Chapter 3: Johannes Climacus and Two Kierkegaards
3
Johannes Climacus and Two Kierkegaards
Strategies for Theology and Social Engagement
When Kierkegaard claims, on numerous occasions and in various voices, that he is really engaged in a kind of poetic communication, that the single individual is the sole audience and goal of his writing, that he speaks without authority, and that he is absolutely not interested in politics, I believe we ought to take him seriously. But taking Kierkegaard seriously means not taking his rejection of politics directly. Why not? Kierkegaard has indicated, through what he calls his “maieutic carefulness,” that not only does he care about sociality, but that his authorship is nothing if not an invitation to venture into existence with others as an active, fully engaged ethical-religious subject. This engagement comprises what we can call Kierkegaard’s politics in the soft sense of the term. Certainly, for Kierkegaard this requires deep psychological reckoning with the spiritual or theological dimensions of our human experience. Hence, we can speak of a “political theology.”
My intention here is not to settle a debate about Kierkegaard’s politics. I am not going to argue for the true Kierkegaard, or that Kierkegaard properly belongs to any particular faction recognizable to twenty-first-century political allegiances.95 I do acknowledge that Kierkegaard’s anti-political and anti-democratic direct statements make him susceptible to a conservative and reactionary politics. But I believe that his indirect communication and the long-view of his authorial project seriously undermine the “conservative” reading of Kierkegaard’s more direct statements. Admittedly, then, I will rely on the elasticity of Kierkegaard’s thought to stretch him perhaps beyond his own acknowledged positions, but I am confident that the configuration here remains faithful to Climacus and the two “Kierkegaards” I will highlight.
Søren Kierkegaard’s deliberate use of pseudonyms and genres are often explained in terms of a strategy he deploys for presenting his three spheres, or “stages” of existence.96 In the conventional reading, those differing authorial voices present the inner psychological dynamics of the aesthetic, ethical, and religious life-views. But what I want to develop here is their outward social-political application. Let us assume that we have taken Kierkegaard’s dialectic of inwardness seriously and we are in the process of becoming ethical-religious individuals, then from this perspective those same pseudonyms and genres perform another function. Rather than simply being devices for self-assessment, they address certain social domains, offering strategies for social engagement, social critique, and activism that aim for a diverse society of existential integrity.
Just as Kierkegaard recognized that subjectivity is complex and differentiated, so too does he recognize the need for a complex and differentiated approach to our social communication, engagement, and activism.97 Therefore, I identify four approaches to social engagement that incorporate his religious imperative to work for edification and to provide for polemical critique. Each approach is associated with a particular voice or “Kierkegaard” and each voice presents a strategy for social engagement. (1) Johannes Climacus communicates a pedagogy of becoming from the point of view of a philosopher, or otherwise ethically committed individual who understands the religious life-view. (2) Søren Kierkegaard (1847), in Works of Love, invites us to direct personal engagement with our fellow humans, but also demands vigilance against closed structures of belonging. (3) Søren Kierkegaard (1855) presents us with the direct-action option of provocation and disobedience toward a church triumphant or a divinized political order.
Johannes Climacus (Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, 1846)98
Climacus speaks to philosophers and those who are engaged in historical cultural criticism. If one of the tasks of the theologian is to participate in scholarly and theoretical conversations about the good and the true, then Climacus is a model for this kind of engagement for two simple reasons. First, the presumed task of a “scientific scholarly” academic is the immediate target of his critique.99 Second, he appreciates how scholars and cultural critics are socially influential. When theologians shift their mode of communication, this impacts how a society approaches its significant questions because they are also educators and cultural producers (for the time being, anyway).
Another important facet to Climacus’s discourse is his public relationship to theology. Although he speaks comfortably and knowledgably about Christianity, Climacus does not speak publically from a confessional point of view. He neither assumes Christianity as a starting point nor does he expect a person to arrive at Christianity necessarily as a result of his discourse. Climacus merely explores the question of the meaning of Christianity from the point of view of an interested outsider (CUP, 36–39). This may seem odd to some readers since Christology is central to Philosophical Fragments, and since the matter of becoming a Christian is the stated task of Climacus in the Postscript.
Certainly Climacus is challenging the speculative understanding of history and consciousness, which regards religious faith as a preliminary stage followed by scientific-philosophical comprehension as advanced consciousness. Against this historical-developmental understanding, he argues that faith is not immediacy but the highest passion, that faith is a possibility only after or through understanding—not before or without understanding. However, for reasons I will outline below, according to Climacus the highest social goal is to become ethical-religious subjects (in a secular/immanent sense), and it is this that ought to be the universally human aim of any concrete philosophy. Becoming religious (in the Christian sense) is a further particular qualification taken in inwardness. For Climacus, then, the existential question is really how to become and remain ethically and spiritually interested individuals in a society that lures us toward abstractions and ambivalence, and as it turns out, this is also the live question of political theology. Below I identify, and merely outline, three strategies in the direction of developing ethical-religious personalities, and which lure away from abstraction.
First Climacean Strategy: Commitment to Process and Communication, or Keeping the “Wound of Negativity Open”
Climacus’s philosophical environment comprised of positive thinkers and negative thinkers. Positive thinkers adhere to a scientific-scholarly outlook. They seek to understand existence objectively-empirically, historically, and speculatively. However, Climacus insists these categories cannot be existentially inhabited, and therefore they are ethically and socially secondary to the task of subjectivity (CUP, 197–98). Furthermore, he reminds us that every science is an approximation process and, as far as truth is concerned, objectively uncertain (CUP, 81). And since scientific thinking (positive thinking) “fails to express the state of the knowing subject in existence,” since it is indifferent to subjectivity, it actually describes a “fictive objective subject” (CUP, 81). What worries Climacus is how knowledge systems dissociate from concrete existence. Through the positive approach, Climacus notices, a person “comes to know much about the world, nothing about himself” (CUP, 81). But Climacus is not dismissing scientific and historical knowledge outright. Rather, he is suggesting that insofar as this knowledge is not, or cannot be, appropriated by individuals into their developing worldview then the knowledge is meaningless (CUP, 193).
And yet, to exist purely negatively is also impossible; after all, every person is an existing thing in a world. Therefore a person is just as positive as negative and vice versa (CUP, 85), which means that a person is the tension between the finite and the infinite, is bound by necessities and is open to possibilities. As long as a person exists these tensions cannot be resolved in speculative or positive results because that would mean both existence and the individuals are complete, which they obviously are not (CUP, 192). Therefore, in order to maintain the integrity of the tension, which, for Climacus, is the structure of existence, the subjective existing thinker “always keeps open the wound of negativity” (CUP, 85). But this is not some theoretical operation; it is precisely the passion for existence, and more specifically, the passion for the infinite which keeps the person striving. Politically, it means resisting final solutions or the belief that existing structures of power and belonging are optimal.
The most important question for a person, then, is how to relate to one’s existential situation, or how we relate to our changing knowledge and how we develop in relation to what we are coming-to-understand. “The passion of the infinite, not its content, is the deciding factor, for its content is precisely itself. In this way the subjective ‘how’ and subjectivity are the truth” (CUP, 203). What is at issue is nurturing in oneself and others a passionate relationship to existence, and in Climacus’s language this carries the ethical-religious significance of relating to an absolute idea, or the infinite (CUP, 203, 406–7).
For those who choose subjectivity as the ultimate task, then what it means to teach and to learn becomes intertwined in a very deliberate and artful way with expressing the process of subjectivity. “Whenever the subjective is of importance in knowledge and appropriation is therefore the main point, communication is a work of art” (CUP, 79).
Second Climacean Strategy: Teaching Capability or “Existence-Communication”
What is the art of communication that Climacus challenges the learned educators to emulate? What makes Climacus’s indirect communication an art is that it must stir passion in the other person’s own subjectivity. And the communicator must do this in such a way that demonstrates how communicator and addressee are both in a process of becoming. Climacus offers this analogy:
To stop a man on the street and to stand still in order to speak with him is not as difficult as having to say something to a passerby in passing, without standing still oneself or delaying the other, without wanting to induce him to go the same way, but just urging him to go his own way—and such is the relation between an existing person and an existing person when the communication pertains to the truth as existence-inwardness. (CUP, 277)
Beyond movement we notice that communication ought to avoid controlling or determining the direction of another person’s understanding or appropriation. The communicator urges the others to go their own way. Where subjectivity is concerned the communicative task combines ethics with pedagogy—that is its art. In fact Climacus even indicates that “the secret of communication specifically hinges on setting the other free” (CUP, 74). Sometimes this can involve calculated deception, which, Climacus insists, is particularly necessary when communicating with the scholarly and academically educated who believe they are “in the know.”
The particular danger that besets this category of thinker is a confidence that they have made easy what is genuinely difficult (CUP, 275). For Climacus, this represents a movement from striving to rest, from interestedness to indifference, from passion to ambivalence. And therefore the task of the communicator is to reframe a person’s knowledge in order to reintroduce the difficulty and get the striving apparatus of existence in motion again (CUP, 275–76).
Third Climacean Strategy: Acknowledging Allies
Finally, I would like us to consider the extent to which Climacus makes room for strategic ecumenical and inter-convictional alliances. While Climacus himself explores how an individual strives toward the highest pathos of Christian faith, and while he believes that such faith is indeed the “highest,” he is under no illusion that such a life-view is objectively valid or objectively communicable—to insist otherwise is irreligious and fanaticism. And from a purely psychological and ethical point of view, inwardness itself is the task, regardless of various external expressions. Recall Climacus’s comment about relating to truth subjectively: “If only the how of this relation is in truth, the individual is in truth, even if he in this way were to relate himself to untruth” (CUP, 199). Speaking more inter-culturally about relating to an absolute he writes,
If someone who lives in the midst of Christianity enters . . . the house of God . . . and prays, but prays in untruth, and if someone lives in an idolatrous land but prays with all the passion of infinity, although his eyes are resting on the image of an idol—where, then, is there more truth? The one prays in truth to God although he is worshiping an idol; the other prays in untruth to the true God and is therefore in truth worshiping an idol. (CUP, 201)
And in an often-overlooked passage near the end of Postscript, Climacus disparages the Christian propensity for wanting to defend its doctrine against other doctrines. This propensity reveals two illusions: the illusion that one possesses and relates to sound doctrine, and the illusions held about the doctrines of another. “The most dangerous illusion of all is to become so sure of being [a Christian] that all Christendom must be defended against the Turk—instead of defending the faith within oneself against the illusion about the Turk” (CUP, 608). These passages not only warn against judging the inwardness of other deeply held worldviews, they also invite us to consider the profound affinity between all people who are existentially committed to ethical-religious deepening.
What distinguishes an ethical-religious worldview from an aesthetic worldview is a person’s relation to an absolute telos. Ethical-religious worldviews (whether they adhere to immanent or transcendent cosmologies) are marked by this: that they relate absolutely to an absolute. Aesthetic individuals either relate relatively to an absolute or relate absolutely to what is relative (CUP, 407).
Ethical-religiousness knows that it cannot base its eternal happiness on anything historical and therefore relates itself absolutely to an ideal, a god, or gods. Christian-religiousness follows Ethical-religiousness and understands it to be true, subjectively and objectively, but then it chooses another possibility, against the understanding, to base its eternal happiness on something historical (this is the first paradox)—the Christ event (this is the second paradox, that the so-called historical object it relates to claims to be the eternal in temporality).
However, what is important for our purposes here is what takes place at the level of social and ethical action. And in fact at the level of outward ethical and existential activity there is no discernable difference between the ethical-religious and Christian-religious. Their difference, which is an essential difference of subjectivity, is hidden in inwardness. At the level of social action there are tremendous opportunities for collaboration in the areas of cultural critique and civil emancipation. Both remain committed to nurturing the existential capability in others. They also need each other to be vigilant against the temptation to “succumb to the positive and go roaring into the world in order to recommend, urge, and offer their beautifying negative wisdom for sale” (CUP, 84). Where they work to keep the wound of negativity open and exist in that tension between the infinite and the finite they are allies; where they work indirectly to communicate an absolute relation to an absolute and nurture ethical commitment to existence they are allies.
Finally, we cannot help but notice that Climacean strategies for social engagement are more pedagogical than plans or programs, precisely because what is at stake is everyone’s subjectivity rather than a predetermined objective result. This may irritate the practitioner of realpolitik, but for the theologian who is interested in a substantive deepening of social and ethical life Climacus’s indirect method provides a workable guide.
The Two Kierkegaards (Works of Love, 1847, and The Moment, 1855)
We begin with Kierkegaard and his 1847 Works of Love.100 This form of communication is more directly related to homiletics and devotional material,101 offering inspirational (but challenging) reflections on Scripture. It is intended to spur the reader toward action. As spiritual inspirational material, it is addressed to every religious individual regardless of cognitive or physical capabilities, regardless of social rank or education, and regardless of party-political preferences. The task of love is not easier for some and harder for others, rather it is equally rigorous and equally uplifting for all who undertake it.
However, despite its pleasant title and its edifying purpose Works of Love has received ambivalent reception with respect to its social-political significance. Foremost among the criticisms is Theodor Adorno’s fierce essay.102 Peter George has also warned against using Works of Love as a source for Kierkegaard’s sociality, claiming that other texts do a better job where Works of Love unfortunately fails.103 Recently, however, a number of studies have chosen to highlight the significance of Works of Love in Kierkegaard’s authorship as a counterpoint to the view that his philosophy espouses only a solitary self-sufficient individual.104
Although theologians have given much thought to Augustine’s question (What do I love when I love my God?), Kierkegaard’s question in 1847 could be restated as, “How should I love if I love God?” There are two responses in particular that I will highlight here as the strategies offered by this Kierkegaard. The first is personal attentiveness to people and a real consideration of their actual particular needs and qualities. The second is to maintain vigilant opposition to domineering and exclusive structures of belonging.
First Kierkegaardian Strategy: Being Present To and For Others
How, then, are we to love if we say we love God? Kierkegaard’s discourse is a reflection on 1 John 4:20, which reads, “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for how can he who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, love God, whom he has not seen?” What is not possible is to love God by neglecting the people we see. Kierkegaard dismisses the notion that God is envious and selfishly demands our devotion to the exclusion of the world. This is to change God into “an unreal something, a delusion” (WL, 160). Instead, we are told,
God does not have a share in existence in such a way that he asks for his share for himself; he asks for everything, but as you bring it to him you immediately receive, if I may put it this way, a notice designating where it should be delivered further. (WL, 161)
We must really turn our attention to people because it is “our duty to love the people we see” (WL, 154). Kierkegaard is helping his reader to make sense of the separation that typically exists between the object of love and the love itself. When it is a duty to love the people we see we cannot be distracted by a meticulous quest for the loveable object. Rather, “the task is to find the once given or chosen object—loveable, and to be able to continue to find him loveable no matter how he has changed” (WL, 159). Kierkegaard is offering a variation on the error of loving the unseen. Not only is it a misunderstanding to love the unseen God at the expense of people, but it is also a misunderstanding of love to love some unseen perfections or values at the expense of the actual qualities that exist in specific individuals. In other words, loving the people we see requires that we give up our fanciful illusions about what we think the objects of our regard must be and look like. When we bind ourselves to the duty to love the neighbor, to love the people we see, “then in loving the actual individual person it is important that one does not substitute an imaginary idea of how we think or could wish that this person should be. The one who does this does not love the person he sees but again something unseen, his own idea or something similar” (WL, 164). The warning here is not to make an idol of ourselves. That is, we ought not to make our own image or ideal the ideal that people must conform to if they are to enjoy our association.
When loving the actual people I see, I am inwardly being asked, “Do I hear their story, or am I listening only to a story being told about them, a story I am creating about them?” Kierkegaard is mining as much as he can from the verb, to see, but it seems impossible to follow through on what Kierkegaard is developing here unless there are also sincere interactions involving attentive listening and the space for development, which indirect communication provides. But in everything, avoid controlling another person’s story. And this means incorporating the complexity of others into how we love the actual people we see.
Second Kierkegaardian Strategy: Opposing Domineering and Closed Structures of Belonging and Power
Kierkegaard is typically not regarded as someone who addresses structural questions in society, except to reject those questions as subjectively diminishing. For those who believe this is a narrow interpretation of Kierkegaard, Two Ages is often used as the basis for a Kierkegaardian social critique.105 However, within the mostly direct communication of Works of Love, I notice an indirect warning and opposition to socially segregated, closed, and domineering social formations. This is most evident in the discourse titled “Love Does Not Seek Its Own.”
In this discourse, Kierkegaard contrasts what he calls “small-mindedness” with a genuinely loving approach. Elsewhere we read, “Love is not a being-for-itself quality but a quality by which or in which you are for others” (WL, 223). Now we are shown a little more of what that looks like. Love, we are told, does not seek its own. Instead, “the truly loving one . . . loves every human being according to his distinctiveness; but ‘his distinctiveness’ is what for him is his own that is, the loving one does not seek his own; quite the opposite, he loves what is the other’s own” (WL, 269). What Kierkegaard means by “one’s own” is distinctiveness, and what he says about distinctiveness in this discourse involves a rather mystical explanation of “God’s gift by which he gives being to me . . . gives being to all” (WL, 271). But what he means more precisely by distinctiveness is a person’s way through their existential process. Or, it is their ethical-religious self-expression. In Climacus’s terminology distinctiveness is their existence-communication. By contrast, “the small-minded person has clung to a very specific shape and form that he calls his own; he seeks only that, can love only that” (WL, 272).
The loving way, which is our guide for social life, looks for diversity and open associations in the hope of nurturing distinctiveness. For those who are committed to seeking the others’ own good, “no strange distinctiveness is a refutation but rather a confirmation or one more demonstration” of God’s gift of distinctiveness” (WL, 272). Alternatively, the small-minded view looks for similarity of one’s own and forms closed associations or domineering associations in the hope of designing a comfortable homogeneity. For small-mindedness, “every distinctiveness is a refutation [of itself, of its own]; therefore it feels a clammy, uncomfortable anxiety upon seeing an unfamiliar distinctiveness, and nothing is more important for it than to get rid of it” (WL, 272). This anxiety is characteristic of every prejudice we are familiar with including racism, sexism, ableism, heterosexism, nationalism, or any combination.
What is important here is how Kierkegaard depicts small-mindedness as a social pathology and not simply a personal psychological expression. He notices that “small-mindedness holds together with small-mindedness,” and this “alliance is then praised as the highest love, as true friendship, as true, loyal, honest harmony” (WL, 272). We can infer from the tone of this discourse that the behavior of a domineering and small-minded individual is interchangeable with the behavior of alliances in small-mindedness. Kierkegaard goes on to list ways this small-mindedness attempts to transform or extinguish any alien distinctiveness: it claims God’s support for its own vision, it claims that its demand for conformity is an altruistic attempt to include people in the truth, and it keeps a lookout for the slightest infraction in order to demonstrate the deficiency of an alien distinctiveness (WL, 272–73).
Based on this discourse, structures of belonging that demand conformity to the dominant or even majority identity are rejected as universalized forms of selfish self-love. In fact, this assessment of small-mindedness stands as a critique of any identity politics that demands association or dissociation based on likeness to a definite, recognizable, and authorized pattern. Populist-nationalist movements are exposed as small-mindedness, and so are race, class, and gender prejudices. This is not to say that these identities don’t exist or don’t bear on our distinctiveness, but those identities do not constitute the horizon of our belonging and they cannot shield us from our responsibility to each other.106 Therefore, rather than affirming a politics of identity Kierkegaard encourages us toward a more open politics of encounter and interaction and risk.
Understandably, for some readers this is a fragile interpretation given that Works of Love also contains the direct statements that “Christianity turns our attention completely away from the external” (WL, 376), that “Christianity does not want to make changes in externals” (WL, 139). And what is more devastating is how this last passage is used by Kierkegaard to dismiss societal shifts toward the political and legal emancipation of women. But in those and other similar cases Kierkegaard contravenes the spirit of his own reflections and the Scriptures he bases them on.
Kierkegaard-1847’s ethic of love, while certainly personalistic, also implies unavoidable sociological demands: (a) it demands an egalitarian ethic, (b) the pursuit of a common good that recognizes diversity rather than sameness as essential to the good, (c) a personal and social rejection of self-serving or domineering power, and (d) replacing the master/slave dynamic with a lover/beloved (or seducer/seduced) relationship.
If Climacus’s strategy is to direct the academic’s thinking toward the concrete, to think existence and communicate existence, then Kierkegaard-1847’s strategy is to show what it looks like to do the concrete task religiously assigned to one. This is what Merold Westphal has termed Religiousness C—the mode of existence that would follow Climacus’s analysis into Christian social praxis.107 Strategically the task is to uphold diversity and to pay attention to its intricacies, particularly the distinctiveness of individuals.
Third Kierkegaardian Strategy: Public Activism and Disobedience108
“When the castle door of inwardness has long been shut and finally is opened, it does not move noiselessly like an apartment door which swings on hinges” (KAUC, 81). This is how Kierkegaard explained to a friend why he was embarking on such an outspoken and radical attack on nineteenth-century Christendom. Here, he expresses the need for a communicative strategy that is not only outwardly active, but which also must be loud and disruptive. The articles published in Fedrelandet, and his self-published pamphlet The Moment (Øieblikket), reveals an activist Kierkegaard whose aim, it appears, is to arouse public opposition to the state and ecclesiastical authority of Denmark. But the strategy of this Kierkegaard also reveals an essential flaw that we can avoid, partly because Climacus and Kierkegaard-1847 have warned us.
There is widespread and ongoing debate about the motives, aims, and outcomes of Kierkegaard’s “Attack” campaign against Danish Christendom in 1855. Placing Kierkegaard’s action within the contemporary politics of his age is fraught with complications, but it was a decisively political form of activism. He knew that his audience was the entire Danish public and that his targets were the political class, consisting of bourgeois liberal officials (legal, economic, and legislative), Danish nationalists, and most importantly, the clergy of the Danish People’s Church. As George Pattison puts it, for Kierkegaard-1855, “the Church is simply a hypocritical front” because “it sought to combine being an institution serving bourgeois and national self-satisfaction whilst claiming also to be the Church of Jesus Christ.”109 In Christendom, existential and spiritual struggle in Christianity is replaced by a kind of religious cultural custom, propriety, and good taste. And the Christian association with the oppressed (Kierkegaard uses “lowly”) and marginalized had been replaced by wealth, high cultural esteem, and state power.
Others have taken Kierkegaard’s attack on the bourgeois character of Christendom (church and state) more seriously as what makes Kierkegaard’s particular action more broadly applicable to twentieth- and twenty-first-century political theology.110 Pattison is also sympathetic to these readings, with the proviso of some important cautions and questions.111 I am convinced that Kierkegaard-1855’s attack on the church absolutely includes an equal attack on bourgeois ethics, politics, and religiosity. The question remains, what alternative ideology are we left with if we follow Kierkegaard’s critique? I will not venture an answer here.
What is important here is not the content of his attack (which contains unnecessary vitriol and hyperbole) but the form. Kierkegaard-1855’s actions demonstrate his conviction that living Christianly or Socratically necessarily collides with an established order. He also understood that direct action means being prepared to risk reputation and position, and even face real danger.112 Tactically, Kierkegaard-1855 utilizes both popular newspapers and self-published pamphlets for public distribution in order to foment public anger at the state-church arrangement. Second, he called for a complete public boycott of the Danish People’s Church, which included for him refusing to receive communion from a priest when he was dying.
From Kierkegaard-1855 we learn that there is indeed a “moment” (Øieblikket) when our words and technique must align with actions in the world, and that one must be prepared to face the consequences of opposition.113 But Kierkegaard-1855 is also a case study in “what not to do.” The problem for me is not that his aims are too radical or his claims unjustified. None of that scandalizes me. Neither is the content of his campaign inconsistent with the critiques of earlier Kierkegaards and pseudonyms. The error is not even in the directness of the message or the public medium of pamphleteering. The error, as I read it, was simply that Kierkegaard-1855 believed he was without any allies. Even more disappointing is that this Kierkegaard seemed to believe having an ally would undermine his truth and conviction. This solitary battle can therefore just as easily be interpreted as the tantrum of an eccentric rather than an important political and spiritual challenge to the existing social order. It also calls into question whether he actually believed that another social-spiritual reality was possible, because when people form communities of opposition and emancipation they demonstrate their ideals even if their revolutions fail. The ideal that Kierkegaard-1855 remains true to is the ideal of the Socratic citizen, the gadfly.114 As it stands, it is no wonder that he became the hero of twentieth-century reactionary and fascist theorists—he appears a singular soul who dares to oppose bourgeois-liberal authority.
However, had the attack campaign been waged in association with Climacean allies and in the spirit of forging loving, open, associations of neighbors, then he could have allowed himself to be part of something, a movement, that demonstrates those ideals. In the end, Keirkegaard-1855 failed to be a good reader of Kierkegaards and pseudonyms prior to 1850. But we are able, with imagination and courage, to bring these strategies together.
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95. For an overview and critical analysis of Kierkegaard’s contribution to a “politics of action” in the twentieth century, see Pattison, Kierkegaard and the Quest for Unambiguous Life, 86–114.
96. Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood, 92.
97. See Mooney, “Pseudonyms,” 191–210. Mooney’s essay speaks to the intricacies, possibilities, and dilemmas arising from Kierkegaard’s pseudonymity without really breaching its wider sociological opportunities.
98. Citations to Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript will be indicated in the text by (CUP).
99. Edward F. Mooney opts for “Unscholarly Postscript” rather than the more common translation, “Unscientific Postscript” (Mooney, “Pseudonyms,” 199). In both cases, the point is to demonstrate how systematic philosophy is ultimately incapable of working through the ethical-religious predicament of existing human beings. But what Mooney fails to acknowledge here is that Climacus employs scholarly technique and language—albeit as a jazz musician reverentially undermines musical convention.
100. Citations for Kierkegaard’s Works of Love will be indicated in the text by (WL).
101. While Kierkegaard utilized this genre earlier in the authorship, 1847 marks renewed attention to the genre and it coincides with his reading of Luther and Thomas à Kempis. See Hinkson, “Luther and Kierkegaard,” 27–45; Podmore, “Lightning,” 562–78; Rasmussen, “Thomas à Kempis,” 289–98.
102. Adorno, “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,” 413–29.
103. George, “Something Anti-Social,” 70–81.
104. Formidable examples of this kind of defense can be found in Evans, Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love (2004); Ferreira, Love’s Grateful Striving (2001); Hall, Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love (2002).
105. See Marsh, “Marx and Kierkegaard,” 155–74; Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society, 43–59; Tilley, “Kierkegaard’s Social Theory,” 944–59.
106. It is worth thinking about how “responsibility” may be very different depending on one’s societal “distinctiveness.” The responsibility of someone from a historically dispossessed or oppressed group may involve embodied resistance to dominant power and critique of those from a historically oppressing group. And the responsibility of those from a historically domineering group may involve difficult words of repentance, genuine acts of abdication, or reparations.
107. Westphal, “Kierkegaard’s Religiousness C,” 535–48.
108. Citations to Kierkegaard’s Attack upon “Christendom” will be indicated in the text by (KAUC).
109. Pattison, Kierkegaard and the Quest for Unambiguous Life, 111–12.
110. M. J. Matuštík (1993); Michael Plekon (1983); Bartholomew Ryan (2014); Merold Westphal (1991).
111. Pattison, Kierkegaard and the Quest for Unambiguous Life, 109.
112. Kierkegaard himself never faced the violence of state power, but he noticed and deplored how the church did employ the power of the police (Kierkegaard, Attack upon “Christendom,” 140).
113. Being willing to face consequences is not the same as accepting them.
114. Pattison, Kierkegaard and the Quest for Unambiguous Life, 110.