Laughing Well is Living Well
KIERKEGAARD
HUMOR AS PHILOSOPHY AT ITS BEST
As soon as I am outside my religious understanding, I feel as an insect with which children are playing must feel, because life seems to have dealt with me so unmercifully; as soon as I am inside my religious understanding, I understand that precisely this has absolute meaning for me. Hence, that which in one case is a dreadful jest is in another sense the most profound earnestness.
—Kierkegaard (Stages on Life’s Way)
Nineteenth-century Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, refers to Shaftesbury, as well as to Hegel, to introduce his interest in the legitimacy of the comic:
In the previous century, a thesis propounded by Lord Shaftesbury that makes laughter the test of truth engendered several little research projects to find out whether it is so. In our day, Hegelian philosophy has wanted to give predominance to the comic. The question of the legitimacy of the comic, of its relation to the religious … is of essential importance for a religious existence in our time, in which the comic runs off with the victory everywhere. (CUP1, 512–3)
The comic has become “the tempter in our time,” but if we understand it correctly we will lose our laughter. Kierkegaard intends to provide us with the necessary understanding: One of his pseudonym affirms that “if there is anything I have studied thoroughly, from A to Z, it is the comic,” and “the more competently a person exists, the more he will discover the comic” (CUP1, 483; 462; 281).
In teaching us how to laugh, Kierkegaard provides a theory of the comic with the intent of demonstrating that Christianity is out of the comic’s reach (CA, 128; CUP1, 483). If he did only this, however, he would not be different from many critics of Shaftesbury. Kierkegaard’s singularity is that in the process of explaining the comic and its legitimate use, he gives to the comic, together with irony and especially humor, the most important place a philosopher has ever attributed to them. Humor for Kierkegaard is philosophy at its best, which, together with the comic, the tragic, and irony, is elevated to the level of existential categories that are essential for the good life. Furthermore, Kierkegaard sees in the comic an instrument of truth, the primary tool of philosophy once it steps into the new existential role Kierkegaard designed for it—to lead the individual toward worshiping the true God.
Other readings of Kierkegaard have failed to appreciate the essential relation of the comic with truth as well as its consequence: In order to further truth, the comic becomes for Kierkegaard an ethical-religious category, making it much more dependent on Kierkegaard’s controversial view of religion than common use allows. This is true as well of the various forms of the comic Kierkegaard uses, such as irony and especially humor, which becomes a Christianized notion serving Kierkegaard’s ladder of perfection toward Christ. By elaborating the roles of the comic, irony, and especially humor as essential to the Kierkegaardian good life, this chapter reveals both Kierkegaard’s radical contribution to the history of philosophical thinking about humor, and the singularity of his religious thought disclosed through his ethical-religious notion of the comic and Christianized notion of humor.
For a long time, Kierkegaard harbored thoughts on irony, humor, the comic, and its relation to the tragic. Although he never wrote the doctoral dissertation on Greek and Roman satire he intended to write, he learned much from his study of the subject (Lowrie 1968a, xiv). Four years before writing his dissertation on a related subject, irony (1841), Kierkegaard conjectured that “it would be interesting to follow the development of human nature … by showing what one laughs at on the different age levels.” He intended this study to reveal the development of one’s response to comedy and tragedy at different ages, as well as the relationship between the two. The study was also to contribute to the work he believed ought to be written, namely, “the history of the human soul” (JP 4, 280). It is this story, the history of the soul through its relationship with the comic that Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship tells. This explains why most of the major themes of Kierkegaard’s authorship can be studied through the window of humor, as Thomas Oden has noted (Oden 2004, 8).
That the “melancholy Dane” had an interest in the comic is explained by his observation that “the melancholy have the best sense of the comic.” Kierkegaard described himself, accordingly, as a two-faced Janus, laughing with one face and crying with the other, and associated in his writings the comic with suffering, and jest with earnestness. “The person who with extreme effort and much self-sacrifice discovers the comic,” he complained, “really has no opportunity to laugh himself out; he is too tense and concerned for that” (JP 2, 272). He confessed at the end of his life to having “a secret and happy understanding” with laughter, and to being “rightly understood” as a friend and lover of laughter (PV, 123). He saw himself as a genius and characterized the genius as humorous (PV, 107, 108), and for a large part of his life he fulfilled the role of the humorist, an “intensely religious humorist,” to use Walter Kauffman’s apt description of him (Kaufmann 1962, 26).
Notorious for teasing when young, Kierkegaard continued this schoolboy habit by incessantly “teasing” prominent figures in Danish cultural life, such as Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Hans Lassen Martensen, and Bishop J. P. Mynster. His public life was quiet, except for two occasions that are relevant to a study of the comic in Kierkegaard’s thought. One occasion was his conflict with the satirical paper the Corsair in the 1840s, the second was his attack on Christendom in the 1850s. Kierkegaard attacked the Corsair because he thought the journal did not respect the ethics of the comic. The journal’s retaliative sustained mockery of Kierkegaard drove him to despair. With the Corsair affair, Kierkegaard’s relationship with the comic took a dramatic turn. In 1849 he wrote, “I am a martyr of laughter and my life has been designed for that; I understand myself so completely as such that it is as if I now understand myself for the first time. To be able to become just that, I am the wittiest of all, possessing a superlative sense of comedy” (JP 6, 119). He redefined the ideal of Imitatio Dei to shed light on this new vision of himself:
It is frequently said that if Christ came to the world now he would once again be crucified. This is not entirely true. … Christ would be ridiculed, treated as a mad man, but a mad man at whom one laughs … I now understand better and better the original and profound relationship I have with the comic, and this will be useful to me in illuminating Christianity. (Pap. X A 187)
After the Corsair affair, Kierkegaard consciously adopts the Orthodox Church’s ideal of the holy fool or the fool in Christ’s name, and thereby redescribes his relationship with the comic.
The second public affair of his otherwise uneventful life was Kierkegaard’s open attack on institutionalized Christianity for not preaching what, in his view, the Christian life really demanded. Under his own name, Kierkegaard mounted toward the end of his life an attack on the Danish Church in the newspaper The Fatherland (Faedrelandet) and in his periodical The Moment (Oiblekket). This attack has been viewed in various ways, ranging from the claim that Kierkegaard had gone crazy to the view that Kierkegaard was making a pseudonym of his own name, putting on the garb of a gutter-press journalist writing for a Corsair-style paper. Kierkegaard deemed Bishop Mynster and the whole order of the clergy comical and accused them of making Christianity “a laughingstock” and a “comedy,” of ridiculing the king and the state and of treating God as a fool.
Roger Poole suggests that the major problem in the twentieth-century reception of Kierkegaard is hermeneutic: In what way can one adequately read Kierkegaard? Poole believes that the reason that so little satisfaction has been obtained is because of the refusal to take seriously the nature of “indirect communication.” By indirect communication, Poole refers to both the various pseudonymous writers and editors Kierkegaard created and to his use of irony and humor as devices of indirect discourse. Poole complains that even “the existential, humorous, continuously self-referring nature of Kierkegaard’s syntax” is expunged from Howard and Edna Hong’s translation of Kierkegaard’s writings (Poole 1998, 62, 61). Thomas Oden rightly remarks that some commentators may have read Kierkegaard intensively without having ever really noticed his comic side (Oden 2004, 3). One knows various things about Kierkegaard, but not Kierkegaard’s “mordant humor, nor the fantastic comedy he played out with his pseudonyms” (Kaufmann 1962, 15). With his marionette show of characters, to use George McFadden’s expression, Kierkegaard created out of his own life a drama in Copenhagen, which has been more difficult to discern than Kierkegaard’s irony. Kierkegaard himself “envied” his reader, “who in peace and quiet will be able to sit and purely intellectually enjoy the immensely comic drama” he performed “just by living” in Copenhagen (JP 6, 79). Indeed, Richard Simon deems Kierkegaard “the most elaborate comic of the nineteenth century,” a reflective comedian, a Christian humorist, a master of irony, a martyr of laughter, a clown.” He notes that his writing, especially his pseudonymous authorship, is a clown’s work, within which is “a complex and extensive meditation on the meanings of laughter, humor, irony, ridicule, and the comic. It is the most elaborate study of the subject in modern European intellectual history, and for the most part it has been ignored or downplayed by Kierkegaard’s critics, for they have been after serious content” (Simon 1985, 85).
Interestingly, Kierkegaard anticipates this attitude to his writings. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, he has one of his pseudonyms, Johannes Climacus, assess another pseudonym’s work, Stages on Life’s Way. Climacus explains that if the latter has any meaning or significance, it will consist
in the existence-inwardness of the different stages variously elucidated in passion, irony, pathos, humor, dialectic. Such things, of course, do not occupy assistant professors … passion, pathos, irony, dialectic, humor, enthusiasm, etc. are considered by assistant professors to be something subordinate that everyone possesses. (CUP1, 299)
Kierkegaard believes the erudite are most prone to ignore or misinterpret the comic. Lacking a sense of humor, the assistant professor is the least likely to grasp his or her own comic contradictions (CUP1, 281), and the least likely to read Kierkegaard correctly.
Recently, however, postmodern commentators have emphasized the aesthetic use of the comic in Kierkegaard’s writings. Walter Kaufmann rightly remarks, however, “a writer who so persistently distinguished between what he called an aesthetic approach and what we might call an existential approach should not be approached and discussed on the aesthetic plane, as he usually is.” Kierkegaard’s “central aspirations are almost invariably ignored, and even those who notice them often give reasons why the things that mattered to him may be dismissed as really of no account” (Kaufmann 1962, 18, 11). Indeed, many of Kierkegaard’s works are parodic or satiric, but he does not use comical devises for the sole amusement of the reader. As Hugh Pyper suggests, “Concluding Unscientific Postscript presents itself as a joke and it is only by taking its character as such entirely seriously that we can deal in earnest with its message” (Pyper 1997, 149). Kierkegaard explains this issue thus:
The reason why Concluding Unscientific Postscript is made to appear comical is precisely because it is serious—and people think they can better the cause by separating these and translating them into pieces of dogma, the whole thing no doubt ending in a new confusion where I myself am treated as a cause, everything being translated into the objective, so that what is new is that here we have a new doctrine, and not that here we have personality. (Pap. X2 A 130)
This comment should be appreciated in light of Kierkegaard’s assertion that true earnestness is necessarily jestful (SLW, 365). Comprehending the comic is thus essential for understanding Kierkegaard’s thought.
Kierkegaard’s theory stands up well against the great theories of the comic in the history of ideas. Not only does Kierkegaard explore comic perception to its depths, but he also practices the art of comedy as astutely as any writer of his time. His theory of comedy is integrated into his practice of comic perception and, as Thomas Oden notes, “both are integral into his entire authorship” (Oden 2004, 1). Most of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms are fascinated by the meanings of the comic, irony, humor, mockery, ridicule, laughter, and there are extensive commentaries on these meanings and arguments between the pseudonyms throughout the authorship. What simplifies or complicates the reading of these passages, however, is that there are very similar statements in Kierkegaard’s journals and autobiographical essays, and, as Richard Simon observes, many of these suggest that Kierkegaard understands himself as a comic figure (Simon 1985, 92).
Kierkegaard is indeed a humorist: Not only do his most important theses appear in a book written by a pseudonym Kierkegaard qualifies as a humorist (Johannes Climacus in Concluding Unscientific Postscript), but, through pseudonymous personalities such as Climacus, Quidam, and Frater Taciturnus, Kierkegaard defines the humorist in such a way that it becomes apparent that much of his own life was a concrete actualization of this perspective (Taylor 1980a, 228). However, Walter Kaufmann is right in qualifying Kierkegaard’s sort of humor, deeming him an “intensively religious humorist” (Kaufmann 1962, 26).
There are a few commentators who appreciate the philosophic importance, rather than the aesthetic use, of the comic and humor in Kierkegaard’s authorship. Merold Westphal suggests that the pseudonym of Concluding Unscientific Postscript “portrays the existing thinker as having what we might call a metaphysical sense of humor, an appreciation of the inherent incongruities of being human” (Westphal 1996, 69–70). In his remarkable Humor and Irony in Kierkegaard’s Thought, John Lippitt notes, “Kierkegaard is one thinker who brings both a philosophical and a religious dimension to the topic of the comic and humor” (Lippitt 2000b, 2). Sylvia Walsh deems humor, irony, the comic, and the tragic, existential categories that are essential to the Kierkegaardian art of existing (Walsh 1994). And Adi Shmuëli asserts that Kierkegaard’s thoughts on humor and irony constitute “the most important part of his philosophy, and only by studying them can one understand Kierkegaard’s philosophy and his ideas on Christianity” (Shmuëli 1971, 69).
I consider the comic much more important in Kierkegaard’s philosophy than the above-mentioned interpreters, however, because I believe Kierkegaard maintains that by examining the content of our laughter we know the sort of person we are. As ethical and religious edification is all that matters for Kierkegaard, this makes the comic the main criterion of advancement one has in the Kierkegaardian negative theology’s ladder, that is, the major positive indicator of one’s relation to the truth. I suggest that, for Kierkegaard, the comic power is both sword and shield whose mastery is crucial for inner progress from lower to higher stages of existence. For lack of an external criterion for inward advancement, which is the sole progress Kierkegaard recognizes, the comic is the main tool of examination, correction, and evaluation an individual possesses for reflecting on himself, his life, and his personal experiences, and for communicating this to others. Hence, the comic becomes the main tool of philosophy, once philosophy steps into the new existential role Kierkegaard has designed for it, which is to lead the individual toward worshiping the true God.
It is the relation to the comic that defines the existential spheres that have made Kierkegaard’s reputation as a philosopher (CUP1, 462) and that constitute the stages that lead to the good life. The ethics of the comic based on Kierkegaard’s hierarchy of existential spheres prescribes a right use of the comic that leads one to the good life. The ethics of the comic justifies laughter when a person’s existential position in life is higher than the position one is laughing at. Through this device, I suggest, Kierkegaard makes certain that his edifying lessons on the comic bear on his lessons on the good life, because laughing well is living well for Kierkegaard. Only the religious person laughs last and well, whereas the rest of us are forbidden to laugh at higher existential spheres lest we appear ridiculous. In this war of laughter, which is a trade of virtues and vices, religion comes out victorious in relation to philosophy as well as in relation to all other life-views, which Kierkegaard’s teleological ladder describes as stages of existence.
Still, Kierkegaard assigns humor the highest comic power with the highest possible role within thought: He characterizes the humorist’s life as the best existence a thinker can attain, topped only by the supra-rational religious life-view. Humor plays an essential role in religion as well, although the kind of role humor fulfills in Christianity changes as Kierkegaard’s view of Christianity evolves. For the young Kierkegaard, humor is intrinsic to the good life defined as the highest life-view, Christianity. For the mature Kierkegaard, however, the existential sphere of humor gains independence from Christianity as a life-view. Lower than Christianity, humor functions also as a border zone from which the leap to a Christian existence may be contemplated, and as a necessary mask of the religious person. The roles humor fulfills in relation to religion and Christianity echo the roles irony fulfills on a lower level in relation to the ethical life. This study investigates the various roles Kierkegaard attributes to humor at different phases of his life and the reasons that account for the changes in his view of the relations between Christianity and humor.
Understanding the comic is essential for understanding the Kierkegaardian good life; without the comic, also in the guise of irony and especially humor, the Kierkegaardian good life is unattainable for many of us. There is only one life-view that can be deemed the Kierkegaardian good life. Kierkegaard sees the remaining life-views, however, not only as “spheres” of existence, but also as stages that may lead to the Christian life. To answer the question of the role of the comic in the Kierkegaardian good life, it is important to understand, then, not only the role of the comic in the Christian life, but also the role of irony and humor as stages along life’s way, as well as the role of the comic within the lower stages, such as the aesthetic and the ethical stages.
Many factors make this endeavor difficult. First, various schools of interpretation have differing interests in the comic: on the one hand, postmodern commentators concentrate on the “how” of the comic instead of the “what,” thereby overstating irony and often using it to dismiss the very subjects most important to Kierkegaard; on the other hand, the theologians’ commentaries relevant to an understanding of Kierkegaard’s views on religion, and therefore, on humor, usually ignore the comic. Second, the wealth of opinions about the comic, mockery, laughter, ridicule, irony, and humor, voiced through the pseudonyms’ different if not contrary perspectives, stand in the way of a systematic exposition of Kierkegaard’s views. Relating opinions to pseudonyms simplifies the task but burdens the reading. Third, the difficulty lies also in the nature of Kierkegaard’s writings, which, as Louis Mackey has noted, “resist the intelligence almost successfully” (Mackey 1986, xxiii). The purpose of these writings is to effectuate a change in the reader, certainly not to enable a successful summary of them. All these make Kierkegaard’s wish of finding a reader that would enter his books and get lost in them a tangible danger.
Yet I believe that in order to understand the role of the comic in the good life, it is important to address Kierkegaard’s views on the comic, irony, and humor in the totality of his writings, both in his journals and authorship, and to respect his wish to relate the views in the voices of the pseudonyms that express them (CUP1, 28). Both devices are uncommon in Kierkegaard’s commentaries, which either homogenize Kierkegaard’s thought on the comic or humor, or narrow the discussion to one work or one pseudonym’s view. To understand the role of the comic, irony, and humor in the life-views described in Kierkegaard’s authorship, I introduce, first, Kierkegaard’s view of the good life, followed by detailed discussions of his view of the comic, irony, and humor. The comic is explained as contradiction, as unified with the tragic, as necessary in communication, and finally, as legitimate and illegitimate. As irony and humor are forms of the comic, I introduce the various roles Kierkegaard finds for them, beginning with irony, which he considers lower than humor. Irony is depicted as a life-view, as a mask of the ethical person, as a tool, as different from humor, and as a defining characteristic of Kierkegaard. Since for Kierkegaard, “the comic power is essentially humor” (CUP1, 282), a thorough discussion of the role of humor in Kierkegaard’s thought follows. Humor is presented, first, as intrinsic to Christianity—the view the young Kierkegaard held—followed by the view of humor in his mature thought, as an existential stage, as a border zone to the religious from which the leap to a Christian existence may be contemplated, and as a mask of the religious person. I conclude the chapter with a discussion of the role in the good life Kierkegaard allots to the comic and to its highest form, humor, and with an evaluation of the feasibility—mainly for nonreligious persons, but also for religious persons who do not share Kierkegaard’s view of religion—of implementing Kierkegaard’s views of the comic and humor.
THE GOOD LIFE
Kierkegaard is a philosopher and psychologist, an important literary author, and, as he states in The Point of View of My Life as an Author, a religious writer:
But I do maintain that I know with uncommon clarity and definiteness what Christianity is, what can be required of the Christian, what it means to be a Christian. To an unusual degree I have, I think, the qualifications to be able to present this. I also think it is my duty to do this. (“Armed Neutrality,” PV, 138)
Despite adhering to a Christian view of existence, Kierkegaard does his best to distance his views from the reader in the bulk of his writing. Instead of explaining in his works how he understands the world, he explores the psychological and intellectual perspectives of a number of views of life. Common to all the views is the notion of goals in life and their effect on the human personality, as well as on the community and human society in general. Kierkegaard uses a series of pseudonyms for that purpose, each inviting the reader to consider whether his description and assessment of the various possible goals, and the path to them, is correct.
Kierkegaard admires Socrates’ maieutic method of teaching through discussion. He aims to follow this ideal of the teacher who causes truth to be born in another but who does not have any claim to truth. For Kierkegaard, that truth is the religious life. Although he attempts to hide his personal viewpoint behind his pseudonyms, it is clear from his writings that he regards Christianity as the highest religion to which the Greek world, as representative of paganism, and Judaism, as the forerunner of Christianity, point. In contradistinction to Hegelianism, in which religion and Christianity are made to take a subordinate place to philosophy, Kierkegaard emphasizes the Christian life as the highest worldview. He makes a sharp distinction between Christianity (Christendommen) and Christendom (Chritenheden). He urges the believer to look for the content of Christianity in the New Testament rather than in the institution of the Church. The individual is encouraged to measure the Christianity of the Church establishment by considering whether it measures up to what is called for by strict New Testament ideality. Christendom is Christianity expressed as a historical sociopolitical institution. Kierkegaard, especially in his later writings, is extremely hostile to the historical spread of Christianity as “Christendom,” in which thousands have been, and still are, bound to the Church as an institution without proper reference to the Christian ideal life portrayed in the New Testament.
Kierkegaard is part of a long tradition in the West that sees human life, including the philosophical and religious understanding of life, in terms of illness and health, the diagnosis of disease and deliverance from it. As David Gouwens notes, the diagnosis might be relatively mild (a person lives in misunderstanding or error) or it may be of a deeper spiritual malady (sin) (Gouwens 1996, 27). In either case, this tradition postulates that the condition of ill health includes, as Kierkegaard puts it, diseases of reflection. Reflection is a broad term for Kierkegaard. It indicates not only thought and intellectual activity, but also the character or tone of one’s imaginative and affective life. For this tradition, salvation as a search for truth becomes a search for wholeness and unity over time. It involves self-analysis and self-examination as a necessary part of “coming to the truth,” and recognizes that this kind of thinking is both a clarification of intellectual confusion and a passion desiring a better way of life. In the task of cleansing the glass of vision, philosophy is a way of wisdom and even spiritual rebirth. For this reason, David Gouwens rightly emphasizes that Kierkegaard sees philosophy, especially in its Greek origins, not as a subject, but as a “way” (Gouwens 1996, 28). Philosophical and religious reflection in this tradition are not specialties of some arcane realms of knowledge or matters of technical expertise alone, but are exercises in a discipline aimed at coming to wisdom, a spiritual self as well as at an intellectual via disciplinae. At the culmination of modernity, this tradition of philosophy and religious reflection as a spiritual discipline, which derives from Socrates and continues in Christianity, is in danger of being undermined.
The personal and human element in philosophical reflection and in ethico-religious existence is necessarily sacrificed. Two factors undermine the human quest for authentic existence, Hegelianism and “Christendom.” Both are expressions of a tendency to conceive existence and existential problems in terms of knowledge. Hegel attempts to understand existence in objective terms, whereas Christendom views Christianity as a doctrine requiring mental assent or dissent on the part of the existing individual. In Kierkegaard’s opinion, both Hegelianism and Christendom rob the human being of self-understanding, development as a self, and ultimately a relationship with God. Hegel and Danish Hegelianism, which epitomize the speculative thinkers pertaining to the platonic movement, present a twofold problem: First, the dangers inherent in thinking, and second, the particular institutionalization and professionalization of philosophy and theology in the modern age. Thus, Kierkegaard’s diagnosis of the diseases of philosophical and theological reflection is not only a general critique of the dangers of reflection, but also a social critique of how philosophy and theology are practiced in the modern age.
Kierkegaard’s own endeavor in countering the diseases of reflection he diagnoses in his contemporaries is to present the reader with a program for attaining an authentic existence. To this end, embracing another form of thinking, subjective thinking, is required as well as arriving at a correct understanding of the human telos and how one attains to it, that is, how one becomes a self.
SUBJECTIVE THINKING
Drawing heavily on Hegelian categories and dialectical methods, Kierkegaard turns Hegel “outside-in,” as Alastair Hannay succinctly puts it (Hannay 1982, 19–53). The Hegelian dialectic is transposed from the sphere of essence to that of the individual human existence. Kierkegaard concedes that Hegel’s speculative construction of the realm of essence and the nature of the categories within it may well be correct. In existence or in “existential dialectics,” however, it is the principle of contradiction and not that of identity between thought and being that is valid (CUP1, 270–1). The difficulty with the Hegelian system is that one cannot reach reality by thinking because as soon as thought begins to control the real, it translates it into the sphere of the possible. Kierkegaard shows how this reality becomes a problem for thought by concerning himself with the further question as to how far the thinking ego is interested in the reality of its own existence. It cannot simply take cognizance of its own specific and characteristic existence. As soon as the thinking ego performs this act of self-awareness, it automatically differentiates itself from its empirical reality. It does not make this differentiation without keen interest; rather, in making it, it measures the empirical subject against a conceptual ideal subject. By this act, the ego becomes conscious of itself as an existing ego. It neither becomes the ideal nor does it remain the empirical ego. Instead, the ego, which is interested in its own existence, becomes a mediator between the two. But it is precisely in this middle term that reality lies—in this “interesse” as a mediating activity, in the literal sense of the Latin “interesse,” or “being between.”
As soon as the immediately existing ego attains consciousness of itself, this immediacy is suspended by the new awareness of a contradiction between the ideal and the real. This happens because consciousness makes clear its concern about the decisive contradiction and in so doing affirms itself. Hermann Diem rightly maintains, therefore:
Kierkegaard’s whole existential dialectic circles around this attainment of self-consciousness by the ego, by which it becomes aware of itself as existent and so wins reality. This is fundamentally its sole and ever recurrent theme, every implicit aspect of which is unfolded. With relentless persistence, the ego is pinned down to this position with no possibility of escape into the bypaths of speculation. (Diem 1959, 22)
According to one of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms, Johannes Climacus, “existing is a prodigious contradiction from which the subjective thinker is not to abstract … but in which he is to remain” (CUP1, 350).
As soon as Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms begin characterizing this essential contradiction between the ideal and the real, his philosophical anthropology emerges. There is a contradiction between “the infinite and the finite, the eternal and the becoming” (CUP1, 89). “Psyche and body,” which is another wording for the “temporal and eternal” (CA, 85), results in a contradiction between the inner and the outer (CUP1, 89). To “finitude/ infinite,” the pseudonym Anti-Climacus adds “possibility/necessity, and consciousness/unconsciousness” (SUD, 29). This essential contradiction has far reaching consequences for any attempt to comprehend existence. Thought no longer corresponds to reality and therefore there is no guarantee of knowing whether that which is thought is an actual expression of existence. Thought is penetrated by a radical uncertainty, and any replacement for Hegelian philosophy must take this uncertainty as its starting point.
In contrast to Hegelian dialectic, existential dialectics places a strict limitation on the activity and competence of thought. It functions very much like a border guard, allowing thought to press forward to its legitimate boundaries, but stopping it from encroaching on existence itself. That is, thought may be legitimately used in the clarification of existential issues but must stop short of absorbing these issues unto itself and reducing them to its categories. Existential dialectics, then, does not explain existence but helps the human being to become aware of crucial existential issues. Furthermore, existential dialectics entails the reduction of the status of thought. In existence, thought finds that it exists alongside categories such as will, feeling, and imagination. Consequently, although thought plays an important role on the human being’s existence, it does so only in conjunction with these nonintellectual elements.
Abstract thought is nevertheless important if one uses it correctly to clarify intellectual confusion and to serve the passion of desiring a better way of life. Existential dialectics is also concerned with bringing about reconciliation between thought and being. It does so, however, within existence and the strictures that existence places on the human being. Kierkegaard describes the means by which this is carried out as “subjective reflection.” Subjective reflection, unlike its objective counterpart, proceeds not away from but toward existence, namely the existence of the individual human being. It is called “subjective” because it turns toward “subjectivity,” that is, the innermost personal being, of the single individual. It is not concerned with establishing a speculative system, but rather with applying the categories of abstract thought to the concrete existence of the individual human being. Johannes Climacus explains the difference between abstract thought and subjective thinking:
While abstract thought seeks to understand the concrete abstractly, the subjective thinker has conversely to understand the abstract concretely. Abstract thought turns from concrete men to consider man in general; the subjective thinker seeks to understand the abstract determination of being human in terms of this particular human being. (CUP1, 315)
Thus, whereas objective reflection only moves in one direction, namely, away from existence to the abstract and essential, subjective thought moves in two directions. First, it makes the movement of objective reflection. That is, abstract thought is used to obtain a conception of existence and of the categories that make it up. Second, it bends objective reflection back on itself and applies it to existence. A circular movement is created in which thought first moves away from existence but is then turned back and applied to its point of origin. A dialectical movement is thus established between existence, the abstract conception of existence, and the existential application of this conception.
The significance of this dialectical movement is twofold. First, subjective reflection provides the existing individual with the means with which to understand personal existence. By means of the first movement, namely that of abstract thought, the individual acquires the concepts with which to understand the self. Thus, in the case of the previous quote, abstract thought provides the existing individual with a concept of humanity. The individual can then use this concept to interpret and comprehend his own individual humanity. By making the second movement of subjective reflection, that is, by applying the abstract concept of humanity to self, the individual achieves an understanding of the individual humanity. In this sense, then, subjective reflection is a reformulation of the Socratic dictum, “Know thyself.” It is the process by which the individual comes to achieve a greater understanding of self (CUP1, 314–6).
Second, subjective reflection has an ethical function. That is, it provides the individual not only with the wherewithal with which to interpret existence, but also with the means with which to develop and improve this existence. For Kierkegaard, the categories of objective reflection are not only forms of thought but also possibilities. Kierkegaard holds that the process of abstraction used by abstract thought results in an object or aspect of reality being transferred ab esse ad posse. If the individual discovers that his existence does not correspond to the abstract conception of what existence ideally is, he is compelled to act to restructure his existence so that it corresponds to this conception.
The question now arises as to how this dialectical process of subjective reflection results in overcoming the contradiction between thought and existence. This division is overcome when the existing individual posits an identity between thought and personal existence. That is, through the application of the categories of objective reflection (thought) to an individual existence (being), an identity can be created. By attempting to live according to the conception of the true nature of existence, the existing individual brings about an identity between thought and being. This identity is short-lived, for living is characterized by striving and not by reaching a result. Nonetheless, it is worth striving for the identity between thought and being, which is reached in moments of passion.
For Kierkegaard, Christianity requires the human being to struggle constantly against the immediate or the phenomenal world. Only the total renunciation of the finite prepares an individual for the religious leap that reveals the existence of the Absolute. Kierkegaard, as a master of indirect communication, attempts to help people free themselves of the immediate. Therefore, he does not teach Christianity directly, nor does he ask the reader to renounce immediate life and believe in God. Quite the contrary, as he declares in the journals:
my idea, the basis of my life … one of the most original ideas in many centuries, and the most original ever expressed in Danish, is that Christianity needed an expert in maieutics, and that I was the one. … The category for deploying Christianity does not suit Christendom. Here it is maieutics which is suitable, for it takes as its point of departure the notion that people have the highest good, but wishes to help them realize what they have. (Pap. VIII A 42)
Kierkegaard’s discussion with others takes place through the authorship, which becomes his version of Socrates’ Athenian marketplace. Alongside the nonreligious pseudonymous works, which mainly point to his religious themes, Kierkegaard publishes religious discourses under his own name. There he makes it clear that he is one “without authority,” and that although the discourse is directed at the reader, it is equally directed at himself. Moreover, although he writes a number of larger religious works toward the end of his life, he also publishes nonreligious or “aesthetic” pieces to ameliorate the impression of being a religious author. Kierkegaard’s authorship thus presents a multifaceted mode of question-and-answer that resembles Socrates’ method and the Platonic Socrates’ ultimate goal of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
The maieutic relationship is an important aspect of Kierkegaard’s philosophy. In his journals, he sees it enabling the reader “to stand alone—by another’s help” (JP 1, 650, sec. 15). Kierkegaardian maieutics is better understood in the light of his theory of indirect communication. Kierkegaard believes that the truth, which is inwardness, cannot be taught directly. In an indirect communication, the recipient of the communication must decipher the message alone. Only the person whose inwardness corresponds to the communicator’s subjectivity can understand the content of the communication.
In The Point of View for My Work as an Author, Kierkegaard testifies that his authorship is the product of a religious writer. Some scholars suggest that his testimony cannot be trusted and should thus be considered ironic. They argue that a direct commentary on authorship is really just another form of indirect communication. That is, just as one cannot take the previous pseudonymous works as direct expressions of what the author thinks, so too, one cannot trust the commentary on the authorship as a genuine expression of the author’s own views and aims. This problem, and perhaps also the problem of the indirect pseudonymous authorship as a whole, is greatly ameliorated by a thorough study of the entire authorship, and especially of the pseudonymous material. Careful study of the authorship reveals a number of underlying ideas Kierkegaard wants the reader to grasp.
First, although different pseudonyms have different perspectives on life, they all work together to illustrate that the aesthetic life, the life lived for the gratification of the senses, cannot ultimately work because it is against nature, against the fundamental structure of the human psyche. The right path is clearly that of the ethical-religious existence. Second, important aspects of human existence, notably the nature and structure of the human psyche, are expounded on by all pseudonyms. But, instead of forming a contradictory picture, their views form a clear presentation of Kierkegaard’s view of the nature and purpose of human life.
Nevertheless, modern scholars have devised a variety of ways to read Kierkegaard’s work. This endeavor is due not only to the prolixity and inventiveness of scholars, but also to the fact that Kierkegaard himself is multifaceted as a thinker. Adding his self-proclaimed irony and the pseudonymity of much of his authorship, Kierkegaard’s writings appear to be a vast field awaiting the tools of competing schools of thought. “My wish, my prayer,” writes Kierkegaard in his own name at the end of Postscript, “is that if it might occur to anyone to quote a particular saying from the books, he would do me the favor to cite the name of the respective pseudonymous author” (CUP1, 28). I suggest that Kierkegaard’s authorship can be read as a whole as long as the reader is sensitive to the ways in which the various characters and pseudonyms speak for themselves alone and does not try to homogenize them.
THE HUMAN TELOS
To understand the basic aim of Kierkegaard’s writings, however, it is important to explain his own private assumptions about the world, especially when his life-view is embedded in an authorship of such complexity. Kierkegaard is not only a committed Christian, but also one trained for the ministry. He believes that the Christian view of the world is the factually correct one, although he emphasizes that one must hold the truth of Christianity by faith. Faith in the rightness of the Christian way of life is required because one cannot be objectively certain that God exists. Moreover, faith is understood to be “against the understanding,” for particular religious propositions seem opposed to that which the human mind conceives as possible. Kierkegaard has a very definite understanding of the way things are. This is something that can be too easily overlooked, given that he expounds on the psychology of a wide range of views of life in his authorship.
Kierkegaard is a dualist. He believes the realm of existence to consist of the world of temporality (i.e., space-time as we experience it in daily life) and the realm of eternity. Eternity is the realm of actual transcendence, the dwelling place of God, the goal of humans who can relate to God both in this world and after death. Kierkegaard also speaks of the possibility of damnation in his authorship. Hell, however, is not a separate realm but the state of isolated personal despair of the person who willfully rejects God. Each human being is born into the world with the potentiality of becoming an authentic person. Humans are biologically part of the animal kingdom, but unlike animals, they have a God-created potentiality for spiritual eternal life. Kierkegaard describes the condition of the human self as a synthesis or combination of body (physical biology) and psyche or soul, which has, in addition, the potential for eternal life. To the extent that a choice is made to actualize the potential, there can, and should, arise an already implicit second synthesis between the temporal and the eternal elements in a person’s nature, between necessity (the factors of heredity and environment over which one has no control) and freedom (to act). This second synthesis develops through the exercise of moral choice with the aid of self-awareness and self-knowledge. Because the individual is located in this bipolar situation with a foot in temporality and at least a potential foot in the eternal realm, humans can experience anxiety and despair. The phenomenon of despair is a feature of human misrelation to the eternal.
The balanced human being is the one who centers life on the eternal, on eternal values, on eternity, and on God. The immature person is the one who makes the realm of temporality the goal of life. A person can do this by making temporal pleasures the most important thing in life. A person may defiantly try to alter, and thus be master of, these elements of the environment as well as heredity, which ultimately cannot be changed. Self-centeredness lies at the heart of what Kierkegaard labels the “aesthetic” way of life. The movement toward spiritual life occurs only through choosing to live a moral existence. There can be no relationship with the eternal, or God, outside ethics, even if the person concerned is seemingly practicing some form of religiosity.
Kierkegaard presents a number of aesthetes or pleasure seekers, from the amoral person, who has never reflected about the rightness of following instinct, to the one who has deliberately chosen this way of life despite ethics. He describes various forms of morality in his writings. Saedelighed (morality) is his term for any code of behavior based solely on temporal values. He does not regard “morality” as genuinely moral because personal egocentricity is replaced merely by purely materialistic codes of self-preservation of the society in question. For Kierkegaard, real morality must be based on some form of eternal value that transcends the community.
Kierkegaard’s main ethicist is Judge Williams, a man who espouses a mild form of Christian altruism, in which a person lives a godly life in society, a life that builds up individual and community existence in terms of both temporal and spiritual goods. Although a Christian, the judge is not allowed to represent a religious position because (although he mentions the possibility of ethical dilemma and religious renunciation) he espouses a world-affirming religiosity, as opposed to a strict totally altruistic religious life of “dying to the world.” Kierkegaard explores the difficulties surrounding life according to the demands of strict religiousness through other characters. Johannes Climacus and Anti-Climacus are examples of fictional figures that fathom the intellectual and psychological depths of religious and Christian religious life. Whereas Judge Williams explores ethical-religiosity in terms of fighting personal self-centeredness, the two Climacus pseudonyms explore an ethical religiosity that, for the sake of the eternal, give up even the morally good things of the world such as marriage and prospering in the community.
Kierkegaard’s doctrine of the “stages on life’s way” embodies this religious theology. As accounts of human emotional life with a religious teleology, the stages also envision a particular goal for human existence, which Kierkegaard terms Salighed, a supple term that for him embraces “happiness,” “eternal happiness,” and “blessedness.” The goal is anything but hedonistic; rather, it carries strong overtones of “task” and “striving.” Concerned not only with “feelings,” it aims at the transformation of a person, including emotional transformation, as one who is earnestly oriented toward the task and gift of relating to God.
The various goals embedded in views of life are described as “stages” or “spheres” (stadier) of existence. Exactly how many stages there are is not altogether resolved in Kierkegaard’s writings. The main stages are the aesthetic, ethical, religious, and, within the religious sphere, “natural” religiosity (Religiousness A) and Christianity (sometimes called Religiousness B). The aesthetic has its goal or telos in immediate enjoyment through the satisfaction and refinement of natural drives, passions, moods, talents, mental capacities, and inclinations; the ethical has as its goal victory over the struggle to fulfill universal ethical requirements in the personal life of the existing individual; and the religious has its telos in eternal happiness, a fulfillment that is only anticipated in existence through a relationship with God characterized by persistent inner suffering due to consciousness of guilt and sin.
Between the stages, Climacus adds to his analysis two boundary zones or transition spheres: Irony is placed between the aesthetic and the ethical, and humor is positioned between the ethical and the religious (CUP1, 501–2). Irony and humor also function within the ethical and religious spheres as the disguise or incognito, through which the ethical and immanent religiousness are given expression. Closely connected to irony and humor are the comic and the tragic. The four concepts are existential categories that are essential, not accidental, to the art of living.
Kierkegaard is convinced that the distance between spheres of existence is bridged, not by any gradual merging or by a necessary transformation of one into another, but only by a “leap” or free decision on the part of the individual. He recognizes certain states of soul, nevertheless, which indicate that a person has plumbed one of the inferior stages to its depths and has reached the extreme limit of that mode of life. A cynical and despairing irony marks the person who has lived an aesthetic life through to its bitter end, and is consequently placed at the borderline, where a leap into the ethical sphere is possible. Humor characterizes the person who has reached the borderline of the ethical sphere. At first, Kierkegaard regards humor as the proper attitude of the Christian with regard to the things of time, a kind of protective covering or incognito, useful in dealing with worldly fortunes and with individuals who do not see the world through the eyes of faith. But by 1845, he feels that humor is not so much a religious as an ethical passion—indeed, that it signifies that a person has reached the borderline of ethical life and is faced with the choice of becoming religious in a plenary way or of thwarting the natural inclination of ethical existence to surmount itself.
During the same year that marked the composition of Postscript, the distinctive nature of Christianity is so strongly impressed on Kierkegaard that he ceases to speak of the religious sphere in an unqualified way, and thereafter sharply distinguishes between all natural modes of the religious and the unique Christian religious spirit. This distinction between Religiousness A and Religiousness B is equivalent to designating four stages in the dialectic of life. The immanent modes of religious existence do not exhaust or naturally blend with the transcendent kind of religiousness, which comes only with the gift of Christian faith.
The importance that Kierkegaard attributes to his characterizations of the stages cannot be overestimated. They constitute his “abiding merit to literature” (Pap. VII A 127). He thinks he has “nailed down the category relations with regard to Christianity so well that no dialectician would be able to loose them” (Pap. IX A 413). The stages are not equally viable options that are equal in value, none having more warrant than the other, as Josiah Thompson and others have claimed (1973). Rather, they are progressive plateaus on a mountainside that Climacus must ascend if he is to attain the highest point and experience the summun bonum. Louis Pojman rightly maintains, then, that for Kierkegaard the human being has “an essence, a telos [a purpose], and authentic selfhood in realizing that telos” (Pojman 1999, 35).
The concept of stages is best seen within the context of Kierkegaard’s larger purpose of providing an account of human moods and emotions and the quest for continuity and unity in one’s existence. Kierkegaard refers to this as “the eternal” and grounds it in the relationship to God as the source and goal of one’s existence. For Kierkegaard, the task of human existence is in large part that of sorting out the complex chaos of moods in one’s emotional life into a life that is characterized by the consistency and stability of emotions. In this transition from moods to emotions, a dominant theme is that of attaining a unity in one’s life. But, for Kierkegaard, this goal of continuity, integration, and stability is also teleogically oriented, as his doctrine of the “stages on life’s way” clearly indicates.
Finally, Kierkegaard’s construction of a Christian epistemology involves two more interesting features. He consciously develops Christian ideas out of the rudiments of secular concepts. His treatment of “anxiety” and “despair” in The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death are good examples of this strategy. The process of Christianizing ordinary secular concepts, infusing them with a potency they do not appear to have at first glance, is interrelated with the second important feature of Kierkegaard’s philosophy: The strategy of constructing a framework in which the move into Christian faith is shown (albeit indirectly) to be eminently reasonable.
BECOMING A SELF
The hierarchy of the spheres points to a teleology that assists the individual in fulfilling the task that faces him. It is the ethical task of each individual to become a whole person. There are no two ways of doing it, as Kierkegaard emphatically affirms the religious dimension of the self: The false self is the self that the individual has conceived (SUD, 30); whereas, the true self is the self grounded in God. The relationship with God is an ontological quality of the self apart from which the self cannot be fully actualized or know itself as the infinite self. “The formula that describes the state of the self when despair is completely rooted out is this: in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it” (SUD, 14). This state is faith (SUD, 82).
An existing individual does not need to “form existence out of the finite and the infinite [by putting them together], but, composed of the finite and the infinite, he, existing, is supposed to become one of the parts [namely, infinite] …” (CUP1, 420). The individual’s decision to risk everything to fulfill his telos of eternal happiness is one by which he does “become infinitized” (CUP1, 423). It is a choice in which he accepts an identity apart from and superordinate to the finite, even though to avoid another main form of despair—to “will to be oneself” (SUD, 14), the individual must accept that possession of the infinite that takes the form of dependence on God.
It is for the acting individual to subordinate finite ends to an absolute end, at least to try to reach that “maximum,” which is to maintain simultaneously a relationship to the absolute telos and to relative ends, not by mediating them, but by making the relationship to the absolute telos absolute and the relationship to the relative ends relative. If, for any individual, says Climacus, “an eternal happiness is his highest good, this means that in his acting, the finite elements are once and for all reduced to what must be surrendered in relation to the eternal happiness” (CUP1, 391). Climacus does not mean that by giving up the finite the individual ceases to be human. The point is rather that the individual consciously subjects the finite goals that confront him to an overordinate, nonfinite end, genuinely conceived as nonfinite. Living in the category of spirit requires the individual to be a stranger in the world of the finite. The reason why so few have attempted the life of spirit is because most persons have still not descended deeply enough into despair.
Thus, Climacus defines the task confronting an individual as “simultaneously to relate oneself absolutely to the absolute telos (end, goal) and relatively to relative ends” (CUP1, 525; see 431–2). The absolute telos is eternal happiness, that is, immortality or eternal life (CUP1, 559). Relative ends are those that pertain to spheres lower than the religious, that is, to the finite realm. The ethical optimism that initiated the existential task of self-transformation into a state conforming with the ethical ideal, flows progressively into a recognition of impotence found in the existential pathos of immanent religiousness or Religiousness A. Climacus talks of “resignation” (CUP1, 400) and of “renunciation of everything” (CUP1, 404), the latter being the first true expression of a person’s relationship to the absolute telos. There are later expressions, first suffering, which is the “essential” expression, then guilt, which is the “decisive” expression of a person’s relation to the absolute telos. Suffering as dying to immediacy is the essential expression of the existential pathos, the distinctive mark of an existing person’s relation to the absolute telos:
The essential existential pathos related itself to existing essentially, and existing essentially is inwardness, and the action of inwardness is suffering, because the individual is unable to transform himself. It becomes, as it were, a feigning of self-transformation, and that is why the highest action in the inner world is to suffer. (CUP1, 433)
Later, as the individual accepts the requirements of ethics but also understands that the human being cannot abide by them, he discovers guilt. Guilt is made the decisive expression for the existential pathos, and the distance from the task becomes even greater (CUP1, 526).
The individual’s task is simultaneously to relate absolutely to the absolute telos and relatively to relative ends. However, one cannot have an absolute relationship with the absolute for it is fraught with incertitude. As soon as there is certitude or understanding, paganism or an aesthetic view of religion is the result. One consequence of the dialectic of existence, then, is the uncertainty of thought.
Another consequence of the dialectic of existence is the limitation of thought. Reason is useless and inappropriate for overcoming ultimate despair because sin and self-deception distort the nature of things. However, reason can play the role of servant, pointing to the place where the leap of faith must be made—to Christian faith. Whereas Kierkegaard was confident that dialecticians could not make someone a Christian, dialectic leads “the individual to it, and says: Here it must be, that I can vouch for; if you worship here, you worship God” (CUP1, 491):
Dialectic in its truth is a kindly disposed, ministering power that discovers and helps to find where the absolute object of faith and worship is, where the absolute is—namely, there where in unknowing the difference between knowledge and nonknowledge collapses in absolute worship, there where the objective uncertainty resists in order to force out the passionate certitude of faith, there where in absolute subjection the conflict about right and wrong collapses in absolute worship. Dialectic itself does not see the absolute, but it leads … to it. (CUP1, 490–1)
The role of reflective reason for Kierkegaard is thus largely negative. By helping us see what a concept is not, we may be better able to appreciate what it is. Louis Pojman notes that one of Kierkegaard’s favorite epigrams is Spinoza’s dictum, “All determination is negation” (Pojman 1984, 145). Kierkegaard sees negative concepts at the heart of human reasoning because they highlight the limits of reason: “Above all, it is a fundamental fallacy to think there are no negative concepts. The highest principle for all thinking, or the proof for it, is negative. Human reason has its limits. There lie the negative concepts” (Pap. X2 A 354). Irony, paradox, the unknown, the limit, dread, and guilt can all be considered negative concepts. The absurd is also a category, “the negative category of the divine or of the relationship to the divine” (Pap. X6 B 79). Hegel undoubtedly influences Kierkegaard’s use of negativity because for both men, the “negative” is an instrument for reaching the truth, albeit in different ways.
Existential dialectics also expresses the negativity of existence or, as Climacus explains, “the negativity that is in existence or rather, the negativity of the existing subject (which his thinking must render essentially in an adequate form) …” (CUP1, 82). This is achieved by “always keep[ing] open the wound of negativity” (CUP1, 85). That is, existential dialectics does not proceed by negating the negative but by holding the positive in conjunction with the negative. As Climacus puts it:
When this is the case, when he [the subjective existing thinker], actually existing, renders the form of existence in his own existence, he, existing, is continually just as negative as positive; for his positiveness consists in the continuous inward deepening in which he is cognizant of the negative. (CUP1, 84)
If the negative is eliminated, the positiveness that results is “untrue” and “illusory” (CUP1, 81). Only in this way can thought do justice to existence and the division between thought and being to which it is subjected. Thus, because the subjective thinker is always equally negative and positive, this thinker is always striving (CUP1, 80). The theme that “the positive is recognizable by the negative” is familiar to an existing individual, who is always in the process of striving to realize an ideal that can never be perfectly realized. In the religious sphere, the positive is distinguished by the negative; the relationship with an eternal happiness is distinguished by suffering (CUP1, 532). “The negative is not once and for all and then the positive, but the positive is continually in the negative, and the negative is the distinctive mark” (CUP1, 524). “The reader will recall,” says Climacus, “that revelation is marked by mystery, eternal happiness by suffering, the certitude of faith by uncertainty, easiness by difficulty, truth by absurdity; if this is not maintained, then the esthetic and the religious merge in common confusion” (CUP1, 432n). David Law rightly describes Kierkegaard as a negative theologian (Law 1993).
The task Kierkegaard describes does not begin by attempting an absolute relation to the absolute telos. Rather, it is done by “taking power away from immediacy” (CUP1, 431). The individual is in immediacy and to that extent is actually in the relative ends absolutely. He begins by practicing the absolute relation through renunciation of the relative ends. Moreover, “the task is ideal and perhaps is never accomplished by anyone” (CUP1, 431). Furthermore, when one has surmounted immediacy, one is nevertheless in existence and thereby again hindered from absolutely expressing the absolute relation to the absolute telos.
Existential dialectics, however, is not only concerned with doing justice to the negativity of existence but also with overcoming this negativity by bringing about reconciliation between thought and being. Truth is the conformity of thought and being. But, if the being involved is empirical, conformity of thought and being is possible only as an ideal toward which one strives, for the empirical being is unfinished and the existing cognitive spirit is itself in the process of becoming. For the existing individual, thought and being can never fully coincide. The unity of thought and being is a task that is posed to the existing individual and is not an accomplished fact. Thus, truth becomes an approximation, an ideal that is asymptomatically approximated, as long as the individual lives in time (CUP1, 189, 196).
Kierkegaard identifies subjectivity—the process of appropriating what one has conceived—with truth for an existing individual (CUP1, 242) and continues one step further by explaining that to say “truth is subjectivity” is to say that “truth is the subject’s transformation in himself.” The truth consists not in knowing the truth but in being the truth (TC, 202, 201). The truth is the quality of an individual’s life, Mark Taylor explains: “to be true to,” “to be faithful to” are expressions that exemplify the way Kierkegaard understands religious truth (Taylor 2002, 255). There are two important consequences of the view of religious truth as subjectivity. First, “to subjective reflection, truth becomes appropriation, inwardness, subjectivity, and the point is to immerse oneself, existing, in subjectivity” (CUP1, 192). Second, Kierkegaard gives more importance to the quality of the relationship to one’s goal or to its possibility than to the nature of that goal and possibility. The person who prays in truth prays to God even if he believes he is praying to an idol, while praying untruthfully to God is much the same as worshipping an idol (CUP1, 201).
To reduplicate is to exist in what one understands (TC, 133). It refers to the process by which an individual appropriates what has been conceived as a possibility. In so doing, the individual becomes true and “truth is for the particular individual only as he himself produces it in action” (CA, 139). By holding that religious truth is subjectivity, Kierkegaard believes that he is fully in line with what he regards as the two most authoritative sources of Christian tradition: the Bible and Luther. The Letter of James is Kierkegaard’s favorite biblical text (especially 1:22–25; see ED, II 84–85); and in Luther’s theme of pro me or pro nobis, Kierkegaard finds the issue of personal appropriation (CUP1, 366; Taylor 2002, 257).
Alastair Hannay maintains that Climacus’ negative epistemology is not far from positivism, leaving the truth out of our grasp. Climacus’ unthinkable hypothesis is that in Christianity the eternal has taken on the form of time, and the example of Christ is revelatory only on the vanishing chance that against all reason it is so. It is up to the individual whether one takes the chance or not. In any event, all one can do is take a step in the right direction (Hannay 2003, 120).
Because Kierkegaard identifies religious truth with subjectivity, religious truth refers to the processive or dynamic life of the individual. For this reason, Kierkegaard refers to subjective truth as “edifying” or upbuilding; that is, the personality of the individual is built up insofar as he appropriates the truth with which he is concerned, or as he strives to achieve his ideals (WL, 199–212). The concept of truth is a complex mirror image of Kierkegaard’s concept of upbuilding. Hannay explains that to “edify” is to get people to “see their personal and interpersonal situations from another perspective, one from which goals previously aimed at and appraisals previously made can be seen as inadequate. The ‘how’ here is the medium of moral change; it is only by acquiring a new and more embracing situational understanding that a person can transcend a narrow or egocentric, less moral, point of view” (Hannay 2003, 119). Morality is a matter of personal growth in which a better self is revealed, a self that can be shunned as well as appropriated, and a prospect that exposes whatever may count as a will to strategies of self-deception and to what Kierkegaard calls despair.
Robert Perkins argues that Kierkegaard is a “moral epistemologist” because of the importance of the concept of upbuilding or the edifying in Kierkegaard’s dialectic (Perkins 2002, 224). Upbuilding is an essential “predicate of all religiousness” (CUP1, 560n). There is a distinction, however, between two levels of upbuilding in Kierkegaard. There is a Christian upbuilding (Religiousness B) and also an upbuilding at the level of human religiousness exemplified by Socrates (Religiousness A). In the latter, the upbuilding element is “the annihilation in which the individual sets himself in order to find God, since it is the individual himself who is the hindrance … in the ethico-religious sphere the individual himself is the place [of edification] if the individual has annihilated himself” (CUP1, 561n). In the former, the individual does not find the upbuilding by finding the relationship with God within himself, but rather relates himself to something outside himself to find the upbuilding. In Religiousness A (Kierkegaard’s category of humane religion, the religion of immanence, of subjectivity, and finally of guilt-consciousness), the individual is the central figure and finds God within himself. In Religiousness B, the individual relates to God as someone external.
Suffering is always the mark of religiousness, but not all suffering is religious. Although Kierkegaard writes much about adversity and the spiritual attitude toward it, adversity is not religious suffering. Religious suffering is based on the inability of the religious person to express the eternal in the temporal. Religious suffering is distinguished by being solely in inwardness: It is partially about not being able to convert pain into perfect joy and partially about uncertainty over the relationship with God (CUP1, 451–5). The individual that diminishes the eternal to the size of the temporal, reducing the infinite to the dimensions of the finite, will never know this religious suffering. Socrates’ irony is an expression of an inaptitude for comprehending the infinite in philosophy. In Religiousness A, suffering is expressed as guilt-consciousness, and in Religiousness B, it is expressed as sin-consciousness. Kierkegaard requires religious suffering to be hidden in one’s inwardness in such a way that it cannot be suspected outwardly. True religiousness resembles God’s invisible omnipresence in that it cannot be seen. The god to whom one can point is an idol, and the religiousness one can indicate is imperfect (CUP1, 475). Renouncing the world should not be noticeable; hence, the requirement to join the world externally and hide the relationship to the absolute. In other words, the truly religious person should go to an amusement park and enjoy himself.
As Richard Perkins suggests, “Kierkegaard gives up a rich contextual environment for upbuilding that transforms this term into a truth test”: Subjectivity and edification are the truth tests for truth (Perkins 2001, 235). Kierkegaard’s position looks anarchistic or subjectivistic when we substitute a concern for objectively correct truth for the truth that builds up, but truth is always human truth for Kierkegaard.
The question I address in this chapter is: What is the role of the comic, also in the guise of irony and especially humor, in the Kierkegaardian good life? There is only one life that can be deemed the Kierkegaardian good life. McCarthy rightly points out that for Kierkegaard only the Christian religious life merits the predicate “life-view” because it alone represents true mastery of the moods (McCarthy 1978, chap. 7). Kierkegaard sees the remaining life-views, however, not only as “spheres” of existence, but also as stages (Stadier) that may lead to the Christian life. To answer the question of the role of the comic in the Kierkegaardian good life, it is important to understand, then, not only the role of the comic in the Christian life, but also the role of irony and humor as stages on life’s way, as well as the role of the comic within the lower stages such as the aesthetic and the ethical stages. I continue, therefore, with an introduction of the role the comic fulfills in the lives Kierkegaard describes, followed by an examination of the role of irony, and finally, of humor.
THE COMIC
The comic is a dominant theme throughout Kierkegaard’s writings because the comic is pervasive in life: “On the whole,” his pseudonym asserts, “the comic is everywhere” (CUP1, 462). The comic is moreover essential in the subjective thinker’s thought because “thought must correspond to the form of existence” (CUP1, 80). It is furthermore necessary in the subjective thinker’s communication, which reflects thought and thereby existence. Because the comic is pervasive in life, thought, and communication, Kierkegaard considers the comic an essential category. He refers to it in his journals as early as 1842 (JP 2, 1737), finds for it new applications in his writings, and continually refines it.
In order to understand the role of the comic in the Kierkegaardian good life, I suggest examining the recurrent themes associated with it in Kierkegaard’s writings. These are the comic as contradiction, the unity of the comic with the tragic, the role of the comic in communication, and the legitimacy of the comic.
THE COMIC AS CONTRADICTION
One of the characteristics of the comic throughout the entirety of Kierkegaard’s writings is that the comic involves an incongruity or contradiction. The comic is “a relation, the misrelation of contradiction” (CUP1, 514n). In his journals, Kierkegaard describes human existence as a synthesis of extreme opposites that make for comic awareness because “the category of the comic is essentially contradiction” (JP 2, 266). Additionally, several of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms, including Johannes Climacus, Vigilius Haufniensis, and Anti-Climacus, speak of human existence as a synthesis of contrasting or opposing elements, which can never be reduced to one another. These include body and soul, temporality and eternity, possibility and necessity, finitude and freedom, which Kierkegaard parses out as the properties of temporality, finitude, and necessity, on the one hand, and infinitude and freedom, on the other. The self is seen as an attempt to unify them by producing an entity—the spirit—which is greater than the sum of its parts.
Despair, Anti-Climacus concludes in The Sickness unto Death, is a symptom of the tension between these two disparate aspects. Considered in this way, a human being is still not a self: “A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself” (SUD, 13f).
In existence, the synthesis is uncompleted, ensuring the perpetual presence of the incongruity between the opposing elements. Our identity is found, then, in the movement between reality and ideality. The human situation is by these very polarities enmeshed in ongoing contradictions of the most extreme opposites, caught up in persistent discrepancies, and hence fraught with pathos and existential suffering, characterized by the uneasiness of freedom with itself. In The Sickness unto Death and The Concept of Anxiety Kierkegaard takes our incapacity to cure ourselves of despair or anxiety by our own powers as a sign of our heteronomy.
The very arena in which the comic appears is a juxtaposition of these opposites—internally conflicted passion—which is the most basic feature of being human. It is in this unremitting interplay of finitude and freedom, temporality and ability that human beings live daily. But incommensurability, polarity, and contradiction are the always-available makings of comedy. Melrod Westphal rightly observes, “Climacus portrays the existing thinker as having what we might call a metaphysical sense of humor, an appreciation of the inherent incongruities of being human” (Westphal 1996, 69–70).
Kierkegaard shares Aristotle’s view of the comic as “essentially contradiction” (Pap. III A 205, 81). Climacus narrows the scope of comic contradiction by emphasizing that “the comic is painless contradiction” (CUP1, 514). Climacus’ characterization is in harmony with Aristotle’s definition of comedy, which states that “the Ridiculous may be defined as a mistake or deformity not productive of pain or harm to others: the mask [propopon], for instance, is something ugly and distorted without causing pain” (Poetics, 5:1449a 32–37). Yet Climacus criticizes Aristotle’s definition as insufficient for leaving out “whole families of the comic” and for being insensitive to pain: “Even if the distorted face does not cause pain, it is indeed still painful to be so fated as to prompt laughter merely by showing one’s face” (CUP1, 514n). Through a pseudonym, Kierkegaard expresses here, as he does in most of his works, his sensitivity toward suffering and his aversion to laughing at suffering. The comic can be painless because “the comic interpretation produces the contradiction or allows it to become apparent by having in mente [in mind] the way out” (CUP1, 516).
Both Kierkegaard and Climacus maintain that the comic emerges as soon as one is aware of instances of existential contradictions: “Where there is life, there is contradiction, and wherever there is contradiction, the comic is present” (CUP1, 513–4). By “contradiction” Climacus does not mean formal or logical contradiction. Rather, his view is taken as representative of the theoretical tradition in which the comic is explained in terms of incongruity. The idea that the comic is essentially based on incongruity or “contradiction” is a view on which both Kierkegaard and the various pseudonyms who discuss the comic are united. Kierkegaard seems to adhere to one form of the “incongruity theory” of the comic, which states that the contradiction is sufficient to give rise to the comic.
But Kierkegaard also holds another version of the incongruity theory, which demands that an additional condition be met, namely, that the incongruity be resolved. A “legitimate comic apprehension” cancels the contradiction by having in mind a way out of it. For the comic to be legitimate, a laugher should not only know more than that which he laughs at, but with that extra knowledge, he should rise above the contradiction at which he laughs. Kierkegaard’s view of the comic, and that of his pseudonym Climacus, is clearly a version of the incongruity theory. The comic is a result of sensitivity to contradiction, incongruity, and incommensurability. Everyone who has “a sense for the comic” can grasp exactly wherein the contradiction is found.
John Lippitt rightly considers that Kierkegaard’s view of the comic as incongruity is his starting point, rather than his only or major contribution to the subject (Lippitt 2000b, 11). Other commentators find in Kierkegaard’s thought significant elements of two other theories that explain the comic—the superiority theory and the relief theory. The notion of superiority is significant in relation to the comic because it is the possession of a superior position that enables an individual, according to Kierkegaard, to experience an incongruity as pleasant rather than painful. Someone who apprehends a contradiction as comic does not feel that he himself is governed by the contradiction; the person believes that no one could laugh at him for the same reason he is laughing. Also implicit in Kierkegaard’s view is the notion that the comic provides a relief from the vexations of life. The person who sees something comically has found “a way out.” Temporarily, at least, he has escaped the pain of life.
It is an important axiom for Climacus that a person in his immediate pathos is always in contradiction with himself. It is therefore necessary to bring the contradictory relationship to consciousness, and this happens only when one is oriented toward a higher ideality. Only here does one see the contradiction and only here can reflection receive its legitimacy as a higher ideality through a reconciliation of contradiction. It is in this context that Climacus develops his theory of the different stages of inwardness, ordered according to how much consciousness of contradiction individual existence has assimilated.
In Stages on Life’s Way, the comic is viewed in relation to a distinct sequence of modes of existence: Immediacy, immediacy with reflection, aesthetic existence, irony, ethical existence, humor, suffering and guilt, immanent forms of religious consciousness, and Christianity. Understanding the comic requires understanding human nature in its three existential stages: It is fairly easy to locate the stage in which one is currently operating if comic sensibilities are understood. It is also easy to see where another stands in the “stages on life’s way” by looking at how that person experiences and understands the comic. To run short of a comic sense is to lack an essential aspect of matured self-awareness. The more one enters into a relationship with oneself and actively recognizes oneself as body/soul, temporal/eternal incongruity, the more one becomes a self, develops a sense of personhood and personal freedom, and is welcomed into comic consciousness.
For the early Kierkegaard, the comic appears at each stage along life’s way (aesthetic, ethical, and religious), but has an essential relation with the religious, and especially with Christianity, where the self is understood decisively in relation to the Incarnation and the Atonement. The comic is always based on an experienced contradiction or incongruity, and Christianity is blessed with many such incongruities: God in time, joy amid suffering, sin forgiven. For the young Kierkegaard, thus, Christianity is the most humorous of all forms of religion, an opinion he abandons later in life.
It is the comic that defines the spheres of existence and thereby Kierkegaard’s teleology. “On the whole,” Climacus claims, “the comic is present everywhere, and every existence can at once be defined and assigned to its particular sphere by knowing how it is related to the comic” (CUP1, 462; cf. 513, 520). The importance Kierkegaard attributes to his theory of spheres, singling it out as his “abiding merit to literature” (Pap. VII A 127), reflects on the crucial role he attributes to the comic. The various stages of existence may be ranked and legitimated according to whether they have the comic within or outside themselves, that is, by whether the contradiction is understood as the consequence of internal or external conditions. The immediate consciousness has the comic outside itself and ranks at the lowest level; both irony and humor have the comic within themselves and consequently rank higher. Religiousness, with humor as its incognito, ranks still higher. However, here the comic is a relative factor and the individual is legitimated by the passion with which the God-relation is sustained. At the apex is the hidden inwardness of religiousness, which in Climacus’ view is inaccessible to comic apprehension precisely because it is hidden and cannot come into contradiction with anything outside itself (CUP1, 522). Thus, Climacus asserts, “the matter is very simple. The comic is present in every stage of life … because where there is life there is contradiction, and wherever there is contradiction, the comic is present” (CUP1, 513–4).
THE COMIC AND THE TRAGIC
The relation between the comic and the tragic is a pervasive theme within Kierkegaard’s writings. “The misrelation, the contradiction between the infinite and the finite, the eternal and the becoming” lies at the root of the comic as well as at the root of the tragic (CUP1, 89). The difference between the two is that whereas a “legitimate comic apprehension” cancels or knows a way out of the contradiction, the tragic does not (CUP1, 516; 523). The tragic is thus the “suffering contradiction” (CUP1, 514) that “sees the contradiction and despairs over the way out” (CUP1, 516).
There is something inherently tragic about the character of human striving, oriented toward presence and certainty, but never able to overcome its origin in absence and uncertainty. Kierkegaard’s originality lies in Climacus’ insistence that for exactly the same reason human life is comical. The notion that the subjective existing thinker is the intersection of certainty and uncertainty, of knowledge and ignorance, and thus of positive and negative “can also be expressed by saying that he has just as much of the comic as of pathos” (CUP1, 87). The pathetic here refers to the pitiful, or that which properly evokes pity, in other words, the tragic, or the “pathos-filled.” Thus, Kierkegaard regards the tragic and the comic as integral features of the subjective thinker’s existence; in this capacity they function as expressions of his awareness of the discrepancy between the inner and the outer, the finite and the infinite, and the temporal and eternal in existence.
Insofar as both the tragic and the comic are based on existential contradiction, they are the same. The difference lies in the basis of the contradiction, whether it is based in the real comparing itself to the ideal, or if it is based in the ideal comparing itself to the real. The first magnifies and is thus tragic; the second belittles and is therefore comic:
The interpretation of the misrelation, viewed with the idea ahead, is pathos; the interpretation of the misrelation, viewed with the idea behind, is the comic. When the subjective thinker turns his face toward the idea, his interpretation of the misrelation is pathos-filled; when he turns his back to the idea, allowing it to shine from behind into the same misrelation, his interpretation is comic. (CUP1, 90)
If both the comic and the tragic are grounded in contradiction and if human existence is at its very heart a “contradiction,” then it is clear why the capacity to sense the tragic and the comic is basic to human life. “Existence itself, existing, is a striving, and just as pathos-filled as it is comic; pathos-filled because the striving is infinite, that is, directed toward the infinite, is a process of infinitizing, which is the highest pathos; comic because the striving is a self-contradiction” (CUP1, 92). The subjective thinker strives to come into the presence of the eternal truth and to exist in the light of this truth. But this striving is also comical because the attempt to embody the infinite and eternal within one’s finite and timebound existence is self-contradictory. This ambiguity in human life may be analyzed in distant objectivity or be defined by its relation to the comic as in Postscript: “The tragic is the suffering contradiction, the comic, the painless contradiction” (CUP1, 514) or as in Stages, where unlike the comic, which is “metaphysical disinterestedness,” the tragic has a clear affinity to the historical and “has the interest of actuality” (SLW, 446).
Despite their differences, the tragic and the comic are united. John Glenn maintains that in Kierkegaard’s thought “the unity of the comic and the tragic has meaning—although a somewhat different meaning—at every stage of human existence” (Glenn 1970, 52). A constant theme in Kierkegaard’s writings is that the comic and the tragic, and in later writings, the comic and pathos, or jest and earnestness, are in some sense, one.
Kierkegaard’s first variations on this theme seem to be primarily expressions of the disparity between his own inner melancholy and his outward appearance. “I have also united the tragic with the comic. I crack jokes and people laugh—I cry,” he writes in his journal in 1837 (JP 1, 5247). In his published works, he gives this theme a subtler literary and philosophical expression. In The Concept of Irony the romantic philosopher unites laughter and tears in romantic irony:
His grief conceals itself in the exclusive incognito of the jest, his joy is enveloped in lament … now something is advanced seriously but immediately twisted inside out—and the unity in laughter shall reconcile all oppositions, yet this laughter is in turn accompanied by the distant flute tones of a deep sadness … (CI, 301, 320)
Either/Or is the first of Kierkegaard’s books in which this theme figures significantly. The nature of this unity is not so much stated as it is instantiated in the existence of A, the pseudonymous author of the first volume. The “Diapsalmata,” the collection of lyrical and aphoristic paragraphs, which constitute the overture to the first volume of Either/Or, is an artistic elaboration of the concept of romantic irony, which Kierkegaard presented in his dissertation, The Concept of Irony. A’s laughter is hollow and despairing: “What if laughter were really tears?” he asks (EO1, 21). This remark is the first clear intimation in Either/Or of the unity of the comic and the tragic. It indicates, moreover, that this unity is a unity in the direction of the tragic. The same idea can be found in a sketch to Either/Or found in the journals:
Modern tragedy has taken the comic into itself; the more one thinks about it, the more one is tempted to cancel the difference between the tragic and the comic in the unity of the tragic. Both obviously depend upon a misrelation between idea and actuality, and the two ways people have always sought to allay it have been either by laughing or by crying. But the misrelation itself is obviously the tragic, which thus becomes the unity of the tragic and the comic. (Pap. III B 180)
Thus, the comic is subsumable under the tragic, rather than the converse, also within each stage of existence: “The different existence-stages rank according to their relation to the comic in proportion to their having the comic inside or outside themselves, yet not in the sense that the comic should be the highest” (CUP1, 524). The unity of the tragic and the comic within the spheres is a unity in the direction of the tragic.
Kierkegaard’s early description of the unity of the comic and the tragic is a prolegomenon to his later reflections in Postscript, which bear on the unity of the comic and the pathos-filled or suffering:
What lies at the root of both the comic and the pathos-filled is the misrelation, the contradiction between the infinite and the finite, the eternal and the becoming. A pathos that excludes the comic is therefore a misunderstanding, is not pathos at all … If I have not exhausted the comic to its entirety, I do not have the pathos of the infinite; if I have the pathos of the infinite, I immediately have the comic also. (CUP1, 89–90)
The role of the comic in both Stages and Postscript is to purify the pathos-filled by amending its immaturity (SLW, 366; CUP1, 87). David Gouwens perceptfully notes that Kierkegaard stands in a philosophical and theological tradition more concerned with “self-purification” than with self-fulfillment (Gouwens 1996, 29, n. 5). The task of human existence is in large part that of sorting out the complex chaos of one’s emotional life into a life that is characterized by the consistency and stability of emotions. The chaotic emotional life can be described as the problematic of moods, and a dominant theme in this transition from mood to emotion is the attainment of unity in one’s life.
Vincent McCarthy has carefully studied the moods and their connection to life-views or stages in The Phenomenology of Moods in Kierkegaard (1978). Kierkegaard takes moods and the emotional life with the utmost seriousness, walking the fine line between the romantics who unduly celebrate them and the intellectuals who shun them. He sees a function of moods in the life of the whole person and sets out to describe, probe, explore, and analyze them. He considers the move from the aesthetic to the religious an intensely rational project from beginning to end, completed by the pathos of Christian seriousness and intimately linked to the idea of a life-view pervading Kierkegaard’s authorship. McCarthy rightly points out that for Kierkegaard, only the Christian religious existence toward which the moods naturally direct the soul of the human being, merits the predicate “life-view” and represents true mastery of the moods (McCarthy 1978, chap. 7). The dialectic of moods and Kierkegaard’s concern with an authentic philosophy of life converge in his thoughts. Mastering the moods is the preparation required for articulating the new life-view. In this capacity, the moods represent the rite of passage from childish illusions about the self to mature understanding of a proper life-view, representing a radical change from victim to master of moods.
The movement begins with the unmasking of an illusory life-view, the aesthetic, and the gradual preparation for the formation of an authentic view of life. This new life-view is formed by means of the spiritual growth reflected in the sequence of moods, which rise to prominence in the emotional life of the individual. The aesthete represents the human being under the illusion of having a life-view and attempting to live according to such a view. It is thus in existence, rather than in detached contemplation, that a life-view is tested and a new life-view is formed. The starting point is the collapse of the aesthetic life-view represented by the mood of irony. McCarthy explains that irony, as a mood, “represents the first conscious breakthrough in the illusion of aesthetic (or nonreligious) existence. A sequence of moods follows naturally one upon the other, viz., anxiety, melancholy, and despair in a series of crisis of the personality” (3). The dialectic of moods represents a purgation, which allows philosophy to take up, once again, its role of service to human existence. By the call to self-understanding in mastering the moods, Kierkegaard seeks to destroy the seduction of the poetic and the false seriousness of academic philosophy, to ground both poetry and philosophy in the depth of existence, and to restore them to authentic articulation of the realities of the individual’s being, rather than merely to the fancies of imagination.
In the end, McCarthy notes, “the new understanding gathered from experience is thoroughly consonant with the Christian revelation about the meaning and the destiny of human existence” (McCarthy 1978, 161). The moods individually and in their dialectic first work to destroy the illusory life-view that the aesthetic represents and then lead to the threshold of positivity and to deepened self-understanding, which are essential to an authentic life-view. Authentic Christianity represents the religious solution provided by the grace of a historical event and personal forgiveness; resolving the moods and positing the fullest understanding of the human being. Kierkegaard combines a very contemporary understanding of human spiritual development with an ancient notion of Christianity as a decisive force in one’s life.
The pseudonymous author of The Concept of Anxiety explains the unique role the comic plays in correcting the moods. When a concept is not treated in the right category,
the concept is altered, and thereby the mood that properly corresponds to the correct concept is also disturbed, and instead of the endurance of the true mood there is a fleeting phantom of false moods. An error in the modulation is just as disturbing as an error in the development of thought. … Yet every error gives birth to its own enemy. Outside of itself, the error of thought has dialectics as its enemy, and outside of itself, the absence or falsification of mood has the comical as its enemy. (CA, 14, 14n)
This is so because, as stated in Stages, “the comic purifies the pathosfilled emotions” (SLW, 366), that is, the moods. A sense of humor is needed to control one’s earnestness, and “he who does not constantly dare to submit his earnestness to the test of jest is stupid and comical” (JP 2, 1743). Climacus adds that it is “precisely just as questionable to be pathosfilled and earnest in the wrong place as it is to laugh in the wrong place” (CUP1, 525).
But the converse is also true, because “the pathos-filled emotions give substance to the comic.” The example given in Stages is that “the most devastating comic perception would be one in which indignation is latent—yet no one detects it because of the laughter.” Thus, the comic and the pathos-filled are mutually related and fortified by freedom (SLW, 366). Like Quidam, Climacus stresses the need for the comic and pathos to be in balance, because “the pathos that is not safeguarded by the comic is an illusion; the comic that is not safeguarded by pathos is immaturity” (CUP1, 87).
The subjective thinker is therefore just as “bifrontal as the existencesituation itself,” that is, both negative and positive, or both comic and pathos-filled in his existence-relation to the truth (CUP1, 89; 80). A comic-tragic apprehension of existence is integral to his makeup because existence itself is both pathetic and comic, being directed toward the actualization of infinitude in the pathos of infinite striving, yet never being able to finish (the tragic) or to give adequate expression to it in external form (the comic).
Ordinarily, these aesthetic elements are divided so as to appear separately in different persons, but the subjective thinker possesses both in equal proportions: He is just as sensitive to the comic as to the pathetic or tragic character of life (CUP1, 87). In Stages, Quidam suggests that this unity inheres not in a new form of literature, but in the person of Socrates (SLW, 365–6). Quidam compares the comic and the tragic to two legs or necessary extremities of movement for the person “who wishes to exist by virtue of spirit and after having abandoned immediacy” (SLW, 422). Just as the condition of proper equilibrium lies in the balance between the comic and the tragic, becoming a master of the comic is an infallible mark of one’s position in life: “But what does it mean to have actually reflected oneself out of the immediate without having become a master in the comic—what does it mean? Well, it means that one is lying” (CUP1, 281).
This particular synthesis of the comic and the tragic Kierkegaard deems the comic-tragic, which should not be confused with the Hegelian concept of the tragic-comic. Kierkegaard considers the latter trivial, resulting in “the many situations over which one does not know whether to laugh or to cry … no essential passion is posited; neither the comic nor the tragic is essentially present” (SLW, 420). In contradistinction to the Hegelian concept of the tragic-comic, the comic-tragic, or the “truly comic” is the essential nature of human existence: “In the comic-tragic both [the comic and the tragic] are posited and the dialectically infinitized spirit simultaneously sees both elements in the same situation” (SLW, 420). Both paganism and the philosophical life that unites thought and deed culminate in the mental fortitude that enables one to see the comic and the tragic simultaneously in the same thing (SLW, 422).
Yet the unity of comedy and tragedy represented by the comic-tragic is only penultimate truth. Seeing the comic “with his understanding” (SLW, 327) and fortifying himself with the comic for the tragic (SLW, 422), the religious person chooses “the tragic higher passion out of the comic and the tragic”; in the higher passion, which chooses the tragic part of the unity, religiousness begins (SLW 422):
Religious earnestness, like the religious, is the higher passion proceeding from the unity of the comic and the tragic. This I know precisely because I myself am not religious and have reached this standpoint (of unity) without skipping anything in advance and without finding the religious within myself. (SLW, 440)
Religious passion stands out, then, as the decisive category. In Postscript, too, Climacus says that to be in passion emerges from the unity of the comic and the tragic: it is “after that” (CUP1, 291).
Another level of the unity of the tragic and the comic, and of the pathos-filled and the comic, is found in Kierkegaard’s claim that jest and earnestness are united: The presence of the comic ensures the presence of the tragic, so that jest is not merely jest but becomes the expression for the highest earnestness in a person. If one wonders how the comic is generated, the answer is that “true earnestness itself invents the comic,” because in spiritual existence “the point is to endure contradiction, but also to keep it at arm’s length in freedom” (SLW, 366). The comic enables us to endure the contradiction and feel free in it. Kierkegaard maintains that earnestness can detect the comic because it excludes it: “What earnestness wills in earnest it does not regard as comic insofar as it itself wills it, but for that reason it can readily see the comic therein.” But he insists that earnestness does not mediate between the comic and earnestness; rather, it “sees through the comic” (SLW, 367).
Jest and earnestness may simultaneously be conveyed by the same remark. Socrates is set before us as an example of this sort of bifrontal contradiction: He was a jester indulging in all sorts of frivolity at the same time that he was deeply concerned about the divine. He was disciplining himself throughout life for the divine test (CUP1, 89; 90n). What the example of Socrates teaches is that remarks that sound like jests “may also be the highest earnestness, and the speaker, while jesting with someone, may be in the presence of the god” (CUP1, 88). Socrates’ earnestness was the unity of the comic and the tragic to which Plato refers at the end of the Symposium when he has Socrates forcing his companions “to admit that the same man was capable of writing both comedy and tragedy—that the tragic poet might be a comedian as well” (223 c–d). Through the example of the “most earnest man in Greece,” Kierkegaard’s pseudonym in Stages reaches the general conclusion that “earnestness is basically not something simple, a simplex, but is a compositum [compound], for true earnestness is the unity of jest and earnestness” (SLW, 365):
[Socrates’] sense of the comic was just as great as his ethical pathos—therefore he was secured against becoming ridiculous in his pathos; his earnestness was concealed in jest—therefore he was free in it and needed no external support whatsoever in order to be earnest, which is always an indication of a lack of the specific worth of earnestness. (SLW, 366)
A “sense of the comic,” and the capacity to express it “in concreto” (CUP1, 524) so as to camouflage one’s earnestness in jest, secure autonomy from exteriority and protection from ridicule.
THE COMIC IN COMMUNICATION
The comic has an important role to play in indirect communication—the indirect discourse that uses such modes as parable, metaphor, irony, humor, and poetic style. This communication is expressed as a combination of jest and earnestness, which intends to be illusive. Indirect communication may be defined as a communication that always contains an inner contradiction on one or more levels. Communication involves four components—the object, the communicator, the recipient, and the communication—and the contradiction can be between two or more of these parts. It also can consist of an internal contradiction in one or more of these parts. Kierkegaard grounds this form of communication ultimately in Christianity insofar as he points to analogies between irony and Christian love, between humor and Jesus, and between Jesus as a sign of contradiction and indirect communication. Later in life, Kierkegaard gives up indirect communication and reverts to a direct–indirect form of communication, which he considers a more appropriate communication for Christianity.
Inwardness cannot be communicated directly because expressing it directly is externality, and expressing inwardness directly is no proof at all that it is there. The required communication between individuals should be a “double reflection”; Climacus explains fully although not clearly what is meant by double reflection: “So to compose jest and earnest that the composition is a dialectical knot—and with this to be nobody. If anyone is to profit by this sort of communication, he must himself undo the knot for himself.” Climacus stresses the importance of reducing to nil the personality of the communicator, thereby suggesting one of Kierkegaard’s reasons for writing pseudonymously: “If what is said is earnestness to the writer, he keeps the earnestness essentially to himself. If the recipient interprets it as earnestness, he does it essentially by himself, and precisely this is the earnestness” (CUP1, 264). In The Point of View, Kierkegaard explains how one can understand such a communication:
The true explanation is available to the person who is honestly seeking. … Only the requisite earnestness takes hold, it can also solve it, but always only in such a way that the earnestness itself vouches for the correctness … a dialectical redoubling relates to true earnestness. Therefore the explanation cannot be communicated to a less earnest person, since the elasticity of the dialectical doubleness is too great for him to manage; it takes the explanation away from him again and makes it dubious for him whether is it indeed the explanation. (PV, 34)
As “the religious is earnestness” (PV, 10), Kierkegaard assumes that the meaning can be found only by a religious person. Indeed, religious persons “suspect each other because of the consonance of the humorous” (CUP1, 511). Kierkegaard conveys, through his pseudonym Climacus, that there is a definite meaning to be found in his writings. He discloses this meaning as well as the appropriate attitude toward jest (whether irony or humor) in his writings. This description is accomplished through Climacus’ reaction to an interpretation of the very first review of Philosophical Fragments, which appeared in a German journal a year after the publication of Fragments. Climacus appreciates the brevity of the review, which consists primarily of an abstract of the book, and thereby represents it as didactic direct communication. “His report is accurate and on the whole dialectically reliable,” he writes, “but now comes the hitch: although the report is accurate, anyone who reads only that will receive an utterly wrong impression of the book …” However, he takes offence with the reporter’s last sentence: “We leave it to each person to consider whether he wants to look for earnestness or possibly for irony in this apologetical dialectic.” Climacus explains:
When the reporter leaves it up to each one whether he will look for earnestness or irony in the pamphlet [Philosophical Fragments], this is misleading … it is only a matter of finding what is there … the concluding comment of the report … is foolish. Suppose that someone had been present at one of Socrates’ ironic conversations; suppose that he later gives a report of it to someone but leaves out the irony and says: God knows whether talk like this is irony or earnestness—then he is satirizing himself. But the presence of irony does not necessarily mean that the earnestness is excluded. Only assistant professors assume that. That is, while they otherwise do away with the disjunctive aut [or] and fear neither God not the devil, since they mediate everything—they make an exception of irony; they are unable to mediate that. (CUP1, 276–7, n. 422)
Climacus explains that it is only a matter of finding what is there. It will be found by the person who understands the comic, and this can happen only if the reader possesses the same earnestness as the writer: “Only he who himself produces this [the comic out of pathos] will understand it, otherwise not” (CUP1, 87), and that the mixture of jest and earnestness “makes it impossible for a third person to know definitely which is which—unless the third person knows it by himself” (CUP1, 69).
The main reason for the use of indirect discourse lies in the nature of the message Kierkegaard wants to convey. In 1847, shortly after he has finished his pseudonymous works, he sets about writing lectures on the use and significance of indirect discourse (Pap. VII B 81–89). Three tenets underlie Kierkegaard’s thought on the communication of the ethical-religious.
The first tenet is that there are ethical facts and that values are facts. There is a hierarchy of values in human existence in which the ethical-religious modalities rank higher than the scientific or the cultural. It is a classical view of the nature of the human being having a telos, that is, becoming a certain kind of being capable of fulfillment and happiness. The true human being is a good person, and one who has realized his innate potential in a specific way. That is, he has special or peculiar abilities that must be realized if he is to be fulfilled, but he must realize these abilities in such an ethical-religious way as to realize the “universal human.” The good carpenter must become not only a skilled craftsman but, more importantly, a good person.
The second tenet is that one knows the ethical-religious truth:
The ethical presupposes that every person knows what the ethical is. Why? Because the ethical requires that each person realize it in every instant, but if it is the case, he must know it. The ethical does not begin with ignorance which is to be transformed into knowledge, but it begins rather with a knowledge and requires a realization. (Pap. VIII B 81, sec. 10)
The ethical is a capacity, a “knowing how” more than a “knowing that.” Kierkegaard often uses “ethical” to refer to the whole ethical-religious domain, that which has to do with the human being’s essential being or telos. Hence, in the previous quote, he seems to refer not only to our moral duty but to knowledge of religious and metaphysical truth as well. He believes that we can know that God exists, that we are immortal, and that we are free beings (Pap. V B 40; VI B 45). It is the Christian God that must be believed: “I do not believe that God exists. I know it, but I believe that God existed [the historical]” (Pap. VI B 45).
The third tenet is that we have the ability to do our duty in the ethical-religious domain. We have free will and can choose the good. Kierkegaard here—with his version of original sin, which states that it affects the totality of our lives, our reason, as well as our ability to choose the good—simply follows Luther. The main effect of original sin, however, is to prevent or hinder us from wanting to do what we know is our duty. Presumably, if we are not sinful, we can do our duty more easily and will have more immediate access to God’s will.
If these three propositions are true, it is of the utmost importance to do everything possible to enable people to choose the good, to become ethical and religious beings who fulfill their telos. But how does one get others to choose the good? What sort of communication is appropriate to the task? One of Kierkegaard’s most persistent defenses of the use of indirect communication is to point out the inadequacies of direct communication in relation to ethics and religion.
Contrary to the paradigm of objective knowledge, which requires the speaker (teacher), the listener (pupil), and the object (that which would be communicated) (Pap. VIII B 81), subjective knowledge or ethical-religious knowledge is altogether different. First, we all know the ethical, thus we need not communicate. Moreover, there is something inappropriate even in attempting to communicate it. “To desire to attempt to communicate the ethical in this matter is precisely the unethical” (Pap. VIII B 81). You cannot teach what is already known, so the communicator is canceled-out as is the receiver, for without the communicator or the communicated message, it makes no sense to speak of a receiver. The conclusion is that there is only one communicator, God, and that “ethically every man must stand alone in his God-relationship.” Louis Pojman adds another reason, which he infers from Kierkegaard’s texts, that like Plato’s “Good,” the ethical is ineffable, it cannot be said but only seen with the mind’s eye (Pojman 1984, 148).
In the realm of the ethical, God is the master-teacher and we are the apprentices. We must learn by doing, by obeying the teacher, which consists in knowing how rather than knowing that. Ethics must be communicated as an art, not as a science. The error of modern philosophy, according to Kierkegaard, is to presume that ethics is a science that can be taught as any other science.
What sort of communication is appropriate if our aim is to draw the individual away from his false loves and to the place where he can hear his conscience speaking with eternal authority? How do you communicate to someone that he is living an unworthy life, has inappropriate values, and is missing his telos? God uses midwives of the spirit to induce labor until we give birth to a new person, until we are forced inward and, if we choose rightly, become new creations. We know how to do the good, and by doing it we become virtuous beings. Kierkegaard tells us that his motivation is to force people inward, where, he hopes, they will gain self-understanding and make better choices pertaining to ethical and religious matters. He identifies this exercise with the Socratic maieutic stimulation. However, whereas Socrates uses the method to produce objective knowledge (cf. Meno), Kierkegaard uses it to produce character and action.
One communicates indirectly through hints, symbols, signs, and suggestions and by telling parables and stories that direct the listener inward. At this point irony serves as an appropriate speech act that, if unraveled, points to something hidden. Likewise for Kierkegaard, humor has its essence in paradox, in the juxtaposition of opposites, and so points to what cannot be spoken. Thus, humor is the mode of discourse that uniquely points to the irreducible duality between temporality and eternity.
Kierkegaard grounds this form of communication in Christianity insofar as he points to analogies between irony and Christian love, between humor and Jesus, and between Jesus as a sign of contradiction and indirect communication. In Works of Love, Kierkegaard compares Christian love to Socratic irony. Speaking of Socrates and also of the Christian lover, he writes:
That noble rogue [Socrates] had profoundly understood that the highest that one human being can do for another is to make him free, to help him stand alone—and he had also understood himself in understanding this, that is, he had understood that if this is to be accomplished, the helper must be able to conceal himself in magnanimously willing his own destruction. He was, as he himself called himself, a midwife in a spiritual sense, and with every sacrifice he worked disinterestedly in this service—for the disinterestedness consisted simply in keeping hidden from the one helped how and that he was helped. … In such an understanding of help to another person there is agreement between the true lover and that noble rogue. (WL, 154–5)
Christian love and irony aim at freeing the other person, that is, making him renounce the immediate. That the Christian loves his neighbor despite everything has an effect on the latter and makes him, in turn, renounce his attachment to the immanent world. Irony also provokes renunciation in the other person, although in its own fashion. There is, however, a difference between irony and Christian love. Irony still trades on prideful superiority; whereas, Christian love is a complete self-abnegation. The ironist likes to see himself as an aristocrat. He is proud of being able to free people and thus shows himself to be superior. That is why the ironist, Kierkegaard writes, sustains “an indescribable smile.” The humorist is also attached to his capacities although he constantly renounces the immediate. Laughing and smiling are a form of auto-satisfaction that can be completely foreign to Christian love.
Kierkegaard also points to analogies between humor and Jesus, and between indirect communication and Jesus as a sign of contradiction. Kierkegaard’s philosophical production, aside from being a maieutic communication, aims to show that the teachings of Christianity are indirect because of the nature of its teacher. Anti-Climacus recalls that the Godman is called a sign of contradiction in the scriptures (Luke 2: 34) and notes that the unity of jest and earnestness is also an example of a sign of contradiction. Jesus is not a simple phenomenon, but a contradictory unity, a synthesis of incommensurables, the lowly and the sublime, godliness and manliness (PC, 150–2). Just as in the case of humor, Jesus is a sign disguising contrarieties in its composition. In fact, the two signs, Jesus and humor, resemble each other even though they are also different.
Later in life, disillusioned with the failure of his pseudonymous works to allure his readers into an ethical and religious life, Kierkegaard gives up indirect communication and reverts to a direct–indirect form of communication, which he considers more appropriate for Christianity. The maieutic cannot be the final form because the truth does not lie in the subject, but in a revelation that must be proclaimed (JP 2, 1957). Kierkegaard comes to see his task as one of cultivating a relationship between his readers and God. Even though a strictly religious discourse includes a communication of knowledge, it must be communicated indirectly, because it is still a communication of capability (JP 1, 657; 651; 653).
The originality and distinctiveness of Kierkegaard’s approach to communication is not entirely without precedent. A model for such an authorship is that of Johann Georg Hamann, for Kierkegaard the humorist par excellence. Another possible model may be found in Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Vertraute briefe uber die Lucinde (“Confidential letters on Lucinde”) (JP 1, 3846/Pap. I C 68). Although Hamann is certainly significant, Kierkegaard also refers to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing as a model for communication (CUP1, 69), as well as to ancient philosophers as the originators of the interrelatedness of jest and earnestness: “… it would be impossible to understand earnestness if one does not understand jest, something (according to Plutarch’s Moralia) that the earnest Cato Uticensis is supposed to have pointed out long ago by pointing to the dialectical reciprocity between jest and earnestness” (CUP1, 70–71). Indeed, Plutarch tells us that Cato the Elder “used to say that those who are serious in ridiculous matters will be ridiculous in serious matters.”
Kierkegaard, who considered writing a dissertation on “the concept of satire with the ancients” and “the relation of the various Roman satirists to each other,” was knowledgeable about the serio-comic, the genre the Stoics and the Roman satirists inherited from the Cynics. He may also have known of Shaftesbury’s use of it. The serio-comic or “seriousness combined with laughter” (spoudaiogeloion) was the singular characteristic of Cynic moralizing often credited as their unique invention. The serio-comic style became a rhetorical mainstay of the Cynics, associated particularly with Crates (third and fourth centuries bc) and his followers. The second century ad satirist Lucian of Samosata was a sort of Cynic, who used humor to provoke the audience to consider the subject simultaneously from divergent, conflicting perspectives. Even more significant for Roman satire was Menippus of Gadara, another Cynic writer of the third century bc. Diogenes Laertius tells us that he completely lacked “seriousness” (Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 6.99), but he was generally regarded as an exponent of spoudaiogeloion (Strabo, Geography 16.2.29). The Romans gave the seriocomic its own genre in the form of satire, notably by the poets Horace and Juvenal, the former explicitly arguing that the best ethical instruction (the utile) is mixed with pleasure (the dulce) (Horace, Ars poetica, 343).
Although late antiquity and the Middle Ages were fond of the antithesis between jest and earnestness, they had somehow lost their ability to conceive of the two in synthesis. Erasmus retrieved Lucian’s capacity of using humor to provoke the audience into considering a subject simultaneously from divergent points of view, and, because his books were translated and read all over Europe, he is considered largely responsible for “the ironic smile that curled so many sixteenth-century lips” (Kaiser 1963, 9). Pascal anticipates Kierkegaard in stating that eloquence “requires the pleasant and the real” but the pleasant must “itself be drawn from the true” (Pascal 1941, Pensées, Fragment 562).
Indirect communication encompasses more than the use of verbal humor for Kierkegaard. Roger Poole maintains that there were four types of indirect communication until early 1846, and five after the Corsair affair. Kierkegaard’s indirection took the form of pseudonymity for many of his works; an unremitting irony that did not allow readers to “place” him as author within his own thought process; a stream of “edifying discourses” to “accompany” the works that he called “esthetic”; and a “lived presence” in Copenhagen that would “counteract,” or “work against,” or in some way dialectically inflect or subvert the expectations about his personality that had been set up by his works, both edifying and aesthetic. This latter kind of nonverbal indirect communication is also a comic devise. It is referred to as a farce in Repetition (R, 159–67), as an “immensely comic drama” in the journals (JP 6, 79), and, discernibly, as a harlequin’s, clown’s, or fool’s performance by Richard Simon (Simon 1985, 78–116).
THE COMIC’S LEGITIMACY
Kierkegaard’s concern about the ethical dimension of the comic prompts him to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate uses of the comical. The comical may gain legitimacy in either of two ways: One is based on the relation between the comic and the tragic, and the other is closely associated with the theory of the spheres of existence, which many of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings advance. In the theory of the spheres of existence, the hierarchy between the spheres and interspheres establishes the legitimacy of comic apprehension. It is legitimate when the comic apprehension cancels the contradiction by knowing a way out, that is, if the comic apprehension is based on a higher point of view rooted in a higher sphere of existence. “The law for the comic” is very simple, according to Climacus: The comic is wherever there is contradiction and where the contradiction is painless by being “canceled and set right in a higher stage” (CUP1, 520), “since the comic certainly does not cancel the contradiction (on the contrary, it makes it apparent)” (CUP1, 519). The legitimate comic is able to cancel the contradiction while the illegitimate cannot.
The test of the comic is to examine the relations among the spheres the comic statement contains. If the relation is not correct, the comic is illegitimate and “the comic that belongs nowhere is eo ipso illegitimate” (CUP1, 524). Thus, the conditions that make the comic legitimate by canceling the contradiction are, first, that the comic be rooted in a particular existence-sphere (so that anyone who thinks he can “hover” outside existence to laugh at the world thereby makes himself comical), and second, that the existence-sphere in which the comic is rooted be higher than the existence-sphere in which the phenomenon the person is laughing at is rooted:
The comic interpretation produces the contradiction or allows it to become apparent by having in mente [in mind] the way out; therefore the contradiction is painless … It follows that this must be understood in such a way that the different nuances in turn obey the qualitative dialectic of the spheres, which denounces subjective arbitrariness. If someone, for example, wanted to make everything comic without any basis, one would see at once that his comic effect is irrelevant, that it lacks a basis in a sphere, and the inventor himself would be made comic from the viewpoint of the ethical sphere, because he himself as an existing person must have his basis in existence in one way or another. (CUP1, 516–7)
The illegitimate comic apprehension consists of holding to an illusory way out, either a fantastic resolution of the contradiction, or a failure to appreciate the nature of the contradiction. To laugh at a higher sphere from a lower existence-sphere is illegitimate. A lower existence does not have the power to make a higher one comical, but the lower, by being joined to the higher, can make the relation ludicrous. Thus, “a horse can be the occasion for a man to look ludicrous, but the horse does not have the power to make him ludicrous” (CUP1, 518–9).
The sanction for an illegitimate comic apprehension is ridicule. The person who makes fun of what he should not make fun of is ridiculous; that is, the person is wounded by the weapon he uses in something of a boomerang effect: As a consequence of his comment, he is ridiculed rather than ridiculing the object of his laughter. There is no subjective arbitrariness in the comic for Kierkegaard. The same idea about the self-castigating power of ridicule is found in Shaftesbury: “And if I have either laughed wrong, or been impertinently serious, I can be content to be laughed at in my turn. … For he who laughs and is himself ridiculous, bears a double share of ridicule … we become more ridiculous than the people we ridicule” (Essay, iv, 3; CR I, 98; ii, 1; CR I, 57, 59). Because human beings fear ridicule, Kierkegaard assumes that this sanction is strong enough to demolish the attack and disarm the attacker (PV, 65, 68):
One must see how no attack is so feared as that of laughter, how even the person who courageously risked his life for a stranger would not be far from betraying his father and mother if the danger was laughter, because more than any other this attack isolates the one attacked and at no point does it offer the support of pathos … (PV, 68)
For Kierkegaard, mockery, laughter, and ridicule are deemed “spiritual pains” because “it is terrible for the sensate human being to stand here on earth laughed to scorn” (PV, 140, 65).
Another way the comic may gain legitimacy is through its relation to the tragic. In this case, the contradiction that defines both the comic and the tragic need not be canceled, but the comic should be counterbalanced by the pathos-filled. Masuru Otani maintains that for Kierkegaard, a legitimate comic apprehension cancels contradiction, but “the true comic does not” (Otani 1980, 231). Indeed, Climacus holds that “the truly comic,” which is humor, “is legitimized in its tragic side” (CUP1, 520). In this case, the contradiction is not abolished, there is no way out; rather, humor “reconciles itself with the pain from which despair wants to withdraw, although it knows no way out.” This is not a down-side of the legitimate comic, because “despair ought to interpret the contradiction as tragic, which is precisely the way to its healing” (CUP1, 520).
The comic may be legitimized in one of the two ways: Either the legitimate comic is rooted in a sphere wherein it can abolish the contradiction, that is, the comic originates in a higher sphere than the sphere at which it laughs; or, in the case of the truly comic or humor, it does not abolish the contradiction, but gains legitimacy by its tragic side (CUP1, 520). The latter possibility is important for Kierkegaard also because it diverges from Hegel and the Hegelians’ view of the comic. Wherever Hegelians refer to contradiction in the comic, they assume that the contradiction can be canceled. For Kierkegaard, the truly comic does not cancel contradiction.
The ethics of the comic is also voiced in Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms’ views on comic writing. In Stages, Quidam insists that a kind of pathos is required for true comic writing. This does not mean a narrow-minded earnestness, but a “true earnestness” that unifies jest and earnestness (SLW, 365). This is a demanding standard that makes the comic not merely a category of aesthetics, but a decisively ethical and religious one as well. Johannes Climacus, the author of Postscript, reaffirms the message of Stages when he stresses the ethical side of comic writing. Continuing the same metaphor as in Stages, Climacus maintains that “the power to wield the weapon of the comic is the policeman’s shield, the badge of authority, which every agent who in our time really is an agent must carry,” a mark of maturity, “an indispensable legitimization for everyone who in our age is to have any authority in the world of the spirit” (CUP1, 250–1, 291). In a powerful passage, he begins a new metaphor, comparing the comic to a harvester’s scythe that has a cradle (wooden rods running parallel with the blade) (CUP1, 251).
In Postscript Climacus maintains that in his authorship he has “never applied the comic interpretation of anything or anyone without first seeing by comparing the categories from which sphere the comic came and how it is related to the same thing or the same person interpreted with pathos” (CUP1, 519n). In a journal entry, Kierkegaard claims to be unable to bring himself to “present as comic, or in an actual situation to laugh at that under which a man suffers” (JP 2, 1763). In a genuinely comic situation, the comic character must be oblivious to the import of the contradiction and preferably should be happy in his delusion. To avoid being a writer who is “just as sordid as the world he depicts” (JP 2, 1761), there needs to be a concern, rooted in ethical and religious earnestness, about the nevertheless comical absurdity of how often human beings fall into confusion (see also COR, 178–9).
Not only does Kierkegaard insist that he apply the ethics of the comic in his writings, but he also uses it as the basis of his criticism of contemporary comic writing and philosophical and theological speculation.
The criticism of philosophical and theological speculation is Postscript’s major target for an inadequate concept of the comic. The ethics of the comic is thus also the basis of Kierkegaard’s condemnation of the Hegelian attitude toward Christianity as ridiculous. Kierkegaard’s criticism of Hegelianism is directed in particular toward the Danish Hegelians, Hans Lassen Martensen and Baron Holberg. In “Illusion and Satire in Kierkegaard’s Postscript,” John Lippitt explains that Climacus sees any objective or disinterested approach to Christianity as fundamentally misguided: “Objective indifference cannot come to know anything whatever” about Christianity (CUP1, 52); a “passionate” inward relation (of either faith or offense) is essential. The speculative thinker renders himself comical by ignoring this inward relation, or the subjective dimension. If the speculative thinker “says that he builds his eternal happiness [Salighed] on speculative thought, he contradicts himself comically, because speculative thought, in its objectivity, is indeed totally indifferent to his and my and your eternal happiness” (CUP1, 55). The speculative thinker is comical in his attempt to gain eternal happiness through objective thought because speculative thought cannot provide what the existing individual needs in relation to his desire for an eternal happiness. The comical is rooted in a “misrelation of the objective” (CUP1, 55; Lippitt 1999b).
Lippitt believes the Hegelian embodies one form of the “fantastic” Anti-Climacus has introduced in The Sickness unto Death. Lippitt explains that knowing becomes fantastic when an increase in knowledge is not matched by an increase in self-knowledge (SUD, 31; CUP1, 518; Lippitt 1999b). The view that self-ignorance is comical, deemed “unconscious comedy” by Alastair Hannay, may be compared with Henri Bergson’s observation that a comic character “is generally comic in proportion of his ignorance of himself” (Hannay 2003, 20; Bergson 1999, 71), and with Plato’s identification of “the true character of the comic” as self-ignorance or the opposite of the inscription at Delphi, “Know thyself” (Philebus 48–50).
The Hegelian position involves a fundamental confusion between the philosopher as an existing human being who philosophizes and the philosopher as philosophy (“speculative thought”) itself:
There are two ways for an existing individual: either he can do everything to forget that he is existing and thereby manage to become comic (the comic contradiction of wanting to be what one is not …) because existence possesses the remarkable quality that an existing person exists whether he wants to or not; or he can direct all his attention to his existing. (CUP1, 120)
Hence, as Lippitt explains in Humor and Irony in Kierkegaard’s Thought, Climacus says that we may object to modern speculative thought for having a comic presupposition, occasioned by its having forgotten “in a kind of world-historical absentmindedness” what it means to be a human being. This is different from what it means “to be human in general, for even speculators might be swayed to consider that sort of thing, but what it means that we, you and I and he, are human beings, each one on his own” (CUP1, 120). Any system must be written by an existing human being. This has been forgotten, for “to be a human being has been abolished, and every speculative thinker confuses himself with human kind” (CUP1, 124). The highest form of the comic arises precisely when the individual comes directly under the infinite abstraction of “pure humanity,” without any of the “intermediary qualifications which temper the humor of man’s position and strengthen its pathos, without any of the concrete particulars of organization which the leveling process destroys” (PA, 56; Lippitt 2000b, chap. 2).
Kierkegaard calls us to deliver ourselves from Hegelianism by laughter. Because of Hegelianism’s relation to the principle of contradiction, it falsifies the real image of the human being, which is the irresolvable contradiction between the objective and the subjective, between eternity and time. The truth of the subjective individual is the passion for the absolute, but when it is sought where in principle it cannot be found, it gives rise to the comical, for misapplied objectivity is comic.
The role of the comic within the Kierkegaardian good life is better assessed when its workings, under the guise of irony and humor, are understood. Humor and irony take many forms, not the least as interspheres that represent life-views that are located at the lower border of the ethical and the religious lives respectively. From these interspheres, higher spheres can be contemplated and chosen as possible ways of life.
Are irony and humor as interspheres necessary steps in becoming ethical and religious respectively, that is, essential steps toward the Kierkegaardian good life? Opinions on this matter differ. For example, Sylvia Walsh answers positively, and Stephen Evans answers negatively (Walsh 1994; Evans 1983, 190–1), because, as Evans emphasizes, one of the characteristics of irony and humor is their assumption of a certain level of intellectual development on the part of the individual (CUP1, 503, 179; PV, 540). The difficulty that this opinion raises appears when irony and humor are brought into connection with the spheres of existence. If the spheres of existence are universally achievable (CUP1, 160), why are irony and humor, which are not universally achievable, regarded as boundary zones of the spheres? The answer is that there are two ways of realizing oneself: First, the ethical and religious passion that makes a human being a self is achievable by the simple person in a direct or straightforward way; second, irony and humor form transition zones in the existential development of individuals who, because of talent and education become intellectually reflective about life to a special degree. Because Climacus is writing for this group, it is natural for him to include irony and humor in his account of the spheres, without making them spheres in their own right. Yet the distinction between these two classes of people is not a sharp one, at least in economically advanced countries, where universal education is the norm.
An understanding of irony and humor is useful, then, for understanding how one ascends toward the Kierkegaardian good life. The comic power is essentially humor for Kierkegaard, rather than irony. In order to understand the role of humor in the Kierkegaardian good life, I introduce irony first, because, although lower than humor, it is a life-view that is a necessary step before humor.
IRONY
Irony ranks high among Kierkegaard’s enduring philosophical preoccupations, and is thus often mentioned in his writings. His career begins with a sustained and explicit treatment of the subject, his university thesis On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates (1841). Although he never again essays into a comprehensive theoretical account of irony, the subject recurs as a topic of discussion throughout his authorship. Even more pervasive than his remarks on irony are his varied uses of the trope and other varieties of verbal indirectness.
In Postscript there are comic and tragic aspects to both irony and humor (CUP1, 520–1), but the relationship between irony and the comic is absent or unclear in earlier works such as The Concept of Irony and Either/ Or I. At one point in The Concept of Irony, it is decisively stated that irony “does not have the redeeming feature of the comic” (CI, 256–7).
Several individuals in Kierkegaard’s writings are ironic: Johannes, the author of Either/Or, is ironic; Constantine Constantius, author of Repetition, is called an ironist; other aesthetic characters in Kierkegaard’s works are not wanting in ironic skills; nor, for that matter, is Kierkegaard, either “as puppeteer in his aesthetic theatre” or as author in his own right (McCarthy 1978, 31).
To understand irony’s complex role within the Kierkegaardian good life, I introduce irony as a life-view or an existential sphere, as a mask or incognito of the ethical person, as a tool, as inferior to humor, and as the characteristic most fitting Kierkegaard according to recent interpretations. I conclude by proposing a way to incorporate irony within Kierkegaard’s authorship without labeling him an ironist.
IRONY AS A LIFE-VIEW
Vincent McCarthy explains that irony is a quality little understood and a word often misused: “One tends to label as ironic any sharp comment with a negative twist; and when real irony appears, one as often as not labels it sarcasm, due to the negativity sensed, which is an aspect of the ironic existence-stance” (McCarthy 1978, 17). Andrew Cross proposes to differentiate between “existential, as distinct from merely verbal, irony” in concordance with Kierkegaard’s view that “irony is an existential determination, and nothing is more ridiculous than to suppose that it consists in the use of a certain phraseology. … Whoever has essential irony has it all day long, not bound to any specific form, because it is the infinite within him” (Cross 1998, 126; CUP1, 504). For Kierkegaard, as for his contemporaries and near-contemporaries, irony is not primarily a particular kind of speech act. Rather, it indicates a particular way of engaging in public activity in general. Kierkegaard examines what it is to speak ironically in order to determine what it is to live ironically—to manifest in one’s life, unqualifiedly, the attitudes and type of orientation toward the world that constitutes irony.
In The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard addresses the question of what it is to be an ironist. And although he nowhere again lavishes the same degree of attention on this way of life, this is not because his early interest in it is a mere youthful passion. Rather, existential irony comes to occupy a crucial place in the spheres of existence. The conception of existential irony as an important stage in self-understanding, which in The Concept of Irony is expressed in saying that irony is “the awakening of subjectivity,” remains largely intact in the later writings. And it returns, as an explicit theme in Postscript, where it is identified as a transitional stage between the aesthetic and the ethical.
In Postscript, the proper place of irony as an existence-qualification is “the confinium [border-territory] between the esthetic and the ethical” (CUP1, 501–2). An ironic view of life stands between the aesthetic sphere, where there are no distinct ethical commitments, and the ethical sphere, where one commits oneself to eternal, universal values. The ironist has realized the limitations of living aesthetically. The aesthete plays endlessly with various existential possibilities, defers the call existence makes on him by various forms of self-deception, including “the most subtle of all deceptions … thinking” (CUP1, 253), but postpones vital decisions concerning his own existence. This prevents him from becoming a self, being “an existence-possibility that cannot attain existence,” such as A in Either/ Or or the “Hegelian”-fantastic thinker. Such a fantasy-existence is no existence at all for Climacus, but runs “aground on time. At its maximum, it is despair” (CUP1, 253). The ironist, however, not prepared to make the concrete commitment to “the eternal” characteristic of the ethical, has nothing positive to offer in place of aesthetic existence, which culminates in nihilism. Thus as early as his dissertation, Kierkegaard attacks Socratic irony—more than two-thirds of The Concept of Irony, With Constant Reference to Socrates is devoted to the ancient philosopher and his commentators—and especially Romantic irony.
Kierkegaard’s view is that Socrates, the archetypal ironist, is an astonishing embodiment of negative freedom, to use Hegel’s phrase, of “infinite absolute negativity.” Kierkegaard’s text is replete with instructive Hegelian allusions, though Kierkegaard objects to several of Hegel’s positions on irony and Socrates. In Fear and Trembling, the narrator declares that Hegel “strangely enough had not much understanding [of irony], and bore a grudge against it” (FT, 36). Through his “infinitely exuberant freedom of subjectivity” (CI, 233), Socrates not only undermines and humiliates mental blindness, he disaffirms “the whole of actuality” (CI, 97). His irony is therefore an “infinite nothingness” (CI, 63–64), an endless emptying or hollowing out. Socratic irony relishes “the whole magic of annihilation” (CI, 92), including the self-annihilation of skeptical estrangement from existence. Yet we are meant to understand, although Kierkegaard seems to evince some measure of ambivalence toward Socratic nihilism, that such irony is a divinely healthy, emancipatory, light-hearted destructiveness. Nevertheless, whatever “positive fullness” (CI, 89) lies within Socrates remains concealed. And though the content of his life, however polemically busy, adds up to a void because it never transcends possibility, Socrates’ heroic negativity “is actually an incitement to ideality,” to “the Idea of the good, the beautiful, and the true” (CI, 221).
The ironist is estranged from existence. The presence of irony in the personality indicates that there has been a rift in the everydayness in which human beings are usually caught up. Something has happened that breaks the flow and, as a result, a new consciousness emerges. For Kierkegaard this “something” is the stirring that is still unconscious. The ironic subject has broken with his age; he points toward a vague future and absolutely denies the present age with a divine madness that leaves no stone standing (CI, 278). As a consciousness thoroughly pervading one’s being, irony is a mood in which one regards oneself, the individual elements of the actual world, the entirety of the actual, and all future possible actuals in an attitude of passionate rejection because they do not comprise the ideal. He is free from the deception of the present actuality, but he is left empty. Albeit he has reached a higher stage of consciousness, it has provided him no support to bear the terrible realization of the absence of content and meaning in his existence. Vincent McCarthy explains that irony as a mood “represents the first conscious breakthrough in the illusion of aesthetic (or nonreligious) existence. A sequence of moods follows naturally one upon the other, viz., anxiety, melancholy, and despair in a series of crisis of the personality” (McCarthy 1978, 3).
Irony is a determination of subjectivity. The ironist is free in a negative sense in that he is freed from the illusion that actuality has validity. It is also a prophecy of completed personality. The ironist is already the singular one, the one who has broken with the crowd. He is still not a complete personality, but he is a subject and exists in the direction of a higher subjectivity, even if its form is vague and unknown to him. Irony is an existence stance with various possible phases and degrees, and thus a measurement for development of personality in the direction of the religious. There is no insurance that the ironist will reach his destiny. However, insofar as he has begun and is moving in the proper direction and traces the outline of a higher subjectivity, one may say that “… the ironist is a prophecy of or abbreviation for a complete personality” (CI, 177).
An “existing ironist” is higher than both immediacy and finite common sense in that he lives his irony: “He himself, existing, expresses it … keeps his life in it” (CUP1, 521). Climacus repeats Aristotle’s remark that “the ironical man jokes to amuse himself, the buffoon to amuse other people” and adds, “the ironist himself enjoys the comic, in contrast to the joker, who is at the service of others in making something ludicrous” (Aristotle, Rhetoric, III, 18, 7; CUP1, 521). Irony, then, has the comic “within itself” (CUP1, 521). John Lippitt explains that the ironist sees how “the irony of the human situation rebounds upon himself. … He views his entire situation and the human condition as being essentially contradictory and therefore comical … irony has the comic ‘within itself’ in the sense that there is a natural ‘fit’ between the comic and the ironist’s own existence” (Lippitt 2000b, 98).
There are negative aspects of irony, however. These are twofold: The ironist lives in possibilities, that is, poetically, and he is non-moral. Irony is thus a stage that one must supersede.
No pure model of irony exists even as an idea. The Romantics represent one possibility of ironic existence. Socrates’ stance is viewed differently although termed essential irony. Indeed, Climacus rebukes Magister Kierkegaard for being “an Hegelian fool” in neglecting the ethical side of Socrates as well as the ethical passion of irony (JP 1, 1679/ Pap. II A 37). We turn now to the ethical function of irony.
IRONY AS A MASK
Irony has a double role in Postscript. It is an existential determinant between the aesthetic and ethical existence spheres, but it also functions as an incognito within the ethical. Climacus describes such irony as “the unity of ethical passion, which in inwardness infinitely accentuates one’s own I in relation to the ethical requirement—and culture, which in externality infinitely abstracts from the personal I as a finite included among all other finitudes and particulars” (CUP1, 503). In view of his absolute and “infinite” commitment to the requirements of the ethical and in order not to be distracted by the finite or the relativities of the world, “the ethicist places the comic between himself and the world and thereby makes sure that he himself does not become comic through a naïve misunderstanding of his ethical passion” (CUP1, 504). That which engages the ethicist absolutely does not engage the others absolutely. He himself then “grasps this misrelation and places the comic in between in order to be able more inwardly to hold fast the ethical within himself (CUP1, 505).
Irony is a shield by which the ethicist protects the integrity of his self by creating a private space for the continual renewal of his commitment to the demands of the ethical. It is also an indirect communication of what it is to live ethically. The ethicist has a duty to communicate the ethical to others; this is highlighted in the need to openness in the Either/Or account of the ethical, but the ethical cannot be communicated directly. This kind of ethicist might seem like someone for whom “nothing is important” (CUP1, 505). But this is the only way in which those progressing toward the ethical and, therefore sufficiently tuned to it, would pick up his cues. The ethicist who uses irony as his mask “is able in turn to see the comic in irony, but he has legitimation to see it only by continually keeping himself in the ethical and thus sees it only as continually disappearing” (CUP1, 501).
To be ethical, for Kierkegaard, involves absolutely committing oneself to one’s projects (primarily social roles, such as parent, judge or teacher). By such commitment, the individual transcends the aimlessness of living aesthetically. Kierkegaard’s ethical individual holds a narrative conception of the self, whereby one’s life is given meaning and value—indeed whereby one becomes a self—through this commitment to and acting on the responsibilities of such projects. To fail in such a project is, at least partially, to fail as a person. But such a mode of living has limitations arising from two connected problems. First, when commitments arising from two conflicting projects clash (e.g., family duties versus duties to one’s country), how do we decide which to prioritize? The problem is the lack of one overriding grounding project. Without such a project, there will always be the threat of conflict between the demands of different projects within the ethical life. Second, how does one choose the projects to commit oneself to in the first place? Despair can arise here too, stemming from a realization of the ultimate arbitrariness of one’s selection of projects. After all, of any given project, it could be asked: What gives it its meaning? Why that project, and not some other?
Here Kierkegaard thinks the religious individual is at an advantage. For the individual who has made the extra-rational “leap of faith,” there is an absolute telos—eternal happiness that God may grant—that grounds all other projects. The fully religious individual maintains, along with “a relative concern for the relative” (commitment to various temporal projects), “an absolute concern for the absolute” (commitment to God). No temporal goal can warrant such absolute commitment, only the eternal God.
IRONY AS A TOOL
The irony of any subject is perceived in its most common form as a tool of discourse. Individuals who are higher than an existing ironist can use irony as a tool. It has various uses, most of which are exemplified by Socrates. Irony may be used to emphasize the ignorance of others. Socrates perceives his mission to be the quest for knowledge; this includes challenging those who think they know (Protagoras). Irony may also push its victim a few steps in a positive direction although in itself, it posits nothing by encouraging thought, “quickening it when drowsy, disciplining it when dissipated.” This can be joined to a form of dialectic of which Socrates is the master. The combination of dialectic and irony represents “irony in its total striving, and dialectic in its negative, emancipating activity” (CI, 152).
Furthermore, irony as a tool can also lead to a heightened awareness of finitude (Phaedo). Irony drives men from all corners of safety but leaves them entirely dependent on their own resources to extricate themselves from the precarious situations in which they always find themselves. Kierkegaard remarks that irony frees, but also subjugates. It is irony that he considers responsible for the binding love incited in Alcibiades for Socrates as well as for his seductive power over the youth of Athens (CI, 85). Kierkegaard compares Christian love to Socratic irony in Works of Love (WL, 154–5) and finds that the difference between the two is that irony trades on prideful superiority while Christian love is complete self-abnegation.
Irony is most effective as a tool when it proceeds from a state of “mastered irony,” that is, when irony proceeds from philosophic depth in one’s existence. In the section entitled, “Irony as a mastered moment. The truth of irony,” Kierkegaard offers us the presumably climactic section of The Concept of Irony. This is a six-page treatment of an inner metamorphosis in which ironic negation is enigmatically negated, thus preparing the way for an existence of genuine self-mastery. Somehow irony in its mastered rather than tempestuous condition undergoes an extraordinary mutation; somewhat magically it now “yields truth, actuality … stability and consistency” (CI, 338–9). It becomes a guide to the authentic life rather than a seducer; even more so, irony becomes a “cleansing baptism,” a surgically regenerative power of living boldly, healthily, and truthfully—even ideally—in finitude.
The result is a balanced attitude toward actuality that properly values it, neither spurning it nor overvaluing it as reflection of the Idea. In achieving balance and serving as a constant check upon one’s personal life, the real significance of irony emerges. Irony serves as a disciplinarian, still negative, still positing nothing, but coaxing one in the right direction: “Irony now limits, renders finite, defines, and thereby yields truth, actuality, and content; it chastens and punishes and thereby impairs stability, character and consistence (CI, 339). “Mastered irony” reflects an existence which has personally appropriated, and thus mastered, the “essence” of irony. Irony usually serves to drive one to a sense of finitude, to leave one in mid-air. Mastered irony, however, functioning with a deepened perspective of existence, serves as a check on one’s personal life. This raises the question of the relationship between mastered irony and humor.
IRONY AS LOWER THAN HUMOR
As early as The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard points cryptically to humor:
Finally, insofar as there can be any question of the “eternal validity” of irony, then this question can only find its answer through an investigation of the domain of humor. Humor contains a far deeper skepticism than irony; for here it is not finitude, but sinfulness, that everything turns upon; the skepticism [of humor] is related to [the skepticism] of irony as ignorance to the old thesis: credo quia absurdum [“I believe because it is absurd,” attributed to Tertullian]; but it also contains a far deeper positivity [than irony]; for it does not occupy itself with the human, but with theoantropic determinations, it does not find rest in making man human, but by making man God-man. But all this lies beyond the confines of this investigation, and insofar as one should wish matter for afterthought, then I shall refer to Prof. Martensen’s review of Heiberg’s New Poems. (CI, 341–2)
Humor contains a much deeper skepticism and positivity than irony because humor does not find rest in making man human, but in making man God-man. In the journals Kierkegaard first compares humor to irony as a total perspective on the world, but then contrasts it in ways that link humor specifically with Christianity. Both perspectives involve roughly a perception of the world of manners and practices devoid of meanings traditionally presumed attached to them. But where irony, as Kierkegaard writes in one entry, says merely “nil admirari” (admire nothing), humor’s “diameter” is the greater for embracing the ironist as well. Once the individual sees himself in irony’s light, there is no longer room for irony’s “egoism.” In the same entry Kierkegaard states that “humor is lyrical … it is the most profound seriousness of life—deep poesy that cannot form itself as such and therefore crystallizes in the most baroque forms” (JP 1, 1690/ Pap. II A 102).
The irony of Christianity lies in its claim to speak for the whole world when its message is that the world as a whole, or the world simply as such, is not to be spoken for: Its value is not in itself. The humor of Christianity lies in its treatment of the whole world as devoid of value except in relation to a “supposed single truth.” The whole world of “princes, power and glory, philosophy, artists, foes and persecutors, etc.” becomes valueless and meaningless in the light of this truth (JP 1, 1674/ Pap. I A 207).
Irony and humor often are described by Kierkegaard as two aspects of what is essentially the same existential situation, with irony as the objective and humor the subjective pole of the dissociation between ideality and reality, between self and world (JP 1, 1690/Pap. II A 102; JP 1, 1711/ Pap. II A 608). “Humor,” Kierkegaard writes, “is irony carried through its most powerful vibrancy” (JP 1, 1699/Pap. II A 136). They are like the two ends of a seesaw with irony lying below and humor lifted above the point of balance (JP 1, 1671/Pap. I A 154). This is to say that the ironic individual suffers under his separation from reality, whereas the humorist rises above it. In this respect irony remains untrammeled in the dialectical phase of existence (i.e., it corresponds to romanticism), whereas humor is closer to the concept of character in its transcendence of the ambiguities and contradictions of dialectics (JP 1, 1676/Pap. I A 239).
Unlike irony, humor is not founded on the self-projective dynamism or the Idea (or the “I”), but on Christian revelation, presupposing as it does the Christian negation of the world in its entirety. Humor understands that “everything which hitherto had asserted itself in the world and continued to do so was placed in relation to the presumably single truth of the Christians, and therefore to the Christians the kings and the princes, enemies and persecutors, etc., etc., appeared to be nothing and to be laughable because of their opinions of their own greatness” (JP 1, 1674/Pap. I A 207).
Whereas irony simply plays off one aspect of the world against the other, humor relativizes the world in its entirety. Thus Kierkegaard pictures “a traveling humorist who is making preliminary studies, preparatory work for a theodicy—he travels about seeking as far as possible to experience everything in order to prove that everything is a disappointment” (JP 1,1736/Pap. III A 98). In this respect, the humorist bears a certain resemblance to Ahasverus, the Wandering Jew. He is entirely solitary, like a beast of prey (JP 1, 1719/Pap. III A 694), or like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island, for humor is “absolutely isolated, independently personal” (JP 1, 1699/Pap. II A 136). The humorist has a clear insight into the essential agony of the human situation, a vision the ironist (or poet) cannot achieve:
When an ironist laughs at the whimsicalities and witticisms of a humorist, he is like the vulture tearing away at Prometheus’ liver, for the humorist’s whimsicalities are not capricious little darlings but the sons of pain, and with every one of them goes a little piece of his innermost entrails, and it is the emaciated ironist who needs the humorist’s desperate depth. His laughter is often the grin of death … (Like the dead man’s grin which is explained as the muscle twitch of rigor mortis, the eternally humorous smile over human wretchedness). (JP 1, 1706/Pap. II A 179)
The humorist’s “desperate depth” not only puts him on a different level than the Romantic ironist, it also puts him altogether outside or above the merely aesthetic standpoint, for “humor is not an esthetic concept, but life” (JP 1, 1699/Pap. II A 136). It follows that it can only achieve an ambiguous and (aesthetically) unsatisfying expression in literature: That aesthetic harmony of idea and form, which is gained at the cost of severance from the actuality of life, eludes the humorist.
Climacus too aims at distinguishing between irony and humor (CUP1, 271–2; 448; 551–3). Irony is proud and tends to divide one person from another. It is teasing and self-asserting (CUP1, 551):
Irony is self-assertion, and its sympathy is therefore an altogether indirect sympathizing, not with any one person, but with the idea of self-assertion as every human being’s possibility. Therefore, one often finds humor in women, but never irony. Any attempt at it on her part is unbecoming, and a purely feminine nature will consider irony to be a kind of cruelty. (CUP1, 553)
Humor is “sympathetic” (CUP1, 582) and “profound” (CUP1, 552n). The profundity of humor lies in the humorist’s comprehension of suffering and guilt, or of “what it means to exist” (CUP1, 272), an understanding far superior to that of the ironist. A humorous retort “must always have something profound, although hidden in the jest, and must therefore say more” (CUP1, 552n). Being more distanced and disengaged from suffering, the ironist tends to “teasingly” reply “with the aid of abstract dialectic” (CUP1, 448n). Lacking in profundity and sympathy, the ironist cannot replace the humorist.
Irony is an important stage in self-understanding as well as a transitional stage between the aesthetic and the ethical. Irony emerges by continually joining the particulars of the finite together with the ethical infinite requirement, thereby allowing the contradiction to come into existence. Irony is a shield by which the ethicist protects the integrity of the self by creating a private space for the continual renewal of his commitment to the demands of the ethical. It is also an indirect communication of what it means to live ethically. Irony is a prophecy of completed personality, but it offers no more than that: It frees while bringing one under its power, and it lacks the qualities of sympathy, profundity, and scope of humor. This raises the following question: Is Kierkegaard as thoroughly ironic as postmodern commentators have portrayed him?
IRONY AS A DEFINING CHARACTERISTIC OF KIERKEGAARD
Irony has been put to use as an interpretative tool for Kierkegaard’s writings. In this context, “irony” is understood as a device implying non-serious, or false content, or no content at all. Yet it is important to recall that Kierkegaard warns us through Climacus that irony does not exclude earnestness: If someone says “God knows whether talk like this is irony or earnestness—then he is satirizing himself. But the presence of irony does not necessarily mean that the earnestness is excluded” (CUP1, 276–7, n. 422). Therefore, according to Kierkegaard or at least to Climacus’ view of irony, Kierkegaard’s irony does not imply false or non-serious content.
To be sure, Kierkegaard frequently employs irony in his writings, and given the use of pseudonyms to detach himself from the positions represented, it is not always easy to discern when he is being ironic toward the contents of these positions even if, as Stephen Dunning has pointed out, “irony always tips his hand, as it certainly must if it is to be understood as irony” (Dunning 1985, 5). But the fact that Kierkegaard uses irony does not justify an encompassing interpretation of him as an ironist, especially in the works issued under his own name.
If, however, one is inclined to trust Kierkegaard’s direct communication and to regard the irony in his writings as an aesthetic device, or “controlled element,” employed for the purpose of indirect communication as well as the protection of the privacy of his own religious inwardness, then one may use the viewpoints to which he explicitly subscribes as guideposts for comparing the views of the pseudonymous authors to his own viewpoints.
I suggest the issues raised by viewing Kierkegaard as thoroughly ironic can be settled by paying attention to Kierkegaard’s differentiation between being ironic and creating ironic situations and by differentiating between self-deception and irony. In the long note that addresses the difference between humor and irony, the humorist is described as particularly apt at creating ironic effects and situations:
If the retort was intended as irony, the speaker would have been a mediocre ironist, because there was in a remark a tone of pain, which from the point of view of irony is entirely incorrect. The remark was humorous and therefore made the situation ironic through the misunderstanding. This in turn is quite right, because an ironic remark cannot make the situation ironic; at most it can create awareness that the situation is ironic, whereas a humorous remark can make the situation ironic. The ironist asserts himself and prevents the situation, but the humorist’s hidden pain contains a sympathy whereby he himself cooperates in shaping the situation and thus makes an ironic situation possible. But very frequently what is said ironically is confused with that which, when said, can have an ironic effect in the situation. (CUP1, 551–3 n803)
And the contrary is also true: A remark that “is proper irony” can have “a ring of humor, although it is not humorous” (CUP1, 551–3 n803).
I suggest that Kierkegaard is not an ironist, but a humorist who creates ironic effects and situations. That Kierkegaard was a humorist can be inferred from his view of the genius as a humorist (PV, 107, 108) and of himself as a genius (Pap. XI A 266; PV, 94, 95), but of a certain kind, that is, “a poetic-dialectical genius, personally and religiously a penitent …” (JP 4, 6317/Pap. XI A 56). In The Point of View for My Work as an Author, moreover, Kierkegaard explains, “while the poet-production was being written, the author was living in decisive religious categories.” In a note, he adds: “Here one will see the significance of the pseudonyms, why I had to be pseudonymous in connection with the esthetic production, because I had my own life in altogether different categories and from the very beginning understood this writing as something temporary, a deception, a necessary emptying out” (PV, 86). Just before that, he writes:
I had really leaped over, humanly speaking childhood and youth. … Instead of having been young, I became a poet, which is youth a second time. I became a poet, but with my religiously oriented background, indeed, with my definite religiousness, the same fact became for me a religious awakening also. So in the most decisive sense I came to understand myself in the religious, in the religiousness to which I had, however, related myself as to a possibility. (PV, 84)
To relate oneself to the religious as a possibility is to be a humorist, according to Climacus. The live in religious categories while writing poetically is to use humor as an incognito. The deception to which Kierkegaard refers above can apply to the humorist using humor as an incognito, who is a deceiver as well. As Kierkegaard explains, however, the humorist can create an ironic situation (CUP1, 551–3 n803). The situation may be ironic, but the humorist is not, at least not according to Kierkegaard’s definition of irony.
Several scholars have commented on Kierkegaard’s alleged dishonesty. Joakim Garff’s reaction to Kierkegaard’s confessions in The Point of View is that “the man has never been honest with himself” (Garff 2002, 94). A recent biographer refers to the “penchant for secrecy and deceptiveness” that runs “as a constant thread through [Kierkegaard’s] life and work” and to a lifelong “urge to bait, seduce, and offend his public” (Thompson 1973, 9–10). I tend to agree, but I suggest that these characterizing features should not to be confused with irony. Living in deception does not make a person an ironist, but rather someone in need of irony, according to Kierkegaard’s own prescription.
HUMOR
Humor is Kierkegaard’s most important category of the comic. Climacus states, “the comic power is essentially humor” and “the contradiction that humor dominates [is] the highest range of the comic” (CUP1, 282, 522). Yet properly speaking, humor is not a subcategory of the comic; rather, it is a mixture of the pathetic and the comic (CUP1, 292).
Kierkegaard’s most extensive discussions of humor are in his pseudonymous works. Three figures stand out as paradigms of the humorous stance within these works, Johannes Climacus, Quidam, and Frater Taciturnus. Each one has moved beyond the ethical life-view and has comprehended major dimensions of the religious stance, but none of them has actually become a religious person. Stages on Life’s Way is the main arena of Quidam and Frater Taciturnus, and Johannes Climacus discusses humor at length in Concluding Unscientific Postscript.
Kierkegaard offers a theory of humor and two interesting theses about it. The first thesis is that there is an essential connection between humor and human existence. Humor is no ephemeral or accidental human characteristic, but is grounded in something deeper within our nature or our condition. The reason humor is basic to human life is that contradiction is basic to human life, and contradiction is both comic and tragic; hence, it is humorous. This idea that humor touches something deep is one that Kierkegaard shares with many other theorists. The second thesis is more unusual, however, and consequently more controversial. Kierkegaard also claims that there is an essential connection between humor and the religious life. Quite contrary to the stereotype of the religious life as dour and somber, completely opposed to the carefree wit of the humorist, Kierkegaard holds that the highest and deepest kind of humor is rooted in a life-view, which is recognizably religious, and that, as Stephen Evans puts it, “all humor is at bottom made possible by those very features of human life which make the religious life possible” (Evans 1987, 176).
Understanding Kierkegaard’s theory of humor is hindered for the following reasons: First, Kierkegaard does not discuss humor for its own sake, but rather uses it to illuminate his theory of stages of existence; second, the significance he attributes to humor can be grasped only in light of the role it plays in the dialectic of the stages of existence; and third, the role of humor in the dialectic of stages keeps evolving in Kierkegaard’s thought. At first, Kierkegaard considers humor as the proper attitude of the Christian with regard to the things of time, a kind of protective covering or incognito, useful in dealing with worldly fortunes and with individuals who do not see the world through the eyes of faith. But by 1845, humor is not so much a religious as an ethical passion, signifying that one has reached the borderline of ethical life and is faced with the choice of becoming religious in a plenary way, or of thwarting the natural inclination of ethical existence to surmount itself. During the same year, which marked the composition of Postscript, the distinctive nature of Christianity is so strongly impressed on him that he ceases to speak of the religious sphere in an unqualified way, and thereafter distinguishes sharply between all natural modes of the religious and the unique Christian religious spirit. This distinction between “Religiousness A” (immanent religiousness) and “Religiousness B” (Christianity) is equivalent to designating four stages in the dialectic of life. The immanent modes of religious existence do not exhaust or naturally blend with the transcendent kind of religiousness, which comes only with the gift of Christian faith. Kierkegaard’s final position on the relationship of humor and Christianity is that not only are humor and Christianity not to be confused, but that Christianity is inaccessible to humor.
To explain humor’s multifarious roles within the Kierkegaardian good life, namely, Christianity, I begin with the young Kierkegaard’s view that humor is intrinsic to Christianity and then introduce the mature Kierkegaard’s view of humor as a life-view or existence-sphere, which is higher than any other except the Christian life. This is followed by a discussion of humor as the boundary-zone of religiousness, and finally, by humor as an incognito or mask for the religious person.
HUMOR AS INTRINSIC TO CHRISTIANITY
Kierkegaard begins his lifelong preoccupation with the relation of humor to Christianity by adopting the view that humor is intrinsic to Christianity, which he later renounces. The early view can be traced to Johann Georg Hamann’s influence on Kierkegaard, who later abandons the view when he disengages himself from Hamann’s influence. Hamann fulfills such an important role in Kierkegaard’s thoughts on the role of humor within Christianity that he is rightly depicted as Kierkegaard’s “constant paradigm of the standpoint of humor” (Hannay 2001, 72). Kierkegaard’s views of irony and humor can be properly understood only in relation to the views of Hamann, who elevates irony and humor to the rank of categories of understanding that are especially apt for comprehending Christianity. Hamann’s Socratic Memorabilia is useful to Kierkegaard in crafting his dissertation on irony; more significantly, however, it is through Hamann that Kierkegaard discovers the category of humor which replaces the category of irony as the deepest attitude toward existence.
The influence of this obscure thinker on Kierkegaard has led commentators to deem Kierkegaard Hamann’s sole “authentic disciple” (Jørgensen 1968, 164). Indeed, Georges Pattison maintains that Kierkegaard takes Hamann’s literary method of indirect communication and direct personal involvement as a model for his own authorship, and Kierkegaard himself views his own work as a development of Hamann’s (JP 2, 1559; Pattison 1992, 66–67). In his recent biography of Kierkegaard, moreover, Alastair Hannay emphasizes the themes in Hamann that Kierkegaard appreciates, such as contextualizing reason, saving Lutheranism from the Enlightenment, and insisting on the inappropriateness of rational criticism and proofs in questions of faith (Hannay 2001, 72). But it is first and foremost Hamann’s humor that Kierkegaard admires.
In the journals, Kierkegaard acknowledges that Hamann “could be a good representative of the humor inherent in Christianity.” He ends the entry by crowning Hamann “the greatest humorist in Christianity, [which is to say] by virtue of being the greatest within the life-view that, in worldhistorical terms, is itself the most humorous life-view, [he is] the greatest humorist in the world” (Pap. II A 75). What makes Hamann a good representative of the humor inherent in Christianity is his self-induced Socratic ignorance, “forcing oneself down to the lowest position and looking up (i.e., down) at the common view, yet in such a way that behind this self-degradation lies a high degree of self-elevation” (SV vol. 17, Journal DD 3, 6; quoted in Hannay 2003, 21). In other words, Christianity makes nonsense of common sense, which judges Christianity’s claims as incongruous. In Postscript, Climacus testifies to his admiration of Hamann (CUP1, 250).
The evolution of Kierkegaard’s thought on the place of humor within Christianity is attested to in the difference between the early entries in his journals and Climacus’ mature thought on humor in Postscript. Early on, the humorist is depicted as far removed from the systematizing ambitions of the philosopher who “believes that he can say everything,” because the humorist “lives in the abundance and is therefore sensitive to how much is always left over” (JP 1, 1702/Pap. II A 140). Like the Christian revelation itself, its truth is always concealed, even in the very act of communication (JP 1, 1682/Pap. II A 78). Indeed, “Humor [is] intrinsic to Christianity” (JP 2, 251). It is “even present through Christianity” because “truth is hidden in … mystery … no matter how much Christian knowledge increases; it will still always remember its origin and there know everything. …” (Corinthians 1.26; JP 2, 252).
The incarnation of God in time is the prototypical event of divine humor. Here the contradiction inherent to humor reaches its highest form and the paradox is absolute, as cross and resurrection constitute an absolute reversal of all human expectations. In Christianity, contradiction becomes normative and paradigmatic. Contradiction is the perspective through which all else is interpreted: It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven (Mt. 19:24); it is the blind who recognize the Messiah (Mt. 9:27); it is the children that know more than the wise; the lilies of the field exceed the finery of Solomon’s clothing. All this refracts and pictures the humor of the incarnation. Kierkegaard considers that “humor appears in Christ’s own utterance” constantly (JP 2, 254).
Just as Socrates pleads ignorance in seeking to reveal the truth, so Christianity seeks the lowliest position (slave, servant) to point to that which is infinitely high. It is precisely from the cave in Bethlehem that Christianity points to the Incarnation of God in a particular person, and from the cross, it points to the atonement. God uses the lowliest things to soar and transcend: Water is changed into wine; the Messiah comes in the form of a child; the thief is admitted immediately into paradise; the ass is transformed into a prophet. In the Kingdom of God, everything is comically upside down. Christianity is nowhere more intensely comic to Kierkegaard than in the Christmas story. This is where the Absolute Paradox, the Incarnation itself, the decisive expression of the comic can be found. God comes to humanity in the least expected way, with the greatest depth of contradiction. The nativity demonstrates God’s own unexpected and seemingly incongruent way of breaking into time. Only God would have thought of us this way; it is as if the miracle is performed “only to disconcert the professors of physics” (JP 2, 253). Here biblical comedy reaches its apex.
Humor has also an intense relationship with suffering. After the apostles were flogged by the Jerusalem authorities and warned not to witness anymore, they left the jail “thanking God that it was granted them to suffer something for the sake of Christ” (CUP1, 452). The humor rooted in Christianity stands bravely against the world. At the heart of the view of humor in the New Testament lies gladness for the privilege of suffering. Suffering is transmuted into joy by its relation with eternal happiness. Thus, “the essential relation to an eternal happiness is not suffering but joy … joy in the consciousness that the suffering signifies the [redeemed God-human] relation” (CUP1, 452). Hence, in the case of martyrdom, the martyr experiences suffering along with more profound experiences of “joy over the significance of this suffering as [redeemed] relationship” (CUP1, 453). “All humor [is] developed from Christianity itself” (JP 2, 229); and the Christian nature of humor is testified historically as a characteristic of the medieval Church (JP 1, 1698/Pap. II A 114), manifesting itself in objectified and institutionalized ways (JP 1, 1687/Pap. II A 85). Yet, when it is most truly itself, humor is intensively individual and personal.
In the early entries of Kierkegaard’s journals, humor is considered intrinsic to Christianity, Christianity is seen as the most humorous view of life, and Hamann is deemed accordingly the greatest humorist (JP 2, 1681; see 2, 1682, 1686, 1687, 1690). In Postscript (published 1846), however, humor is thought to be inferior to Christianity. Climacus holds that humor, backed by the ideality of Christianity, is the final pathos that still has an external expression. Highest in the hierarchy, though, is hidden religious inwardness, which is raised above all immanent dialectic (CUP1, 508; cf. CUP1, 554f). In the section entitled “The Dialectical” (CUP1, 561–86), the consciousness of sin replaces the consciousness of guilt, and the truth of Christianity is changed “paradoxically-dialectically” to the absurd, the absolutely unintelligible, which can only be grasped by another intensification of subjectivity until it reaches the passion of true faith. This is what Climacus, using Hegelian terminology, calls the crucifixion of the understanding (CUP1, 561f). Because there is nothing to understand, there is no place for humor.
It is against a contemporary speculative conception of humor that Climacus in Postscript presents the existing humorist, who is not Christian but has Christianity and authentic faith in mind, as the highest possibility for subjectivity (see CUP1, 451). Indeed, for Kierkegaard’s contemporary Hans Lassen Martensen, who builds upon the reflections of his time, humor is a designation for the culmination of Christianity in Protestantism. From this highest of all possible perspectives, which has incorporated the entire world in its recollection, all human contradictions appear comical. Kierkegaard sees Martensen’s humor as objective humor, as a pure perspective of consciousness with no affinity to existence. Therefore, it also lacks a double reflection and the truth of Christianity can thus never emerge as the paradoxical-religious. Without subjectivity there is no faith. Without faith, human beings cannot be reconciled to that which offends the understanding, the absolute paradox.
Kierkegaard rejects the view that identifies Christianity with humor, the view he adopted in his youth and expressed in the early entries of his journals, because he rejects the theological theory of Kneschtsgestalt Christi. This theory emphasizes the contradiction of Christ appearing in the “form of a servant,” as the Apostle Paul says in his letter to the Philippians (2:7); because divinity most often appears in lowly form, one may fail to recognize it. Hamann insists on some variety of this theory as the inescapable precondition of valid aesthetic, ethical and religious knowledge. Kierkegaard now sees this theory as the kernel of the view, shared with Hamann, which makes Christianity the highest humor:
If it is given and assumed that it is easy to understand that God becomes a particular human being, then the difficulty is only in the next—that he becomes a lowly and despised human being—then in summa summarum Christianity is humor. Humor diverts a little of the attention away from the first, the qualification “God,” and now stresses that the greatest … became the lowliest of all … But if Christianity is humor, then everything is confused. (CUP1, 596–7)
At this point Kierkegaard considers the view that emphasizes the low aspect of Christ “a childlike orthodoxy.” To dwell on Christ’s appearance hides the true paradox, that God has become man (CUP1, 596). A childish orthodoxy misleadingly emphasizes Christ’s suffering and sees as a paradox that Christ entered the world to suffer. But “the fact that the innocent may suffer in this world … is by no means absolutely paradoxical, but humorous” (CUP1, 597). A childish orthodoxy takes the “terror” away, “the fact which was an offence to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks” (CUP1, 598). Kierkegaard’s final position on the relationship of humor and Christianity as absolutely paradoxical and therefore terrifying is that not only are humor and Christianity not to be confused, but Christianity is inaccessible to humor.
Humor is nevertheless far from being a monolithic notion in Kierkegaard’s thought. The descriptions Kierkegaard provides range from “immature humor” to “holy jest.” Immature humor lags behind what Kierkegaard properly calls humor. Unlike humor, which is an equilibrium between the comic and the tragic, immature humor is nothing more than “a kind of flippancy” or “esthetic subtlety” that “skips past the ethical”; and far from being true religiousness, it is instead a parody of the religious (CUP1, 292). In contrast, holy jest is expressed in humor that is the incognito of the religious individual. Whereas jest is an expression for the humorist’s revocation of the decisive significance of existence, holy jesting serves as a sign of the utmost earnestness toward existence (CUP1, 462, 471–2).
Between immature humor and holy jest (used by those who appear to be humorists but are in fact genuinely religious people hiding behind humor as an incognito) there exists an existential category of humor wherein the “mere” humorist Climacus claims to dwell (CUP1, 501). But humor is also a boundary-zone between the ethical and Religiousness A or immanent religiousness; and, as Religiousness A is “not the specifically Christian religiousness” (CUP1, 555), but an essential prerequisite to it, humor is also the boundary between Religiousness A and Religiousness B or Christianity.
With this in mind, Stephen Evans rightly suggests that humor is not a slot in a lock step of existential positions, but an existential possibility within a “range” (Evans 1983, 201). Indeed, Climacus asserts, “the humorous, precisely at the confinium [boundary-zone] of the religious, is very comprehensive” (CUP1, 451). This comment, together with humor’s apparent “mobility,” suggests that it might be able to act as the incognito for both Religiousness A and B. Thus, humor sometimes appears on the boundary of the ethical and “full-blown” Religiousness A and at other times on the boundary of Religiousness A and Religiousness B. Humor can be used as a mask for either forms of religiousness.
In what follows, each of humor’s roles is examined separately, beginning with humor as an existence-sphere or life-view, followed by humor as the boundary-zone of the religious, and concluding with humor as an incognito or a mask for the religious.
HUMOR AS A LIFE-VIEW
Humor is an existence-qualification. Climacus speaks of existential humor with personal authority because he identifies himself as a humorist. A humorist is a person who has mastered the comical, who “has the comic within himself” (CUP1, 521). That is, he perceives the contradiction to be essential rather than accidental in human life. Because humor is not an aesthetic category but “life” (JP 1, 1699/Pap. II A 136), the humorist is the person who lives his life in humor. Kierkegaard typically speaks of the humorist as someone who, compared with the systematizing philosopher, is particularly aware of how to live:
The humorist can’t really ever become a systematizer, for he regards every system as a renewed attempt … to burst the world open with one single syllogism … whereas [the humorist] has precisely come alive to the incommensurable which the philosopher can never account for and must therefore despise. He lives in the fullness of things and is therefore sensitive to how much is always left over, even if he has expressed himself with all felicity … therefore this disinclination to write … (Pap. II A 140)
For the humorist, what cannot be said is true and primary, whereas the systematizer believes that he can say everything and that whatever cannot be said is erroneous and secondary. As the humorist exists, so also does he express himself (CUP1, 449).
The humorous is the consciousness of the failure of the ethical, which recedes before Christianity. This hesitation before Christianity, as a radical cure that one postpones as long as possible, is the distinctive mark of the humorist (Pap. I A 89). Kierkegaard, however, emphasizes the life development necessary for embracing Christianity by pointing to the richness and meaningfulness of the humorist’s life: “It is possible both to enjoy life and to give it meaning and substance outside Christianity, just as the most renowned poets and artists, the most eminent thinkers, even pious men, have lived outside Christianity” (CUP1, 292–3).
The definition of humor refers to the idea of God: Humor comes about when a totality-category (CUP1, 553n) is joined with the God-idea (CUP1, 505). A totality-category is a concept that applies to the whole of a person’s life. The statement “all in life is disappointing” is an example of a determinant of totality. When a remark does not reflect upon any totality-category, even if it hints at it, it is not humorous. The idea of God is given in immanence since knowledge of the ethical-religious truth and religious and metaphysical truth is given to all in recollection (Pap. VIII B 81, sec. 10). We can know that God exists, that we are immortal, and that we are free beings (Pap. V B 40). “I do not believe that God exists,” writes Kierkegaard, “I know it, but I believe that God existed [the historical]” (Pap. VI B 45).
Thus, humor has much in common with Religiousness A or immanent religiousness, not least the view of eternity. Religiousness A, which is in continuation with the ethical, does not express itself in the form of a determinate religion, and thus can exist in paganism as well as Christianity (CUP1, 557). It is a natural religiousness, which presupposes only human nature in general. Kierkegaard ascribes it to Socrates; from Socrates’ point of view all knowledge is recollection. Because spirit is missing, eternity for the Greeks becomes the intemporality of the past. Recollection is the backward movement discovering eternity as that which was already there before one turned back to it. “Humor is always a revocation … is the backward perspective” (CUP1, 602). The absolute is present in every human being who discovers himself in recollection and inwardness. Both the humorist and the person in Religiousness A believe with Socrates and Plato that all humans already possess the eternal.
It follows that both the humorist and the person in Religiousness A believe that all attain eternal happiness (CUP1, 581, 450). There does not exist an important distinction between religious and nonreligious persons for the humorist, but “a humorous difference: that whereas the religious person utilizes his entire life in becoming aware of the relation to an eternal happiness and the other does not concern himself with it … they both, viewed eternally, go equally far” (CUP1, 581–2).
Moreover, “the existing humorist is the closest approximation to the religious person” (CUP1, 447), because, like the latter, the humorist perceives suffering as essential to human existence. The religious person of Religiousness A and the humorist apply suffering and guilt to the whole of his life: Each of us is totally guilty in relation to God. In this sense suffering and guilt are totality-categories. The “eternal recollection of guilt” of which the humorist is aware (even if he has not decisively appropriated it) makes his comment profound (CUP1, 552n). Nevertheless, the humorist “makes the deceptive turn and revokes the suffering in the form of jest” (CUP1, 447).
Whereas humor is a revocation of existence into the eternal by recollection backward from adulthood to childhood, Christianity constitutes the movement forward toward becoming a Christian. The humorist’s view is sentimental or feminine (CUP1, 553, 271n), and it entertains a particular relation with childhood: “The sadness in legitimate humor consists in its reflecting purely humanly, honestly and without deception, on what it is to be a child (literally understood), and it then becomes forever certain and true that this cannot be done over again” (CUP1, 602). The humorist has eternity behind it, whereas Christianity has no room for sadness because “to look back … is perdition” (CUP1, 603).
Humor is said to be on the boundary (confinium or border territory) of religiousness (CUP1, 500). This means that only against religiosity humor is not justified (CUP1, 521). The difference between a humorist and a religious person is that the religious person is related to God (CUP1, 505). The humorist admits that he is not related to God, but, on the other hand, he is not like other people below him, for he is not related to what they are related. These other people are related to things in such a way that when one puts them (as a whole) into conjunction with the God-idea, there is a contradiction. The thing to be related to—God—is not among these things: “The humorist levels everything on the abstract relationship with God” (CUP1, 448n). A thing given more importance than others is seen to be as unimportant as everything else that is less than God. Thus the humorist “removes the distinction in which the unfortunate one has his life” (CUP1, 448).
In order to be justified, the humorist must not be like the person of “finite common sense” who is guilty of the same sort of contradiction he contemplates. The humorist has a thought that takes in the totality of the predicament of the people below him. It is the contradiction between the determinant of totality and the God-idea to which the humorist is related. “The humorist gains legitimization by having his life in it [humor]” (CUP1, 521). If he is to be justified, he must find his life in his humor in a way that is essentially different from the way those beneath him find their lives in the objects to which they are related.
“Humor is legitimized in its tragic side … it reconciles itself to the pain from which despair wants to withdraw, although it [humor] knows no way out” (CUP1, 520). Humor is evidently not comic, for it does not know how to escape pain. Nor is it tragic, for the following considerations: The difference between the tragic and the comic is that whereas the comic apprehension has in mind a way out, the tragic apprehension despairs of a way out (CUP1, 516); humor differs from despair in that despair seeks to depart from the pain to which humor attempts to reconcile itself. Thus humor is not tragic, although it has a tragic side. Rather, it can be identified by its ambiguous nature, as being the comic-tragic.
If humor were fully tragic it would despair, and this means it would seek to escape the pain. In despairing over the fact that all those things are less than God and that one should not be related to them, one moves from the pain that all those things are less than God and that of desiring to escape from the pain. In so doing, the despairing person desires an imaginary (and therefore abstract) state, the state of escaping from his plight. He would be like all the others, seeking to find happiness in something that is less than God. But the humorist does not make this move. He feels the pain—he knows no way out—and then he reconciles himself to the pain. He conceals the pain in a jest that dwells on the fact that this is the way things are (that there is a contradiction between the fact that all the things we find before us are possible objects of desire and the God-idea): “There is always a hidden pain in humor” (CUP1, 553). The humorist differs from others in that he renounces the pursuit of happiness among temporal things, and therein lies his justification. It is the recognition that he has no worthy object of desire that can make him happy and that would free him from the temporal. Instead of desiring God, the humorist rests in the contemplation of the way things are.
It is a misunderstanding to laugh at humor (CUP1, 551n). Whereas the comic is the painless contradiction (CUP1, 514), humor is always a concealed pain. The jest is due to the fact that it constantly seems as if humor is aware of something else (CUP1, 532n). T. Morris explains that the humorist “presents us with a contradiction and conceals the fact of the contradiction’s pain; thus we have the suggestion that there is no pain, that the humorist knows a way out. Thus we can mistakenly take his statement as comic, as a jest” (Morris 1988, 304). The humorist
comprehends the meaning of suffering in relation to existing, but he does not comprehend the meaning of suffering. He comprehends that it belongs together with existing, but he does not comprehend its meaning otherwise than that suffering belongs together with it. The first is the pain in the humorous; the second is the jest—and this is why one both weeps and laughs when he speaks. (CUP1, 447)
The humorist is, opposite the believer, a thinker. It perhaps sounds odd to attribute philosophical significance to humor, but the high evaluation of humor that one finds in Climacus is inherited from a distinct tradition, which holds that humor entered the world with Christianity. Tonny Olesen describes this tradition thus:
It claims that humor gains its strength by bringing with it a category of totality, that humor is not a designation of the first immediacy but includes reflection, that humor designates the unity of tragedy and comedy, that humor designates a culminating standpoint, and that humor is melancholic [vermodig]. The literature contemporaneous with the writings of Kierkegaard is replete with discussions of humor as the counterpart to Greek irony. (Olesen 2003, 220)
Kierkegaard assigns the humorist the highest reflective place and the ultimate understanding without faith. The humorist understands that which he has deemed existence, but he also knows that with regard to faith, he must give up understanding in order to relate to the truth of Christianity in the medium of existence and in the passion of faith. Socrates was the wisest man of his time in that he knew that he knew nothing. Climacus reaches a similar insight: He understands that he understands nothing in relation to faith and the paradox, except perhaps that Christian faith is the highest form of subjectivity or inwardness. Whereas humor as a lifeview is not “essentially different” from irony (CUP1, 271), it is essentially different from Christianity. The humorist is a lower form of existence than the Christian, according to Kierkegaard, for the humorist does not relate himself to the God in time, that is, he has not appropriated the absolute paradox into his life (CUP1, 272).
HUMOR AT THE BOUNDARY OF RELIGION
At this point, humor tends to become either “religious or demonic” (JP 2, 263). Either humor is directed toward the truth of its own subjectivity, which will lead to the religious, or toward a madness like Don Quixote’s, which consists in having an absolute relation to the relative: “Don Quixote is the prototype of a subjective lunacy,” which is comic in its extreme contradiction (CUP1, 195).
Humor seems to play a double role in Postscript. On the one hand, humor is said to lie on the boundary between the ethical and the religious, where the humorist evokes a contradiction by setting the God-idea into conjunction with other things, but does not personally have a passionate relation to God (CUP1, 505). On the other hand, humor is described as “the final terminus a quo in relation to the Christian-religious,” which “terminates immanence within immanence” and as “the last stage in existenceinwardness before faith” (CUP1, 291). It seems, then, that humor may function as a boundary category at two levels, between the ethical and the religious (the religious here being conceived in the widest sense as including Christianity, but understood mainly in terms of immanent religiousness or Religiousness A), and between Religiousness A and Religiousness B or Christianity:
Thus humor is advanced as the final terminus a quo in relation to the Christian-religious. In modern scholarship, humor has become the highest after faith. That is, faith is the immediate, and through speculative thought, which goes beyond faith, humor is reached. This is a general confusion in all systematic speculative thought insofar as it wants to take Christianity under its wing. No, humor terminates immanence within immanence, still consists essentially in recollection’s withdrawal out of existence into the eternal, and only then do faith and the paradoxes begin. Humor is the last stage in existence-inwardness before faith. … Humor is not faith but is before faith, is not after faith or a development of faith. In other words, Christianly understood there is no going beyond faith, because faith is the highest—for an existing person—which has been adequately developed above. Even when humor wants to try its hands at the paradoxes, it is not faith. Humor does not take in the suffering aspect of the paradox or the ethical aspect of faith but only the amusing aspect. It is, namely, a suffering, faith’s martyrdom even in times of peace, to have the eternal happiness of one’s soul related to something over which the understanding despairs. (CUP1, 291–2)
The religious individual is absolutely engaged in his relationship with God (CUP1, 508). In order to reach this state the individual must cut off “every teleological relation to what is directed outward” (CUP1, 506). If he still desires to accomplish some telos in the world, he cannot be absolutely engaged with his relationship with God. The individual achieves this severing through reflection. “In an absolute passion, the passionate person is at the peak of his concrete subjectivity by having reflected himself out of every external relativity” (CUP1, 509). Individual teleological relationships can be severed by thinking about the limitation of an object of desire. But to sever every such relationship requires reflecting on a determinant of totality, something that comprehends the limitation of all the objects a person might find desirable. If one must reach the point of realizing that all outward teleological relations are unworthy because they are less than God, then the desire to have an object one could desire would be a desire for God (or else despair).
The humorist is not as such related to God. Thus he is said to reflect with sad longing (CUP1, 552n), for melancholy is the state of not finding possibilities that one can desire. In this way melancholy longing brings the individual into a relationship with God; God becomes the object of desire.
Initially the individual desires various unworthy objects. To look for one’s happiness through a relationship with something that is less than God is idolatry. To be totally caught up with idols is to be totally guilty. The humorist is thus totally guilty before God. Another way to look at humor is to see it as a reflection on “the totality of guilt-consciousness in the single individual before God in relation to an eternal happiness” (CUP1, 554). Humor and religiousness reflect on the same things, but religiousness applies subjective seriousness to the thought. Humor, on the other hand, reflects on the totality of guilt, “but in turn revokes it” (554). This revocation lies in placing oneself under the category of the species: The humorist does not see himself as a guilty individual, but as one of a group of individuals (a species), all of whom are in the same plight. As the religious individual passionately desires God, he recognizes that he is in relationship with God. He moves from a consciousness of sin to a consciousness of forgiveness, and knows he is no longer in the state he is leaving behind. Thus “the consciousness of sin definitely belongs to the consciousness of the forgiveness of sin” (CUP1, 524).
Humor on the boundary of the religious comes close to the religious and is often confused with it inasmuch as the humorist, like the religious individual, perceives suffering and its persistence as belonging essentially to existence rather than being something accidental, such as misfortune, which one seeks aesthetically to overcome. “In our day, people have frequently enough been inclined to mistake the humorous for the religious, even for the Christian-religious, and this is why I try to return to it everywhere” (CUP1, 451). But in Climacus’ opinion the humorist on this level does not comprehend the significance of suffering beyond this bare apprehension of its relevance to existence (CUP1, 447). Instead of seeking an explanation of suffering, the humorist takes the opposite course of revoking its significance in jest by making light of the existential plight. Although the humorist, in perceiving the essentiality of suffering in existence, gives more significance to existence than the ironist, existence for the humorist nevertheless lacks the significance it has for the religious individual. This is because the humorist, like the ironist, essentially opts for a retirement out of existence and into the eternal by way of recollection (CUP1, 242).
The self-transformation necessary for religious (and ethical) transitions involves describing oneself in two perspectives simultaneously: Sliding between the two perspectives and holding the elements in tension. M. Jamie Ferreira illuminates the former with Gestalt shifts and the latter with metaphor (Ferreira 1991). John Lippitt argues convincingly that the two forms of the comic that Climacus places as boundary zones, irony and humor, fulfill this role in relation to the ethical and the religious, respectively. Antti Mattila explains that one of the best ways to cultivate one’s ability to reframe is humor, as reframing plays an important role in humor (Lippitt 2000b, chap. 6; Mattila 2001, 92–94).
In the boundary-zones of humor (and irony), one does not embrace the higher position, but makes some attempt to identify with it imaginatively. Ferreira maintains that leaps are not sudden, but rather the realization that a particular vision has taken hold, such that it has become “so real that it seems to be the only way to see it” (Ferreira 1991, 110, 166). But I think this view blurs the importance of the choice of a higher suffering, which constitutes the higher level on which Kierkegaard repeatedly insists. A better explanation is provided by one of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms:
As soon as I am outside my religious understanding, I feel as an insect with which children are playing must feel, because life seems to have dealt with me so unmercifully; as soon as I am inside my religious understanding, I understand that precisely this has absolute meaning for me. Hence, that which in one case is a dreadful jest is in another sense the most profound earnestness. (SWL, 365)
It is the humorist’s sensitivity to both jest and suffering that allows him realize, once he is ready to think of himself as guilty instead of subsuming guilt under the species, that his life is “a dreadful jest.” Quidam makes sense of his suffering by reinterpreting along religious lines the dreadful jest that represents his life.
HUMOR AS A MASK
Humor can also function as the mask or incognito of a religious person, for the religious person does not want to secularize religion by expressing it outward. The attitude of religiousness to the humorous is the following: Religiousness can see the humorous as comic because it knows a way out (CUP1, 521). But if religiousness allows itself to dwell on the fact that it knows a way out, then that fact becomes the thing that makes the religious person happy, rather than his relationship with God. Because religiousness turns away from this particular possible object of desire as it passionately turns toward God, it perceives “the humorous as comic” only as “continuously disappearing” (CUP1, 521–2).
The comic makes itself felt in opposition to the religious “in the same degree as the negative … is allowed to be once and for all and thereby sufficient” (CUP1, 524–5). To the extent that someone who has made the religious move desires to rest on his laurels as someone who has succeeded in realizing the totality of guilt (thus treating the past realization of guilt as good for the present and future, once and for all), he now implicitly sees himself as someone who has escaped the plight depicted by humor. Thus, to that extent, he relates to the contradiction of humor as a person who knows the way out, that is, he sees it as comical.
We are told that the person defined by hidden inwardness must discover the comic (CUP1, 555). This requires a twofold explanation: First, why he must discover the contradiction (which is necessary for there to be the comic); and second, why he must discover the point of view which makes the contradiction painless (why he must have in mind a way out, why he must see the realization of guilt as something that has presented itself once and for all). The thing that makes certain that the religious individual will discover the contradiction is that “he does not dare to express it [his religiousness] in the outer world, because it is thereby secularized” (CUP1, 508). The problem is that in expressing what is inward, one is not able to preserve that inwardness. The danger pertains to the way one appears to other people: In order to safeguard and ensure the inwardness of his suffering and his relationship with God, the religious individual sets up a veil between himself and others (CUP1, 506).
Yet, “as long as the struggle and the suffering in inwardness continue he will not succeed in hiding his inwardness completely” (CUP1, 550–1). One does not simply switch from caring about the opinion of some party to caring about God. What one can do is switch from wanting to express one’s inwardness directly to expressing it indirectly. The way this is done is to employ the assistance of the humorous (550–1). The religious sufferer puts a veil between others and himself by employing humor: “Humor becomes his incognito” (CUP1, 508). Instead of expressing his relationship with God before other persons, he simply brings to mind the other aspect of what he feels makes him different from other people—that they are all looking for happiness through a relationship with something less than God. He thus makes a remark whose point is that people are stuck here in this world with nothing to desire but things that are less than God. He still feels that he has something different, his inwardness, which he expresses but indirectly (CUP1, 501).
The religious sufferer hides his inwardness and “thereby discovers the comic” (CUP1, 508). Once he has brought to mind the contradiction that people are looking for happiness among things that are incapable of making them happy, he has the opportunity to relate to that contradiction comically, for he believes that he has a way out, that he has this relationship with God. We are told: “The comic emerges through the relation of hidden inwardness to the surrounding world as the religious person hears and sees what produces a comic effect when it is joined together with his inward passion” (CUP1, 511). Part of this quotation does not seem to be in accord with what we have been saying, but the trick is that the religious person qua humorist “cooperates in shaping the situation” (CUP1, 551n). What the religious individual comes to hear and see is his own remark; the remark is in his environment because he put it there. But the religious individual does not take the time to comprehend the comic (CUP1, 508). If he would take the time, he would be seeking his happiness in the fact that he is unlike others, and he would no longer be related to God.
How does the individual move from the position of feeling different from other people (for the humor here is an indirect expression of his relationship with God) to being passionately concerned with maintaining a relationship with God? How does he come to realize that relating to humor comically is a temptation? It is through the recognition that he too is drawn toward finding his happiness in the world about him, rather than in relationship with God; he is like the people to whom he feels superior. “Hidden inwardness must also discover the comic, which is present not because the religious man is different from others but because … he is just like everyone else” (CUP1, 555). He is like others not merely because he is tempted to relate to the humor as if he knows a way out; he has actually been thinking that he knows a way out all along. It is his desire to express this way out, to express his God-relationship, which started the whole process. Humor as such only pertains to the species, but the religious individual makes the move of realizing that he, a member of this species, is at this very moment doing the same thing as all the other members. It is not simply a matter of algebra, but of introspection. Humor prompts him to look at his own reality, and he then finds that he is as guilty as others for seeking his happiness through a relationship with something less than God (i.e., through the fact that he has a God-relationship). Once again he is in a position to use humor as the starting point for turning to God.
For Climacus, “the highest earnestness of the religious life is distinguishable by jest” (CUP1, 235). Whereas jest is the expression of the humorist’s revocation of the decisive significance of existence, there is yet another form of jesting that serves as a sign of the utmost earnestness toward existence, which Climacus calls “holy jest” (CUP1, 462, 471–2). This form of jest comes to expression in humor that is the incognito of the religious individual. Characteristic of the religious personality, as Climacus understands it, is a consciousness of impotence or the inability to do anything by oneself to transform one’s existence into conformity with the ideal (CUP1, 461, 484). In the world, however, it may appear that one has the power to do many things. This contradictory state of affairs occasions the discovery of the comic by the religious individual, for that person is able to enjoy the amusement of apparently having the power of accomplishing everything while inwardly understanding this to be an illusion (CUP1, 462). This comic discrepancy between the religious individual’s outward appearance and actual inner condition makes itself felt in a variety of ways, since the art of the religious individual is precisely to live so that “no one will detect anything in him.” As Climacus sees it, true religiousness consists in secret inwardness and has its criterion in invisibility (CUP1, 475).
Like the knight of faith in Fear and Trembling, the religious individual looks and acts like others, but this is an incognito whereby inwardness is humorously concealed in order to protect it from direct expression and the taint of worldliness (CUP1, 500). Like the knight of faith, the religious individual remains in the world rather than withdrawing from it, but this apparent worldliness on his part becomes an incognito, or “veil,” behind which the inward suffering and God-relation of true religiousness are ensured and safeguarded. The religious individual is also active in the world, but this outward activity is likewise transformed into an inward matter in the admission before God that one can do nothing by oneself (CUP1, 506).
Using humor as an indirect mode of expression, the religious individual appears outwardly to be a humorist, but inwardly is not. On the contrary, Climacus claims that the religious individual is “infinitely higher than” and “qualitatively different from” the humorist (CUP1, 501). One crucial difference between the two is that the religious individual is earnest, that is, existentially committed to the religious ideal, whereas the humorist is not. Here again a characteristic noted earlier with respect to the subjective thinker comes into play, namely, that jest functions as the sign of earnestness and, in this instance, that humor functions as a sign of religiousness in the religious individual with humor as an incognito. For the humorist, jest and humor signify nothing but themselves, or more precisely, they signify the opposite of humor in the religious individual, namely, that the humorist does not maintain a decisive relation to God in jesting, but, on the contrary, uses it as a way of distancing herself from such a relation. Thus, the humorist may reflectively comprehend the various movements of the religious sphere, such as resignation, suffering, and the consciousness of guilt, but in an impatient, childlike manner revokes them in the non-serious form of jest. By contrast, the religious individual with humor as an incognito uses humor or holy jest precisely as a means to preserve and give indirect expression to the forms of pathos in his life.
Humor therefore may function in several different ways and on more than one level as an existential art. It should be noted, however, that Climacus restricts the expression of humor as an incognito of the religious to Religiousness A or immanent religiousness, which serves as the terminus a quo, or presupposition, for defining Religiousness B or the Christian paradoxical religiousness: “Religiousness with humor as its incognito is still not Christian religiousness” (CUP1, 532n; see 534–5, 556). In Climacus’ opinion, humor is incapable of dealing with the “decisive Christian category of becoming a Christian,” that is, the consciousness of sin, because humor falls essentially under the category of recollection: It is “always a revocation” of existence “into the eternal by recollection backward,” whereas Christianity is “the direction forward” that continually moves toward becoming and being a Christian (CUP, 602). Here Climacus is in essential agreement with another pseudonym, the humorist Constantin Constantius, who associates humor with recollection rather than the forward movement of repetition. Climacus’ point is that humor assumes an essential relation to the eternal that is denied in Christianity on the basis of original sin, and thus it is an inappropriate category for the expression of Christian inwardness.
“Now we are standing at the boundary,” says Climacus. “The religiousness that is hidden inwardness is eo ipso inaccessible for comic interpretation. It cannot have the comic outside itself because it is hidden inwardness and consequently cannot come into contradiction with anything.” Hidden inwardness contains the contradiction that humor dominates as something lower than itself. “In this way it is absolutely armed against the comic or is protected by the comic against the comic” (CUP1, 522). In the conclusion of Postscript, humor is said to be justified regarding Christianity only when the latter becomes aesthetic, that is when it is confused with outward expressions, or when it is confused with paganism: “The existence-sphere of paganism is essentially the aesthetic” (CUP1, 432n), says Climacus, and direct recognizability is paganism as well (CUP1, 600). Authentic religiousness is not to be laughed at:
If anyone wants to laugh at this, let him do so, but I would still like to see the esthetician or the dialectician who is able to show the slightest trace of the comic in the suffering of religiousness. If there is anything I have studied thoroughly, from A to Z, it is the comic. It is just for this reason that I know that the comic is excluded in religious suffering, that it is inaccessible to the comic. (CUP1, 483)
This implies that the attitude of the religious person to suffering is such that he construes suffering as more tragic than comic. In other words, incongruities can be seen as tragic or comic, and the religious person is ultimately compelled to the former interpretation: “Suffering is precisely the consciousness of contradiction, which therefore is tragically assimilated with pathos into the religious person’s consciousness, and thereby the comic is excluded” (CUP1, 483). Also in Stages on Life’s Way, Quidam “sees the comic, but with passion, so that of that he chooses the tragic”: “This is the religious,” Frater Taciturnus adds, something that the Frater, a humorist who sees the tragic and the comic in equilibrium, cannot understand (SLW, 434). Choosing the tragic means reflecting on suffering rather than on the way out of it, that is, viewing one’s life in terms of suffering and guilt as totality-categories. Hence, a truly religious person “does not consider the comic as the highest” level (CUP1, 462).
We are now in a position to understand the role of humor in the good life as the mature Kierkegaard sees it. The comic power is essentially humor because the contradiction that humor dominates is the highest range of the comic. Humor is thus Kierkegaard’s most important category of the comic, although humor is, properly speaking, an ideal balance of the pathetic and the comic. The humorist moves beyond the ethical life-view and comprehends major dimensions of the religious stance, but he does not become a religious person. Nevertheless, all humor is at bottom made possible by the very features of human life that make the religious life possible. The categories of guilt, suffering, and God are essential for the humorist. This is why humor as a life-view constitutes a lower existence bordering on religion or Christianity, a steppingstone for the leap toward faith, and a mask for the religious person. Humor as a life-view is the highest life-view attained by thought, solely through human effort: It is the highest philosophy as lived thought exemplified by Socrates. But it is lower than Christianity, which for Kierkegaard is the sole viable life-view after God’s revelation, and which, according to his final view of the matter, is inaccessible to humor. Hence, humor has no place in the good life, according to Kierkegaard, but living in humor is the second-best life, which, moreover, could be helpful in attaining to the best life.
CONCLUDING REMARKS: THE COMIC AND HUMOR IN THE KIERKEGAARDIAN GOOD LIFE
The comic is not Kierkegaard’s last word in life or beyond. The comic belongs only to the temporal because all contradictions are canceled in eternity (Pap. V B 60, 137; CA, 154). Not only is the comic limited to life, it is limited in life (EO1, 41–42). First, the comic, or one of its forms, is not the highest stage in the teleology: Ridiculing Hegelian philosophy for giving “predominance to the comic,” Kierkegaard seeks to relegate the comic to the religious (CUP1, 512); “in regard to earnestness,” Vigilius Haufniensis asserts, “he will know how not to tolerate any joking” (CA, 128), a view that is echoed by Climacus (CUP1, 483). Second, the comic is subsumable under the tragic not only in the hierarchy of life’s stages, but within each stage as well. Within these limitations, however, the comic, and its highest power, humor, fulfill a crucial role in the Kierkegaardian good life, which I purport, first, to explain, and, second, to assess according to both originality and feasibility.
THE COMIC’S ROLE IN INWARDNESS
The ethical task Kierkegaard assigns to each individual is to become a self. But as the self is defined in religious terms, it cannot be brought about by human means alone. Becoming a self requires faith. Once faith enters the picture, the task becomes “simultaneously to relate oneself absolutely to the absolute telos (end, goal) and relatively to relative ends” (CUP1, 525; see 431). The absolute telos is eternal life or “eternal happiness.” The religious life is defined as deepening one’s inwardness without exterior signs. Subjectivity and upbuilding are the truth-tests of truth, in the sense that living in the truth is living the religious life.
The general movement of progress from the aesthetic life to the religious is through suffering, which creates as its counter-force the comic. The comic corrects the mood, thus enabling the choice of a higher level of suffering or a new pathos, which again is corrected by the comic. This movement culminates with the choice of the tragic over the comic in the balance between the two, which defines the inwardness of the humorist. This choice is faith, which concludes the role of the dialectic or philosophy in its new role, leading the individual to the place where he can worship God rather than idols. To understand the role of the comic in the deepening of inwardness that leads to Christianity, the following points about the comic should be clarified:
1. The comic reflects and expresses the relative attitude toward relative ends. As these ends change when one advances, the comic is the main indicator of one and another’s situation in Kierkegaard’s hierarchical stages. Relating absolutely to relative ends is comical because it involves the self-contradiction of inconsistency. Relative ends should be conquered as jests, that is, they should create in the individual a comical reaction as the appropriate attitude to something lower. According to the sort of comical reaction an individual has or discerns in another’s communication, he can infer the place he and the other person occupy in the teleology as described by the stages of life.
As a higher viewpoint enters into an individual’s existence, his former evaluation loses its significance and everything is seen in a new light. The content of the individual’s previous experience is fully retained when a new factor enters or when a new stage begins. However, each time this occurs, the total content is seen in a new perspective. This movement from lower to higher viewpoints is the law of repetition directed against Hegel who, according to Kierkegaard’s interpretation of his work, maintains that each new, opposing element eliminates the preceding one (JP 3, 2858/Pap. II A 49).
The individual in the new existential stage maintains a relation with the previous stage by perceiving it, its telos and the suffering it entails, as comical. This is important for Kierkegaard, because the task of living includes not only an absolute relation to the absolute, but also a relative relation toward the relative. The relative relation is secured by the comical, which reflects the inferior position of that which has been superseded as a former telos. If severing the relation to the finite is blasphemous for Kierkegaard, the comical, under the guise of humor, acquires a theological importance: “Being earnest about anything else than oneself—realizing one’s spirit—is comical. On the other hand, whoever has become earnest at the right place will prove the soundness of his spirit precisely by his ability to treat all other things sentimentally as well as jokingly” (CA, 150).
2. The contrast between the inward and the outward creates the comic. This makes it the sign of a deepened inwardness, which is tantamount to religiosity. Religious suffering stems from the inability of the religious person to express the eternal in the temporal. Religious suffering can be discerned by being solely in inwardness, part of it is created because one is not able to convert pain into perfect joy, and part of it is created because of the uncertainty over the relationship with God (CUP1, 451–5). Kierkegaard’s first requirement of the religious person is to renounce the world. Renouncing the world should not be noticeable; hence, the requirement to join the world externally and hide the relationship to the absolute. But the contrast between inwardness and outwardness creates the comic, and “the most perfect the contrast of form, the greatest the inwardness …” (SV 9, 202; quoted in Pattison 1992, 66). The comic that is created by the contrast is the indication of the depth of one’s inwardness (SLW, 246).
3. The comic is reflective: It creates a distance from the self that is necessary for progressing. A situation that contains a contradiction creates suffering, but when the individual reflects on the situation, he sees it with disinterestness, and can thus notice that the situation is also comical: “Reflection is disinterested: all knowledge is therefore disinterested (mathematical, aesthetic, metaphysical knowledge)” (Pap. IV B 1 147), and the comic has “the disinterestedness of metaphysics” (SLW, 446). In the comic situation, “reflection is in motion within” (EO1, 263). The way out envisioned by the comic is kept in mente, that is, confined to the level of thought (CUP1, 516). For example, the comic takes no account of the difficulties in actually adopting the way out from suffering offered by religion.
Recall that the difference between the tragic and the comic lies in the interpretation of the misrelation, whether it is seen as the real comparing itself with the ideal or as the ideal comparing itself with the real: “When the subjective thinker turns his face toward the idea, his interpretation of the misrelation is pathos-filled; when he turns his back to the idea, allowing it to shine from behind into the same misrelation, his interpretation is comic” (CUP1, 90). The first magnifies the finite and therefore sees it as tragic, whereas the second belittles it and therefore sees it as comical. To step out of the impotence of suffering, one needs perspective. Tragedy confronts the situation as an actual challenge, it “has the interest of actuality” (SLW, 446), but at the same time, it sees no way of meeting it. There is no (human) resolution to the contradiction. Alternatively, perspective is gained through a distance from the self, which is the outcome of reflecting on the situation. Reflection discloses the contradiction in the situation and reveals the discrepancy between the real and the ideal to be also comical.
4. The comic is imaginative: It enables us to “envision” a new situation, which is a necessary preliminary stage to change. The comic provides a glimpse of a higher view that ultimately lightens the predicament in which the individual is caught. Kierkegaard rejects the notion of the supremacy of thought, and emphasizes the harmony of thought, fantasy, and feeling. To be able to see a way out at all, imaginative reflection has to envisage it. John Lippitt shows how important the role of the comic is, in the guise of irony and humor, in viewing or imagining the situation differently (Lippitt 2000b, 104–20). One has to imagine or envision something, and be able to shift perspectives between the current situation and the imagined situation as a precondition of such a willed change as the “leap” to the ethical or the religious.
5. The comic, born from suffering, also mitigates it: It allows one to remain in the suffering, which is the precondition of choosing a higher suffering. “The more one suffers, the more … has one a sense for the comic” (SLW, 231). Because the comic envisions pain in relation to eternity, Thomas Oden explains, it changes the perspective we have of the suffering contradiction:
Comic consciousness looks from the outside to turn the internal suffering itself into a new configuration by contradiction. Comedy thus becomes the reverse side of suffering. It objectifies and transmutes inward discord by a reversal of perspective. It views pain in relation to eternity. (Oden 2004, 31)
The ironic individual suffers from his separation from reality, whereas the humorist is directly attuned to the pathos of pain. Hence, wherever suffering exists, the seeds of comedy are planted. The parry of jest always springs from pain. With every quip goes a little piece of the humorist’s guts (JP 2, 260). Religiously speaking, comic perception is freed from idolatry to see beyond it toward eternity and eternal happiness. The comic detaches itself from absolute seriousness about human incongruities. It maintains distance through the perspective of eternity. Humor provides a greater detachment than the ethical because it can grasp the relativity of human values in relation to eternity. Comic perception frees one to transcend tragic seriousness by beholding it finite, hence, not absolute: “Finite common sense wants to interpret immediacy as comic but in doing that becomes comic itself, because what presumably is supposed to justify its comic effects is that it easily knows the way out, but the way out that it knows is even more comic” (CUP1, 520). In uncovering the seriousness of finitude, comic awareness points beyond finitude.
The absence or falsification of mood has the comical as its enemy (CA, 14n). The comic purifies the pathos-filled emotions so that one’s pathos is not vehement and one is not blind in it (SLW, 366), like the “revivalist,” who should be differentiated from the “knight of hidden inwardness” (CUP1, 512). This is reminiscent of Shaftesbury’s criticism of the “enthusiast,” whose enthusiasm should be corrected by ridicule. The comic also is substantiated by “the pathos-filled emotions” (SLW, 367). Climacus stresses the need for the comic and pathos to be in balance because “the pathos that is not safeguarded by the comic is an illusion; the comic that is not safeguarded by pathos is immaturity,” and “a pathos that excludes the comic is therefore a misunderstanding, is not pathos at all” (CUP1, 87, 89). The comic balances the tragic and purifies suffering by differentiating between suffering created by external sources and religious suffering, so that one is stable and strong enough to choose a higher level of suffering.
6. The comic is brought about by fear and dismay, which are important steps in upbuilding. Whereas another, and perhaps more important step in upbuilding, is love, dismay is the first step to the upbuilding (WL, 199–212): “Where there is nothing at all dismaying and no dismay, there is nothing at all edifying and no edification” (CD, 102). Dismay is facing up to the unpleasant truth that not all is quite right in life. It shows that self-knowledge, a moral knowledge that can make a distinction between good and evil, is involved in upbuilding.
Terror is also important in the Kierkegaardian progress. In Postscript, Climacus describes the transition into higher existence-spheres in terms of terror, “otherwise, the upbuilding is make-believe” (CUP1, 258). Irony and humor, as forms of life, also are intermediary stages between the aesthetical and the ethical and between the ethical and the religious, respectively. The comic as irony and humor plays an important role in the leap between the stages, which is not incompatible with its description as terror, as “one of the paradoxes that life requires us to hold in tension” (Lippitt 2000b, 168; see 164–8). Additionally, contemporary research has shown that terror itself creates the comic as a necessary relief (Roeckelein 2002, 135–6, 177ff), and we know, at least since Herbert Spencer and Sigmund Freud formulated the release and relief theory of humor, that the comic releases tension and thereby fear (Spencer 1860; Freud 1905).
Kierkegaard envisions another way to overcome fears. In the introduction to The Sickness unto Death, Anti-Climacus deems “jest” to be that which the “natural man” catalogs as appalling. To regard something as “nothing” is “jest”:
The Christian has gained a courage that the natural man does not know, and he gained this courage by learning to fear something even more horrifying. This is the way a person always gains courage, when he fears a greater danger, he always has the courage to face a lesser one; when he is exceedingly afraid of one danger, it is as if the others did not exist at all. (SUD, 8–9)
One smiles at that which has been conquered as a jest. The comic taints the attitude toward previous fears for the individual who has climbed the teleology.
7. The comic is the negative in Kierkegaard’s negative epistemology and theology. The role of reflective reason, which uses the comic as a tool, is largely negative for Kierkegaard. When introducing his negative theology, Kierkegaard refers to suffering, guilt, and sin as the negative, and to happiness and joy as the positive. Nevertheless, at the beginning of Postscript, the comic is the negative and pathos is the positive: “In his existencerelation to the truth, the existing subjective thinker is just as negative as positive, has just as much of the comic as he essentially has of pathos” (CUP1, 80). Elsewhere in Postscript, Climacus refers to humor too as the negative (CUP1, 501).
One can approach the absolute only negatively, by renouncing the world. Just as resignation determines the individual’s absolute orientation toward the absolute telos, the continuance of suffering is the guarantee that the individual is in position and keeps himself in position (CUP1, 443). However, not all suffering is religious suffering. As there is nothing comical in religious suffering, according to Climacus, perhaps the way to know that the suffering is religious is to realize that it has nothing to do with the relative (CUP1, 483). Suffering created by an outward relation (the relative) yields a different kind of comic than religious suffering, which is entirely internal. The main indication one has of advancing toward the religious, given Kierkegaard’s criterion of truth and the solitude of the individual, is the quality of the comic he experiences. Thus, the comic plays a unique role in Kierkegaard’s epistemology and theology.
8. A sense of the comic is the opposite of despair, and despair is that which impedes one from becoming a self. The tension between the poles of the duality, which constitutes every human existence, is the postulated presupposition for the authentic realization of existence and the condition of possibility for despair. Kierkegaard’s view is that this tension must be maintained. Ambiguity as the possibility of despair must unceasingly be present, but its actuality, despair itself, must unceasingly be rejected. Kierkegaard insists that despair is precisely the attempt to ignore the “possibility of despair,” that is, to repress the tension. However, this attempt does not succeed because the repression does not conquer or abolish the antitheses, but merely removes them from consciousness.
At the end of a long discussion of humor in Postscript, Climacus says, “all despair is a kind of ill temper” (CUP1, 554). In his essay “Humour and the Irascible Soul,” Alastair Hannay suggests that Climacus could have used ill-humor, for “surely all that is intended is some sort of contrast between a sense of the comic and despair as two distinct and opposed attitudes to it all” (Hannay 2003, 148). The idea that the comic is the opposite of both despair and ill-temper is as old as Sotion, Seneca’s teacher (first century ad), who contrasted the attitudes of the laughing and the weeping philosophers, Democritus and Heraclitus, with anger (ira) at the world. Recall also that Shaftesbury views atheism, which represents the sin of acedia or disgust with God—Kierkegaardian ultimate despair—as, nothing but ill-humor: “I very much question,” Shaftesbury writes, “whether anything besides ill-humor can be the cause of atheism” (Letter, 3). Shaftesbury maintains that melancholy and ill-humor distort our vision of God, for in a state of dread and anxiety we cannot have a true conception of Him.
For Kierkegaard, it is despair that construes contradiction as tragic because despair concentrates on the finite: “… the tragic interpretation sees the contradiction and despairs over the way out” (CUP1, 516). Despair in its despairing “knows no way out, does not know the contradiction canceled” (CUP1, 520), and interprets thus the contradiction as tragic. In contradistinction, imagination is always infinitizing. The comic, which involves both imagination and reflection, is brought about by looking at the finite from infinity’s point of view, as is evident also from the definitions of irony and humor (CUP1, 502, 291). Because the comic involves the infinite, it is the antidote to despair, which is brought about by finitude’s shortsightedness.
9. Kierkegaard teaches the nature of the comic and its correct use explicitly and at length. His is an edifying discourse on the comic. Alastair Hannay remarks on Postscript that the work says so much about humor that it might be read as much as a disquisition on humor as a humorous disquisition (Hannay 2003, 17). The edifying discourse discloses an ethic of the comic and a guide for using it, which leads one to the true telos: “If you worship here, you worship God,” instead of an idol (CUP1, 491).
10. Kierkegaard teaches how to laugh by its opposite, by using one’s fear of being ridiculous. The concern with the legitimacy of the comic brings Kierkegaard to devise an ethics of the comic, whose purpose is to secure an edifying role for the comic. The edifying roles the comic plays differ according to the kinds of legitimacy opened to the comic. If the legitimacy lies in the hierarchy of the stages—the higher being justified in making the lower ridiculous—the comic is edifying in its siding with the higher stage. If the legitimacy lies in the comic being tied up with the tragic or pathosfilled, and in the jest with earnestness, the comic is edifying in serving the tragic. The evasion from suffering the comic provides fortifies the person without sabotaging the choice of suffering, which is the way to its healing. By keeping the pathos in check and avoiding the ridicule of sentimentality or enthusiasm, the comic allows for choosing a higher level of suffering from the right reasons. The former edifying role of the comic corresponds to Plato’s idea, according to which the ridiculous person does not know himself (Philebus 48–50), and the latter is Shaftesbury’s view, according to which the comic keeps enthusiasm in check. In both cases, the comic is edifying, and thus legitimate, when it amends ridicule.
The sanction for an illegitimate comic apprehension is ridicule. There is no subjective arbitrariness in the comic. If a person thinks something said is comical when it is not legitimately so, he is being ridiculed instead of the target of his laughter. Because all human beings fear ridicule (PV, 65, 68), Kierkegaard implies that this sanction is strong enough to demolish the attack and disarm the attacker.
In most of the cases where ridicule is advanced as a sanction for using the comic illegitimately, it is inferred that only the jester is aware of the ridicule, for the comic in these cases has no outward expression. “Ridicule” here is synonymous with being in the wrong, of being mistaken about an important issue, of making a fool of oneself in one’s own eyes, as in the following examples: “He who does not constantly dare to submit his earnestness to the test of jest is stupid and comical” (JP 2, 1743); “[Socrates’] sense of the comic was just as great as his ethical pathos—therefore he was secured against becoming ridiculous in his pathos” (SLW, 366). In the imaginary construction of Stages, Quidam suggests that the hold “the comic from the outside” can have on a person is an indication that the person’s suffering is not religious because it is related to the outside instead of being confined solely to inwardness. If pathos originates in another’s actions, one can become comical by another’s actions or by a reverse of the situation; whereas, if the comical originates in oneself as a reaction to inward suffering, a person is inadvertently protected from being comical: “I have not established my life on her word and gown. That is why I have perceived the comic from the very beginning, and precisely for that reason I can never in all eternity become comic” (SLW, 367). To be secured against the comic in that way is a characteristic of the legitimate comic: “The religious person must discover the comic, if he actually is religious, because otherwise he himself becomes comic” (CUP1, 463). This device applies till the very end of the comic power, when the religiosity of hidden inwardness (Religiousness A) is “protected by the comic against the comic” (CUP1, 522).
LAUGHING WELL IS LIVING WELL
Together, the 10 points about the comic just mentioned lead to the following considerations.
1. The comic emerges from a retrospective view that presupposes a higher point of view. Only a superior life-view can legitimately laugh at an inferior one. It is ultimately from the Christian point of view that Kierkegaard laughs. “Life can be interpreted only after it has been experienced,” he writes in the journals; “it is true what [Hegel’s] philosophy says that life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward” (JP 1, 1025, 1030). The legitimate comic implies looking backward from higher spheres to lower ones. The more one looks backward, comprehends, and conquers in jest, the more comic consciousness one has gained, the more inwardness one has, and the more one has advanced in existence.
2. The comic corrective is the major corrective available for Kierkegaard’s negative theology and negative epistemology. The comic (all that has been conquered in jest, all that is beneath one) is the main indication an individual has of advancing, which is described as choosing pathos, stabilizing it with the comic, and choosing a new pathos. This movement is reminiscent of the Shaftesburean moralist, who is sensible of this rhythm of subjectivity, which takes off and checks itself, switching from exaltation to self-criticism.
3. The comic seems to be Kierkegaard’s most effective reflective tool. After one suffers the tragic, one sees and understands the comic. The tragic is felt, the comic is thought. The individual suffers the tragic and sees the comic “with his understanding” (SWL, 327). The first entry in category A of the Papers (April 15, 1834) reads:
In order to see one light determinately we always need another light. For if we imagined ourselves in total darkness and then a single spot of light appeared, we would be unable to determine what it is, since we cannot determine spatial proportions in darkness. Only when there is another light is it possible to determine what it is, since we cannot determine spatial proportions in darkness. Only when there is another light is it possible to determine the position of the first in relation to the other. (JP 2, 2240/Pap. I A 1)
This entry can be interpreted to mean that Kierkegaard has perceived that no position or point of view can ever be determined solely by itself; it can be more explicitly determined only in relation to another position or another point of view. I suggest that the comic plays the role of the second point of view for Kierkegaard, without which one would be devoid of any sense of proportion and capacity for orientation.
4. The comic entertains an essential relation with the truth, which is at the root of both Kierkegaard’s ethics of the comic and his later view, following the Corsair affair, that whoever is in the truth will be ridiculed. The latter is an inversion of Shaftesbury’s formula that whatever is true can withstand ridicule. Kierkegaard differs from Shaftesbury in that he prefers to restrict the comic to its legitimate use as secured by his ethics of the comic. As was shown in the last chapter, Shaftesbury opposes the idea that the comic be regulated, either ethically or politically. Unlike Shaftesbury, who allows religion to be ridiculed, Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms forbid it. For example, Vigilius says that “in regard to earnestness he [the religious man] will know how not to tolerate any joking” (CA, 128), a view which is echoed in Climacus (CUP1, 483).
Yet Kierkegaard’s view is similar to Shaftesbury in that the latter thinks that truth cannot be ridiculed: One can attempt to ridicule it, but truth will not withstand ridicule. This seems to be Kierkegaard’s view as well, as he states that if something is (ethically, religiously) true, it is protected from the comic. Although Shaftesbury grounds this view in a vision of the universe as harmoniously beautiful and of the comic as false because it portrays the beautiful as ugly, Kierkegaard grounds his view in a vision of the human being as a synthesis of contradictions, and truth as the domination of the highest contradiction: If something is true, it has conquered the comical as lower, and in that sense, truth is protected from the comic. “Ridicule as the test of truth,” in the sense that truth is immune from ridicule and whoever does not see that is ridiculous, also applies in Kierkegaard’s case as the key to his ethics of the comic.
Following Kierkegaard’s dispute with the satirical journal the Corsair, ridicule becomes the test of truth for Kierkegaard in yet another way. The mark of truth is ridicule, he believes, for “if Christ came to the world now … [he] would be ridiculed, treated as a mad man, but a mad man at whom one laughs …” Kierkegaard draws personal conclusions about this realization and considers himself from now on a martyr of laughter, whose life has been designed for illuminating Christianity (JP 6, 119/ Pap. X A 187).
5. In summarizing the role of the comic in inwardness, we turn to the problem facing Kierkegaard—how to advance inwardly when there are no external criteria one can use to measure one’s progress: “That subjectivity, inwardness, is truth, is my thesis; that the pseudonymous authors relate themselves to it is easy to see, if in no other way, then in their eye for the comic” (CUP1, 282). The comic succeeds through three devices in fulfilling the crucial role it plays in the deepening of inwardness, which is Kierkegaard’s sole criterion for advancing.
First, the comic deters. It calls on us to immunize ourselves from laughter by adopting a superior life, so that the wish voiced by Kierkegaard’s pseudonym “to have the laugh always on my side” could be fulfilled (EO1, 41–42). Human beings can bear many things, but not ridicule, and the strategies one uses to immunize oneself from it constitute a code of conduct Francis Buckley calls “the morality of laughter” (Buckley 2003, x). I find Buckley’s views on laughter highly relevant to understanding Kierkegaard’s views on the comic. By highlighting comic vices, laughter teaches us a superior lifespan that is immune from ridicule. In the morality of laughter, one cannot help admiring those who have risen above laughter. Self-development is the goal of comic virtues. Laughter always sanctions a butt’s comic vice and reveals a correlative comic virtue that immunizes us from laughter. Laughter offers valuable lessons on how to live, for few emotions are stronger than the fear of being a butt. In the war of laughter, contestants trade off laughter in an effort to show that comic virtue is on their side and that their opponents are ridiculous. Moral and comic virtues would be unitary if there were one highest good. A teleological account of laughter is necessarily a superiority explanation because nonsuperiority theories are agnostic about what constitutes the good life.
Kierkegaard’s account of laughter is unmistakably teleological, for it assumes, first, that the human being has a natural end (telos) through which to realize personal potential, and second, that laughter’s message of superiority assists in reaching this end. It therefore fits Buckley’s description of the morality of laughter, which is teleological and which presupposes universal standards in which butts are naturally visible. Moreover, like supererogatory virtue, comic laughter is unsatisfied with adherence to the negative injunctions of simple commandments. It seeks something more. It calls on us to immunize ourselves from laughter by adopting a superior life. Comic norms are capable of analysis, and we may usefully search for insights about how we should live by deliberating over what makes us laugh (81, 75–76).
Second, the legitimate comic protects from ridicule. In order to be protected from ridicule, one adheres strictly to the legitimate comic. Kierkegaard refers to this as “being protected from the comic by the comic” (CUP1, 522). Being protected from ridicule is important for the following reasons. First, it secures independence from public opinion. This is important as Kierkegaard assumes that to be perceived as comical by others weakens: “The public’s eye cannot make him comical in all eternity.” Second, being secured against becoming ridiculous in pathos, one “is free in it and needs no external support whatsoever in order to be earnest” (SLW, 366). One “places the comic in between in order to be able more inwardly to hold fast the ethical within himself” (CUP1, 505). One places the comic between himself and the world, and thereby makes sure that he himself does not become comic “through a naïve misunderstanding of his ethical passion” (CUP1, 506), in contradistinction to “an immediate enthusiast.” The religious person, however, does not put the comic between himself and other people to laugh at them (CUP1, 508), but rather to protect himself.
Third, the comic gives a clear indication of an individual’s inward progress. Because the individual has conquered as a jest everything that is lower, Kierkegaard’s teleology of the comic warrants that he laughs at it. The comic is both sword and shield that distances the individual from himself: As a counter-force to the tragic, the comic enables reflection, purifies the emotional pathos, shields from ridicule, and stabilizes the inner equilibrium, thus helping to create the conditions for choosing the leap towards a higher level of tragic.
Buckley differentiates between the positive and the normative superiority thesis, a distinction that is helpful in clarifying Kierkegaard’s view of the legitimacy of the comic and its role in the dialectic. According to the positive superiority thesis, “laughter announces and enforces a code of behavior through the jester’s signal of superiority over a butt. There is not laughter without a butt, and no butt without a message about a risible inferiority.” The normative superiority thesis makes the stronger claim that “our laughter communicates a true superiority and that the butt is truly an inferior person.” Although the two theses tend to run together, it is important to distinguish them. Buckley considers the former far more plausible than the latter. Those who laugh are sometimes “inferior brutes, and even evil ones as well,” and in such cases we should disregard the message (Buckley 2003, xi).
In Laughter, Henri Bergson defends both the positive and the normative superiority thesis (Bergson 1999); whereas, Thomas Hobbes subscribes to the former and rejects the latter. I suggest that Kierkegaard adopts both theses, as the normative superiority thesis is the Kierkegaardian concept of the legitimate comic. Kierkegaard, I suggest, would have agreed with Buckley’s assertion that “the wit might be a very inferior fellow. What he cannot do, however, is laugh if he thinks himself inferior” (Buckley 2003, xi). Kierkegaard objects to misplaced feelings of superiority, even if their origin lies in self-ignorance. His adherence to the normative superiority thesis is the basis for his denouncing illegitimate uses of the comic.
Kierkegaard’s position on the comic may be summed up as the following principles. First, the comic has an objective basis in reality. As Climacus implies, there are ludicrous and non-ludicrous things; “unable to make ludicrous what is not ludicrous,” he has an inordinate capacity in “making ludicrous what is ludicrous” (CUP1, 622). Second, when one laughs, one feels superior to the object of laughter (the positive thesis of superiority), whether the butt is or is not objectively ludicrous or inferior. Third, one should not feel superior when one is not actually superior, and it is the teleology of the spheres that determines who is inferior to whom. One must learn what to laugh at and what not to laugh at, and how to distinguish between the genuinely superior and the inferior in order to laugh well (the normative thesis of superiority). Fourth, laughing well is living well, for laughing well is being earnest about the right things, having conquered as a jest everything that is lower and maintained a relationship with it as something comical. By learning how to laugh, one upbuilds personal inwardness, and by teaching how to laugh, one helps to edify another’s inwardness.
For lack of an external criterion for inner advancement, which is the only sort of progress Kierkegaard recognizes, the comic reveals itself as the main instrument of examination, correction, and evaluation the individual has recourse to when reflecting on himself, his life and experiences. Hence, the comic becomes the primary tool of philosophy once it steps into the new existential role Kierkegaard designed for it. And humor, as the highest form of the comical, becomes the necessary corrector of pre-Kierkegaardian philosophy because from this point on reflection should incorporate the irrational in the form of doubt about its own certainty. Paraphrasing Shakespeare’s melancholic Dane Prince, who claims, “there are more things in heaven and earth, / Horatio, / than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Hamlet, Act II, Sc. V, 160), the philosopher known as “the melancholy Dane” writes:
Danish Philosophy—if there ever comes to be such a thing—will be different from German philosophy in that it definitely will not begin with nothing or without any presuppositions whatsoever or explain everything by mediating, because, on the contrary, it begins with the proposition that there are many things between heaven and earth that no philosophy has explained. By being incorporated in philosophy, this proposition will provide the necessary corrective and will also cast a humorous-defying warmth over the whole (JP 3, 3299).
From now on, the philosopher should learn to laugh, as well as keep silent when the knight of faith laughs at him: According to Kierkegaard’s ethics of the comic, the most earnest has the last laugh. Accepting this hierarchy involves accepting Kierkegaardian Christianity as the highest life view and the only good life for all individuals.
In conclusion, Kierkegaard’s thought focuses on how the individual exists and ought to exist in the world rather than on trying to describe the world in objective terms. Laughter helps to answer the question Plato believes to be the most fundamental problem of philosophy: How ought one to live (Republic 352d; see Buckley 2003, 71). I suggest that Kierkegaard’s position is that in teaching how to laugh, one is teaching how to live. Because one cannot teach effectively how to live, Kierkegaard forbids himself the latter task, while indulging through pseudonyms in the former. His is an edifying discourse on the comic, which is the key to his teleological philosophy of the stages of existence: “Every existence can at once be defined and assigned to its particular sphere by knowing how it is related to the comical” (CUP1, 462; see 513, 520). This is why Climacus insists that “a sense for the comic” is a vital part of our humanity (CUP1, 304)—an assertion that is contingent on a definite view of that which makes us human.