Introduction
Introduction
The very word parable carries with it intriguing and memorable images in the history of western thought—of a good Samaritan, of a dark cave in which vague shadows dance on the wall (Plato), of a field mouse and a city mouse (Luther), of Bunyan’s pilgrim, of Nietzsche’s “ugliest man,” Kafka’s castle, Gide’s Theseus, and John Hick’s celestial travelers. There can be no doubt that the western philosophical tradition has turned perennially to parable as a means of communicating moral and spiritual insight.
No writer in that tradition has made more persistent use of parables, stories, and narrative metaphors than has Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), whose gift of storytelling has imprinted unforgettable images on our minds. The aim of this volume is to bring together a careful selection of these stories for edification, enjoyment, and critical examination. The essential conviction underlying this effort is that Kierkegaard ranks among the best of the great parabolists of the western tradition.
The mind of Kierkegaard has been kept alive in the common memory more by his parables than any other part of his authorship. Like all good parables, they have developed an oral tradition. Do not be surprised if you find here parables that you have heard imperfectly retold or partially revised. Now the reader can track down the original.
That these parables belong to the central tradition of western parable writing is commonly acknowledged. What is less well known is that Kierkegaard is one of the few writers in that tradition who was himself a literary critic, who himself offered a detailed theory of (indirect) communication that accounted for his writing in parable and story form under pseudonyms, and who clearly envisioned parabolic communication as an integral part of his philosophical method.
Kierkegaard’s authorship is so vast and his method so complex that the ordinary reader is easily intimidated by it. Here, instead, we have a little book that anyone can read, that is not intimidating, yet reveals the central energies of his work as an author.
When we speak of Kierkegaard’s parables, what in particular do we have In mind? Instead of answering abstractly, it is best to offer an example:
There was a man whose chatter certain circumstances made it necessary for me to listen to. At every opportunity he was ready with a little philosophical lecture, a very tiresome harangue. Almost in despair, I suddenly discovered that he perspired copiously when talking. I saw the pearls of sweat gather on his brow, unite to form a stream, glide down his nose, and hang at the extreme point of his nose in a drop-shaped body. From the moment of making this discovery, all was changed. I even took pleasure in inciting him to begin his philosophical instruction, merely to observe the perspiration on his brow and at the end of his nose.
This story is exemplary of Kierkegaard’s parables, characterized as it is by an unexpected reversal, a condensed plot, and easy memorability for oral transmission. This parable in fact is a précis in story form of the whole essay on “the rotation method” in which it appears. Kierkegaard often caps off a longer essay by telling a story that nails down the point.
Because Kierkegaard’s authorship is vast, searching for the hundreds of parables in his writing is like looking for veins of gold in a mountain. Having taught a seminar on Kierkegaard to graduate students for many years, I have witnessed this frequent dilemma: The reader will come across a beautiful parable embedded in the text, experience it powerfully, a month later remember it in vague outline, and two months later begin searching for it to no avail. The indices do not help. So the vein of gold remains hidden in the mountain. This repeated experience motivated me years ago to begin my own collection of parables that had particular significance for the study of Kierkegaard and for the edification of human experience. Thus a major motivation for this collection is the presentation of a well-indexed selection of his parables both for new and old readers and for literary and philosophical criticism.
Why do we read Kierkegaard’s parables and why do they merit philosophical attention? Is it because they are like maddening puzzles daring some attempted solution ? Is it because the problems they address drive to the depths of ordinary human experience? Or are they mere entertainment, revealing the comic side of human pretenses—subtle poetry, with virtually inexhaustible levels of meaning? Wherever the weight of the answer is to fall, anyone who lives with these parables for awhile experiences both their power and their beauty. Soon you realize that it is not you who are interpreting the parable but the parable that is interpreting you.
Storytelling was a preoccupation of Kierkegaard, whether in his private journals or edifying discourses or psychological experiments, or in the most closely reasoned philosophical dialect. What is less evident is why storytelling was so crucial to his whole authorship and intrinsic to his method of indirect communication. It can be said of Kierkegaard as it was said of Jesus, that “indeed he said nothing to them without a parable” (Matthew 13:34). Kierkegaard had a metaphoric mind. He communicated, and apparently thought, in dramaturgic images. One has the impression that it would have been impossible for him to communicate meaningfully in any other way, for it is difficult to find a long stretch of his writing where he does not take the reader aside and say: I will show you a picture of what I mean. He then presents the picture in the form of a brief story of spare characterization and surprising reversal, with the underlying intent of moral or spiritual illumination, which is precisely the classical definition of a parable.
The use of parables served Kierkegaard’s aims as an author for at least five reasons, the first of which Kierkegaard himself mentions as early as 1842, when he says that this approach supplies him an excellent weapon in his philosophical-polemical arsenal. Using parables places his philosophical intentions in stark contrast to the stilted, non-experiential Hegelian logic against which he is struggling. In one of his earliest references to his “method of story-telling,” in Johannes Climacus, he contrasts its simplicity with the labyrinthine confusions of “modern philosophy”:
He who supposes that philosophy has never in the world been so near to solving its problem (which is the revealing of all secrets) as now, may well feel it odd, affected, offensive that I choose this method of story-telling, and do not, in my humble way, lend a hand with putting the copingstone on the System. On the other hand, he who is convinced that philosophy has never been so perverted as now, so confused, in spite of all its definitions, so entirely to be likened to the weather last winter when we heard what had never been heard before, men crying mussels and prawns in such a way that he who attended to a particular cry might at one time think it was winter, at another time spring, at another time midsummer; while he who paid attention to all these cries at once might think that Nature had become all muddled up, and the world could not continue till Easter—he will certainly think it right that I should try by means of this story-telling method, to counteract the abominable falsity which is the mark of modern philosophy; a philosophy which is speedily distinguished from older philosophy by its discovery of the ridiculousness of doing what one said one did or had done—he I say will find this story-telling method appropriate, and will only be sorry, as I am, that the person who begins this task has not greater authority than I have.
Like Socrates’, Kierkegaard’s philosophical quest was full of strife. So it is not surprising that he, like Socrates, so frequently elects to disarm his opponents with a seemingly innocuous story. “In its most characteristic use,” wrote A. T. Cadoux, “the parable is a weapon of controversy, not shaped like a sonnet in undisturbed concentration, but improvised in conflict to meet an unpremeditated situation. And with this handicap it has at its best a delicacy and complexity of aptitudes showing a range of mind and genius of association beyond that required for the similies and metaphors of other poetic compositions.” It is with such aptitude and genius that Kierkegaard enlists the parable so effectively as a weapon of philosophical conflict.
A second reason why Kierkegaard turns so often to storytelling is that he quite evidently relishes meeting his reader in this way. He takes delight in leading his readers along a path, only to arrive at an unexpected junction where he suddenly leaves them to make a decision about a set of events. There is a play element in all good parable writing. Kierkegaard’s view of play, however, is more akin to a fairly rough contact sport. “Literature should not be a nursing home for cripples,” Kierkegaard wrote in 1843, “but a playground for healthy, happy, thriving, smiling, well-developed children of verve, finely formed, whole, satisfied beings, each one of whom is the very image of his mother and has his father’s vitality— not the abortions of weak desires, not the refuse of afterbirth.”
What does the story format do for Kierkegaard’s psychology and philosophy that could not be easily done by analytical discourse or direct, objective information? It disarms the reader, putting him or her in a non-defensive, receptive frame of mind that allows the author to enter more deeply into personal communication with the reader. Kierkegaard found that a distinct advantage of parabolic communication is that it does not ask for any assent to systematic presuppositions or for any sacrifice of intellect, nor does it require commitment to any logical rules of procedure. It rather starts concretely with commonly experienced images presented benignly in the form of a narrative, allowing the readers to compare that story with their own perceptions. The readers are in a sense taken unawares into potentially new levels of insight when they identify vicariously first with the character who poses the dilemma and then with the developing circumstances of the plot that metaphorically bestows some unexpected angle of vision on the dilemma. So the readers often do not quite grasp what has hit them in this fantasized situation until they move more deeply into the self-examination that the parable elicits and requires. Thus, it should be remembered that, however witty these stories may be, Kierkegaard’s purpose was not simply to amuse, but to edify, to upbuild (opbygge), to draw his readers into self-awareness, to sensitize moral and spiritual consciousness to the task and gift of authentic human existence.
This leads us to our third and most substantive reason why parabolic communication is so central to Kierkegaard’s authorship: The story format was necessary for implementing his highly explicit theory and method of indirect communication, which was essential to the purpose of his writing. If subjectivity (or personal existence, or becoming oneself) is truth, which is Kierkegaard’s premise (“the truth exists only in the process of becoming, in the process of appropriation”), then the communication of truth must be quite different from the objective presentation of data or information. Such an “indirect” communication requires a “double reflection”: on the one hand the communicator is imaginatively presenting alternative possibilities of self-understanding that call for decision (“either/or”) by the reader; on the other hand the communicator is intensively concerned about what Kierkegaard calls “the appropriation process,” that is, the means by which the reader grasps his or her own human possibilities. “An example of such indirect communication is, 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.” This is exactly what the parables require of readers, that they untie the knot for themselves; and for this reason I deliberately make no attempt to write a standard or allegedly “correct” commentary on each parable, since each parable aims to challenge the subjective consciousness of the individual reader in its own way.
We have in Kierkegaard’s writings (especially the Journals and Papers, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Training in Christianity, and The Point of View of My Work as an Author) a detailed account of his own understanding of his indirect communication, along with an elaborate rationale for his use of pseudonyms. The parables clearly fall into Kierkegaard’s category of indirect communication, because they confront us with a choice between possibilities of self-understanding, so that in the process of having to choose, we discover ourselves, or something of ourselves. Parable is indirect both because it tends to “deceive the hearer into the truth,” and because it inconspicuously requires us to make imaginative choices, so that in doing so we are in some sense offered the possibility of more fully choosing to become ourselves.
That this task of indirect communication is exceedingly difficult is recognized by Kierkegaard in this analogy: “To stop a man on the street and stand still while talking to him, is not so difficult as to say something to a passer-by in passing, without standing still and without delaying the other, without attempting to persuade him to go the same way, but giving him instead an impulse to go precisely his own way. Such is the relation between one existing individual and another, when the communication concerns the truth as existential inwardness.”
The task of the parabolist is made even more difficult by the clear moral awareness that the ethical communicator is required “to be what he teaches!” Furthermore, his personal address must be “as manifold as the opposites he holds in combination. . . . His form must first and last relate itself to existence, and in this connection he will have at his disposal the poetic, the ethical, the dialectical, and the religious.” This is why the parables of Kierkegaard are an interdisciplinary event. They must be broadly imaginative, yet narrowly focused in the service of the concrete, subjective existence of the hearer. Such an author “has only a single scene, existence, and he has nothing to do with beautiful valleys and the like. His scene is not the fairyland of the imagination, where the poet’s love evokes the perfect; nor is the scene in England, and the task to make sure of local color and historical exactness. His scene is—inwardness in existing as a human being.”
Kierkegaard’s parables aim not merely at a change of mind but a change of will. Kierkegaard does not tell his parables with the expectation that his hearers will experience a casual illumination or fascination, but rather that they might say to themselves, “Aha! I know how that is and it makes a difference in the way I understand myself and make fundamental choices!” If the parable is functioning maximally, “the spectators become participants, not because they want to necessarily, or simply have ‘gotten the point,’ but because they have, for the moment, dost control,’ or as the new hermeneuts say, ‘been interpreted.’ ”
The fourth reason that parables served Kierkegaard’s aims follows as a consequence of the third. “All communcation of knowledge is direct communication,” wrote Kierkegaard. “All communication of capability is indirect communication.” But what does Kierkegaard mean when he suggests that these stories intend to communicate a capability, rather than information ? What kinds of capabilities do they communicate ?
They communicate the capability of an altered vision of oneself that places the reader in an intensified internal self-relation. What Kierkegaard hoped from his parables is that they would draw or entice, even seduce in some instances, the individual into more profound extensions of self-awareness, and into a more fundamental affirmation of oneself as an unresolvable tension between possibility and necessity, finitude and infinitude, body and spirit.
Kierkegaard’s parables intend to communicate an enriched capacity for self-examination leading to increased moral sensitivity and intensified spirituality. They offer his readers a potential gift, the acceptance of which requires their participation. A parable is not like an easily recognized object that is handed to someone to use, but like a gift that one first needs to open and then has to figure out what to do with it. The parables seek to facilitate a capability that can only be set in motion by the act of self-discovery, but that capability may remain dormant unless the self is jolted out of fixed behavioral routines, which the parables powerfully challenge.
A good parable, then, does not merely serve as an illustrative point, one that could easily be omitted from the text without being missed, but rather suddenly makes the larger intent of the text transparent. At the least it introduces new possibilities of self-understanding through its metaphor; at best it alters the consciousness of the reader.
Could Kierkegaard have accomplished such a change of consciousness without his parables and stories? It is doubtful. At least it is clear that in practice he constantly returns to them and in theory views indirect communication as a central requirement of his authorship. Direct communication fails to communicate capability, even though it may succeed very well in communicating information. This is why the parables are pivotal for the whole of Kierkegaard’s effort, because they seek to communicate to readers their own capacity to reach into their own experience with heightened self-awareness, to challenge them to come alive, to become themselves, to become persons, individuals in the richest sense. So the parables seek intensely to actualize what the whole authorship is after: to facilitate the birth of selfhood.
However, can these stories stand on their own as literature, or are they so deeply enmeshed in their context that they intrinsically resist anthologizing ? The answer to this question leads us directly into the fifth reason why the parables deserve special attention: they are by the author’s intention designed to serve oral tradition, and therefore in some measure they are able to stand alone as credible, and even astonishingly beautiful, literary entities.
In order to qualify as a parable in a literary sense, a story must have aesthetic balance, some trenchant elements of metaphorical imagination, brevity and economy, limited development of characterization, and a concentrated plot with a powerful “twist” or reversal of insight. In addition to fulfilling these criteria, a parable has to undergo some intergenerational testing, that is, must survive in the living memory of at least two or three generations.
On what grounds, then, do we argue that Kierkegaard’s parables may be viewed as separable entitles and brought into a general collection ? The answer must be offered basically on generic and literary grounds. As a distinctive literary genre, the parable, by definition, is intended to be remembered, to lend itself to oral retelling. Memorability is thus a crucial criterion for any parable. Therefore an astute writer of parables has precisely in mind the detachability of the parable from its original context, otherwise his purpose is defeated. If, before telling or commenting upon the parable of the prodigal son, one were required to place it in its original historical context, the parable would seldom be told or remembered. But, it has been remembered, and it has been appropriated in and out of many historical contexts, often in ignorance of its original context. I am not hereby approving of historical ignorance vis-à-vis parables, and, in fact, this collection of Kierkegaard’s parables provides biographical information and interpretive assistance to the reader in notes where necessary, particularly in the case of several enigmatic parables. But most of the parables can stand alone, and do.
This memorability criterion has been an influential standard for this selection. Out of many hundreds of parables I have selected only a few, and avid Kierkegaard readers will wish that many more could have been included. (For them a list of omitted parables appears as an appendix, with English and Danish text references.) But the parables included here are those, in my judgment, most worthy of remembering and telling, with good reversal, rich imagery, and concise thematic development. For parables are distinguished from novels or short shories precisely at this point: they direct themselves particularly to memory, oral repetition, and adaptation.
I have set forth five reasons why these parables play such a crucial role in Kierkegaard’s authorship : they serve as valuable polemical weapons for combat with the philosophical assumptions of his day; Kierkegaard has an unremitting love, and an extraordinary gift, for story-telling that manifests itself in every aspect of his multifaceted career as a writer; the story format is necessary for implementing his highly explicit method of indirect communication, which he regards as a central feature of his entire authorship; through the parables he seeks to actualize what the whole authorship is after, to facilitate the birth of selfhood; and of all his many different kinds of writing, the parables lend themselves most easily to memory and oral repetition.
But do these stories indeed refract the central beam of light of Kierkegaard’s authorship ? This will be debated by scholars and critics. Rather than attempting to settle the issue, the most this volume can do is offer a better frame of reference for its pursuit by gathering for the first time some of the parables in a single collection for critical examination as well as for enjoyment and instruction. My own opinion is that these parables for the most part stand on their own as enduring literary gems, explosive multicolored bursts of moral and spiritual illumination on the darkened skies of modernity, intriguing puzzles that invite the ordinary reader’s most intense reflection and extended contemplation. They do not need a committee of experts to provide an elaborate apparatus of interpretation or historical excursi or hints for allegorization. They only need you, the reader, to read them, preferably aloud (“My dear reader: If it be possible, read aloud!”), yet in the silence of deepening interiority.
Either/Or (hereafter E/O), I, p. 295.
Johannes Climacus or De omnibus dubitandum est, and A Sermon, p. 102.
A. T. Cadoux, The Parables of Jesus, p. 13.
Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers (hereafter JP, with Papirer entry reference in parenthesis), I, p. 57 (IV A 130).
Concluding Unscientific Postscript (hereafter CUP), p. 72.
JP, I, pp. 274ff (VIII2 B 8I).
Training in Christianity (hereafter TC), pp. 132-33.
JP, I, p. 288 (VIII2 B 85).
CUP, p. 247.
JP, I, p. 287 (VIII2 B 85).
CUP, p. 319.
CUP, pp. 319-20.
Sallie Teselle, Speaking in Parables, p. 79.
JP, I, p. 282 (VIII B 83).
For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourselves! and Three Discourses, p. 29.