the Fall, education of spirit |
| 13 | Hannay | Despair as trying to be rid of the self |
| 14 | Quinn | Commanded love, imitation not admiration |
| 15 | Deuser | Christology and existential dialectic |
| 16 | Kodalle | Faith resists utilitarian reduction |
Several glosses set up live disagreements. Ferreira (8) and Jackson (9) face the tension between volitionist texts and texts on grace, and Mooney (11) comes down for repetition as receptive.
What the companion is for
Hannay and Marino introduce a volume that refuses a single "Kierkegaard doctrine". The authorship is a chameleon: signed discourses, comic pseudonyms, strict Christian pseudonyms, late attack literature. Reception made him a proto-existentialist, a neo-orthodox theologian, a deconstructive ironist and a virtue ethicist in turn. The editors' bet is that reading the disagreements among competent interpreters is itself the education: Westphal's Hegel, Evans's realism, Green's hidden sin level, Poole's anti-blunt polemic and Kodalle's pointless Absolute do not settle into one system.
The life sketch stays brief: Copenhagen, Regine Olsen, the Corsair, the attack on the Church, death in 1855. The point of the sketch is causal, not antiquarian: family melancholy, broken engagement and church establishment are the pressures under which the pseudonyms were invented. The Point of View (printed 1859, though the Introduction slips to "1856") remains a contested self-interpretation, not a master key. Kafka is invoked as a kindred intensity; the Introduction's "forty-two" for Kafka's age is wrong (he died at 40).
Editors' map: one authorship, many competent disagreements.
"Out with It!": The modern breakthrough, Kierkegaard and Denmark
Two deathbed refusals
On 19 October 1855, as Kierkegaard lay dying in Frederik's Hospital, his brother Peter Christian Kierkegaard (theologian and pastor, later bishop and briefly a cabinet minister) travelled from his parish at Pedersborg-by-Sorø. Søren refused to see him; Peter went home the next day. The same day Emil Boesen asked if he wanted the Eucharist. "Yes, but from a layman, not a pastor." When Boesen said that would be hard to arrange: "Then I will die without it", because "pastors are civil servants of the Crown, they have nothing to do with Christianity".
Both refusals were private and public acts: the Eucharist refusal became public knowledge at once (the Grundtvigian Gunni Busck quoted it in November letters). The essay is explicitly not psychohistory; it tracks how Kierkegaard's reading of his family life changed his reading of "familien Danmark", and vice versa.
Denmark's childhood
The more than 90 per cent who worked with their hands, mainly in farming, were outside it. In 1848-49, partly to assert national identity against German nationalism, Denmark became a constitutional monarchy with representative government on "near-universal manhood suffrage, probably the broadest suffrage in the world at the time".
- The welcomers. The Peasant Party, many National Liberals and, after hesitation, N. F. S. Grundtvig greeted the change.
- Kierkegaard. He came to see democracy as inevitable, the will of "[Divine] Guidance" (Styrelsen): a danger of atomism and an opportunity to make each person a responsible individual.
- Mynster. The primate officially welcomed the "new" People's Church but plainly loathed the democratic age.
- Heiberg. The patrician critic withdrew into "a lofty and bitter isolation".
Dead souls: Heiberg against Kierkegaard
Johan Ludvig Heiberg, a Hegelian, was no political reactionary: he thought people could rise to higher insight and then earn a growing share in public affairs. But he made the classroom his model of art. The poet is a tutor, the public his pupils, and art is the catalyst that lifts the uncultivated (udannet) to "cultivation" (Dannelse) and their place in an organic society. Individuals as such have no place: the cultivated "represent" the rest.
Heiberg's apocalyptic comedy A Soul after Death (En Sjæl efter Døden, in Nye Digte, published December 1840) is one of the major works of the Danish Golden Age. Its middle-class "Soul" learns after death that his life of politics and busyness was Hell, since he lacks cultivation. Kierkegaard's The Sickness unto Death (written 1848, published 1849) invites comparison, and not only for the title: both attack "spiritlessness" (Aandløshed), a living death common among the philistines (Spidsborgerne).
- Heiberg. The spiritless are spiritless because they are philistines: the cure is education and cultivation, dispensed from above; the uncultivated are fit only for mockery.
- Kierkegaard. The philistines are philistines because they are spiritless: "self" is "spirit", and "the more will, the more self" (SV1 XI 127, 142). Becoming "this particular individual person, alone before God" is open to absolutely everyone, whatever their intellect, and the main stronghold of spiritlessness is Golden Age Christendom itself.
Kierkegaard, twenty-two years younger and a peripheral member of Heiberg's salon, built a radical critique of the taste-making clique; 1848 tore past from present "as if a generation had gone by". Where Heiberg wrote off the middle class, Kierkegaard made it his ideal interlocutor: the quietly "encapsulated" (indesluttet) official of Sickness, kind at home, a Christian who "prefers to avoid talking about it". The "churchyard" (his name) had the task to awaken the dead, not mock them.
Kirmmse's parallel between the two 'dead souls' works and why they end worlds apart.
Denmark's breakthrough and Kierkegaard's, on one timeline.
The Kierkegaard family
Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, a poor boy from the west Jutland heath at Sædding, was apprenticed to a cloth-merchant uncle in Copenhagen and became wealthy young. His first marriage, to a partner's sister, was childless and ended within two years with her death. He then married his serving maid and distant cousin Ane Sørensdatter Lund, already pregnant, under a contract so one-sided (no custody, almost nothing on divorce) that court officials tried to force better terms. The marriage lasted "some thirty-eight years" and produced seven children. At 40 he retired on his investments; he was 56 when Søren was born, so his youngest son always knew him as an old man.
- The invisible mother. Ane is never once named in Kierkegaard's thousands of pages; her family owned "one cow and four sheep", and she was "little Ane", youngest of three sisters all called Ane.
- Two religions. The father kept his rural pietist link to the Herrnhut Congregation (weekday evening prayer) while making Mynster his pastor at the Church of Our Lady: peasant religiousness against Copenhagen piety, or a social hedge.
- Parvenus. Of fifteen siblings in the two parents' families, only these two reached the upper middle class; their children, one generation from sheepherders, could hardly avoid being seen as parvenus.
The sons of the father
Kirmmse reads the brothers through a triangle of desire for recognition by the father. Peter's diary on Søren's confirmation at 14 says it all: "Søren was confirmed on the 20th and received my watch; I [received] Father's." Peter was the hardworking star; Søren the sharp-tongued "Benjamin", kept from growing into authority (Myndighed), who fought with "the weapon of a boy" (he was "the fork") and later teased Heiberg, Martensen and Mynster. The legal "age of authority" was 25; the common people too were held in "tutelage" (Formynderskab).
Peter studied theology in the turbulent 1820s and became a (vacillating) follower of Grundtvig, whose circle visited the family home. The cautious father would not give up Mynster for "these young troublemakers", and Søren, who thought Grundtvig a fool, stayed with Mynster, which put him in his father's camp and left Peter with the Grundtvigians. To Søren, Peter was a "moderate" Grundtvigian who temporized, could talk to Martensen and married strategically twice (a bishop's daughter, then Grundtvig's niece Henriette Glahn). Something close to a state of war prevailed between the brothers early on.
Bishop Mynster: "my father's pastor"
Søren's reverence for Mynster was only apparently unlimited. Søren was sensitive to the urbane aristocrat's least condescension toward his peasant father. By Søren's account things went wrong the day his father died (9 August 1838): when Søren brought the news, Mynster seemed at first unable to remember who the old man was. We know this only from a journal entry of 29 June 1855, so the slight festered for seventeen years. At his father's death Søren had just reached the age of majority, yet in a sense stayed a minor, now Mynster's "parish child" (sognebarn).
Mynster's crime was personal and social. He ignored the son's work, misread Practice in Christianity, and in 1851 publicly equated him with M. A. Goldschmidt of The Corsair. He could not see that a peasant could be an equal, an adult, and so blocked the father from conferring adult recognition on his son. Søren judged that Mynster "was very worldly wise, but weak, pleasure-mad, and great only as an orator" and that the misfortune of his life was to have accepted, from his father, Mynster's sermons as "this counterfeit note" (SV1 XIV 10). He should have "had the character to fall along with everything else that fell" in 1848.
Mynster died at the end of January 1854. Kierkegaard had wanted a deathbed confession that Mynster preached "a toned-down version" of Christianity; without it "everything is changed". Skipping Mynster's last sermon ("now you must break your father's tradition") he read as Divine Guidance. A week after the 24 September entry he collapsed in the street.
How Kirmmse links the family drama to the attack on the Church: recognition denied on two fronts, resolved by 'character'.
Outgrowing childish things
Kierkegaard's published rhetoric repeatedly attacks prolonged "childhood" and "unmanliness", equated with being a "eunuch" and with "effeminacy". Kirmmse suspects period stereotypes whose ordinary usage needs further study.
- Works of Love (1847). "Woe to him who first thought of preaching Christianity without the possibility of offense": every learned defence leaves Christianity "as exhausted as a eunuch" (SV1 IX 190).
- The Sickness unto Death (1849). Despairing narrowness has "emasculated" (afmandet) oneself, Paul's child not yet a man.
- The Moment (1855). Clerical gowns are "women's clothing"; official Christianity uses cunning and "ambiguity" to keep power. "One cannot become a Christian as a child", any more than a child can beget children; Christianity presupposes "a man's maturity".
A late journal entry records a 180-degree reversal: his task had seemed to defend the Established Church, but Guidance meant him to overturn it.
| Stage | Kierkegaard's stance on the Church | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 1848-51 | Congregation an "impatient anticipation of eternity", yet do not overturn the Establishment; ideal "hovers over it" | SV1 XII 204; Pap. X3 A 415 |
| 1854 | The concept of congregation ruined Christianity; Christ meant the single individual | Pap. XI1 A 189 |
| 1855 | NT "unconditionally requires" separation of church and state; called to overturn | Pap. XI1 A 414; XI3 B 110 |
Breaking through: Peter's revenge and guilt
Pseudonymity, Kirmmse argues, was Kierkegaard's way of escaping the problem of authority: distance from his works let him say anything. After pseudonyms "beneath" him he wrote in his own name, keeping only Anti-Climacus, who stood "above" him. During the attack he decided that being "a person of character" was enough, and revoked the foreword and pseudonymity of Practice in Christianity. He had found his own voice.
Peter fought that voice. On 30 October 1849, before the Grundtvig-leaning Roskilde Ecclesiastical Convention, he contrasted Søren's "ecstasy" with Martensen's "sober-mindedness", a code word Søren heard as "madness". In July 1855 he attacked his brother in a speech ending with the insinuation that even what was signed "Søren Kierkegaard" might not be "his last word (but a point of view)". Søren refused to see him in August and again in October.
Peter's side of the rivalry, from public rebuke to self-imposed incapacity.
The funeral, despite Søren's call to "cease participating in public worship", was held in the Church of Our Lady on a Sunday between services, and Peter gave the eulogy. He compared his brother to Ølver of Snorri's saga, who left a beer party to fight eight pagan Wends and had to be carried off; Ølver's full name means "Ølver Bigmouth", and the implication was that Søren was mad.
- Haunted. As early as 1834 Peter could not "become truly reconciled with Søren" and cited Matthew 5:23-4.
- Penance. He gave the royalties to charity (1879-83), resigned his bishopric in 1875 and returned his royal decorations.
- Self-unmaking. In 1884 he voluntarily accepted legal incapacity (borgerlig Umyndiggørelse), the loss of civil majority, an ironic end to a rivalry over authority.
- The letter. In 1883 he wrote to the Probate Court from 1 John 3:15 ("Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer"). He died on 24 February 1888, "in the darkness of insanity".
Marriage contract, peasant roots and the old father
Kirmmse's family dossier is denser than most companion chapters. Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard's second marriage to Ane Sørensdatter Lund (serving maid, distant cousin, already pregnant) came with a one-sided marriage contract: in a divorce she would have received almost nothing and not custody. Court officials took offense and forced only limited improvements. The marriage lasted some thirty-seven years (the book's "thirty-eight" is high) and produced seven children. Michael was forty at the second marriage, already rich enough to retire on investments; Søren was born when the father was fifty-six and always knew him as an old man.
The peasant side matters. Michael was one of nine children from ordinary poor farmers in west Jutland's tiny Sædding. One brother died young with an uncle; another was a Copenhagen madman who wore three overcoats in summer before returning to die in Sædding; six siblings lived obscurely nearby. Sister Else Pedersdatter inherited the family farm, lived pinched, and regularly wrote to Michael and later to Peter Christian and Søren for aid, which she received. The "stern religious old man with peasant roots" is thus both true and a son's selective portrait.
Mynster, Divine Guidance and the last journal
Kierkegaard had wanted to transform his being into a triumph for Mynster, later requiring only a "little admission" that Christendom was an illusion. A hidden misunderstanding followed; he hoped to avoid attacking while Mynster lived. He missed only one of Mynster's sermons, the last; being in another church that day meant, to him, breaking the father's tradition under "Divine Guidance". Then the storm of the Church attack.
About a week before collapse (late September 1855), the journal entry of 24 September 1855 divides the judgment: aesthetically Mynster was great "as a counterfeiter"; personally Kierkegaard kept undivided devotion "out of piety towards my late father"; Christianly, Guidance assigned him "the most dangerous of allies". Filial obligation stayed the hand; higher considerations then compelled the attack. Kirmmse's larger claim: Denmark's modern breakthrough required outgrowing childish things, and Kierkegaard's private war with the father's pastor is that national drama in miniature.
Kirmmse: from filial piety to attack under Divine Guidance.
Two deathbeds and Peter's unfinished revenge
The chapter opens and closes on deathbed refusals. Søren refuses communion from a pastor of the established Church; Peter Christian later refuses, as bishop, to speak the expected public reckoning. Heiberg's "dead souls" charge against Kierkegaard's unsystematic authorship is the cultural mirror: Golden Age Denmark wanted Hegelian polish; Kierkegaard offered offense. Peter's guilt after Søren's death (and the unfinished attempt to settle accounts) is Kirmmse's evidence that the family drama never resolved into a clean modern breakthrough.
The unknown Kierkegaard: Twentieth-century receptions
Oblivion at home
After the scandal of 1855 the exhausted Danish public consigned man and works to oblivion, helped by Bishop Peter Christian Kierkegaard's funeral oration. H. P. Barfod and H. Gottsched edited the papers (1869-81), but the bishop held many back and Barfod threw away the originals as he arranged entries, a problem that has "bedeviled Kierkegaard scholarship ever since".
- Brandes (1877). The positivist Georg Brandes wrote the first monograph explicitly to free the Danes from Kierkegaard's influence; ten years later he urged Nietzsche to read him, and Nietzsche planned to study "the psychological problem" of Kierkegaard: a confrontation that never took place.
- Høffding. Another positivist, Harald Høffding, gave him low marks for philosophical acumen in Søren Kierkegaard as a Philosopher.
- Troels-Lund (1922, 1924). The historian, a relative, admitted Kierkegaard changed the course of his life yet called him a genius-eccentric of no lasting importance, "a typically Danish evasion".
Why Denmark forgot Kierkegaard after 1855, in Poole's sequence.
The German and French reception
Kierkegaard's influence, Poole says, is decisive only within a personal problematic that already exists: he modifies a worldview "in a suggestive and insidious way", through a sudden self-identification.
- Kafka. On 21 August 1913, reading the Buch des Richters: "his case ... is very similar to mine ... He bears me out like a friend." In 1916 he scolds himself for comparing himself with Flaubert and Kierkegaard, "men of decision", a strong misreading of his own life.
- Jaspers. At a Heidelberg psychiatric hospital in 1913, appalled by Kraepelin's brain-disease model, Jaspers read Kierkegaard and came to see "mental illness" as often an event in the patient's Existenz; the "will to total communication" of Reason and Existenz (1935) and Der philosophische Glaube (1947, Basel) echoes the indirect communication.
- Heidegger. In Sein und Zeit (1927) he "remorselessly ransacks" Kierkegaard while hiding the debt behind minimal footnotes, a case of Bloom's "anxiety of influence".
- Bonhoeffer. Imprisoned in Tegel from 1943, executed 1945, he conceived a "religionless Christianity" of individual conscience, lived out an Imitatio Christi, and entered politics as Kierkegaard had entered conflict with the Danish Church.
| Kierkegaard (1844-46) | Heidegger, Being and Time (1927) |
|---|---|
| Angest: its object "is nothing" (Vigilius Haufniensis) | Anxiety's threat is "nowhere", "so close that it is oppressive" |
| The public as "a monstrous Nothing" (A Literary Review) | Das Man, "the They" |
| Talkativeness, formlessness, superficiality, flirtation, "reasoning" | Idle talk, curiosity, ambiguity |
| Loose speech as a masterless dog no one is responsible for | Gerede: understanding everything "without making the thing one's own" |
| Vertigo (Svimmel) before choice, the Fall | Falling and thrownness; Dasein's being as care |
Heidegger's purpose was to phenomenologize and ontologize, not to existentialize, so he shrank from making individuals ethically responsible. Poole cites Patricia Huntington's "Heidegger's De-Ethicization of Kierkegaard": separating psychology from epistemology let Heidegger underplay interiority and blame his National Socialism on destiny. His one formal acknowledgment is a note (BT p. 492): Kierkegaard went "farthest in analysing the phenomenon of anxiety".
Sartre "existentialized" Kierkegaard: L'Être et le néant (1943) is full of him though his name is unspoken, from authenticity and mauvaise foi to "vertigo" and "anguish" in "The Origin of Nothingness" and freedom as unavoidable fate; L'Âge de raison (1945) has a man "condemned for ever to be free". At the UNESCO colloquium of 1964 (Kierkegaard vivant, 1966) Sartre still denied any debt and even skipped the discussions. Meanwhile Kojève's Hegel lectures of the late 1930s Kierkegaardianized Hegel. Beauvoir under the Occupation found the System giddying until "the least flutter of my heart gave such speculations the lie", and turned back to Kierkegaard: "I am, I exist, here and now".
Poole's map of how Kierkegaard entered twentieth-century thought: through individuals, often unacknowledged.
Camus gave the Absurd lapidary form in Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942). Kierkegaard had relegated the logical unthinkability of Christianity to the Absurd, "a category introduced to make livable something that is unthinkable"; Camus read Fragments with all its premises but took the conclusion literally: "The Absurd is sin without God." The absurd spirit prefers Kierkegaard's own answer, despair, to "the roses of illusion".
The British and American reception
English post-idealist philosophy (Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, then Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic, 1936, and "Oxford" philosophy) opposed "woolly abstractions"; Husserl's four London lectures (1922) and the Crisis (Belgrade, 1936) went unnoticed. The one spark was Charles Williams of the Inklings at Oxford University Press, who ran a "one-man crusade" to get Kierkegaard translated, enlisting Alexander Dru and the retired American pastor Walter Lowrie.
The English channel: one editor's crusade and two translators.
- 1936. David F. Swenson (Minnesota, 1898-1939) translates Philosophical Fragments.
- 1938. Dru's The Journals of Kierkegaard 1834-1854; Lowrie's biography Kierkegaard.
- 1939-41. Lowrie (OUP New York, Princeton): Point of View, Stages, Repetition, Fear and Trembling, Sickness unto Death and Swenson's Postscript (1941).
- 1940. Swenson dies in February; Lowrie completes Postscript and Either/Or.
- 1943-48. The Swensons' Edifying Discourses (Augsburg) and Works of Love (1946); 1944 The Concept of Dread and Attack upon "Christendom".
- 1967-78. The Hongs' Journals and Papers (Indiana UP); then Princeton's Kierkegaard's Writings.
Blunt reading
Because the first translators were theologians or philosophers of religion, Kierkegaard reached English as an orthodox Christian believer, with "remarkably impoverished awareness" of him as writer, stylist and rhetorician. Poole names the elements of the indirect communication, which grew after the Corsair attack of early 1846 (with P. Klæstrup's cartoons) forced him to give up his walks.
- Pseudonyms. Many works issued under invented authors, each with its own voice.
- Unremitting irony. No way for the reader to "place" the author within his own thought.
- Two streams. Edifying discourses "accompany" the aesthetic works.
- Lived presence. His visible life in Copenhagen's streets was staged to "work against" (modarbejde) the expectations his books created.
- After the Corsair (1846). The lived element had to be restructured, raising the subtlety demanded of the reader.
Lowrie disregarded the first three: in his preface to The Concept of Dread (perhaps the most parodic of the aesthetic works) he says we need not apply Kierkegaard's admonition about the pseudonyms, as this was "his first completely serious book". Poole defines blunt reading as refusing the text literary status, ignoring the pseudonymous technique, missing the irony, and refusing, on religious grounds, that indirect communication is bound up with the pathos of the lived life. The Hongs' Princeton edition, with its massive annotation, changed the climate, but its committee fixed each key term to one rendering regardless of context, expunging the humorous, self-referring syntax, so the text seems to lay down the law.
- The Plato parallel. Dialogue form, Socrates as ironic figure, traps and the unwritten doctrines keep Plato's own view out of reach; Kierkegaard's texts work the same way.
- The "makers of sense". C. Stephen Evans (Kierkegaard's Fragments and Postscript, 1983; Passionate Reason: Making Sense of Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments, 1992) is the "risible side" of the tradition: "Would it be possible to entitle a book Making Sense of Plato's Theaetetus?"
- The unifiers. Sponheim (Kierkegaard and Christian Coherence, 1968) ignores that Climacus and Anti-Climacus disagree about Christ; Elrod (1975) mediates the pseudonyms into one self by policy; Connell (To Be One Thing, 1985) refuses them autonomy.
- The aestheticians. Pattison (1992) and Sylvia Walsh (1994) turn the pseudonyms into Hegelian Gestalten; Dunning (1985) loses verisimilitude stage by stage.
Poole praises philosophers who argue within the pseudonyms' constraints: H. A. Nielsen (Where the Passion Is, 1983) treats Climacus as a "lens-grinder" outside Christianity; Robert C. Roberts (Faith, Reason and History, 1986) rejects Niels Thulstrup's view that Fragments states Kierkegaard's own views; Jeremy Walker (1985) asks for Kierkegaard's own titles and Danish. Alastair Hannay's Kierkegaard (1982, rev. 1991), with Ronald Green's work, "one of the ticking bombs", argues his debt to Kant rivals his debt to Hegel; Hannay's Penguin translations restore colloquial life.
The deconstructive turn
Louis Mackey's Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet (1971) argued that Kierkegaard is "a poet" who must be read "chiefly with the tools of literary criticism". After two essays in Josiah Thompson's collection (1972) he fell silent for a decade, absorbed Derrida, and in Points of View (1986) concluded that the texts show "an almost complete abstention from determinate meaning". Poole credits him with seeing both the necessity of a literary approach and its inevitable shortfall.
- Mark C. Taylor. Kierkegaard's Pseudonymous Authorship (1975) was admirable, but Journeys to Selfhood (1980) Hegelianized the texts, and Erring (1984), Altarity (1987) and "Nothing Ending Nothing" (1990) slide into "free play" and punning: Danish "Mor" (mother) as a cry for English "more".
- The Tallahassee series. Kierkegaard and Post/Modernism (1986-88) advanced the problem: Mackey, John Vignaux Smyth on irony, Pat Bigelow via Finnegans Wake, Sylviane Agacinski's Aparté (1977).
Poole places his own Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication (1993) in this line. The real recent growth is in ethics. Against Richard Rorty's wish to make obligation "as quaint as the divine right of kings", Derrida's The Gift of Death (1992; Eng. 1995) starts from Jan Patočka, a Charter 77 spokesman who died on 13 March 1977 after eleven hours of police interrogation, and reads Fear and Trembling in "Whom to give to". John D. Caputo's Against Ethics (1993) separates reassuring "ethics" from concrete "obligation"; Martin Matuštík runs Habermas, Charles Taylor and two Derridas against Kierkegaard, and the individual survives as a workable hypothesis for "a more just world".
Poole's verdict on the reading traditions, from blunt to responsible.
Blunt reading versus the deconstructive turn
Poole's polemic names "blunt reading": the habit of translating Kierkegaard into a set of doctrines (leap, absurd, stages, teleological suspension) that can be taught without attending to pseudonymity, irony and literary form. Blunt reading made Kierkegaard usable for theology and existentialism; it also made him unknown. The German reception (early Heidegger, Jaspers, early Barth) and the French (Sartre, later Derrida and the deconstructive turn) pulled different Kierkegaard into view. British and American reception long preferred the blunt path, especially where Kierkegaard was taught inside divinity schools.
Poole's corrective is not that Kierkegaard has no views, but that the views cannot be read off as if Climacus, Johannes de silentio, Anti-Climacus and the signed discourses spoke with one voice. Høffding's early philosophical portrait, Swenson's work, the Hongs' Kierkegaard's Writings (from 1978) and Hannay's Penguin Either/Or (1992) are milestones Poole places inside that history of use and misuse. The deconstructive turn (Agacinski, Derrida's reading of Fear and Trembling, related literary theory) restored attention to undecidability and signature, at the cost of sometimes dissolving argument into textual play.
Poole: from blunt doctrine-extraction to reading the signatures.
Art in an age of reflection
Why "the aesthetic"?
In The Point of View the split between aesthetic and religious writings defines the whole authorship, yet Kierkegaard did not condemn art lovers. His 1847 feuilleton The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, a tribute to Johanne Luise Heiberg playing Juliet nineteen years after her debut in the role, was meant to refute the idea that religion is "something one first has recourse to when one grows older". Conversely, even philistines are "aesthetic": most nominal Christians "live in aesthetic, or at most aesthetic-ethical categories", and the late Attack says the only difference between church and theatre is that the Church won't refund your ticket. To see why the word fits existential inauthenticity, Pattison goes back to how art is made and received. Kierkegaard wrote no Aesthetics (unlike Hegel or his professor F. C. Sibbern), but one can be reconstructed.
The ideal form of art
Kierkegaard shared the idealist framework of the Romantics (Sibbern, Poul Martin Møller) and of the Hegelian Heiberg. An early journal says he cannot positively enjoy nature because he gets lost in its details, but a work of art he can grasp from its "Archimedean point": one main idea that every detail illuminates, as in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, "a true microcosm". When artist and recipient unite in the idea, life is "transfigured" as by "a refreshing, renewing bath". Yet poetry only approaches reality: art's "poetic morning-dream" relates to life as Moses to Joshua, who alone enters the promised land. Poetic existence is an "unhappy consciousness"; the poet's life is "the unconscious sacrifice" of real wholeness to ideal wholeness, and at worst "the evaporation of the person".
- Genre rules. A work is good if it meets its genre's requirements, a masterpiece if it "answers perfectly to its concept"; taste is objective subordination to art's sceptre.
- Immediacy. Expressed in the musical side of art: lyric, character, monologue.
- Reflection. Expressed in the plastic side: epic, situation.
- Ranking. Drama unites both, so outranks painting, music or sonnet; comedy outranks tragedy, because it subordinates character to situation and presupposes irony.
Heiberg's genre ranking as Kierkegaard used it: drama unites the two sides, comedy tops it.
A's essay on Don Giovanni in Either/Or I applies these rules. A classic shows an "absolute correlation" of subject matter and form. The content is the Don alone, the sun lighting only the side of each character turned to him; he is "desire as a principle", seducing with no plan, "the elemental originality of the sensuous". Music suits him because Christianity "brought sensuality into the world": by measuring it against spirit, it posited sensuality as an excluded principle, and music, the medium closest to but not language, is qualified by spirit as what spirit excludes. It is "fatuous" to call the opera immoral: moral judgment applies only to someone who tries to live like Don Juan.
- Representative figures. Early journals pair Don Juan (sensuousness, music, Middle Ages), Faust (doubt, drama, Reformation) and the Wandering Jew (despair, epic, modern age), a triad echoing Heiberg's Hegelian logic.
- Scribe's The First Love. Sixteen-year-old Emmeline "wants to sacrifice everything for nothing"; the play "revolves around nothing". Comedy, if artistically correct, tempts one to absorption more than tragedy, like gazing at swirling tobacco smoke: endlessly enjoyable, meaningless.
- Ancient and modern tragedy. The hero must both suffer and be responsible; the more reflective the subject, the more "Pelagianly" guilt falls on him. Ancient tragedy has deeper sorrow, modern more pain; repentance "eclipses the aesthetic".
Pattison's ladder of the aesthetic: rising reflection pushes art to its limit, where only repentance remains.
Art in the development of the personality
Constantin Constantius's excursus on the theatre in Repetition ties art to youth. No imaginative young person escapes "the magic of the theatre": in adolescence the self "comes out" and must try on roles, a shadow-play in which "the individual has a variety of shadows" of equal standing, an "artificial actuality" where he can "split himself up into every possible variation". The point is timing: shadow-existence "demands satisfaction", but if a person lives his life in it, "the cock crows" and we come under "the disquieting supervision of responsibility" and approach the demonic. The Danish word for "disquieting", ængstende, means "causing anxiety".
Art is not only for the young. The mature Mrs Heiberg has escaped being merely "a damn pretty ... wench of eighteen", and the novel requires ethical maturity, judged by its life-view (Livs-Anskuelse), a concept from Møller: "the transubstantiation of experience", an unshakeable certainty won from all experience, Stoic or Christian.
Art in the growth of a person: the theatre of youth must yield to a life-view.
| Novel | Kierkegaard's verdict | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Gyllembourg, Two Ages (Heiberg's mother) | Praised | A "battle-won confidence" life-view; but she belongs to an older generation |
| Schlegel, Lucinde | Doctrinaire | Propagates Fichtean irony: "docetic", "acosmic", "an attempt to suspend all ethics" |
| Andersen, Only a Fiddler | Formless | No controlling idea; "has skipped over his epic [stage]", "an amputation" of himself |
| Fibiger, Clara Raphael | Critique implied | Journal fragments on an early Scandinavian feminist novel |
Anxiety is the frontier: it appears in Don Giovanni, Antigone and Quidam, and Judge William's Nero, an artist manqué whose spirit cannot break through his sensuousness, is "still a child", "his inner being is anxiety", a "nightmarish Peter Pan". Since anxiety can also be the dawn of freedom, the aesthetic is not unequivocally wicked and may lie along the path to freedom.
Art and society: the age of reflection
Kierkegaard's view of art follows a historical model of spirit from nature to freedom, mirrored in each person's growth; but the person cannot be abstracted from society. Gyllembourg's sound life-view belongs to an older generation, while Andersen grew up in the "political period", when reflection fragmented relationships and eroded the Christian tradition that a life-view needs. The Two Ages review (1846) makes reflection the mark of "the present age": no passion, short enthusiasms, calculating prudence, craving for publicity, envy, chatter and leveling; it "lets everything remain but subtly drains the meaning out of it". An apostle would be unrecognizable. "The sharp scythe of levelling permits ... every single one to leap over the blade: look, God is waiting!"
- Love made dialectical. "In our day even a grocer's boy would be able to tell Romeo and Juliet some astounding truths"; "without passion, no poet".
- Politics too. "The same reflection that corroded love will also corrode the infinite passion of politics."
- The end of immediacy. "That the time of poetry is over really means that immediacy is at an end", so "it is a matter of attaining the religious".
- Either/or. The aesthetic is no longer a legitimate stage: to stay with it is to refuse the religious, and an age without decisive faith is an "aesthetic" age.
Pattison's social argument: reflection destroys the conditions of both great art and religious authority.
Why artists love him anyway
Despite the polemics, modern artists claim Kierkegaard: Ibsen, Strindberg, Kafka and Mann in literature; painters Arshile Gorky and Mark Rothko; composers, notably Samuel Barber. His own writing is intensely poetic, and even Anti-Climacus paints a "demonic" self-portrait of a poet in the service of the religious. Since Romanticism ebbed, artists have asked with Hölderlin "What are poets for in a barren age?" and made "the death of art" a subject of art; Kierkegaard "lived what Heidegger has called the raging discordance between art and truth".
Reflection's age and the loss of immediacy in art
Pattison places Kierkegaard's aesthetics inside the Golden Age diagnosis of an age of reflection. Where Greek art (for Hegel) could still embody spirit in sensuous form, modern art inherits a culture that has already reflected itself out of immediacy. Kierkegaard's early papers on the theatre (Om Vaudevillen, cited via later editions) and the great Mozart essay in Either/Or I treat music as the medium of sensuous-erotic genius, with Don Giovanni as its hero. The point is not a taste judgment; it is that music can express a desire that language would already moralise.
The reflective aesthete (A) then tries to recollect enjoyment, to poetise life, to keep experience at a distance that writing can control. Pattison's ordering of the aesthetic materials is his own reconstruction: from immediacy of music, through tragedy and modern drama, to the comic and the religious critique of the poetic existence. Climacus will later say every poet-existence as such is sin when it refuses the ethical and religious demand; Pattison shows why the aesthetic remains tempting: it offers intensity without the commitment that would bind the self.
Pattison: art under reflection, from musical immediacy to poet-existence judged.
From theatre to the religious suspension of the aesthetic
Pattison tracks Kierkegaard's lifelong theatre-going and his use of dramatic categories (irony, the comic, the tragic) as existence-categories. The religious does not simply abolish art; it suspends the aesthetic as the highest. Judge William already tries to reclaim marriage as an aesthetic-ethical task; Johannes de silentio and Anti-Climacus raise the stakes until admiration of the hero becomes the admirer's evasion. Pattison's contribution is to keep the aesthetic essays from being read as mere juvenilia: they diagnose the same reflective age that the religious authorship later attacks.
Reflection's age and the arts of the present
Pattison reads Kierkegaard against Heiberg's programme for an age of reflection: vaudeville, theatre criticism and speculative aesthetics promise reconciliation; Kierkegaard's authorship stages the failure of that promise. Art can still awaken, but it cannot save. The aesthete's rotation method, the seducer's diary and the critic's taste are symptoms of an age that knows too much to act.
Kierkegaard and Hegel
The dancer who claims to fly
Hegel's preface to the Phenomenology promises to raise philosophy from "love of knowing" to actual knowing, a scientific system. Concluding Unscientific Postscript is a sustained satire on that claim. Johannes Climacus objects that "existence itself is a system, for God, but it cannot be a system for any existing spirit". Then the image: we admire a dancer who leaps higher than anyone, but if he gives the impression he can fly, "let laughter overtake him"; flying is for winged creatures, "perhaps also for inhabitants of the moon", where the system may find its readers.
- The issue is theological. For Climacus the gap between human and divine is fundamental; the system needs it compromised or collapsed.
- A compliment inside the joke. Conceding that this dancer leaps highest, Climacus grants that Hegel's system outdoes Aristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza or Kant; only the claim to finality makes him ridiculous, like a new Whitehead and Russell claiming, after Gödel, a logic both consistent and complete.
Westphal's arc of the critique: two Hegelian texts prepare two overtly anti-Hegelian ones.
Irony and Either/Or: Hegelian, but already apart
The Concept of Irony (1841) is widely seen as Kierkegaard's most Hegelian work. Some (Capel, Thulstrup, Agacinski) treat its Hegelianism as itself ironical. Stephen Dunning finds its triads in five later pseudonymous works too, "neither acknowledged nor obvious". Westphal thinks neither move is needed: triads as such do not make one Hegelian (Kant's first Critique is "loaded with triads" yet renounces speculation), and the dissertation's critique of romantic irony as excessive subjectivity matches Either/Or. Sharing an enemy is not agreement: "Churchill did not become a totalitarian nor Stalin a democrat" by agreeing Hitler must be stopped.
The distance shows in the Socrates the dissertation draws. Ironic negativity is the birth of a subjectivity no longer submerged in the state, which links him to the sophists, but Kierkegaard sharply separates him from the sophists (no romanticism of preference) and from Plato (no speculation). His higher duty than his duty to Athens is an ethico-religious subjectivity. Robert L. Perkins: for Hegel irony is overcome by the march of spirit through family, society and state; for Kierkegaard it is overcome by the concrete individual, and "the infinite still calls".
Fear and Trembling: either Hegel or Abraham
Johannes de silentio's preface attacks "our age", which presupposes faith and wants to "go further"; he calls the philosophy he challenges "the system" (nine times) and "science" (twice) and defines it as the attempt "to transpose the whole content of faith into conceptual form", Hegel's replacement of Vorstellung by Begriff. Each of Problems I, II and III opens with the same formula: if such and such is so, Hegel is right; but then Abraham is lost. The text is a confrontation between biblical faith and a system that abolishes it while claiming to perfect it.
- The usual reading. The ethical is the Moral Law (Platonic, Thomistic, Kantian) or my duties to neighbour and self; faith is absurd because duties to God conflict with them.
- Westphal's reading. The ethical is Hegel's Sittlichkeit: Johannes writes "if the ethical, that is, social morality, is the highest" (the Danish equivalent of Sittlichkeit). Jephthah, Agamemnon and Brutus kill their children for the nation, remaining tragic heroes inside the ethical; no social need justifies Abraham. The teleological suspension says the laws of my people are penultimate: the question is whether the source of the moral law is society or God.
Faith is "the paradox that the single individual is higher than the universal", that he "determines his relation to the universal by his relation to the absolute, not his relation to the absolute by his relation to the universal". In a Hegelian context the universal is a polity, not a principle; faith reduces the ethical "to the relative", never identifying the law of the land with the law of God. That relativizes every Sittlichkeit, modernity included, so modern self-consciousness cannot be Absolute Knowledge nor the modern state the fulfilment of history. Like Marx's critique of political economy, the teleological suspension rejects modernity's ultimacy.
Westphal's reading of Fear and Trembling: if social morality is highest, Abraham is lost.
Postscript: objectivity, approximation and the God's-eye view
The question is how one can know the higher law. Philosophical Fragments weighs recollection (reason) against revelation; Postscript aims the analysis at Hegel. Socrates keeps recollection in the subjective mode, so he never claims escape from time: hence Socratic ignorance and objective uncertainty, shared by the Christian believer. Hegelian speculation is not even playing faith's game: "A triple somersault on a trampoline may be quite spectacular, but it is not the consummate form of the triple axel."
- Hegel insufficiently dialectical. Using Hegel's own distinction (Encyclopedia Logic §§79-82), Climacus sides with negative, dialectical reason against speculative reason, which "puts Humpty-Dumpty together again".
- Approximation. Outside formal systems, objective knowledge yields only approximation; for a holist like Hegel, for whom truth is the whole, an unfinished system has no truth at all.
- Appropriation. Even if philosophy could deliver, faith joining it would be suicide; faith is infinite, personal, passionate interest, which objectivity deliberately abandons.
- Two images. Aristotle's gods in "their blissful pastime of thinking" (Hegel's system ends with Aristotle's thought thinking itself); and the wife who tells her doubting husband, "You are Danish, aren't you? ... What else would you be, then?", a "speculative and almost Hegelian public" that turns a subjective question into a census fact, and so obliterates it.
Climacus's two-sided account of truth: the what can only be approximated, the how must be appropriated.
The point is not to deny objective truth but to say human knowledge only approximates it and that the task of appropriation must not be supplanted. The system is doubly wrong: it promises a certainty it cannot deliver (it too is an interpretation), and it eliminates inward appropriation. Against "Wizard of Oz Reason", faith is "absurd" only relative to a reason that has forgotten it is human. By making "existence" a technical term for temporal being, Kierkegaard became "simultaneously an existentialist and a postmodernist".
- A system of existence (CUP 118-19): against the Logic and Phenomenology.
- Being the spectator for whom "world history is the world's judgment" (141, 158): against the philosophy of history.
- The identity of thought and being (190, 196): truth as objectivity, against the Logic.
- Explaining the paradox of Christian faith so that it ceases to be a paradox (212, 562): against the philosophy of religion.
Climacus's claim that "a logical system can be given" but "a system of existence cannot" is not a grant of Hegel's Logic, because Hegel's Logic is metaphysics, "the exposition of God ... before the creation of nature", and imports movement into logic. Its beginning fails: Hegel demands a presuppositionless start in pure being, but reaching it takes reflection, and reflection takes resolution, which Hegel himself concedes is a "resolve, which can also be regarded as arbitrary". That resolve presupposes that one can think thought apart from the thinker and that one should, both of which Climacus denies. Without the Alpha point there is no Omega point: "Existence must be annulled in the eternal before the system concludes itself". Climacus is finally offended, not amused, by "impious, pantheistic self-worship": "Let us be human beings."
Climacus on why Hegel's system cannot begin, and so cannot end.
| Sphere | Christ is | Where (Westphal) |
|---|---|---|
| Religiousness A | Not needed: immanent pathos, Socratic | Postscript |
| Religiousness B | The Paradox to be believed | Fragments, Postscript |
| Religiousness C | Also the Pattern to imitate, compassion for the poor and powerless | Post-Postscript writings |
Westphal ends with ideology critique: the quarrel with theory has its telos in the quarrel with practice. Climacus charges speculation with reducing the divine other to the human same, and the practice-focused texts around him show Christendom, which sanctifies social practice, against an ethic of radical compassion across class lines. The critique of Hegel serves "overcoming our allergies to alterity" of God and neighbour.
Climacus against speculative Reason as faith's end
Westphal's Postscript reading turns on Hegel's own distinction (Encyclopedia Logic §§79-82) between Understanding, dialectical Reason and speculative Reason. Kant had left Reason in dialectical illusion; Hegel lets the speculative moment put Humpty-Dumpty together again as the Idea. Climacus introduces himself as a kind of Kantian for whom the dialectical prevails over the speculative (CUP 13). He challenges the drive to make dissonance resolve into harmony. Faith is paradigmatic resistance to the Procrustean embrace of the system (CUP 14). Neither Johannes de silentio nor Climacus claims to be a man of faith; both set out to rescue faith from a mode of reason that is its end not as telos but as termination.
Hegelian speculation is "not even playing the same game" as Christian faith. A triple somersault on a trampoline may be spectacular, but it is not the consummate form of a triple axel. Climacus does not claim to prove Christianity true; he claims to show the falsehood of Hegelianism as the highest form of Christianity. Religiousness A (immanence) and B (transcendence) only reinforce the point. It is not reason as such that opposes faith, but modes of human reason that have forgotten their limits and lapsed into self-deification.
Westphal: Climacus prefers dialectical over speculative Reason.
Religiousness C and Sittlichkeit's shallowness
Westphal's coinage Religiousness C names the further sharpening in which following Christ includes offense, imitation and the break with Christendom's civic piety. Hegelian Sittlichkeit (ethical life in family, civil society and state) is the foil: Johannes's teleological suspension looks unintelligible inside that frame because the universal is already the divine. Westphal reads Kierkegaard as showing that Sittlichkeit runs aground on its own shallowness once sin and grace are serious. Contributors such as Green and Quinn press more Kantian divine-command readings; Westphal keeps the Hegel fight primary. The dancer who claims to leap and land in the system is still dancing on the trampoline.
Neither either nor or: The perils of reflexive irony
Three features of irony, from speech to life
For many contemporary philosophers "irony" means a speech act, and an ironic person is someone who often speaks ironically. For Kierkegaard and his contemporaries it names a way of engaging in public activity in general; he analyses ironic speech in order to learn what it is to live ironically "all the way down". Cross draws three features from the dissertation.
- Contradiction of inner and outer. Not the trivial "Lovely weather" in a downpour (Vlastos's example), which "cancels itself", like a riddle given with its solution; the opposition must be deeper than this and still differ from lying.
- Exclusion. Irony "travels around ... in an exclusive incognito", like kings speaking French; it splits an imagined inner circle from the uninitiated, and "only a secondary form of ironic vanity desires witnesses".
- Liberation. Direct speech binds me; saying what is not my meaning makes me "free in relation to others and to myself". Irony's purpose "is nothing other than the irony itself": to feel free.
Cross's example of exclusion is a reference letter: "You will be lucky if you get this person to work for you." The pleasure lies in seeing how it seems to mean one thing to a naive reader and another to us. Pushed to the limit, these features give "radical verbal irony", Kierkegaard's Socrates: utterances that could be taken as p, not-p or q, with the speaker indifferent to which. Unlike the liar, who at least intends to convey some belief, the radical ironist only pretends to converse. He is free in three ways: from responsibility for being wrong, from engagement in conversation (it is playacting), and from dependence on the hearer's discernment.
Cross's scale of verbal irony, from the self-cancelling trope to Socratic pseudo-conversation.
The ironist as a way of life
The ironist generalizes this stance to every practice: he converses, pays taxes, goes to work, attends PTA meetings, but it is all a game. He rejects the practices' constitutive aims not by attacking them, which would attach importance to his outward life, but by playing along, indifferent whether anyone suspects. "To want to be seen as independent is, of course, to fail to be independent." Kierkegaard's Socrates is "entirely negative" toward the established order, "suspended above all the qualifications of substantial life"; revolutionary "not so much by doing something as by not doing something", never a partisan; for him "know yourself" means "separate yourself from the other".
- Immediacy (three senses). One's given nature (body, time, social identity); an unreflective relation to something (from Don Giovanni's sensuousness and the child's trust to "ethical immediacy"); and a life of immediacy, taken as it comes, whose life-view is "good fortune" (CUP 433).
- The break. Irony is the self's break with immediacy, "the awakening of subjectivity": the ironist stops identifying with the identity delivered by his place and upbringing, as Socrates made Greeks "alien to the immediacy in which [they] had previously lived" (CI 228).
- Only negative freedom. The ironist "does not possess the new. He knows only that the present does not match the idea"; any positive content would be something he was not ironical toward.
Cross's dilemma for the total ironist: both horns destroy his irony.
Kierkegaard half-saw this. He contrasts irony with religious devotion: the devout mind also says "all is vanity", but because relations to God are affirmed, and it "makes no exception of its own person". The ironist, as everything becomes vanity, becomes "lighter, emptier, more volatilized" and "rescues his own vanity" (CI 257-8). What Kierkegaard did not see, Cross says, is that the ironist can rescue himself only by arbitrary privilege or by the regress.
Postscript: irony between the aesthetic and the ethical
Climacus agrees that irony is "an existence-qualification", so nothing is more ludicrous than treating it as a style (CUP 503-4); its essence is "the outer is not the inner"; the ironist's cunning "prevents the conversation from being a conversation"; "in irony there is no sympathy; it is self-assertion". He locates irony as the confinium between the aesthetic and the ethical, and humour as the confinium between the ethical and the religious (CUP 501-2), though elsewhere he places irony between immediacy and the ethical (531n). Cross explains why the aesthetic counts as immediacy.
- How A looks. Self-conscious to a fault; consciously committed to an aesthetic life; scornful of the bourgeois; moving from enjoying Don Giovanni to enjoying the recollection of enjoyment, to fantasy about others' lives. Climacus: "As a thinker A is advanced", "an existence-possibility that cannot attain existence"; he "has thought everything possible, and yet he has not existed at all".
- What he shares with immediacy. Judge William: "Enjoy yourself" is "a higher reflection" that "does not penetrate into the personality". A never questions his devotion to experience, which he simply inherits; his categories remain "fortune, misfortune, fate, immediate enthusiasm, despair" (CUP 434), so he is passive about the shape of his life.
At the end of the aesthetic road stands the "defeated aesthete" of "The Unhappiest One" and the "Diapsalmata", in William's phrase "the laughter of despair". A concludes not that his project was wrong but that life cannot be meaningful, a tragic condition for which he is not responsible: "If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will regret it ... If you hang yourself, you will regret it; if you do not hang yourself, you will also regret it ... This, gentlemen, is the sum of all practical wisdom."
The way out is ethical self-choice, "an unrestricted taking of responsibility for oneself" in a double movement: first ceasing to identify with one's empirical self (an autonomous will; William's "complete isolation", an "abstract identity"), then re-uniting with it by taking it on as one's own. Backward, that is repentance; forward, the self becomes a task, raw material shaped by an ideal posited in freedom. This "broadly Kantian" project has its own problems (both Climacus and Kierkegaard seem to think it leads to another despair), but it is "the means" of escape. Irony sits exactly between: dissociated from immediacy, not yet reintegrated.
Cross's reconstruction of where irony sits among the existence-spheres, with its two confinia.
The comic ironist: Climacus's repair
Climacus says the dissertation brought out "only the one side" (CUP 503), the negative. He distinguishes two responses to the clash between one's given nature and one's capacity for transcendence.
| Interpretation | How the contradiction is lived | Who |
|---|---|---|
| Tragic | "Suffering contradiction": a demand one has no notion how to meet; "despairs over the way out" | Defeated aesthete; CI's ironist (CI 279: free of actuality's sorrows and its joys) |
| Comic | "Painless contradiction": produced "by having in mente the way out" (CUP 513-16) | Climacus's ironist |
Climacus's ironist sees that and how ethical self-choice could integrate his finite nature with the "ethical infinite requirement", without yet taking the step: "Irony is only a possibility" (CUP 505). Because the way out is always open, both his immediate life and his ironizing become games he chooses to play, "a home in which he chooses to dwell". He can include his own existence in his irony, judging himself by the same standards that make others laughable, and still feel transcendence: neither the one self nor the other, hence the title's "neither either nor or".
Tragic and comic irony: the same contradiction, with and without the way out in mind.
Liberation, exclusion, and radical verbal irony
Cross's three features of irony (contradiction of inner and outer, exclusion, liberation) escalate. Ordinary ironic speech still aims to communicate something to the initiated. Radical verbal irony, Kierkegaard's Socrates, goes further: the utterance could be taken as p, not-p or q, and the speaker is indifferent which. Unlike the liar, who at least intends to convey some belief, the radical ironist only pretends to converse. Freedom comes in three forms:
- From responsibility for being wrong (nothing was asserted).
- From engagement in conversation (it is playacting).
- From dependence on the hearer's discernment (success does not require being understood).
Pushed from speech to life, the ironist pays taxes, goes to work and attends PTA meetings as a game. He rejects the practices' constitutive aims not by attacking them (which would attach importance to outward life) but by playing along, indifferent whether anyone suspects. "To want to be seen as independent is, of course, to fail to be independent." Socrates is "entirely negative" toward the established order, revolutionary "not so much by doing something as by not doing something", never a partisan. "Know yourself" means "separate yourself from the other" (CI 228).
Cross: from ironic speech to a life that never asserts.
Why the reflective aesthete is still immediate
Climacus places irony as confinium between aesthetic and ethical (CUP 501-2), and elsewhere between immediacy and the ethical (531n). Cross resolves the apparent clash by showing what A shares with immediacy. A is self-conscious to a fault, scornful of the bourgeois, moving from Don Giovanni to recollection of enjoyment to fantasy about others' lives. Climacus: "As a thinker A is advanced", yet "an existence-possibility that cannot attain existence"; he "has thought everything possible, and yet he has not existed at all" (CUP 253).
What he shares with immediacy is that he never questions his devotion to experience. Judge William: "Enjoy yourself" is "a higher reflection" that "does not penetrate into the personality". A's categories remain "fortune, misfortune, fate, immediate enthusiasm, despair" (CUP 434). He is passive about the shape of his life. At the end of that road stands the "defeated aesthete" of "The Unhappiest One" and the Diapsalmata: "If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will regret it ... This, gentlemen, is the sum of all practical wisdom." The laughter is "the laughter of despair".
Comic irony's repair: neither either nor or
Climacus says the dissertation brought out "only the one side" (CUP 503). The tragic ironist lives "suffering contradiction" and "despairs over the way out"; the comic ironist lives "painless contradiction" by having in mente the way out (CUP 513-16). He sees that and how ethical self-choice could integrate finite nature with the "ethical infinite requirement", without yet taking the step: "Irony is only a possibility" (CUP 505). Because the way out remains open, both his immediate life and his ironizing become games he chooses to play. He can include his own existence in his irony, judging himself by the same standards that make others laughable, and still feel transcendence: neither the one self nor the other. Hence Cross's title: neither either nor or.
Irony as controlled element and as infinite absolute negativity
Cross tracks two placings of irony that the journals never fully unify. Socrates as pure ironist (infinite absolute negativity) is one pole; irony as a controlled element in a mastered life is the other. Climacus's "correction" of the dissertation is Cross's reconstruction, not Kierkegaard's labelled project. Vlastos-style readings of Socratic irony contest the pure-ironist portrait. The peril of reading Either/Or as a choice the author has already made for the reader is Cross's warning: the book stages the either/or; it does not deliver the Or as a package.
Realism and antirealism in Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript
Defining the debate
By realism Evans means that there is a mind-independent reality by virtue of which our judgments are true or false. The antirealist accepts "the real world" in an everyday sense but denies that language can refer to the world as it is in itself, apart from our concepts and interests.
- Alston. "Whatever there is is what it is regardless of how we think of it", plus the belief that there is something ("Yes, Virginia, There Is a Real World", 1979).
- Plantinga. Antirealism holds that objects "are not ontologically independent of persons and their ways of thinking" (1982).
- Putnam. On the realist sense of "true", "it is logically possible for even the best attested statement to be false" ("Realism and Reason", 1977); his antirealism is explicitly Kantian: many authors write many true "versions".
- Rorty. He cites Kierkegaard as rejecting the Socratic idea of a timeless "truth-tracking faculty called Reason".
Evans's framing: a literary-versus-philosophical quarrel is really a realism quarrel.
Texts on both sides
- Antirealist-sounding. "Freedom ... is the wonderful lamp. When a person rubs it with ethical passion, God comes into existence for him" (CUP 138). God "is not something external, as is a wife" one can ask whether she is satisfied; his "vengeance is terrible: the vengeance that God does not exist for me at all, even though I pray" (163). If Christianity is subjectivity, "the object of cognition is the inwardness of the subjective individual himself" (53).
- Realist-sounding. "Nature is certainly the work of God, but only the work is directly present, not God" (243); inwardness awakens to a God-relationship, "and then it is possible to see God everywhere" (246-7); God as creator who needs no human to carry out his plans (136-9). An infinite moral demand I place on myself "hardly seems up to the job of creation".
Neither set is decisive. The God passages can be read as saying a person first becomes aware of God by acting freely, and even a local antirealism about moral and religious truth would matter enormously, since those truths matter most to Kierkegaard. Conversely, readers committed to global irony can read the realist passages as not "straight", or as old religious language filled with new pragmatic content.
Evans's point about method: each hermeneutic theory already presupposes an answer to the realism question.
No neutral method
Evans argues there is no neutral hermeneutic method to settle the matter. If every text "deconstructs" and none can affirm objective truths, Kierkegaard becomes an antirealist who knew that asserting antirealism would be incoherent and so "showed" what cannot be "said" (Wittgenstein). If meaning is fixed by authorial intent, a realist Kierkegaard follows. Both are question-begging. Still, rival readings can be tried on and tested by how well they illuminate the text, and "conversions may happen". Evans takes the claims and arguments seriously as claims, because even thoroughly ironic texts undermine their irony if we refuse to "play along".
Kant, Hegel and the knower's own existence
Chapter III of Postscript asks whether Hegel answered "Kantian skepticism". It seems to reverse the usual labels, with Kant the skeptic and Hegel the realist, but Kierkegaard is viewing Kant through Hegel's eyes in order to show that Hegel's answer is no answer and in fact a deeper skepticism. Kierkegaard's own view turns out close to Kant's, though he may not have known it (Green's Kierkegaard and Kant, 1992, suspects a suppressed debt).
- Doubt is willed. Global skepticism rests on a resolution, so "it can only be ended by a resolution" (CUP 335-6n); this does not mean beliefs are generally under voluntary control.
- Thought turns actuality into possibility. Thinking applies concepts, and a concept is a possibility; the "identity of thought and being" means only that being-as-thought equals thought, a sign that thinking has abandoned actuality (331).
- One exception. The individual "is able to know what lives within him, the only actuality that does not become a possibility by being known" (320): not Descartes's consciousness but the reality of agency, turning possibility into actuality. The risk is acosmism, which Mackey presses in "The Loss of the World in Kierkegaard's Ethics".
Approximation implies realism. To call historical knowledge "approximative" presupposes an ideal to approximate, and what else could it be but an accurate representation of an independent object? Existing objects have an "illusiveness" grounded in their independence of us. How, then, can I know a reality I can only think as possibility? Not by Cartesian inference, but because I know what it is to exist by existing. "Existence" is not a concept (thinking a tiger as existing does not change the concept), yet belief links thought-possibilities to my own actuality: believing that Julius Caesar existed is tying him, as forerunner or causal antecedent, to "that stream of passionate doings" I know as my own existence.
Evans's reconstruction of how an existing knower reaches an independent world without certainty.
Truth: correspondence as an unreached ideal
Postscript weighs two definitions of truth (CUP 189-90). The idealist "agreement of being with thinking" is tautological, because the "being" thought is only being-as-thought; hence "a logical system is possible", an existential system is not. The empirical "agreement of thinking with being" makes truth an ideal never fully realized, because both the object and the knower are unfinished. Evans reads this as an objection not to correspondence but to the claim that it can be finally achieved: exactly Putnam's "radically nonepistemic" truth. Einstein made the same point: "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."
| Position | Is there mind-independent truth? | Can we be certain of it? |
|---|---|---|
| Classical foundationalism (Descartes to Husserl) | Yes | Yes: there must be a method of certainty |
| Antirealism (Rorty) | No: truth is "what it is good for us to believe" | No method, so no contact with reality |
| Kierkegaard (Evans) | Yes, as the aim of all knowing | No: only approximation, through belief |
The shared premise of the first two rows, that objective knowledge requires a method of certainty, is what Kierkegaard rejects. Could Kierkegaard ground objective truth in God's omniscience (existence is a system for God)? Westphal rightly stresses that his limits on knowledge are theistic, but Evans thinks the inference runs the other way: we believe in God because we believe in objective truth, since one cannot trust God while doubting God's objective reality. Believing in a real world is simply what belief is; like Hume, Reid and Moore, Kierkegaard holds some beliefs are "called forth by life itself", so "one must work to be a skeptic".
Truth is subjectivity
"Truth is subjectivity" presupposes objective propositional truth: asked objectively, the question is whether what one relates to is true; asked subjectively, whether the how of the relation is true, "even if he in this way were to relate himself to untruth" (CUP 199). Hence the pagan who prays to an idol "with the passion of infinity" has more truth than the Christian who prays to the true God in a false spirit (201). The thesis covers only "essential" truth, moral and religious truth about how to live: a life can "correspond" or fail to correspond to its ideals, the reverse direction of knowing.
On the sincere Nazi, Evans answers that how one believes is decisive but what is not unimportant: the pagan would be better off still with true beliefs, and is more likely to gain them, because God has "providentially arranged" that moral and religious insight comes only through moral and religious striving. That is why the one who rubs the lamp with ethical passion finds God. God's reality is not founded on human activity; because God objectively exists and wants humans to live truly, finding the truth about God depends logically on learning to live truly.
Evans's reply on the sincere idolater: the how decides, the what still matters.
Proof-texts on both sides, and why they do not settle it
Evans stages the realism/antirealism debate inside Postscript without letting slogan-citations win. Antirealist-looking lines stress that the knower's existence qualifies every result; realist-looking lines keep correspondence as an ideal and refuse to collapse the object into the subject. Each side can explain away the other's passages. Evans's methodological claim: there is no neutral method that would decide the issue from outside an existence-commitment, yet that fact does not entail antirealism about the world.
Kant and Hegel both, for Climacus, forget that the knower exists. Approximation in historical knowledge never yields the existential decision Christianity requires. "Truth is subjectivity" then means: the how of appropriation is decisive for the truth that matters existentially, not that there is no mind-independent reality. Evans reads Climacus as a realist about God and the world who is an antirealist about the attempt to secure faith by objective approximation.
Evans: subjectivity as how of appropriation, not denial of the real.
Sincere error and the theism presupposition
Evans's reply to the "sincere Nazi" style objection (can passionate inwardness make a horrible belief true?) is that Climacus's account presupposes a theistic frame in which the object of faith is the God who is there. Subjectivity without that object is not the Postscript's topic. Critics (Poole among them) note that Evans is a party to the dispute he adjudicates, and that setting pseudonyms aside by stipulation (n. 7) begs questions the volume's other contributors keep open.
Existence, emotion, and virtue: classical themes in Kierkegaard
A polemical vocabulary
When Climacus says his generation has "forgotten what it means to exist and what inwardness is" (CUP 249), Roberts hears: forgotten what it is to be a person of integrity. Each term is defined by its polemical target:
| Term | Contrasted with | Where it dominates |
|---|---|---|
| Subjectivity (Subjektivitet) | The character-formation of speculative philosophy and historical scholarship ("objectivity") | Postscript |
| Inwardness (Inderlighed) | Externalities: position, reputation, results | Postscript 243-7 |
| Self (Selv) | People who amass money and "make a name in history" but "themselves they are not" (SUD 35) | Sickness unto Death |
| Existence (Existents) | Living abstractly sub specie aeterni | Postscript |
| Individual (Enkelte) | The crowd: emotional slavery to peers' approval | Many works |
| Character (Charakteer) | The present age's passionless, short-lived enthusiasm | Two Ages |
The classical key is a footnote in which Climacus recalls "Plutarch's splendid definition of virtue: 'Ethical virtue has the passions for its material, reason for its form'" (CUP 161-2n; Moralia 440). Roberts calls that "uncharacteristic" reference a good summary of everything Kierkegaard wrote. Aristotle made virtue "a state of character concerned with choice" with respect to actions and pathē; Aquinas devoted questions 22-48 of the Summa (Ia2ae) to the emotions before the virtues.
Plutarch's definition as Roberts uses it: virtue is passion given rational form.
Character and essential passion
Two Ages (a month after Postscript) uses "character" for sustained ethical enthusiasm. "Morality is character; character is something engraved ... but the sea has no character, nor does the sand, nor abstract common sense, either, for character is inwardness" (TA 77f). Without "essential passion" a person is an "unstable emptiness" and life together "stagnant water" (TA 62). Inwardness is a metaphor for centrality to the self, not privacy. Essential passion is not unruly: like poetry versus prose, it invents its own propriety. Ethical envy keeps a sense for the excellent; characterless envy would abolish all excellence to have no superiors. What makes a passion "essential" is its power to integrate the personality, which is close to Aristotle's telos.
Practical wisdom: passion and reflection
The mature self is a synthesis of passion and reflection. Passion without reflection is childish immediacy; reflection without passion is the emptiness that Two Ages attacks, a "professorial monstrosity" Aristotle would also deplore. Kierkegaard sketches a sequence: immediate inspiration, then prudence, then "the highest ... enthusiasm" which "perceives what is the most prudent thing to do but rejects it".
Two Ages on enthusiasm and reflection, with Roberts's two corrections.
Roberts makes two corrections. The temporal sequence is artificial: once formed, a mature person's immediate responses are already shaped by thought (Aristotle's "desiderative reason or ratiocinative desire"). And the rejected "prudence" is not understanding but Christendom's "self-serving, cowardly, leveled and leveling indolence"; there is also Christian reflection (Works of Love is subtitled "Christian Reflections").
Five facts about emotions
- Concern-based. Emotions arise from concerns (interests, passions), which constitute character, so episodes of emotion manifest character.
- Thought-dependent. Hence there are aesthetic, ethical and Christian emotions; emotions are partly subject to the will; and they have a "dialectic" whose knowledge is moral wisdom.
- Perceptual. Emotions are perceptions of the situation's moral and spiritual qualities, which is why changing thoughts cannot guarantee changing feelings.
- Counterfeitable. They have simulacra, "mere feelings", that make a person think himself more virtuous than he is.
- Dissociable. A person can stand back and say "that is not really me", in resolute dissociation rather than denial.
Passion as emotion and as concern
Kierkegaard does not theorize the distinction, but his usage of Lidenskab and Pathos marks it. Roberts's example is a woman with a specialty bookbinding workshop: her concern (her shop is her passion) yields joy when it flourishes, hope at signs of recovery, anxiety at the prospect of closing, grief if it fails, gratitude to a rescuer and anger at a saboteur. "Virtually any concern ... can give rise to any or all of the whole range of emotions," depending on how she construes her circumstances.
Roberts's model: one concern, many emotions, depending on construal of circumstances.
A romantic attachment is a Lidenskab but not an emotion; Climacus's "infinite interest" in eternal happiness is "the possibility of faith and then faith", and faith is a "happy passion", with joy and gratitude dominant. A journal entry shows both senses at once: civil wars and religious schisms are the most violent because "at the root of the other controversy lies friendship", a concern for unity whose betrayal fuels secondary shame and anger. Men in a passion "lie to the high heaven" and so "passion must be purified": a change in dispositions to emotional response, not a better system (Pap. VII¹ A 102).
Emotions shaped by thought
Becoming a Christian is "pathos-filled and dialectical" (CUP 555). The "turbulent religious address" that mixes "esthetics, ethics, Religiousness A, and Christianity" in a "jumbled, noisy pathos" cannot be assimilated; Pastor Adler used Christian language without Christian concepts, so his emotions were not specifically Christian. The discourses teach how to think in order to feel rightly:
- Abundance. The heathen is shaped by "the thought of possession"; the Christian, a traveller sitting on benches that are not his, enjoys goods as gifts and resources for service (CD 29-36).
- Tribulation. "Tribulation is the way": a man crippled for life can see his disability as a special path rather than a spoiling.
- The lily. The lily on a dunghill behind a ruined chicken coop thinks, "that I stand where I stand is God's will" (CD 339); a brilliant philosopher with a crushing load "in a second-rate university" might learn to think likewise, though for a human this takes "laborious, long-term, and sometimes violent self-discipline".
How thought shapes emotion in the Christian discourses: the same goods, a different construal.
Emotions as aspect perceptions
The Christian is not literally "ignorant" of his poverty or wealth; it is not salient to him. Emotions are "impressions" of a situation's personal importance, like Wittgenstein's aspect that is "half visual experience, half thought", a "second immediacy". That is why rehearsing that it is better to serve God gladly "in Fort Hays than ... in New Haven" may fail: like the Müller-Lyer illusion, the rival view keeps impressing. Kierkegaard's imagery is perceptual: the believer is blind and deaf to the world's "all"; fixing one's gaze on the oppressors' strength is "an error of vision" (CD 131).
Feelings without depth and dissociation
Følelse (feeling) is often a perception of oneself in an emotional state, so it can be inaccurate. The aesthete of Either/Or deliberately poetizes his moods and keeps them at a distance. Anti-Climacus warns that "fantastic" feeling volatilizes the self into "abstract sentimentality", like a rheumatic at the mercy of the weather (SUD 31): someone who feels only at the theater or before documentaries about suffering far away. Dostoevsky's underground man knows his spite is fake: he was "merely frightening sparrows".
- Shared. Virtue as disposition to proper emotion, choice in its exercise and formation, and upbringing (Opdragelse) over mere instruction.
- Suspicion 1. Reflection cut off from passion becomes an enemy of the virtues.
- Suspicion 2. Emotions, or their simulacra, can be faked and detached from the self.
- Christian addition. Aristotle denies continence is a virtue; with Romans 7, Augustine and Galatians 5:23, Kierkegaard makes dissociation from one's own vicious emotion virtuous: "the ungodliness does not consist ... in being anxious", but in "not being willing to know that this anxiety is sinful" (CD 23). The struggling Christian is "a conflict of two characters".
Character as engraved passion, not private mentality
Roberts presses the Two Ages etymology: character is something engraved (χαράσσω), and the sea, the sand and "abstract common sense" have none (TA 77f). Inwardness here is not privacy; it is centrality to the self. The core is concerns (enthusiasms, interests, passions) and what flows from them: emotions, intentions, decisions, actions. Take away "essential passion" and "everything becomes meaningless externality" (TA 62). Passion of the right kind invents its own propriety, as poetry invents constraints prose does not know.
The envy contrast makes the telos vivid:
- Ethical envy still wants the excellent and therefore envies the person who has it; the passion remains ordered to the good.
- Characterless envy would abolish excellence so that no one is superior; the passion cannot integrate a self, because its aim is comparative rank, not a human end.
What qualifies a passion as essential is its power to consolidate the personality, which Roberts reads as close to Aristotle's idea of a human telos. The self as a synthesis of finite/infinite and temporal/eternal is "designed to be actualized" in such a passion.
Roberts on essential passion: engraving a self against characterless envy.
Practical wisdom's two peculiarities
Two Ages and Postscript are both about the life of the mind. Subjective thinking is commended; objective thinking and passionless reflection are exposed as diseases of the spirit. The mature self is a synthesis of passion and reflection. Kierkegaard's sketch (TA 110-22) runs: immediate inspiration, then prudence, then the highest enthusiasm that "perceives what is the most prudent thing to do but rejects it".
Roberts flags two peculiarities. First, the temporal sequence is artificial: once formed, a mature person's immediate responses are already shaped by thought (Aristotle's "desiderative reason or ratiocinative desire", NE 1139b5). Second, the rejected "prudence" is not understanding as such but Christendom's self-serving, cowardly, leveled indolence. There is also Christian reflection: Works of Love is subtitled "Christian Reflections". Kierkegaard is more alert than Aristotle to deliberation's pitfalls inside a leveled age.
Emotions as concern-based perceptions, with counterfeits
Roberts's emotion theory is classical with Christian additions. Emotions arise from concerns that constitute character; they are thought-dependent, so there are aesthetic, ethical and Christian emotions; they are perceptual, which is why changing thoughts need not change feelings (the Müller-Lyer rival view keeps impressing); they have simulacra (følelse as self-perception of an emotional state); and a person can dissociate ("that is not really me") without denial.
- Shared. Virtue as disposition to proper emotion; choice in its exercise and formation; upbringing (Opdragelse) over mere instruction.
- Suspicion 1. Reflection cut off from passion becomes an enemy of the virtues (the present age).
- Suspicion 2. Emotions, or their simulacra, can be faked and detached from the self (the aesthete; Dostoevsky's underground man "frightening sparrows").
- Christian addition. Distinctively Christian emotions (gratitude, joy in adversity, forgiveness) are formed by revelation-shaped thought, not by pagan phronesis alone.
Christian emotions and the long school of formation
Roberts's Christian addition is not a veneer on Aristotle. Gratitude, joy in adversity and the refusal to let wealth or poverty be salient are formed by revelation-shaped thought. The believer is not literally ignorant of poverty or wealth; those facts are not salient. Emotions are impressions of a situation's personal importance, "half visual experience, half thought" (Wittgenstein), a "second immediacy". Rehearsing that it is better to serve God gladly "in Fort Hays than in New Haven" may fail: like the Müller-Lyer illusion, the rival view keeps impressing. Kierkegaard's imagery is perceptual: fixing one's gaze on the oppressors' strength is "an error of vision" (CD 131).
Følelse can be inaccurate self-perception. The aesthete poetises moods; Anti-Climacus warns that fantastic feeling volatilises the self into "abstract sentimentality", like a rheumatic at the mercy of the weather (SUD 31), feeling only at the theatre or before distant documentaries. Formation is "laborious, violent" long self-discipline, closer to monastic askesis than to a workshop on emotional intelligence. That is why Roberts can call Kierkegaard an eminent virtue ethicist while insisting the present age's reflection is often the virtues' enemy.
Faith and the Kierkegaardian leap
Where the leap appears
- Fragments. The leap first appears in Chapter III ("Metaphysical Caprice"), the third pass at the non-Socratic story after the "Thought-Project" and the "Poetical Venture". Climacus warns that the "most mistaken impression" of Fragments is that it is didactic (CUP 275n), and he declares himself not a Christian.
- Demonstration falls loose at both ends. Proofs of God only develop "the definition of a concept" (PF 40). "So long as I am holding on to the demonstration ... the existence does not emerge ... but when I let go of the demonstration, the existence is there." That letting go is "meine Zuthat", my contribution, and "it does not have to be long, because it is a leap" (43).
- Postscript. The "renewed attempt" says there is "no direct and immediate transition to Christianity" and that "wanting to quantify oneself into faith" is a delusion (CUP 11-12). "Direct and immediate" means the Hegelian transition that "flops over" by "immanental necessity", where "one standpoint ... necessarily determine[s] its transition".
Climacus on demonstration: existence appears only when the proof is let go.
Lessing's ditch
The fullest treatment is "Something about Lessing" (CUP 63-125), on the German dramatist's "broad ugly ditch" between historical truths and truths of reason. Some (Ronald Green) trace the leap more to Kant, and Ferreira grants the kinship: both limit theoretical reason to make "room for faith". But Climacus's explicit reference is Lessing, and his gratitude is sincere. Lessing knew the religious "pertained to Lessing and Lessing alone", refused to be "world-historically butchered, salted, and packed in a paragraph", and wrote in "a mixture of jest and earnestness". His "der Sprung" and Aristotle's metabasis name an all-or-nothing transition: "the leap, as decisive, is qualitatively dialectical and permits no approximating transition" (103).
- Cumulative. One inches up to faith by evidence or culture, Jacobi's "elastic spot" that catapults you (Climacus grants there is something "rather well said" in it, since in a sense "it will come by itself").
- Muscular. The Münchausen leap: "one closes one's eyes, grabs oneself by the neck ... and then one stands on the other side" (CUP 99); "the unutterable sighs of prayer are incommensurate with the muscular".
- Pure gift. Faith as a miracle with no human activity (Wisdo, 1987).
- Ferreira. A free, engaged transition in which passion or imaginative captivation constitutes the change; gift and activity are not exclusive: "we let go, we embrace the Absolute Paradox, we leap".
Ferreira's map of readings of the leap: three caricatures against one engaged transition.
Freedom without willpower
Kierkegaard's "theory of the leap" (two journal references) gives two clues: the leap belongs essentially to freedom, and it concerns "the difference between a dialectical transition and a transition of pathos", which "Aristotle called an enthymeme". The volitionalist reading takes "the leap is the category of decision" (CUP 99) as an arbitrary choice among options formulated beforehand. Ferreira widens "decision":
- Inference. Kierkegaard calls induction and analogy leaps ("the conclusion can be reached only by a LEAP"); all other conclusions are tautological.
- Gestalt shifts. In the duck/rabbit, one cannot decide to see the new figure, only to look for it. But the model is symmetrical and reversible and the two pictures are unrelated, so a better one is needed.
- Critical thresholds. Water heats by degrees but does not boil gradually; explosives do not explode gradually. The change is qualitative, directional and decisive, yet "a function of what precedes it": heat, or evidence, is registered all along. Kierkegaard himself lists "the leap by which water turns to ice, the leap by which I understand an author, and the leap which is the transition from good to evil", and notes the paradox has "continuity only in reverse".
Ferreira's critical-threshold model of the leap: qualitative, directional, yet anchored in what precedes.
Freedom is compatibilist for Kierkegaard: it never requires liberum arbitrium, the "bare and naked", "contentless" freedom of indifference; "true freedom" is compatible with there being "no choice", and with divine governance. Responsibility survives in the decisions around the transition: to look patiently and attentively, or to close one's eyes stubbornly. Risk survives too: "Without risk, no faith", out over seventy thousand fathoms. "To be infinitely interested and to ask about an actuality that is not one's own is to will to believe" (CUP 323); to ask like that is to dare to be radically changed. "Risk attends the looking as much as the seeing."
Pathos as the substance of the leap
The enthymeme is a rhetorical syllogism built from the audience's opinions, aimed at practical, non-necessary change, but it is still a syllogism: a pathos-filled transition has implicit structure, so Kierkegaard rejects not structured transitions but necessary ones premised on abstractions. "Everything has its dialectic": it is as questionable to be "pathos-filled and earnest in the wrong place as it is to laugh in the wrong place" (CUP 525).
- Aesthetic pathos. The "pathos of possibility", disinterested.
- Ethical pathos. "The pathos of interestedness": I, acting, transform my whole existence (389-90).
- Religious pathos. Relating absolutely to an absolute telos: "the religious is the purest pathos" (462), and even within immanence a resistance "intensifies pathos" (535).
- Christian pathos. "Sharpened" because one must "venture to believe against the understanding" (429); sin-consciousness, unthinkable and isolating, gives the "pathos of separation".
In Fragments, faith is a passion, a "happy passion" (PF 54, 59, 61), modelled on happy love, and the leap and the onset of the passion are the same transition. Lidenskab shares a root with lide, to suffer, but Aristotle also treats passion as "an eager outreaching of the mind", and passions like fear are constituted partly by interpretation. So passion fits neither simple passivity nor simple willpower; Climacus even calls offense both active and passive (PF 50). Faith is "neither an act of knowledge nor an act of unconditioned willing" (PF 62).
Suffering as seeing-as. While suffering is understood as accidental ("misfortune") it is expected to end; when it does not, one despairs, and a transition to "comprehending suffering" as essential becomes possible (CUP 434, 445). The transition is a new understanding. Likewise "essential decisions" are not like buying quarts of milk rather than pints: one comes "in passionate concentration" to discover that one is decided, that one already clings. "A pathos-filled transition can be achieved by every one if he wills it, because the transition to the infinite, which consists in pathos, takes only courage."
Paradox and the leap to Religiousness B
The muscular reading feeds on an empty notion of paradox: if paradox has no content, only brute force can accept it. But what is embraced is a paradoxical self-understanding, "absolute likeness and absolute unlikeness", whose content is sin-consciousness, "the leap of sin-consciousness". Willing here is "approving affirmation", not creation ex nihilo. There is a qualitative dialectic between all spheres, not only before Christianity: "The relation between esthetics and ethics: the transition, pathos-filled, not dialectical" (journal, 1842-3). All leaps are formally similar shifts of vision ("then it is possible to see God everywhere"; "the god ... opened for him the eyes of faith"). The difference for Religiousness B is that the condition must be given, but "once the condition is given, that which was valid for the Socratic is again valid" (PF 63). The mechanism finally involves imagination, which "infinitizes", holds tensions unresolved and ranks with thinking and feeling among "all elements" of existence (CUP 346-8), where will is not listed.
| Leap | Kind | Who leaps |
|---|---|---|
| Induction, analogy, understanding an author | Homogeneous qualitative transition | We do |
| Aesthetic to ethical; eudaemonism to duty | Pathos-filled, qualitative dialectic within immanence | We do |
| To Religiousness A ("see God everywhere") | Irruption of inwardness | We do |
| To Religiousness B (sin-consciousness) | Same form; condition given | We do, by gift |
| Christ's entry into the world | The only non-homogeneous leap | God |
Pathos as the substance of the leap
Ferreira's second journal clue names "the difference between a dialectical transition and a transition of pathos", which "Aristotle called an enthymeme" (JP III 20). A dialectical transition merely unfolds what is already there; a pathos-filled transition is a genuine derivation. An Aristotelian enthymeme is a rhetorical syllogism whose premises come from the audience's popular opinion and whose aim is a practical, concrete, nonnecessary change. The appeal to pathos is not formless feeling: Aristotle's enthymeme is still a syllogism, so there may be an implicit structure that could be reconstructed. Kierkegaard's rejection of the Hegelian System is not a rejection of structured transitions as such, but of transitions that were necessary and premised on abstractions.
Postscript warns both ways: earnestness is not "a beatifying universal balm"; it is "just as questionable to be pathos-filled and earnest in the wrong place as it is to laugh in the wrong place" (CUP 525). "Everything has its dialectic", not a relativising mediation but a dialectic by which "the absolute becomes distinguishable as the absolute". Pathos is "the substance of the leap"; inwardness is subjectivity; subjectivity is essentially passion (CUP 33, 142).
Ferreira: pathos-filled transition as enthymeme, not muscular will.
Critical threshold against Gestalt symmetry
The duck/rabbit shows that qualitative free transitions need not be acts of willpower, but it is symmetrical and reversible and the two pictures are unrelated. Ferreira prefers critical thresholds: water heats by degrees but does not boil gradually; explosives do not explode gradually. The change is decisive (further increase is superfluous) yet "a function of what precedes it". Kierkegaard's own list: "the leap by which water turns to ice, the leap by which I understand an author, and the leap which is the transition from good to evil". Continuity appears "only in reverse".
Christian faith is stronger still: not a development of what man originally is, but "a qualitative transformation, a total character transformation in time (just as qualitative as the change from not being to being which is birth)" (JP III 416). The "quality of the divine" is not "the superlative of the most superlative superlative of the human". Evidence and attention are registered by degrees; pathos intensifies; at the threshold a new way of seeing becomes actual. One can decide to look; one cannot decide to recognise.
Letting go, gift and activity together
Climacus's demonstration argument already contains the model: existence emerges when one lets go of the proof (meine Zuthat). Ferreira refuses the forced choice between pure gift (Wisdo) and Münchausen willpower. "We let go, we embrace the Absolute Paradox, we leap": gift and activity are not exclusive. Jacobi's "elastic spot" is granted something "rather well said", since in a sense "it will come by itself", yet Climacus still insists the transition is all-or-nothing: "the leap, as decisive, is qualitatively dialectical and permits no approximating transition" (CUP 103).
Leap, will and the MacKinnon/McKinnon trail
Ferreira refuses a cartoon leap that floats free of preparation, yet she must still reckon with Climacus's language of an "act of will" (PF 83). James's question about a "superadded will force" remains open in her treatment. The companion's note slips "MacKinnon" for McKinnon; Climacus is not a Christian, so his map of the leap is diagnostic rather than confessional. Transition, qualitative break and the passion of resolution are her preferred vocabulary against a decisionism that would make faith a bare fiat.
Arminian edification: Kierkegaard on grace and free will
The envelopes argument and three positions
Kierkegaard's journal gives the problem its sharpest form. We are saved by grace, through faith; no one can give himself faith, he must pray for it; but then praying aright must be given, and so on: "There are many, many envelopes, but there must still be one point or another where there is a halt at subjectivity ... subjectivity cannot be excluded, unless we want to have fatalism" (JP IV 352).
The envelopes regress: grace all the way down, yet one point where subjectivity halts.
| Position | The first step toward God | Grace |
|---|---|---|
| Pelagianism | Ours, by intrinsic resources; human nature is perfectible | Not required |
| Semi-Pelagianism | We take the first step; God catches us | Needed to complete |
| Arminianism (Jackson's Kierkegaard) | None: God must turn and draw us; we can only accept or refuse | Indispensable, resistible |
| Mature Augustine / Calvinism | None, and no real refusal either | Irresistible for the elect |
Kierkegaard sometimes flirts with semi-Pelagian language: "there must be the situation", brought about "by an existential step" (JP II 20). But that step is "a patient running in place", a dying to the world that opens one to receive gifts. "Man's highest achievement is to let God be able to help him" (JP I 22). The label is logical and psychological, not historical. Jacob Arminius (born Oudewater 1560, pastor in Amsterdam 1588) denied strict predestination, since if God necessitates all action, God is the author of evil. What links them is the kenotic, self-emptying nature of grace.
Jackson's three Arminian themes in Kierkegaard, each set against a rival doctrine.
Universal access, but not identical access
Kierkegaard is unambiguous: "every man, however simple ... can nevertheless grasp the highest, namely religion ... If that is not so, then Christianity is really nonsense." The Bible is "of two minds", and Jackson distinguishes the extent of the offer from the extent of acceptance: to be demonic is "to pray to be free from being saved" (JP II 77). But Climacus's claim that God makes the covenant "equally difficult for every human being" (PF 134) is not credible. Neglect or abuse in childhood can leave a person unable to trust anyone, God included. Jackson prefers Peter Geach (Providence and Evil, 1977): all have a genuine chance at glory, not an identical chance.
Can others help or harm us spiritually?
Kierkegaard often seems to hold that others can give us neither spiritual help nor spiritual harm: "one human being ... owes nothing to another but everything to the God" (PF 127); spiritual death is always "suicide" (WL 308); the woman with hemorrhages keeps "the secret of faith" even when she cannot move her tongue. Yet that would undercut his own authorship, which aims to remove illusions and upbuild: "to help another human being to love God is to love another man" (WL 113). Jackson draws three distinctions:
- Maturity. What holds for selves past the threshold of ethico-religious agency differs from what holds in spiritual nonage, when the spirit is "dreaming" (CA 41).
- Decisive help or harm. Virtue given unto eternal salvation, or injury unto damnation: "One person can do much for another, but he cannot give him faith" (EUD 12).
- Decisively given. Help or harm that necessitates virtue or vice without the other's consent; Kierkegaard rules this out even for God: "The self is freedom" (SUD 29).
Jackson's four amended theses: others may give profound, not decisive, help or harm to premoral, emergent selves; to mature selves, no one but the agent can supply sufficient conditions of spiritual harm or help, even divine grace. The result is a doctrine of social responsibility: the duty of neighbour-love becomes in the first instance a duty to protect her inchoate freedom, calling the vulnerable "into realized spirit" by care. Preventing the frustration of selfhood is, on this view, the principal function of civil law.
Jackson's amended theses on spiritual help and harm, split by maturity.
Augustine and Kierkegaard: reason, passion and two freedoms
- Faculties. Augustine keeps the hegemony of reason (via Plato): "Reason proposes, the will disposes"; after the Fall passion and cupiditas blind reason. Kierkegaard inverts this, giving epistemic priority to passion and will (and regulated imagination): Either/Or's epigraph from Edward Young asks, "Is reason then alone baptized, are the passions pagans?"
- (JP I 71).
- Sin. Augustine: original sin is inherited, humanity non posse non peccare; the elect are moved by grace and will be non posse peccare. Kierkegaard: this makes Adam "essentially different from the race" (CA 29); every person is his or her own Adam, and "sin presupposes itself ... in that it is posited" (CA 62). Predestination is "a thoroughgoing abortion" (JP II 56).
- Perseverance. For Kierkegaard a faithful person can always fall away: "Christ cannot, 'love' cannot, make this impossible" (SUD 126).
Both thinkers distinguish two senses of freedom. Liberum arbitrium, freedom of choice, is the bare, neutral ability to do otherwise. Libertas, true freedom, is the concrete identity gained by choosing and binding oneself: "to be able" (CA 49). Kierkegaard calls abstract freedom of choice a "chimera", a "nuisance for thought", but only when taken in isolation, as "an abrogation of the concept of freedom". He is not a compatibilist: freedom of choice is the ontological precondition of true freedom, which is gained by giving it back.
Jackson's map of two freedoms: freedom of choice is transformed, not abolished, in true freedom.
The opposite of freedom is guilt, not necessity (CA 108). Faith is not Promethean self-creation, nor accurate cognition, nor preordained experience, but a passionate "Yes" to a "Gifted Reality" that looks paradoxical; not crude subjectivism, since pathos-filled choices can be mistaken, and not irrationalism, since faith is supra rationem, not contra rationem.
Three conundrums and a kenotic God
Kierkegaard affirms three pairs that must be held dialectically: universal access and the rarity of faith ("the majority of men never experience the spiritual life"); equal accountability and gracious upbuilding; and liberum arbitrium and libertas. Taken undialectically, each pole collapses into an error: Christianity by birth, or chosenness; "radical autonomy", or "decisive help decisively given"; postmodern arbitrariness, or premodern irresistible grace. In order to do just that, omnipotence is required" (JP II 62). Arminius, appointed professor in 1603, was hounded by the state church, a forerunner of the Attack upon Christendom.
Arminian typology: grace that does not coerce
Jackson reads Kierkegaard's account of grace and free will as Arminian in type, not as a historical membership claim. Against a Calvinist picture in which grace is irresistible and election unconditional, the Arminian line (Remonstrance 1610, though the chapter's note slips to 1609) holds that grace is necessary and enabling yet resistible, and that human response is a real condition of salvation without being its meritorious cause. Kierkegaard's edifying discourses repeatedly say both: without God one can do nothing, and yet the address is to an agent who must will to be open.
The typology organises the dispute Jackson stages with Lutheran and Augustinian readings that make the human contribution vanish into divine causality. His concern is pastoral as much as doctrinal: if the hearer of a discourse cannot in any sense respond, edification becomes a spectacle. If the hearer can respond without grace, Christianity collapses into moralism. The Arminian middle keeps both poles: sola gratia without determinism.
Jackson's Arminian middle: grace necessary, response real.
Edification as the test of the doctrine
Jackson's method is to let the discourses test the dogmatics. Passages that sound strongly monergistic are set beside passages that exhort, warn and invite. Colossians "1:27-28" (printed as "27:28" in the chapter) and related texts are used to show that admonition presupposes responsibility. The "sincere Nazi" style objection (can someone sincerely refuse grace?) is met by refusing to make sincerity a trump: the will can close itself, and that closing is still coram Deo. Jackson's Arminian label remains typological; contributors such as Evans and Green press divine-command and hidden-sin readings that shift the weight toward grace's initiative.
"Developing" Fear and Trembling
Green's four levels of Fear and Trembling, each exposed beneath the last and then read back together.
Level 1: the call to Christian commitment
Christian civilization's cultural triumph had effaced primitive Christianity: risk had become a matter of being born to Christian parents, and "the results" overshadowed the anguish. Johannes de silentio applies "theological shock treatment" (Dietrichson's phrase): "What is omitted from Abraham's story is the anxiety" (FT 28). A preacher thunders at the parishioner who wants to imitate Abraham, "You despicable man, what devil has so possessed you that you want to murder your own son?". Faith is "not as the content of a concept but as a form of the will" (draft, Pap. IV B 87). The book is bracketed by commerce: the age stages "ein wirklicher Ausverkauf", a real sale of faith at "a bargain price"; the epilogue recalls Dutch merchants sinking spice cargoes to raise prices, as Johannes uses Abraham to raise the price of faith against the Hegelian "go further".
Level 2: the psychology of faith
- Infinite resignation. The young swain renounces the princess and finds "eternal consciousness": "peace and rest and comfort in the pain" (FT 45), like a shirt spun in tears.
- Faith. He "does exactly the same" but then: "Nevertheless, I have faith that I will get her, that is, by virtue of the absurd, by virtue of the fact that for God all things are possible" (FT 46).
- Abraham. He gives up Isaac and still believes he will be happy in Isaac again in this life (FT 35), unlike the four despairing Abrahams of the "Exordium".
- The tax collector. The Copenhagen knight looks like a bourgeois philistine, yet "the finite tastes just as good to him as one who never knew anything higher" (FT 40).
Edward Mooney reads this as selfless care: renouncing all proprietary claim to the finite is not renouncing care for it. At this level the book starts to look less like a defence of religiously commanded homicide and more like a traditional defence of selfless love.
Level 3: the ethics puzzle
The Problemata introduce the "teleological suspension of the ethical" and an "absolute duty to God". The ethical is "the universal"; faith is "the paradox that the single individual is higher than the universal" (FT 55). Abraham is no tragic hero: Agamemnon, Jephthah and Brutus sacrifice children for the common good, but Abraham acts "for God's sake and ... for his own sake" (FT 59). Ethically he is the murderer of his son, yet "I cannot understand Abraham, I can only admire him". Green sets out the main attempts to resolve this jarring inconsistency:
| Reading | Proponent | Green's objection |
|---|---|---|
| Against Kantian absolutism (no lie even to a murderer) | Elmer Duncan, Clive | Tragic heroes already break rules; Abraham leaves the ethical entirely |
| Against ethical philistinism | Discussed by Outka | Makes Abraham a defender of genuine ethics; tragic heroes also defy convention |
| Against Hegel's Sittlichkeit: the individual against the state | Common; anti-totalitarian reading | Implies Abraham is ethically higher, which Johannes denies |
| Call to individuation ("see himself not as a father") | Jerome Gellman | Leaves ethics in doubt; why Genesis 22? |
| Divine command ethics, "general trust with specific perplexity" | C. Stephen Evans (the knife-thrower's assistant) | The book barely mentions God's nature; one remark that "God is love" (FT 34) |
The divine command view fits Kierkegaard's own position (self-imposed duties lead to moral laxity; we need an authoritative lawgiver), but read as an ethical treatise the book leaves a god "beyond good and evil" and an exemplar who "borders on the psychopathic". That points deeper.
Level 4: sin and forgiveness
Abraham "is not a sinner", so sin seems absent. Green argues from three sources:
- Interpretive tradition. From Paul and Hebrews 11 (Isaac received back as a figure of resurrection), the Fathers read Abraham as a type of God sacrificing his son; Kierkegaard noted this in 1839. Kant, in Religion and The Conflict of the Faculties, made Abraham the negative example of obeying alleged commands against conscience, and footnoted the "symbol of the world-savior's own sacrifice". Fear and Trembling may be the opening salvo in Kierkegaard's battle with Kant over historically mediated salvation (Green's Kierkegaard and Kant: The Hidden Debt, 1992).
- The text. The title recalls Philippians 2:12; and in Problema III, prefaced by "a comment that says more than has been said at any point previously", the merman who seduced Agnes can return "only by virtue of having come as the single individual into an absolute relation to the absolute" (FT 98), the very words used for Abraham. Abraham and the merman are counterparts: both suspend the ethical, one by obedience, one by sin, and both are saved only by a supraethical relation to God. An ethics that ignores sin is futile; one that acknowledges it has exceeded itself.
- Repetition. Published the same day, it uses Job the same way. Kierkegaard's unpublished reply to Heiberg says repetition, posed dogmatically, "will come to mean atonement".
Green's three sources for a hidden Level 4 on sin and forgiveness.
The transparent image
Read back from Level 4, each level deepens. The call to commitment becomes repentance: a successful life still stands under judgment. Infinite resignation becomes abandoning one's sense of moral integrity (a movement the merman can make); faith becomes an absurd hope of redemption (beyond the merman's powers). The ethics of following Jesus, even to "hating" father and mother (Luke 14:26), sharpens duty "to the breaking point", so that "Before God, we are always in the wrong", and Hegelian Sittlichkeit runs aground on its own shallowness. The teleological suspension is a suspension, not an annulment: grace aims at full moral renovation and elicits selfless care. Like Paul and Luther, Kierkegaard can celebrate Abraham's transcendence of the law (nothing in his conduct merits election) and hold him up as a model, because he is justified by grace alone.
How each surface level is re-read once the sin level is developed.
Level 1: theological shock treatment against results
Green's surface reading treats Fear and Trembling as a stinging critique of popular and cultured Christianity. Cultural triumph had made Christian identity a matter of being born to Christian parents in a Christian nation. Eighteen centuries of hindsight replaced risk, suffering and martyrdom with "the results". Johannes de silentio's antidote is theological shock treatment: follow Abraham "step for step" on the road to Moriah and recover what veneration erased. "What is omitted from Abraham's story is the anxiety" (FT 28). "We are curious about the results, just as we are curious about the way a book turns out. We do not want to know anything about the anxiety, the distress, the paradox" (63).
The imaginary parishioner who takes the Sunday sermon seriously and plans to imitate Abraham is thundered at by his pastor: "You despicable man, what devil has so possessed you that you want to murder your own son?" (FT 28). The reply "But that was what you yourself preached" cuts no ice, because the established church has replaced primitive Christianity with cliché-ridden worldly piety. Abraham also shifts faith from dogmatic assent to a way of life. A draft margin defines faith "not as the content of a concept but as a form of the will" (Pap. IV B 87). Jerry Gill reads the story as a reductio of traditions that treat faith as mental assent. Among the cultured, Hegelian "One must go further" was the new evasion.
Green Level 1: shock treatment against result-Christianity and Hegelian 'further'.
Level 4: sin and forgiveness beneath Abraham
Ordinarily Fear and Trembling is not read as a book about sin: Johannes repeats that Abraham "is not a sinner". Green argues a latent fourth level: how can the individual believer be saved from sin? Three supports:
- Interpretative tradition. David Lerch traces Genesis 22's Christological use from Paul (Isaac as "child of promise", Galatians 3:16 / 4:28, though the chapter cites 3:13-14) through Hebrews 11:17-19 to the Fathers' view of Abraham as a type of God offering the Son. Kierkegaard knew this by 1839 (Pap. II A 569). Kant used Abraham as the negative example of placing alleged divine commands above rational conscience, and footnoted the world-saviour typology in Conflict of the Faculties.
- The text. The merman in Problema III can make the movement of infinite resignation (abandoning moral integrity) but not the further movement of faith as absurd hope of redemption. Read back, Level 1's call becomes repentance; Level 2's resignation becomes giving up one's sense of moral integrity; Level 3's ethics of following Jesus (even to "hating" father and mother, Luke 14:26) sharpens duty "to the breaking point".
- Biography. The usual Regine-as-Isaac reading is incomplete. Kierkegaard's own explanation: God said "no" because of "the eternal night brooding within me", rooted in his father. So Søren is Isaac, "both sacrificer and sacrificial victim". "If I had had faith, I would have stayed with Regine" (Pap. IV A 107).
Hidden level, Philippians and what Green will not prove
Green's thesis that Fear and Trembling hides a sin-and-atonement level beneath the Abraham story is powerful and unfalsifiable in the strong sense: contrary surface readings can always be called pedagogic masks. He corrects nothing about Abraham's silence that de silentio does not already dramatise. Agacinski's rape-of-Regine speculation is noted as speculative. Green's lasting service is to keep atonement on the table when readers would stop at knight-of-faith heroics.
Repetition: getting the world back
Why so much disguise
Walter Lowrie found no Kierkegaardian term "more important and none so baffling". Kierkegaard called the book "a droll little book, dashed off as an oddity", a jest meant to throw readers off the scent. Mooney gives three reasons for the indirection:
- Autobiography. Kierkegaard wrote these books while breaking with Regine Olsen and then wishing for reconciliation; learning in proof that she was engaged to someone else, he ripped out the final pages and rewrote them.
- Social critique. He had to speak in the flawed language of the Christendom he wished to undo, so the novella becomes a Trojan horse.
- Developing concepts. Indirection let him revise without going on record. Repetition means different things in different spheres: a perverse repetition in Don Giovanni, Judge William's ethical "choose yourself", and finally "repetition in the pregnant sense", which is received.
The narrative: Constantin's experiment
The pseudonym Constantin Constantius is itself a repetition, and Mooney reads four meanings into it: constancy and motion; a steady friend to the lovesick youth; one who seeks constancy; and existential complacency, a "rather hollow figure" with "all too glib advice". He announces repetition as "the new category that will be discovered" (R 148), rival to Hegelian mediation and Greek recollection, then turns to whether it is possible and tests it by returning to Berlin: the jolting coach, the theater, the café, the now-married host. Everything has changed, so repetition is "impossible". But an empirical test cannot refute a metaphysical concept, and nothing deeper than curiosity moves him to try the coffee across town: "The Berlin experiment is childish whimsy."
- Hegelian mediation. Development by immanent negations, general, natural and aimed at civic propriety: the "1, 2, 3 dance step" (R 226). It buries individual choice and transcendent bestowal.
- Platonic recollection. Meaning lies in a past eternity, like keys mislaid "where we left them". A pagan view.
- Repetition. "Recollection forward": meaning radiates "from one's future", from a God of open possibilities. "If one does not have the category of recollection or of repetition, all life dissolves into an empty meaningless noise" (R 149).
Receptivity, not effort. Job does not labour to repossess his world; he demands reasons. Abraham sets out to give Isaac up. Seeking repetition may be like "shoving on a door that opens only inward". At its highest, repetition gives up self-sufficiency, and giving up repetition as an explicit task prepares for it as world-bestowal.
Three answers to the problem of motion, and where repetition differs.
The letters: a counterfeit knight
The nameless young man of the letters craves the return of his beloved, which puts him deeper than Constantin, and he invokes Job each night, awaiting "his thunderstorm" (R 214). Yet he is neither knight of faith nor knight of resignation, only "a charming mimic". Constantin boasts he "brought the poet into existence" (R 228), hinting the youth may be his literary contrivance. Both men prefer, in Lessing's words, "the delights of conception" to "the pains of childbirth"; in both, theatricality outweighs responsibility.
Mooney's triangulation of repetition in the book, and where the real exemplars lie.
Theory and antitheory
Repetition is "the interest of metaphysics and the interest on which all metaphysics comes to grief" (R 149). Mooney grants a "parametaphysical", critical Kantian position: metaphysics pressed to its own limits. Hannay (unpublished, 1995) sees recollection and repetition as two ways of constituting reality in inner time, but against Kant there is "no way of 'returning' to the universal within the limits of reason alone". An unsent letter to "My dear Reader" gathers the claims:
| Claim about repetition | Mooney's gloss |
|---|---|
| A task for freedom | Labour to stay open amid loss: like musicians taking a repeat and an audience receiving it; toward the religious one becomes "an alert receptor" |
| Consciousness raised to the second power | Reflecting on, and taking up, a stance toward any datum; Frankfurt's second-order care; against the "ethnical" (tribal) view |
| The interest of metaphysics, its grief | A totalizing aim never completed (Kant's questions "we can never abandon"), and general theory cannot hold my particularity |
| Watchword ("password") of every ethics | Judge William's ethics founders on demands it cannot meet; forgiveness cannot be required, so must come "from above" |
| Conditio sine qua non of dogmatics | Forgiveness of sin is a matter of faith |
| True repetition is eternity; it will mean atonement | Pursued until it "vanishes for psychology" at "the border of the wondrous" |
"Get me possibility, get me possibility, the only thing that can save me is possibility!" (SUD 38-9). Self and world become reciprocally articulate: the world one gets depends on the self one is, and the self on the world one has. Abraham's double desire (to obey and to have Isaac back) "vanishes for psychology", since we cannot account for holding two incompatible beliefs with equal fervour; his and Job's repetitions come "by virtue of the absurd". Job meets the Whirlwind at "the border of the marvelous" because any bestowal would seem wondrous in his straits, because the world given is magnificent (heavens, sea and creatures "the same yet born anew"), and because it outstrips his ethical demands without defeating him.
Mooney's reciprocal articulation: self and world are given back together.
- A grant. Not self-initiated: repetition "as a strategic human goal" is impossible; its essence is "the shock of knowing its impossibility".
- Not recollection. What is lost returns "on new and unexpected terms", like a new day from an open future.
- A need for world. Not natural recurrence ("as the songs of birds in the woods ... how empty", FT 15), but lived loss and return. Nietzsche asks whether one can face the past recurring; Kierkegaard whether one can face a lost world restored.
- Lived, not theorized. "Abraham gets Isaac back: he needn't care about Johannes de silentio's 'double movements'." Too much theory "blunts the object's prospective eloquence" (Fiumara).
Berlin as comic experiment, and Judge William's false lead
Constantin's Berlin trip is staged as an empirical test of whether "everything has changed". The jolting coach, the now-married host, the café, the theatre: each detail refuses to return. Mooney's point is double. First, an empirical failure cannot refute a metaphysical concept; second, Constantin's motive is curiosity, not need. He never asks whether coffee across town could shore up a demoralised self. That is why the experiment is "childish whimsy": it treats repetition as a lab result rather than as the ordeal Abraham and Job undergo.
Judge William's ethical "choose yourself" looks like repetition and is not. In Either/Or II the judge promises a metamorphosis that retakes the detail of one's life under an ethical frame. Mooney treats this as a false lead: the judge assumes self-consolidation can be won by effort or willpower. Kierkegaard later corrects it. "Repetition in the pregnant sense" is received, a grant of life and world, not an outcome that can be cornered. The judge's self-choice remains inside immanence; Abraham's and Job's restorations require transcendence.
Mooney's false leads: Berlin curiosity and ethical self-choice against pregnant repetition.
Job's Whirlwind and the border of the marvelous
The young man invokes Job each night and "awaits his thunderstorm" (R 214), but Mooney doubts the appeal is serious. Job's ordeal is not theatrical suffering. When the Whirlwind answers, Mooney gives three reasons the meeting is "at the border of the marvelous":
- Any bestowal would seem wondrous in Job's straits: after total loss, return itself is miracle-shaped.
- The world given is magnificent: heavens, sea and creatures appear "the same yet born anew", not a ledger of restored cattle.
- It outstrips his ethical demands without defeating him: Job asked for reasons; he receives a world that exceeds the lawsuit.
Abraham's double desire (to obey and to have Isaac back) "vanishes for psychology", because holding two incompatible beliefs with equal fervour has no ordinary account. Both restorations arrive "by virtue of the absurd". That is why Constantin and the youth are counterfeits: theatricality outweighs responsibility; they prefer, in Lessing's words, "the delights of conception" to "the pains of childbirth".
Reciprocal articulation and the threat of theory
"Get me possibility" (SUD 38-9) is Anti-Climacus's cry, and Mooney uses it to name the mutual dependence of self and world. The world one gets depends on the self one is; the self depends on the world one has. A demoralised self cannot receive a restored world as gift; a restored world remakes the self that can receive it. That is why doctrine is not enough. Abraham gets Isaac back and "needn't care about Johannes de silentio's 'double movements'"; Job gets a transformed world and needn't care about the philosopher's "problem of evil". Gemma Corradi Fiumara's warning (misprinted "Fuimara" in the notes) is Mooney's closing caution: arming oneself with a cognitive model lets one lose interest in the object, surrounding it with a "dense cloud of theory" that blunts its eloquence.
Constantin as hollow friend, and the shopkeeper analogy
Mooney's four readings of the name Constantin Constantius (constancy and motion; steady friend; seeker of constancy; existential complacency) climax in the fourth. Compared with Abraham's or Job's need, Constantin's interest is halfhearted. He is a hollow figure with glib advice; his Berlin outing and philosophical flourishes are aesthetic diversions. Kierkegaard was pleased that "repetition" could be said in simple Danish (R 149), the linguistic equivalent of Fear and Trembling's unassuming shopkeeper knight of faith. The concept travels without academic costume, which is why Constantin's theoretical flourishes ring false.
The unsent letter's claim that repetition is the "watchword of every ethics" points past Judge William: forgiveness cannot be required from within ethics, so it must come "from above". As conditio sine qua non of dogmatics, repetition names the forgiveness of sin as a matter of faith. "True repetition is eternity"; pursued until it "vanishes for psychology" at "the border of the wondrous". Nietzsche asks whether one can face the past recurring; Kierkegaard asks whether one can face a lost world restored. Natural cycles ("songs of birds in the woods") are empty; lived loss and return are not.
Anxiety in The Concept of Anxiety
The book and its pseudonym
Vigilius Haufniensis published the book on 17 June 1844, four days after Philosophical Fragments; Kierkegaard was 31. Kierkegaard had paired each pseudonymous book with signed upbuilding discourses, but The Concept of Anxiety came with none, only the airy Prefaces by Nicolaus Notabene. Climacus later called it "a little bit objectively dogmatic", a direct communication of knowledge (CUP 269-70). Marino follows the "First and Last Declaration" and attributes views to the pseudonym, except where the journals say the same.
Concept and mood
Haufniensis attacks the Hegelian habit of trespassing across sciences: putting "Actuality" as the last section of the Logic serves neither, since contingency cannot enter logic. Every object of thought has its proper science and its proper mood: "an error in modulation is just as disturbing as an error in the development of thought". Universalized, this is doubtful (how does earnestness falsify metaphysics?), but locally it "is a light": one who thinks about the Holocaust with curiosity, or does ethics in "a crossword-puzzling mood", has not understood. "Whenever the issue of sin is dealt with, one can observe by the very mood whether the concept is the correct one" (CA 15). Anti-Climacus adds that we need revelation to learn that we are sinners, not that we are saved.
Reading the Fall
Hegel read Genesis as the "eternal and necessary history of humanity" in mythical form; Thulstrup notes this puts individual responsibility to sleep. Haufniensis asks readers to drop their smug superiority to myth: "The Genesis story presents the only dialectically consistent view" (CA 32). He refuses any account that places Adam outside the race. If we are born so corrupt that we must sin, we are not sinners and need no atonement. We inherit not sinfulness but a "quantitative something", "objective anxiety".
Haufniensis's account of the Fall, as Marino reconstructs it: anxiety as the middle term between innocence and guilt.
- Spirit. The human is a synthesis of body and soul united in "a third ... spirit" (CA 43), a line unlike Plato, Aristotle or Descartes, though Haufniensis never says what spirit is.
- Nothing. In innocence "there is peace and repose ... What, then, is it? Nothing. But what effect does nothing have? It begets anxiety" (CA 41). Marino calls this a koan.
- Prohibition. Adam cannot understand "you shall surely die", so "there is nothing but the ambiguity of anxiety"; "innocence is not guilty, yet there is anxiety as though it were lost" (CA 45). "Further than this psychology cannot go."
- Motive. Philip Quinn argues that this account improves on Kant and Schleiermacher by giving Adam a motive: anxiety explains the possibility of sin, in "a transcendental argument", but not the fact.
What anxiety is
Two fixed points: anxiety is the possibility of freedom, "freedom's disclosure to itself in possibility", yet "freedom is never possible; as soon as it is, it is actual" (CA 22). Marino declines to solve this "Rubik's Cube" and suggests anxiety is freedom actual but "entangled in itself" (CA 49), since we must sin freely. Anxiety is "an affect with cognitive content", and, unlike fear (Kant and Hegel lumped them together), it is usually about nothing determinate, often the future: "anxiety is about tomorrow" (CD 80), "anxiety is simply impatience".
Anxiety as Marino reads it: a sympathetic antipathy that leads to the fall.
The dizziness is "just as much in his own eye as in the abyss", and seizing the finite to steady oneself is the fall. Why do we "really love" our anxiety? Perhaps because we love our freedom, or because we cleave to our wounds: Kierkegaard loved his melancholy too much to be cured. "Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God" (JP I 40). Like Freud, Haufniensis knew anxiety is often unconscious and deflected; a stranger to anxiety is only "very spiritless".
Educated by anxiety
- Two kinds after the Fall. Anxiety about sin and anxiety about the good (the demonic), anticipating the weakness/defiance scale of Sickness.
- Two ways to perish. By never having been in anxiety (spiritlessness) or by succumbing to it. "Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate" (CA 155).
- Wrong school. Anxiety about externals and finite relations educates only finitely, since one can "always bargain" and "make the best of things".
- Right school. Anxiety about freedom's possibility, which the person "himself produces". Like the Indian ascetic who lived on dew for two years and became a drunkard after tasting wine, the true pupil knows he is capable of anything.
- Graduation. Honesty and faith: guilt known "by analogy to judgments of the police court" is not understood; "if a man is guilty, he is infinitely guilty". The danger is suicide, so faith is required: the one educated by anxiety "will rest only in the Atonement" (CA 162).
Haufniensis's school of anxiety: wrong schools against the right one.
No need to go to Paris or London: put the pupil "in the middle of the Jutland heath, where no event takes place" (CA 159), where Kierkegaard's father once cursed God. Anti-Climacus supplies the courage logic: one who fears a greater danger has courage for lesser ones.
Genesis without Adam outside the race
Haufniensis knows most readers treat the Fall as myth beside Greek myths. He invites them to take Genesis as telling the truth that sin comes into being for each of us by our sinning. Contra Hegel: "The Genesis story presents the only dialectically consistent view" (CA 32). He rejects any account that "places Adam outside the race". Adam must not differ essentially from his descendants. Readings in which Adam sinned freely but we are born so corrupt that we are predestined to sin make Adam fantastic and volatilise the concept of sin: if we are compelled, we are not sinners and there is no need for Christ or atonement. Contemplating Adam as the only free sinner engenders a mood antithetical to sin-consciousness.
Scripture says Adam was ignorant of good and evil before the first sin. "Innocence is ignorance. In innocence, man is not qualified as spirit but is psychically qualified in immediate unity with his natural condition" (CA 41). Body and soul need a third that unites them: "This third is spirit" (CA 43). Anti-Climacus repeats the claim and adds that the relation relates itself to itself (SUD). Without spirit there would be no anxiety in Haufniensis's sense.
Haufniensis's Fall: Adam inside the race, spirit as the third.
Anxiety, nothing, and entangled freedom
"Anxiety is the possibility of freedom" (CA 155); also "freedom's disclosure to itself in possibility". Yet "freedom is never possible; as soon as it is, it is actual" (22). Marino refuses to turn the clash into a Rubik's Cube. Haufniensis does not encourage theorising about self-consciousness, freedom and sin. Still, a few comments: anxiety is "entangled freedom, where freedom is not free in itself but entangled, not by necessity, but in itself" (CA 49). In anxiety we use freedom to make ourselves feel powerless. Heidegger, Sartre and Tillich took the point that in anxiety we come to understand, feelingly, that we are free.
Anticipating psychiatry, Haufniensis holds that anxiety is almost always about nothing. The exception: anxiety about sin has "a determinate something" and loses dialectical ambiguity (CA 110-11). Kant and Hegel classified anxiety as a kind of fear; Kierkegaard was first to note that anxiety's object is usually indeterminate. Long before Freud he found "the pit of desire" in the prohibition that awakens what it forbids.
Anxiety's object and the 1843/1831 slip
Marino insists anxiety is not fear of a definite object; it is freedom's dizziness before possibility. The companion's "1831" for The Concept of Anxiety's 1843 is a clear error. Nordentoft's English translation date is 1978, not 1972. Logic citations via the Hong introduction (CA xiii-xiv) are secondary. Marino's pastoral edge: anxiety diagnosed as a disorder to be medicated away misses Kierkegaard's claim that anxiety is the school in which the self meets spirit. That does not forbid clinical care; it forbids confusing pharmacology with the concept.
Kierkegaard and the variety of despair
Three senses of despair, and Anti-Climacus's
Ordinary usage offers several notions. The drowning swimmer clutches "despairingly" at a rope she knows is too short (activity inappropriate to the facts), as against "desperately" (she might succeed). Or to despair is to give up because the goal is impossible (cessation appropriate to the facts), unless one's "finding" oneself powerless is a strategy that "conveniently absolves one" from further effort. Anti-Climacus's formula fits neither: "to want to be rid of oneself" (SUD 50), whether over one's defects, history, the human condition or the demands of selfhood. "In despair" is appositive: it names the project, not its manner. The responses that there is no sense to look for, that the author is to blame, or that obscurity is a virtue are themselves "that premature hopelessness one finds in people whose real hope is that there is nothing of the kind in question to hope for".
Hannay's sorting of ordinary despair against Anti-Climacus's technical sense.
Hegel's despair and Kierkegaard's
- Hegel. In the Phenomenology, consciousness travels "the way of despair" (Verzweiflung), "the conscious insight into the untruth of phenomenal knowledge". Each loss of self clears the way to a better conception; despair is a solvent-cum-propellant. Climacus's "despair is despair because it does not know the way out" (CUP 520) is close to this.
- Kierkegaard. Despair is impatience with the eternal, "a kind of irascibility" (CUP 554; the irascible soul from Aquinas). In Sickness it is "not wanting to be a self otherwise conceived than the self one finds it more congenial to be", even refusing to entertain a more adequate conception. What becomes clearer along the way is not that we are the truth but how much more is needed to be the selves we are.
Either/Or's despair. Judge William tells the aesthete, "this life is despair", and "every aesthetic life-view is despair" (EO 502). Not everyday, piecemeal despair (the aesthete has suffered no setbacks), nor a last-ditch dead end, since early aesthetes are happy. The despair is relational: failing the standard of a higher view. "Everyone who lives aesthetically is in despair whether he knows it or not. But if one does know it, and you indeed do, then a higher form of existence is an inescapable requirement" (501). So Either/Or already fits the formula.
The self's standard rises, and with it the stakes of despair.
The typology of The Sickness unto Death
Where Either/Or culminates in one advanced life-view, Sickness offers a typology of whole life-styles, practically every recognizable way of life. Its premise is that humans are not exhaustively identified by finite properties: there is an irreducible "I" whose collection of dispositions they are, the "negative form of the infinite self", alongside personality, how the collection works in society.
Hannay's reading of the despair taxonomy in The Sickness unto Death, from unconscious despair to the devil's absolute defiance.
- Weakness. Any failure to adopt the position of one's singularity, experienced as loss of earthly things, but underneath an attempt to "lose" the eternal. When one recognizes the weakness, one may repress the very notion of what one is too weak to face: reserve (Indesluttethed).
- Active defiance. One exploits the negative self "experimentally", making one's own mark, fashioning selves "de novo". Even so, this is still weakness, not Nietzschean strength: despair is now "trying not to see the weakness" instead of "humbling himself before God under his weakness".
- Passive defiance. One makes a point of being weak, parading weakness as proof the project of selfhood is not worth the candle.
- The cure. The self "grounded transparently in the power that established it" (SUD 44).
Part II: before God
Part I keeps theology expunged; Part II changes the measure to God, then Christ, through whom God reveals "what stupendous reality a self has" (SUD 147). Hannay rejects reading Part II as a template substituted into Part I: it would wreck Part I's phenomenological appeal (singularity is arguably structural; being before God is not), and the template does not fit, since weakness and defiance become "the converse of what they normally are" (146). He prefers a Hegelian reading of the sequence: only when the negative infinite self is reached, with nowhere to go but back to the world on its terms, does the renewed task appear. Every existence "not grounded transparently in God, but opaquely rests or merges in some abstract universal (state, nation, etc.)" is despair (SUD 76), and on that test Judge William himself may be a "murky self".
| Text | Despair is | Way out |
|---|---|---|
| Hegel, Phenomenology | Insight into the untruth of one's self-conception | A better conception: despair propels |
| Postscript (Climacus) | Not knowing the way out; impatience, irascibility | Comprehending suffering as essential |
| Either/Or (William) | Every aesthetic life-view, known or not | Choose despair, choose oneself, repent back into family and race |
| Sickness (Anti-Climacus) | Wanting to be rid of oneself, in every lifestyle | Grounding transparently in God; before God a precondition, not an outcome |
Despair's grammar: forms before cases
Hannay reads The Sickness unto Death as a taxonomy before it is a casebook. Anti-Climacus defines the self as a relation that relates itself to itself and is established by another. Despair is the misrelation in that synthesis. The famous forms are not clinical types first; they are logical positions a self can occupy relative to finitude/infinitude, possibility/necessity, and consciousness of being before God.
| Axis | Deficit form | Excess form | What fails |
|---|---|---|---|
| Finitude / infinitude | Despair of finitude (narrowness) | Despair of infinitude (fantastical) | Concrete self lost or volatilised |
| Possibility / necessity | Determinist fatalism | Possibility without necessity (mirage) | No actual self to inhabit |
| Consciousness | Spiritless ignorance of despair | Defiant clarity that will be itself without God | Transparency before God |
The progression toward conscious despair is also a progression toward the possibility of faith. Spiritlessness is not innocence; it is despair that does not know it is despair. Weakness will not be itself; defiance will be itself in spite of the power that established it. Both are forms of wanting to dispose of the relation that makes a self possible.
Hannay's despair grammar: misrelation across three axes.
Stages admitted as heuristic, not ladder
Hannay is frank that applying the "stages" (aesthetic, ethical, religious) as a clean developmental ladder is often baseless when pressed onto the despair taxonomy. The book is written under a Christian pseudonym who already knows the diagnosis from the standpoint of faith. That editorial position matters: Anti-Climacus is not Climacus. Despair's "sickness unto death" is the sickness in which one cannot die, the self endlessly consuming itself. The cure is not a further self-assertion but faith: the self resting transparently in the power that established it. Hannay's contribution is to keep the logical grammar visible so that pastoral or existential readings do not flatten the distinctions.
Despair's forms and the baseless stages shortcut
Kierkegaard's Christian ethics
The moral gap and Kant's radical evil
John E. Hare (The Moral Gap, 1996) defines it as "the gap between the moral demand on us and our natural capacities to live by it". Without divine help there are three failed strategies:
- Puff up capacities. Keep the demand high and inflate our natural powers.
- Reduce the demand. Lower the standard to fit what we can do.
- Naturalistic substitute. Admit the gap and seek a non-divine source of help.
Hare's moral gap and the three failed strategies Quinn sets against Kierkegaard's answer.
Kant explains the gap by radical evil: a propensity "brought by man upon himself", which corrupts the ground of all maxims and is "inextirpable by human powers", yet must be overcome since we are free. A "single unchangeable decision" can make one "a subject susceptible of goodness", but only "from bad to better". We must do all in our power and may then hope for "cooperation from above"; sin is "the transgressing of the moral law as a divine command". So for Kant we wreck the first ethics by becoming sinful.
Commanded love
The Great Commandment makes love the subject of a command, and Works of Love calls Christian love "commanded love". "To love is a duty" seems to contradict Kant's denial of a duty to love, but only if the love is feeling, which is not subject to the will. Love of neighbour must be commanded because it is unnatural for sinners: it does not spontaneously engage the affections, and "if it were supererogatory ... most of us simply would not pursue it". And it opens the gap: "no amount of time changes eternity's requirement, that love is the fulfilling of the Law" (WL 134).
- Changes in the lover. Feelings alter even when nothing else does. Test: the duty to recollect the dead, "weep softly, but weep long"; the dead do not change, so any change is ours (WL 348, 358).
- Changes in the object. "It is not the neighbor who holds you fast, but it is your love that holds the neighbor fast" (WL 65): Shakespeare's love that "alters not where it alteration finds".
- Despair. Not the loss of the beloved, which is unhappiness, but "the lack of the eternal": infinite passion for a finite good. (WL 41).
Preference against neighbour-love
- Erotic love and friendship (Forkjerlighed). Preferential: one and only beloved, one and only friend, found by luck, cherished for dissimilarity; the poet praises their exclusivity. "Preferential love is the middle term." Aristotle agrees one cannot have perfect friendship with many people.
- Love of neighbour (Kjerlighed). "Self-denial's love", all-inclusive, "even the enemy", demanding "eternal equality", which "unqualifiedly" makes no distinction. "God is the middle term" (WL 57-8).
- Not abolition. Christian love is to dethrone, not abolish, the others: "love the beloved faithfully and tenderly, but let love for the neighbor be the sanctifying element"; "your wife must first and foremost be to you your neighbor" (WL 62, 141).
Quinn judges the claim that preferential love is a form of self-love ("the other I") "not a persuasive argument", allowing for rhetorical exaggeration; the command also says "You shall love yourself in the right way" (WL 22). The price can be high: truly to love is to help the other love God, "also the sacrifice of becoming hated oneself" (WL 114), even by breaking off a relationship.
Foolishness and offense. Works of love look foolish by worldly standards. "Love builds up" by presupposing love in everyone's heart, even, Quinn notes, a serial killer such as Jeffrey Dahmer. "Love hides a multitude of sins": leave guilt to the state's judges and supply "a mitigating explanation" (WL 293), though criminal justice concerns all citizens and not every crime admits a true mitigating story. The world's reward is "ingratitude, opposition, and derision": the Christian idea of self-denial is to work unselfishly "and then, for that very reason, put up with being abominated almost as a criminal" (WL 194).
Seeing with closed eyes
Sinners can do works of love in the right way only by learning to see differently. "Shut your eyes, then the enemy looks just like the neighbor" (WL 68). Closing one's eyes to dissimilarity lets one see what is hidden from ordinary sight, with divine assistance:
- The watermark. Write something different on many sheets, "hold it up to the light, and you will see a common watermark on all of them ... you see it only by means of eternity's light" (WL 89).
- The play. When the curtain falls, king and beggar "are all alike ... actors"; dissimilarities are disguises that "hang loosely", through which glimmers "the inner glory, the equality of the glory" (WL 87-8).
Eternity's light shines "dimly and fitfully", so we can only sometimes bridge the gap, never close it, and must not think even right works meritorious: Kierkegaard's God is Lutheran. The Apostle John's gentle "Beloved, let us love one another" is the completion, not the beginning: "in the mouth of a beginner" it would be "a philandering" that escapes "the school-yoke" (WL 376). Quinn sees "cause ... for melancholy" that most of us will not get beyond the elementary grades of the love command's school.
Practice in Christianity: imitation
Kierkegaard's own preface says the requirement is "forced up ... to a supreme ideality" (PC 7). Following Thomas à Kempis, Anti-Climacus makes Christ's life the paradigm, and "only the imitator is the true Christian" (254): a life with "as much similarity to his as is possible for a human life to have" (106).
| Theme | Anti-Climacus's claim |
|---|---|
| Contemporaneity | Faith is being contemporary with the lowly, crucified Christ; judging him by historical results "is blasphemy" (PC 23) |
| Suffering | Not bearing the inescapable, but suffering evil at others' hands for willing the good; what matters is willingness (172-3) |
| Offense | Contemporaries would have scoffed ("Does he have a permanent job? No."); "one never comes to faith except from the possibility of offense" |
| Imitator vs admirer | The admirer "keeps himself personally detached"; admiration is "the invention of my sloth and spinelessness"; he "will make no sacrifices", but is "inexhaustible" in praising Christianity |
| Conditions | "To become just as poor, despised, insulted, mocked, and if possible even a little more" (PC 241) |
Practice widens the gap further: most will draw a line somewhere (at mockery, poverty, persecution), and "few if any of us will draw no line at all". As Kirmmse puts it, "what Moses was to St. Paul, Kant can be to us", and Quinn adds that Kierkegaard and Anti-Climacus can play the same role. One could reduce the demand (imitation only for religious virtuosi, or the highest ideal as supererogatory), but the Kierkegaardian alternative, with Malantschuk, is to keep the requirement and have recourse to grace, twice over: for assistance and for forgiveness. Seen from outside a Christian worldview, these ethics "look harsh and inhuman", which only shows they contain the possibility of offense.
Why Practice in Christianity widens the gap: imitation draws no line.
Why commanded love looks like a contradiction
Quinn opens Works of Love on the Gospel form of the Great Commandment (Matthew 22:37-40, though the chapter prints "12:37-40"). Love is "commanded love" (WL 19), and Kierkegaard's slogan "to love is a duty" (WL 24) seems to contradict Kant's denial that there is a duty to love. The clash is only apparent if the loves differ. Kant has in mind love as feeling, which the will cannot produce; by ought-implies-can there is no duty to feel it. Kierkegaard's commanded love is not that feeling. It is agape, set against erotic love (eros) and friendship: those aim to love this one above all others, while neighbour-love aims at every human being without distinction of preference.
Why command it at all? Quinn's answer: neighbour-love is unnatural for humans in their present sinful condition. It does not spontaneously engage affections. If it were merely supererogatory, most would not pursue it. So it must be presented, at least at first, as obligatory, with the feel of something that can curb natural inclination. In the tradition Jesus and his hearers share, divine commands impose obligations, and Jesus himself is a divine lawgiver.
Quinn on why neighbour-love must be commanded, not left as ideal.
The moral gap and three loves
Paul's "love is the fulfillment of the law" (Rom. 13:10) opens what Quinn, following John Hare, calls the moral gap: the distance between the Law's demand and unaided human capacity. "Is there any more accurate expression for how infinitely far a person is from fulfilling the requirement" than that one cannot even total the account (WL 134)? Time mitigates one's own judgment of past guilt; eternity's requirement does not change. Kirmmse's gloss: we confront the radical absoluteness of Christian ethics and our inability to live by it without divine assistance.
Kierkegaard distinguishes the three loves by their preferential structure:
| Love | Object | Risk Kierkegaard names |
|---|---|---|
| Erotic love | The beloved above all | Can become self-love in two |
| Friendship | The friend as second self | Can become a alliance against the third |
| Neighbour-love | Each human being as such | Looks "foolish" by worldly lights |
Self-love is not abolished; it is the measure ("as yourself") and the danger. Quinn finds Kierkegaard's argument that preferential loves collapse into selfishness unpersuasive as psychology, yet grants the ethical point: without a non-preferential demand, love stays inside the circle of inclination.
Duty as backup when perception fails
Kierkegaard's best move, for Quinn, is to treat the "shall" as backup motivation. At its best the moral life is a progress in which one comes to see the neighbour and act from that perception. But perception is fitful. When it fails, the command carries conduct. That is why duty can look "foolish" by worldly lights and still be rational inside the Christian worldview: it is not a rival to perception but the scaffold for days when perception sleeps. Seen from outside that worldview, the ethic looks "harsh and inhuman", which for Anti-Climacus only shows it contains the possibility of offense.
Practice: contemporaneity, offense, imitator versus admirer
Anti-Climacus in Practice in Christianity widens the gap Works of Love already opened. Faith is being contemporary with the lowly, crucified Christ; judging him by historical results "is blasphemy" (PC 23). Suffering that counts is not bearing the inescapable but suffering evil at others' hands for willing the good; what matters is willingness (172-3). Contemporaries would have scoffed ("Does he have a permanent job? No."); "one never comes to faith except from the possibility of offense".
The admirer "keeps himself personally detached"; admiration is "the invention of my sloth and spinelessness"; he will make no sacrifices but is inexhaustible in praising Christianity. The imitator seeks "as much similarity as possible". Conditions: "To become just as poor, despised, insulted, mocked, and if possible even a little more" (PC 241). Most will draw a line (mockery, poverty, persecution); few draw no line at all. One could reduce the demand to virtuosi or call the ideal supererogatory; the Kierkegaardian alternative, with Malantschuk, is to keep the requirement and have recourse to grace, twice: for assistance and for forgiveness.
Religious dialectics and Christology
The historical situation
After Schleiermacher's On Religion (1799) and Hegel's Absolute Spirit, piety was no longer a matter of course; Kant and Lessing's opposition of reason to revelation cast "a long shadow", and Feuerbach and Marx made the atheistic break politically effective. Kierkegaard's age probes this post-Romantic, post-Idealist crisis in life as well as thought, which makes it a model for modernity and postmodernity alike. Religion now has two senses: a historical, communal worldview, and, "starting with Kierkegaard", the personal appropriation of one's self-relation, which presupposes relation to God: religiousness.
The crisis Deuser places Kierkegaard in: piety no longer a matter of course.
Religiousness A: the confession discourse (1845)
Kierkegaard's core is Lutheran and Pietist: the tormenting and liberating experience of sin and forgiveness before the crucified Christ. To shield it, he built the pseudonymous polemics for intellectuals and the discourses for human proximity. The discourses walk the path of Religiousness A and at first avoid even the name of Christ. Its definition: what we seek most passionately "can in no way be ... placed at the disposal of any human being".
- Stillness. Confession's mood cancels worldly distinctions: "Whoever says that this stillness does not exist is merely making noise"; "the injured party possesses the most" of forgiveness.
- Becoming a sinner. Standing before God is "becoming a sinner", so the seeker "can become the place where God in truth is": Luther's simul iustus et peccator, and the Small Catechism's "We should fear and love God" (1529).
- Sighs before words. Adoration begins as "sighing without words", then thought, then words; Kierkegaard defends the sigh against Hegel's scorn for the "beautiful soul".
- Wonder. The highest good is "the unknown, and this good is God"; "wonder is immediacy's sense of God and ... the beginning of all deeper understanding".
- Shared. Both separate religion sharply from knowing.
- Schleiermacher. Piety is feeling, "pure dependence", a unitary qualitative state and the transcendental ground of religion, naturally a community feeling.
- Kierkegaard. He avoids the concept of feeling and starts from ambivalence: "wonder is an ambivalent state of mind containing both fear and blessedness" (Phil. 2:12). It is an intensification situated in the conflict of human and world, so it individualizes and rejects social forms as "crowd" and "the course of world-history", and it turns to action: "one essentially appropriates the essential only by doing it".
Deuser's three stages of religious wonder in the 1845 confession discourse.
Religiousness B: the God-man exposed to contingency
Religiousness B answers modern Christology's two problems: how to speak of one person with two natures without patristic substance ontology, and how biblical authority survives historical criticism. Kierkegaard "undermines its legitimation": there is no objective access to Christ. "One wants to consider objectively that the God was crucified, an event that, when it occurred, did not permit even the temple to be objective, for its curtain tore" (CUP; Mark 15:38). Deuser says Kierkegaard anticipated a twentieth-century finding, that the gospels' testimony is a literary form.
Deuser's contrast: Religiousness A exposes only the human side, B exposes God too.
The 1847 discourse "The Joy of It That in Relation to God a Person Always Suffers as Guilty" (Gospel of Sufferings) is the first to invoke New Testament authority. (Luke 23:41). Doubt whether God is love is conquered only by assigning roles: guilt on the human side, true love on God's. The disjunction is complete: either God is love and guilt is ours ("joyful"), or God is not love, God is quasi-guilty and the self is lost. Asking for grounds that God is love is "presumptuousness". The joy lies in what opens up: since one is always guilty, "there must always be something to do". Job shows that humanly one may not call the innocent guilty, but sub specie crucis everyone is guilty before God.
Critique
- History. Historical knowledge of Christ "is not worth a pickled herring" (PC); Christ is "an extremely unhistorical person". Fair as corrective, but historical mediation and contemporary appropriation "need not fear one another".
- Aesthetics. Kierkegaard separates the poetic from the Christian ("every poet-existence ... is sin"), yet relies on the utmost aesthetic power, as in the child who sees a crucifix among children's pictures and asks, "But why were they so mean to him, why?" Appropriation presupposes a viable tradition; today the situation is reversed, and texts and concepts must first be made accessible again.
- Society. "A Church triumphant in this world is an illusion." His critique of Christendom and mass society proved prophetic, and it contains no anarchism; but responsible people must still work to make social structures succeed.
Religiousness A as necessary presupposition of B
Deuser reads Climacus's A/B distinction as strategy, not taxonomy for its own sake. Religiousness A is the universal dialectic of a person's relation to eternal destiny; B is the specifically Christian paradoxical dialectic tying that destiny to the historical contingency of Jesus. Talk about Christianity in the strict sense must first focus on impassioned self-examination before God. Despite the rupture with all other avenues, A remains the necessary presupposition of B: not a smooth transition, but the condition of every existential understanding, namely impassioned self-relation without external constraint.
The Upbuilding Discourses tread A's path and at first omit even the name of Christ. Their centre is the phenomenological field of Religiousness A: confession, wonder, guilt before God. The (existential) concretisation toward which the authorship aims is Lutheran-Pietist: the paradoxical experience, tormenting and liberating, of sin and forgiveness in the image of the crucified Christ. Pseudonymous polemics address intellectuals; discourses appeal to human proximity. Both shield that basic configuration from romantic, idealist, atheistic, political and ecclesiastical misunderstandings.
Deuser: Religiousness A prepares B without mediating into it.
Christology without substance ontology
Modern Christology faces two problems Deuser names: how to speak of one divine-human person without patristic substance ontology, and how to uphold biblical authority after historical criticism. Kierkegaard does not answer as a scholar; he undermines the legitimation of the questions. There is no "objective" modern-historical access to an adequate understanding of Jesus Christ, not even of the crucifixion. Climacus: one wants to consider objectively "that the God was crucified, an event that, when it occurred, did not permit even the temple to be objective, for its curtain tore" (CUP; Mk 15:38). Historical objectivity is obstructed by the dogmatic presupposition of the God-man, yet that presupposition is advanced by referring back to the narrative, not as quasi-objective fact. Deuser says Kierkegaard balked at the historical research of his time yet anticipated a twentieth-century conclusion: gospel testimony is to be understood as a literary form, and therein lies its power.
Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (1847), third part "The Gospel of Sufferings", first invokes New Testament authority in a discourse. Passion becomes care already in the 1845 confession discourse: the seeker is transformed into the one who is found, estranged, guilty, a sinner. Christian discourses then inscribe suffering into the dialectic; the sharpening of scandal, the authority of God and Christ's exemplary suffering mark the passage to B.
Dialectics of the God-man and offense as mark
Deuser's christological dialectic keeps incognito, paradox and offense as structural, not optional. Low Christologies that dissolve the God-man into moral teacher fail the Postscript's and Practice's tests; high Christologies that skip offense fail equally. Religious dialectics means the understanding collides and must yield or take offense.
The utilitarian self and the "useless" passion of faith
Against religion as a meaning resource
Religious needs must not enter theoretical discourse to bolster argument: "pressure emanating from a need can substantially distort discussion in matters of truth". Religion's social and psychological functions are real, and the Feuerbach and Marx critique of compensation and projection may diagnose "a thoroughgoing misunderstanding of the God-relationship". The Absolute is "absolute" precisely as absolved from all teleology and instrumental rationality. Its freedom is one with Walter Benjamin's "intentionlessness", "absolved from all exploitation as a 'meaning resource'". This passage through purposelessness, "hard by the edge of despair", yields Climacus's humor: "whoever has truly learned how to be anxious will dance when the anxieties of finitude strike up the music" (CA 161).
Secularization was a necessary preliminary: by debunking religion's secondary functions, it let faith express itself as purpose-free exposition to grace. It also removes the ground from providence used to explain away "the horrors of history".
Omnipotence that withholds itself
God "communicates creatively in such a way that in creating he gives independence vis-à-vis himself" (CUP 260). Kodalle links this to the contractio Dei (also found in the Kabbalah): the finite emerges as God holds himself back, and the nothing of creatio ex nihilo is the sphere of finite freedom.
Two notions of power in Kodalle's reading: finite power binds, omnipotence frees.
The incognito and the refusal of discourse
A logically compelling proof of God is superfluous, though presenting "good grounds" and metaphor is worthwhile. Pascal's Memorial, the dated testimony sewn into his coat lining, shows that "the existential center of the individual remains a mystery": to make one's kairos communicable would invite idle talk and use one's inwardness "as a beacon for the half-hearted". "One person cannot help another at all", for "the terms of salvation differ for every individual" (JP §4922). Modern life offers "life at second hand": "One does not love, does not have faith, does not act; but one knows what erotic love is, what faith is" (CUP 344); some intellectuals have "a virtuosity in knowing how to avoid acting" (CUP 604). Refusing discourse can be mandatory, though maxims must still be universalizable, and the silence of nonconformity may be demonic or a creative impulse for others, never a model for imitation.
Power, the mass and the crucified reason
Kodalle's diagnosis of the utilitarian self and the movement of faith that pierces it.
- Too strong. "The tragedy of the majority of men is by no means that they are weak but that they are too strong, genuinely to be aware of God" (JP §4453). "Everything that is mass is eo ipso perdition" (JP §2970).
- Reason's urge. Man "continually feels an urge to have something finished, but this urge is of evil" (CUP 86); faith must "think infinitely the uncertainty of all things" and mobilize "the distrust of infinity" against oneself.
- Not nonsense. One cannot believe nonsense against the understanding (CUP 568), and Christianity is not "a tidbit for dunces" (557). The paradox is "a symbol, a riddle" for reason, a negative concept at its border, grasped with "the full use of the categorical power of reason": "simplicity armed with reflection" (CUP 607).
- Not sacrifice. "To do this or that ... in order to serve the cause of God: this thought has never moved me" (JP §1431). God is like an older person who joins a child's game to make the child happy.
Suffering without economy
Suffering is unavoidable ("it takes great courage to dare look at yourself"), yet "its inevitability is no justification for thinking of suffering instrumentally". Religious masochism, heroism and readiness for sacrifice face the same verdict; martyrdom may show lack of inwardness, and no one should think "sorrow is more meritorious than joy". "In the unconditioned all teleology vanishes ... if he dimly glimpses one 'Why?' something is impaired" (JP §4901). Faith therefore cannot be unmasked as "a pious form of barter". "It is really the God-relationship that makes a human being human" (CUP 244), and at the peak of struggle earnestness turns into effortless lightheartedness, which the self cannot sustain, giving humor "an eminent theological significance".
Kodalle's refusal of an economy of suffering: no 'why' in the unconditioned.
| Utilitarian self | Purpose-free faith |
|---|---|
| God as meaning resource, providence explaining horrors | The Absolute absolved from all purposes |
| Power that coerces and makes dependent | Omnipotence that withholds itself and frees |
| Closed systems, the mass, "something finished" | The incognito, uncertainty thought infinitely |
| Suffering and sacrifice for a goal | Suffering without an economy of salvation |
The Absolute is pointless: against religion as resource
Kodalle's thesis is drastic: "The God-relationship should no longer be made to serve life's purposes. Or, to put it more drastically: The Absolute is pointless." Rapid change in industrial societies produces talk of "crises of meaning" and escalates irrational religious needs. Kodalle insists such needs must not enter theoretical discourse as argument-bolsters; pressure from need distorts truth discussion. A skeptical theology keeps the ideological function of religion separate from its absolute truth claim, mindful of Feuerbach- and Marx-inspired critiques of compensation and projection, and of dialectical theology's radical critique of religious need.
The functions of religion can be analysed sociologically and psychologically, but absolute spiritual presence cannot be reduced to those functions. Religion may stabilise societies in rapid change; that usefulness is not its truth. Kodalle's Kierkegaard refuses the utilitarian self that asks what God is for. Omnipotence that withholds itself, the incognito of the God-man, and the refusal of discourse that would make faith a technique all serve that refusal.
Kodalle: strip religion of utility so the Absolute is not a tool.
Useless passion and crucified reason
Faith as "useless passion" is Kodalle's slogan for a relation that does not pay in worldly currency. Suffering is without economy: it is not an investment with guaranteed return. Power, the mass and "crucified reason" name the political edge: Christendom's alliance with success is the utilitarian self writ large. Kodalle's essay is the volume's shortest and most thesis-driven; it sits in tension with Jackson's Arminian edification and Quinn's commanded love, which still speak of assistance and forgiveness as divine help. Kodalle would not deny help; he denies that help may be booked as a life-strategy.
Main Points
Twenty takeaways
- The private and the public are one story. Kierkegaard's struggle for adult recognition from father, brother and Mynster ran parallel to Denmark's 1848-49 breakthrough, and "character" replaced "authority" (Kirmmse).
- The reception is a history of individuals. Kafka, Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre and Camus met him at a turning point and often borrowed without acknowledgment (Poole).
- Read the pseudonym before the sentence. Quote the named pseudonymous author; blunt reading that turns irony into doctrine misses what the text asks (Poole, Introduction).
- The aesthetic ends in repentance. Rising reflection pushes art to its limit, and in a reflective age art can no longer carry religious authority (Pattison).
- The Hegel critique is an Aufhebung. Kierkegaard keeps Hegel's dialectic but rejects speculation's collapse of the human and the divine (Westphal).
- Pure irony undermines itself. Total negativity cannot exempt itself; Climacus repairs irony as a border zone with a positive standpoint (Cross).
- Antifoundationalist, yet realist. Postscript denies certainty but keeps truth as correspondence, an ideal approached, never reached, by an existing knower (Evans).
- Passions are concern-based construals. Character is a set of dispositions to proper emotion, which makes Kierkegaard a virtue ethicist (Roberts).
- There is no "leap of faith" in the Danish. The leap is a qualitative transition, free but not an act of willpower, reached at a critical threshold (Ferreira).
- Grace is indispensable, not irresistible. We take no step toward God alone, yet can say yes or no: a consistent Arminian account (Jackson).
- Fear and Trembling has hidden levels. From a call to commitment down to sin and forgiveness, the levels read together as one transparent image (Green).
- Repetition is received, not engineered. The lost world returns as an other-initiated grant, "recollection forward" (Mooney).
- Anxiety educates. Anxiety is the middle term between innocence and guilt, and undergone rightly it forms spirit (Marino).
- Despair is wanting to be rid of oneself. Not futility but refusal of selfhood, typed from unconscious despair to defiance (Hannay).
- The second ethics starts from sin. Works of Love commands love higher than Kant's demand, humane only within a worldview of grace (Quinn).
- Imitation, not admiration. Christ is to be followed, not applauded (Quinn, Anti-Climacus).
- Religiousness A grounds B. Human exposure to contingency is the presupposition of God's own exposure in Christ (Deuser).
- Faith is purpose-free. God is no meaning resource; true omnipotence makes independent (Kodalle).
- Society erodes inwardness. The public, the press and the mass offer "life at second hand" (Pattison, Poole, Kodalle).
- The individual stays inassimilable. Each essay rebuilds a different Kierkegaard, and the volume's own disagreements show why no system holds him (Introduction).
How the strongest takeaways connect: from the struggle for recognition to purpose-free faith.
Where the essays split: how unified, how ethical, and how rational the authorship is.
Frameworks and mental models
These are the reusable tools the essays draw from Kierkegaard, each a way of testing how a person stands in what they claim.
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| The three spheres | Aesthetic, ethical, religious lives, with irony and humour as border zones | Diagnosing what really drives a choice |
| Indirect communication | Some truths can only be occasioned, not transmitted | Teaching a skill or value that a rule cannot carry |
| Truth is subjectivity | The how of holding a belief matters, alongside the what | Belief is professed but never acted on |
| Approximation | Historical knowledge never reaches certainty | A decision waits forever for complete evidence |
| Leap / qualitative transition | Change of kind is not more of the same | Incremental steps will not reach a new state |
| Anxiety as possibility | Dread of one's own freedom precedes every fall | Choices stall before a big commitment |
| Forms of despair | Weakness and defiance both refuse the self | Someone hides from or overreaches their role |
| Repetition | A lost good returns only as received, on new terms | Recovering after a loss or failure |
| Power that makes independent | Real power frees rather than binds | Judging a central team or platform |
Who's who
| Person | Role in the book |
|---|---|
| Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55) | Subject of every chapter |
| Alastair Hannay, Gordon D. Marino | Editors; Introduction, chs. 13 and 12 |
| Michael Pedersen and Peter Christian Kierkegaard | Father and brother in the recognition drama (1) |
| J. P. Mynster, H. L. Martensen, J. L. Heiberg | Golden Age establishment and foils (1, 3) |
| G. W. F. Hegel | Chief philosophical target (4, 5, 6, 13) |
| Socrates | Model ironist (5, 11) |
| Kant, Aristotle | Rival frames for the ethics (7, 10, 14) |
| Johannes Climacus, Anti-Climacus, Vigilius Haufniensis | Key pseudonyms (5, 6, 8, 12, 13) |
| Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, Derrida | Twentieth-century borrowers (2) |
| Abraham, Job | Biblical exemplars of faith and repetition (10, 11) |
Disagreements that should stay unresolved
A useful companion leaves fights standing. Westphal vs more Kantian readers (Green, Quinn) on whether Hegel or divine command is the main foil. Evans's realism vs Poole's suspicion of blunt doctrine-extraction. Ferreira's leap-as-will vs readings that keep Climacus's "act of will" language as parody. Green's hidden sin-level in Fear and Trembling vs Agacinski-style sexual readings and vs de silentio taken at face value. Kodalle's pointless Absolute vs Jackson's Arminian edification and Quinn's assistance-plus-forgiveness. Hannay's despair taxonomy vs stage-theory shortcuts he himself calls baseless when over-applied.
Use the frameworks table as a toolkit, not a creed. When a claim is only Climacus's, say Climacus. When Anti-Climacus tightens the Christian requirement, do not soften it into Judge William. When the signed discourses speak of love's tasks, do not replace them with the comic pseudonyms' ironies. That discipline is the volume's real education.
Keep the fights: which foil, which voice, which Absolute.
About this book
The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard by Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino (eds.), 1998. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions
- The private and the public are one story. Kierkegaard's struggle for adult recognition from father, brother and Mynster ran parallel to Denmark's 1848-49 breakthrough, and "character" replaced "authority" (Kirmmse).
- The reception is a history of individuals. Kafka, Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre and Camus met him at a turning point and often borrowed without acknowledgment (Poole).
- Read the pseudonym before the sentence. Quote the named pseudonymous author; blunt reading that turns irony into doctrine misses what the text asks (Poole, Introduction).
- The aesthetic ends in repentance. Rising reflection pushes art to its limit, and in a reflective age art can no longer carry religious authority (Pattison).
- The Hegel critique is an Aufhebung. Kierkegaard keeps Hegel's dialectic but rejects speculation's collapse of the human and the divine (Westphal).
- Pure irony undermines itself. Total negativity cannot exempt itself; Climacus repairs irony as a border zone with a positive standpoint (Cross).