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Chapter Seven The Ghost of Irony in Kierkegaard’s Authorship The aim of this study is to offer an interpretation of On the Concept of Irony which focuses on Kierkegaard’s conception of irony as an existential position or worldview. Because much recent research has mined On the Concept of Irony in search of Kierkegaard’s contribution to a theory of literary irony, the focus of this study departs in many respects from those of its immediate predecessors. Most importantly, I suggest that Kierkegaard’s analysis of irony is centered on existential consequences associated with it. Since critics in Kierkegaard’s time had already noted that his analysis of irony is as much an investigation of ethics as it is aesthetics, this reading returns to an earlier understanding of irony and it is my hope that it brings to the fore some of the issues implicit in On the Concept of Irony that have been neglected. Although the focus of this study is On the Concept of Irony, I am also hopeful that the results of this research can be used as a point of departure for future studies of Kierkegaard’s other works. In particular, I would like to suggest that an existential reading of On the Concept of Irony underscores themes that recur throughout the authorship, including problems like finding meaningful practical guidelines in the finite world, closing oneself off from relationships with the other, and opening oneself to a divine power. For this reason, I think that the results of this analysis of On the Concept of Irony can be helpful in interpreting Kierkegaard’s corpus. In this concluding chapter, I present both an overview of the results of this study and offer examples of how these findings can contribute to Kierkegaard studies in general. In section one, I summarize what I take to be the essential arguments in each chapter, focusing on the implicit existential movements of irony. In section two of this chapter, I turn my attention to other works, including Either/Or, and some that might not seem to be directly related to On the Concept of Irony, including
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Fear and Trembling. I suggest not only that the major theme in Fear and Trembling, for examble—regaining finitude though the movement of faith—is a development of themes from Kierkegaard’s dissertation, but that the pseudonymous author, Johannes de silentio, is acutely aware of the problem of “closedness and openness.” One might say that de silentio continues the investigation of the “religious” consciousness that was identified by Kierkegaard as the key in On the Concept of Irony to a genuine reconciliation with actuality. Finally, I conclude with some thoughts about one of Kierkegaard’s later works, The Sickness unto Death.
I. A Glance at the Foregoing Chapters
In order to understand Kierkegaard’s strategy for treating irony as an existential position, it was necessary at the outset to provide an interpretation of the general structure of this complicated book which begins as a detailed philological study of the historical Socrates and ends as a loosely-organized diatribe against romantic literature. I argued in “Chapter One” that Kierkegaard has dual aims in his text, one historical and another existential. With regard to the historical, he employs a historical-philosophical methodology which shares many of the features of a Hegelian analysis of history. At least on the surface, one of Kierkegaard’s aims is to give a philosophical account of Socrates’ contributions to world-history. While Kierkegaard is ambivalent or perhaps even unconcerned about the degree to which his project is consonant with a strictly Hegelian approach to history, he is nonetheless insistent that he has more accurately and persuasively identified the key to interpreting Socrates’ activity and ultimately his personality: Socrates was an “ironist,” he says, and contributed to world-history the possibility of seeing the world through ironic lenses. When Kierkegaard writes that Socrates is an ironist, he does not mean that Socrates ironically acted as if he were ignorant about philosophically important matters. As Kierkegaard sees it, the irony which permeated Socrates’ speech and behavior was grounded in a genuine ignorance. Socrates’ irony is characterized as a thoroughgoing skepticism with regard to the culturally established “order of things.” Whether he knew it or not, Socrates’ interrogating conversations with his contemporaries illustrated a novel critical approach to the authority of the state. For
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Socrates showed that public laws, traditions and religious beliefs need not be taken as the authoritative source for defining human purposes and ends. Socrates showed that an individual also had the possibility to look inward to find a guide for practical activity. In this sense, Kierkegaard can argue that Socrates contributed a rudimentary understanding of “subjectivity” to world-history. Kierkegaard has a second aim with his investigation of Socrates, however. Even more important for him than defining Socrates’ place in world-history is getting an accurate picture of how the ironic worldview is instantiated in Socrates’ personality. As we saw in “Chapter Two” of this study, Socrates is said to inhabit an existential no-man’s-land. On the one hand, he is isolated from his cultural environment because he cannot accept its values as personally binding. He simply cannot take seriously the social and political goals of Athenian culture. On the other hand, he has not discovered any other standard which could provide him with purpose or direction. Nor is he interested in finding new ethical guidelines. Socrates is happy to hover in the nihilistic void of ignorance and, crucially, he is said to house this emptiness within himself. Kierkegaard’s Socrates is in no way an ethical hero who consciously argues for the sake of bringing a consciousness of the Good to light. Socrates is said to be a mere critic who destroys all conceptions of truth. One might say that the “result” of this historical investigation in “Part One” of the dissertation is a psychological characterization of the ironic personality. For with this in hand, Kierkegaard then subjects the ironic worldview to an existential analysis in “Part Two.” Here he turns his attention to contemporary conceptions of irony and attempts to show how irony can be viewed as both truth and untruth. In the course of his existential assessment of irony in “Part Two,” Kierkegaard sketches more clearly what we might call the “movements of irony”—and in doing so, outlines a problem that exercises him throughout his authorship. First, he suggests that the consciousness of irony results in an alienation from a life of immediacy. The ironist, who recognizes that ethical custom and inherited habits of mind are ultimately arbitrary, frees him- or herself from serious engagement with others and becomes psychologically “isolated” from his or her world. In “Chapter Three” of this study, we saw that Kierkegaard defines irony in
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terms of the subject’s relation—or mis-relation—to his or her objective world. The more extreme the discontinuity between the individual and the world, the more thorough the irony. Like Socrates, the worldview of “pure irony” is one in which the values of the objective world mean nothing. The ironic individual is alone, uncommitted to any of the rules that govern human interaction or personal consistency. The ironist who sees the world through the lenses of pure irony has removed him- or herself from a commitment to his or her “life conditions” and “relationships”: the ironist has broken with “actuality.” As far as this first movement of isolation goes, Kierkegaard insists that it is healthy. In fact, he insists it is necessary for every authentic human life. With this he means that one can never become a self or develop a personality without first becoming radically aware of oneself as a subject. The psychological recognition that one is ultimately completely alone, apparently free from all merely inherited ethical rules and purposes, is a necessary existential insight, he suggests. This is the “truth” of irony—first made possible by Socrates’ contribution to world-history. At the same time, Kierkegaard also notes that irony is “untruth”: it is “the way,” he writes, but not the “truth.” Kierkegaard implies here that another movement is necessary if the full development of personality is to be realized; irony must be overcome. In essence, the movement of the ironic individual away from actuality has hollowed out actuality. It has replaced an immediate world with “nothing.” Kierkegaard presupposes that selfhood can never be achieved if this nihilistic vision continues to guide one’s activity. The finite world must become re-enchanted; finite goals and tasks must be viewed as if there were some permanent non-finite purposes behind them. In short, the isolated individual must become “reconciled with actuality.” Irony brings one, then, to an existential crossroads: Kierkegaard suggests that, in the strict sense, one cannot live without some sort of guidelines. In order to act at all, one must find a way to overcome the ironic insight that there are no objective criteria for valuing one choice over another. One can either 1) close oneself off from sources that originate outside one’s own will, and thus consult oneself in search of purpose—even if that purpose is to maintain a negative freedom from obligation, as is the case with many of Kierkegaard’s ironic figures. Or one can 2) open oneself to another possible source, the divine. It is the
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former option, says Kierkegaard, that romantic irony has chosen. And this is why he takes it to be problematic. As we saw in “Chapter Four,” Schlegel—who is the prime example of what Kierkegaard has in mind with a “romantic ironist”—is interested in many of the same kinds of existential problems as those Kierkegaard addresses in On the Concept of Irony. Schlegel’s authorship arises in a postKantian context in which the relationship of the finite and the infinite was a guiding philosophical problem. Schlegel’s ironic literature can be read as an attempt to articulate the existential tension of an individual whose finite relationships have lost meaning, and who demands the wholeness that a spiritual meeting with the infinite promises. Guided by a belief that artistic genius is an inner light originating from a divine infinite sphere, Schlegel seeks his own “reconciliation with actuality.” His hope is that by using the gift of “irony” or “wit,” he can transform the finite world, that by experimenting with the “destruction and creation” of personal ends and purposes, a series of fluid syntheses of the finite and infinite will emerge. The gift of irony allows the romantic poet to serve as a prophet, bringing the divine light of the infinite back to earth. As Schlegel sees it, finitude is illuminated by infinitude; the actual world, and the self which inhabits it, becomes reunited in an endless process of experimentation. Kierkegaard, however, is suspicious of the romantic “construction” of the self and its world. Following a host of his contemporaries, he argues that the Schlegelian project does not lead to genuine reconciliation but rather rules it out. As he sees it, romanticism ends in an empty egoistic closure, not a reintegration into the world. We saw in “Chapter Five” that Kierkegaard’s arguments against the romantic position rely extensively on those of his predecessors. Along with Hegel and Møller, he claims that the romantics have misunderstood the philosophical premises of their own arguments: they have assumed that idealist philosophy justifies their project of subjectively “creating” existential purposes. Furthermore, Kierkegaard holds that as the romantic ironist “destroys and creates” the things that matter to him- or herself, he or she loses touch with the self that is already potentially present. On the one hand, instead of taking ownership of the primitive inner life which is unique to each individual, romantic irony celebrates the cultivation of fabricated moods. As the ironist plays with possible personalities, he or she loses touch with the
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unique self. On the other hand, as the ironist goes about redefining and redescribing his or her own purposes, he or she undermines the consistency of his or her relationships with others. The result of the ironic worldview is an individual who is closed off from the concrete conditions for selfhood. There is no development of personality since there are no relationships the ironic individual can identify as binding. The ironist closes out content, and closes in emptiness. The most important aspect of Kierkegaard’s argument against romanticism, however, is his claim that it is “irreligious” and thus ultimately “unpoetic.” With this assertion, Kierkegaard moves beyond the ethically oriented argumentation presented by many of his contemporaries in order to push an issue that was peripheral for many of his contemporaries. As Kierkegaard sees it, the most tempting aspect of the romantic project is located in the claim that the individual has become reconciled with the world based on a kind of divinely inspired art. Despite the language of mysticism present in works of authors in the Schlegelian school, as Kierkegaard sees it, the romantic project lacks an essential feature of a religious consciousness: an willingness to open oneself to a power that is greater than one’s own ego. In fact, romantic irony not only lacks humility, but it celebrates a deification of one’s own private intuitions. According to Kierkegaard’s interpretation of the romantics, they have failed to recognize the distinction between a subjective will and a divine will. Thus, the ironist not only creates provisional principles of “morality and ethics,” but he or she creates God in his or her own image. For Kierkegaard, this irreligious worldview results in the ultimate creation of irreligious and thus empty “artworks”—and here, the artwork he has in mind is the life of the artist, the artist’s personality. As Kierkegaard sees it, the constructed personality which emerges is aesthetically “empty” because it lacks the essential element which could give it “aesthetic validity,” so to speak. The romantic life builds on the private, arbitrary interests and moods of the artist rather than the actual, concrete circumstances in which a person finds him or herself. These “artworks” are said to be missing an ideal binding truth behind their appearance, the original an sich. With this negative criticism in place, it is also possible to see what Kierkegaard adds positively to a concept of irony. It is possible to infer the general direction he thinks one must go if there is to be a reconciliation
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with actuality. As noted above, he underscores on several occasions that the first movement of an “authentic human life” is the movement away from immediacy to a psychological consciousness of isolation; but once this consciousness of negative freedom is achieved, the individual must also find a way back to finitude again if this life is to be meaningful. Freedom must also become positive. The only hope, as Kierkegaard sees it, lies in a subjective openness, a willingness to receive a transfigured world as a divine gift. This implies that at bottom, a genuine “reconciliation with actuality” presupposes that the subject accept his or her inability to be independently free. In “Chapter Six,” we saw that even before he wrote On the Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard had been working out the basic structure of irony and the accompanying problem of a “reconciliation with actuality.” In his early journals, Kierkegaard investigates a topical issue of his day, working out what he takes to be the essence of the ironic position by comparing it with the related position of humor. These early journals confirm that the solution to overcoming ironic isolation is an open willingness to accept the gift of a transfigured world. In general agreement with his Danish contemporaries, Heiberg and Martensen, Kierkegaard writes that the ironist places him- or herself in a position of superiority with regard to the conventional world. The ironist laughs at the world, congratulating him- or herself on having achieved this insight. The humorist, by contrast, looks at him- or herself with the same critical eye as the ironist, but then discovers that his or her own subjective values are no more meaningful than those of his or her cultural environment. The humorist laughs at him- or herself while laughing at the world. From the perspective of humor, “we’re all in it together.” For Martensen and Heiberg the solidarity implied in the humorous consciousness of fallenness is already a kind of salvation. For Kierkegaard, this insight is still only a preliminary step. The individual must still make a move of openness. In a biblical image which captures this movement, Kierkegaard writes that after the ironist—or humorist—has cut him- or herself off from the actual world as if he or she inhabited a solitary island, he or she “releases a dove” in hope of rejoining actuality again. Like Noah, he or she cannot force the reconciliation, but must wait for the dove to return to him or her, signaling that the cleansed or transfigured world has been given back again.
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With this image of reconciliation, the logic behind Kierkegaard’s argument in On the Concept of Irony reaches its provisional endpoint. Kierkegaard’s analysis ends with the suggestion that a humble “religiosity” is the key to a “reconciliation with actuality” and thus to a reconciliation with one’s original “self.” Beyond the relatively undeveloped assertion that an authentic reconciliation with actuality requires an openness to the divine power that posited it, however, he does not explain how this spiritual openness is related to Christian concepts like sin and redemption. Such theological considerations “lie beyond the scope” of his study, he writes in the concluding section. For the most part, he is content to spell out the existential problems associated with the ironic subject who refuses to be a part of the actual world. After Kierkegaard’s dissertation was published, the formal discussion of romantic irony all but vanishes from the pages of Kierkegaard’s books and journals and one might conclude that the issues which engaged him in the dissertation fade in importance as well. I do not believe this is the case. The problems associated with overcoming isolation and becoming a self integrated into the actual world are, of course, lifelong interests for Kierkegaard. A comprehensive treatment of these general themes in Kierkegaard’s authorship “lie beyond the scope” of this study as well, but I would like to offer some examples from a few pseudonymous works, without offering a full justification, of how the problems identified with irony reappear. More specifically, I will focus on the dilemma of ironic isolation: one can either attempt to create a concept of self based on one’s own subjective desires and interests—or one can cultivate oneself in faithful dependence on a higher being.
II. The Discussion of Irony Recast
I suspect that the general claim that On the Concept of Irony anticipates themes from Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works is not in need of much argumentation. As a matter of fact, the relationship has been observed in the secondary literature from the outset. Danish critic Hans Frederik Helweg noted as early as 1855 that On the Concept of Irony was the
CI 329 / SKS 1, 357.
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springboard for Kierkegaard’s activity and his observation been repeated ever since. Georg Brandes made similar claims in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and one finds such sentiments in English language literature as early as 1923 via the first translator of Kierkegaard’s writings into English, Lee M. Hollander. In his introduction, he notes that even though Kierkegaard did not consider On the Concept of Irony to be a part of his project as an author, his magisterial dissertation, entitled “The Conception of Irony, with Constant Reference to Socrates,” [sic] a book of 300 pages, is of crucial importance. It shows that, helped by the sage who would not directly help anyone, he had found the master key: his own interpretation of life. Indeed, all the following literary output may be regarded as the consistent development of the simple directing thoughts of his firstling work.
But even if it is intuitively clear that On the Concept of Irony is the foundation for much of Kierkegaard’s later thought, the way these themes reappear is less often treated.
A. The Shadow of Irony in Either/Or
The similarities between Kierkegaard’s critique of romantic irony and Kierkegaard’s first major pseudonymous work, Either/Or, are especially often noted. As has often been suggested, A’s writings in the first part of Either/Or can be read as a literary staging of the ironic consciousness, Hans Frederik Helweg, “Hegelianismen i Danmark,” in Dansk Kirketidende 51-52, 1855, pp. 825-837, 841-852. Georg Brandes, Søren Kierkegaard. En kritisk Fremstilling i Grundrids, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1877; republished by Gyldendals Uglebøger 1967, p. 49. Selections from the Writings of Søren Kierkegaard, trans. by Lee M. Hollander, Austin: University of Texas Bulletin 1923; reprinted as Selections from the Writings of Søren Kierkegaard, trans. by Lee M. Hollander, New York: Anchor Books 1960, p. 6. This has been noted by a host of authors, including Sylvia Walsh Living Poetically. Kierkegaard’s Existential Aesthetics, University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press 1994, pp. 63-67, and Howard and Edna Hong in their “Introduction” to Either/Or, pp. ix-x.
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while Wilhelm’s letter can be viewed as a critique of romantic irony. Indeed, I do not think it an exaggeration to suggest that what Kierkegaard describes as the “romantic” or “ironic” consciousness in On the Concept of Irony is essentially what Wilhelm has in mind when he labels A’s worldview “aesthetic.” Of course, it should be noted that Either/Or is organized as a sort of dialogue between an ironic aesthete and his critic, and neither position is obviously victorious. And A is not simply an ironist. His consciousness might be better termed “post-ironic”: it is as if A has read and acknowledged the insights of Kierkegaard’s interpretation of romantic irony, but chooses to embrace irony nonetheless. He is a hardened ironist well aware that he is unable “to be present to himself ” because he “lives outside himself.” Already here we see that Kierkegaard’s style in his pseudonymous works makes it difficult to simply label the ironic position the loser without recognizing that there is a truth to irony as well as an untruth. “Part One” of Either/Or reveals several themes related to Schlegel’s works including the difference between ancient and modern thought, the categories of “the beautiful” and “the interesting,” “boredom,” and the liberation of eros from societal constraints. Beyond these clear similarities, however, the most important ironic theme is this: A is an instantiation of a poet who wants to create and recreate himself, even if the project is doomed. A seems to take it for granted, like Schlegel, that the modern individual has no choice but to “create” an interpretation of the self. All other categories that could serve as guides for shaping the self have becomes fragmented in modernity, and only the subject can reorder or recreate them. In his essay on ancient and modern tragedy, for example, he notes that “our age has lost all the substantial categories of family, state, kindred; it must turn the single individual over to himself in such a way that strictly speaking, he becomes his own creator.” In perhaps the best example of the despairing ironist, we find the story of a young man in “The Seducer’s Diary” who tries to control and survive his own principles of re-creating the self. Most importantly, the seducer is careful to protect the possibility of re-creation by refusing to recognize his past behavior as his own. He is convinced that he must avoid objective demands like marriage since this sort of “ethical” obligation
EO1 149 / SKS 2, 148.
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stifles and suffocates “love.” He is far more interested in creating situations that he will be able to recollect, reorganize and reinterpret—just as Julius speaks of in his introduction to Lucinde. In a sense, the seducer argues that his reflective approach to love allows him to avoid the pitfalls of committing to anyone or anything, and this frees him to live with his own memories of erotic moments and situations. In “The Unhappiest One” we find a similarly ironic perspective. But here A offers a slightly different interpretation of his refusal to take ownership of his behavior. He cynically and sarcastically celebrates his own discontentment, congratulating himself that he has understood the deepest principle of unhappiness: not being present to oneself. He speaks of the sadness of living “outside” oneself since one lives in a “recollected future” and a “hopeful past.” With these paradoxical formulations, he admits that the unhappiest people never live in the present and never obtain a realized past or a realizable future. In essence, the strength which allows him to distance himself from “the now” is also the stubborn strength that seals him into an impotent lack of self. These same melancholy insights are repeated in the Diapsalmata as well. In many cases A ironically praises his lack of self; but he also willingly admits to the inner pain of not being present to himself. The Diapsalmata are also replete with passages about hovering above actuality, returning to it to take memories away, etc. Of course, unlike the analysis of romantic irony in On the Concept of Irony, A’s writings do not treat the problems of poetic construction academically; one reads about them from the inside, as it were, from the perspective of an ironist who experiences the dissonance of irony and the lack of selfhood it entails. Wilhelm’s letters to A in the second volume of Either/Or can be read as response to the fundamental problem introduced in On the Concept of Irony, namely, how can an ironist overcome his own ironic insight and become “reconciled with actuality.” It is also important to admit, however, that while Wilhelm develops Kierkegaard’s critique of the ironist, Wilhelm is not speaking to Schlegel or any other particular historical “ironist.” He is speaking to A, Kierkegaard’s own instantiation of the ironist. Particular romantic ironists are not directly the issue here. It is rather Kierkegaard’s interpretation and perhaps misinterpretation of
EO1 226 / SKS 2, 221-222.
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Schlegel and the romantic ironists. For as we saw, even in On the Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard interprets Schlegel’s Lucinde such that his irony ends in emptiness and nothingness rather than the happy reconciliation Julius himself celebrates. That being said, Wilhelm seems to think A suffers from many of the same problems Kierkegaard mentions in his critique of romantic irony: a disillusionment with the traditions, norms and ethical principles that govern human relationships, an unengaged attitude with regard to the people he interacts with, a freedom from the continuity of past, present and future, and a freedom from an original self. In both of Wilhelm’s letters to A, he laments the fact that A is set upon defining himself at the expense of cultivating his self. Wilhelm’s strategies for overcoming the self-creative tendencies of modern irony are also more nuanced that what we saw in On the Concept of Irony, for he focuses first and foremost on how he might convince A that there is indeed an original self he could keep watch over. He can appeal to A to take his “self ” seriously, for example, by appealing to A’s sense of despair: Are you not aware that there comes a midnight hour when everyone must unmask?….can you think of anything more appalling than having it all end with the disintegration of your essence into a multiplicity, so that you actually became several, just as that unhappy demoniac became a legion, and thus you would have lost the most inward and holy in a human being, the binding power of the personality?
More directly addressing A’s perceived self-creative tendencies, Wilhelm suggests that if A chooses to take ownership of his actions, he will indeed discover the self or “personality” that is bound up with the actual world in which he lives. He will experience a kind of “reconciliation with actuality.” To take just one example, he writes that in the moment of choice, the individual, then, becomes conscious as this specific individual with these capacities, these inclinations, these drives, these passions, influenced by this specific social milieu, as this specific product of this specific environment.
EO2 160 / SKS 3, 157-158.
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But as he becomes aware of all this, he takes upon himself responsibility for it all. He does not hesitate over whether he will take this particular thing or not, for he knows that if he does not do it something much more important will be lost. In the moment of choice, he is in complete isolation, for he withdraws from his social milieu and yet at the same time he is in absolute continuity [with it], for he chooses himself as a product.
And echoing Kierkegaard’s assertion in On the Concept of Irony that a transfiguration of the conditions for selfhood is tied to a religious openness to the divine, Wilhelm writes, When around one everything has become silent, solemn as a clear, starlit night, when the soul comes to be alone in the whole world, then before one there appears not an extraordinary human being, but the eternal power itself, then the heavens seem to open, and the I chooses itself or, more correctly, receives itself. Then the soul has seen the highest, which no mortal eye can see and which can never be forgotten; then the personality receives the accolade of knighthood that ennobles it for an eternity. He does not becomes someone other than he was before, but he becomes himself. The consciousness integrates, and he is himself.
Wilhelm’s admonitions to A in Either/Or give nuance to Kierkegaard’s critique of romantic irony, but the Kierkegaardian story of selfhood is, of course, far from exhausted. The problem of how religiousness is related to Christian doctrines like sin and faith is only touched upon briefly in Either/Or. Wilhelm represents a general religious consciousness that takes seriously the search for a primitive self as opposed to A who is the instantiation of an ironic consciousness that wants to create itself. As Tjønneland notes, insofar as books like Repetition and Stages on Life’s Way are variations of themes from Either/Or, On the Concept of Irony is also implicitly present there. Indeed, Kierkegaard returns EO2 251 / SKS 3, 239. EO2 177 / SKS 3, 172-173. Eivind Tjønneland, Ironie als Symptom, Frankfurt am Main, et al.: Peter Lang Verlag 2004, pp. 1-2. Tjønneland adds Johannes Sløk and Josiah Thompson to the list of interpreters who see On the Concept of Irony as the starting point
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indirectly to the problems raised in his Magister thesis in many of his early works like Repetition, where the key characters—the young man and Constatin Constantius—struggle with the problems of the poetic life vs. religious life. And in “Guilty? / Not-Guilty?” in Stages on Life’s Way, one finds a discussion of why poetry can never fully capture inward suffering. In the course of this exposition, Frater Taciturnus mentions Schlegel directly, and repeats the crucial critique of irony from On the Concept of Irony: poetry is not a true reconciliation with one’s factical self, but rather a “mediocre reconciliation.” Only a religious perspective, he says, can approach the inwardness necessary for appropriating subjective experience. To show how this study of On the Concept of Irony can cast light on yet another of Kierkegaardian pseudonymous works, I have chosen to examine a text which is rarely compared with On the Concept of Irony, namely Fear and Trembling. My suggestion here is that Fear and Trembling can be read as a more detailed investigation of the very issue that troubles Kierkegaard in On the Concept of Irony, namely the problem of becoming reconciled with actuality via a religious consciousness. In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that on this issue—like Either/Or—Fear and Trembling also takes up where On the Concept of Irony left off.
B. Ironic Closure in Fear and Trembling
1. Johannes de silentio on Closure, Openness and a Reconciliation with Finitude As Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes de silentio makes clear, the issue of a reconciliation with actuality is the motivating theme in Fear and Trembling. More than anything else, de silentio is fascinated to the point of sleeplessness by the Abraham story because it represents an aspect of the religious life that he is unable to grasp: the story of Abraham of Kierkegaard’s authorship. See Johannes Sløk, Shakespeare og Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: Berlingske Forlag 1972, p. 131, and Josiah Thompson, Kierkegaard, A Collection of Critical Essays, New York: Anchor Books 1972, p. 120. SLW 458 / SKS 6, 423. SLW 454-465 / SKS 6, 420-429; cf., CI 297 / SKS 1, 330-33.
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promises that one’s relationships in the finite world can become valuable even after one has given up all hope in that possibility. For as de silentio emphasizes, the truly amazing thing about Abraham is not his willingness to follow God’s absurd command to sacrifice Isaac, but rather his conviction that he will receive the finite world back again—in the person of Isaac—even though he has given it up as irretrievably lost. Abraham’s faith transforms the circumstances of his existence right here and right now, in the temporal, finite world: “Abraham had faith, and had faith for this life,” writes de silentio. De silentio is in awe of the fact that Abraham and other knights of faith are able to live in the finite world again after all rational hope for living happily in finitude has been resigned. Alastair Hannay nicely summarizes the critical issue explored in Fear and Trembling in the introduction to his translation. The key issue, he suggests, is the rediscovery of values in a world which has been emptied of anything that was once significant. Hannay writes that de silentio’s account of resignation: could be read as symbolizing the way a person must look upon everything he values, whether or not it is attainable. It could symbolize the attitude that says that nothing in the world has value simply because one values it. This would be resignation about values generally, as in Max Weber’s “disenchantment” (Entzauberung). Faith would be, correspondingly, the attitudinal appendix to this, that things have their value nonetheless, but they have them on their own account and from God. It would be plausible to attribute this compound attitude to the shopman knight of faith, but also of course, to attribute it to Abraham and his belief that what he is giving to God will be returned, as it was but with its clarified status.
As Hannay notes, the decisive category which enables reconciliation is of course faith—a more nuanced category within “the religious.” In order to make Abraham’s movement of faithful reconciliation with the actual world as vivid as possible, de silentio contrasts faith with a number of incomplete modes of reconciliation. The key in each case is the way
FT 53-54 / SKS 4, 116; Hannay’s italics. FT, Hannay’s introduction, p. 24.
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in which the individual relates to the actual finite world. As de silentio writes, the relationship to actuality [Virkelighed] is “that upon which everything turns.” De silentio’s first step in identifying the characteristics of faith is thus clearly to demarcate the line which separates faith from a host of worldviews which might seem to resemble faith. Crucially, this demarcation is marked by their respective “relationships to actuality.” It is important to note here that the most fundamental distinction is said to be the line which separates faith from a life of resignation. As we will see, this is ultimately the line which de silentio uses to indicate that every worldview on the other side of faith falls into the category of self-sufficiency: it is the line which separates the individual who saves himself, and the individual who is saved by another. De silentio characterizes the infinitely resigned individual as one who lives as a stranger in the actual world, having given up all claims to finitude. Put differently, the resigned individual’s given actual world, the sphere of human relationships which was once loved and valued immediately, has been made relative. What once was the center of the resigned individual’s life is no longer central and maybe not even important any longer. Whether this alienation from actuality stems from the disappointment of failed expectations, the loss of others in death, or the pain which results from a loss of existentially orienting landmarks, the individual has accepted that a deep happiness is not a part of existence. The finite relationships which make life meaningful have become hollow. One of the best examples of a character living in resignation, de silentio himself, admits that he does not expect to find fulfillment in this life. If he were tested as Abraham was, he would be courageous enough to follow God’s command, he says; but unlike Abraham, at the very moment he were to receive such a command, his joy in this life would disappear. The knight of infinite resignation receives no consolation in actuality. De silentio, however, does claim to find some comfort. He is FT 70, 78 / SKS 4, 136, 143. I have changed the translation of Virkelighed from Hannay’s “reality” to “actuality” for the sake of consistency. In general, however, I agree with Hannay’s choice since the less formal “reality” better captures Kierkegaard’s Virkelighed. FT 64-65 / SKS 4, 130.
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“reconciled with existence” in some sense: his original passion for living in the finite world is redirected away from actuality and transformed into a love of God. He is reconciled with the world in this weak sense by giving a spiritual expression to his earthly love since he cannot give it an actual expression. It is in connection with the discussion of resignation that the category of irony explicitly reappears in Fear and Trembling. De silentio himself, who claims to know a thing or two about irony, draws the comparison between infinite resignation and the resigned distance which accompanies an ironic worldview. He writes that the distance resulting from an ironic worldview—and the humorous worldview which is closely related to it—falls under the category of infinite resignation. Drawing comparisons with the worldviews of irony and humor, he writes: …our hero of faith was not even an ironist and humorist but something still higher. A lot is said in our time about irony and humor, particularly by people who have never succeeded in practicing them but who nevertheless know how to explain everything. I am not altogether unfamiliar with these two passions; I know a little bit more about them than is to be found in German and German-Danish compendia. Therefore I know that these two passions differ essentially from faith. Irony and humor reflect also upon themselves and so belong in the sphere of infinite resignation; they own their flexibility to the individual’s incommensurability with actuality.
FT 72-73 / SKS 4, 138. FT 80 / SKS 4; 145; translation modified. The targets of de silentio’s accusations are likely Martensen and his students. While de silentio says that Hegel does not understand irony, Hegel does not emphasize that humor or irony are essential aspects of Christianity (See also FT 136 / SKS 4, 199). As noted in the previous chapter, in Martensen’s review of Heiberg’s Nye Digte, he claims that humor is a Christian category. He writes: “[Humor] relates to irony just as depth of mind relates to sharpness of mind. Humor, which belongs exclusively to Christianity, contains all irony, the poetic justification over the fallen world, but also the fullness of love and reconciliation. It contains all the pain of the world conquered in a deep wealth of happiness.” See Martensen, Fædrelandet, January 10-12, 1841, no. 398‑400. In another small study Martensen writes, “Humor is the most inward background in every Christian view of the world.”
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It may be apparent already that this movement of resignation emerges from the basic categories Kierkegaard speaks of in On the Concept of Irony. As noted above, Kierkegaard there argues that an ironic critical distance from the values of conventional life precedes the religious life. De silentio repeats this move in Fear and Trembling. Like the ironist who never returns to the harsher reality of actual ethical life but finds solace in his own “higher actuality”—a closed [indesluttet] and self-centered interpretation of actuality—the resigned individual admits that his movement toward the infinite transforms the finite into a kind of “higher actuality,” an abstract, “spiritual” actuality. The knight of resignation consoles himself with a one-sidedly ideal version of actuality, devoid of the concretion of meaningful activity in the world. De silentio’s abstract spiritual life does not include the most difficult move, however. The paradoxical move of faith which receives the world at the same time as it is relinquished. De silentio gives nuance to the idea of a faithful reconciliation when he moves to the three problemata in the last section of the book. Abraham’s return to the world is the primary issue, but instead of focusing on the psychological aspects which make the story come alive, he focuses on the philosophical structure. In other words, he promises to “extract from the story of Abraham its dialectical element in the form of problemata in order to see how monstrous a paradox faith is.” Here Kierkegaard makes use of a discussion that was central to On the Concept of Irony: He draws upon the critique Schlegel which was inspired by Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. This time, however, de silentio will not only make explicit the ways in which he agrees with Hegel but also the ways in which ways he does not.
2. Reconciliation in the Problemata
De silentio begins his dialectical discussion in the Problemata by sketching a position in which ethical and moral rectitude is taken to be the telos of human striving. In this worldview, the goal of every individual is to discipline him- or herself in such a way that his or her activity can always See Hans Lassen Martensen, Grundrids til Moralphilosophiens System, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag 1841, § 56, p. 60. FT 82 / SKS 4, 147.
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be said to be an expression of a universal ethical demand. A person’s eternal happiness [Salighed] is said to be dependent upon the degree to which he or she is able to practice and attain a virtuous life. As noted above, de silentio attributes this position to Hegel, and refers the reader specifically to a discussion of the “Good and Conscience” from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. De silentio argues here that if Hegel is correct in his assessment that the highest human telos is to surrender a particular will to a universal will, then it is impossible to praise Abraham for his faith. De silentio writes that if indeed it is the case that the purpose of human existence is to live an ethically upright life, “then Hegel is right in his ‘Good and Conscience’ where he discusses man seen merely as the single individual and regards this way of seeing him as a ‘moral form of evil’ to be annulled in the teleology of the ethical life, so that the individual who stays at this stage is either in sin or a state of temptation.” The point de silentio wants to highlight by introducing this apparently Hegelian position is clear enough: he wants to point out that Abraham’s faithful willingness to sacrifice Isaac cannot be justified if one accepts Hegel’s absolute ethical life as the telos of human existence. Rather one must admit that from an ethical perspective, faith is a “moral form of evil.” But one might initially wonder why de silentio singles out this particular chapter of a book which Hegel conceives of as a philosophy of law. Why has de silentio chosen this section of text—the only specific reference to Hegel’s primary works cited in Kierkegaard’s authorship after Either/ Or —rather than a Hegelian text which deals with the relationship of ethics to faith? Furthermore, an examination of the “Good and Conscience” chapter in Philosophy of Right reveals that it is not an explicit FT 83-84 / SKS 4, 148-149. FT 83 / SKS 4, 148-149. Louis Dupré, Kierkegaard as Theologian New York: Sheed and Ward 1963. p. 74. See Jon Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relation to Hegel Reconsidered, especially chapter 7, “Hegel’s View of Moral Conscience and Kierkegaard’s Interpretation of Abraham.” Kierkegaard refers to the very same chapter, “Good and Conscience,” again in Practice in Christianity (PT 83 / SV1, 83). Even in Either/Or, the specific references to Hegel’s texts are limited to those which Kierkegaard studied in connection with his dissertation, namely Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, and a section of the Phenomenology of Spirit.
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account of the highest human telos at all; it is not even an account of a fully developed ethical position. The “Good and Conscious” describes various subject-oriented ways of thinking about morality, something which Hegel ultimately considers to be an unsatisfactory ground upon which to found law or ethics. The key to understanding why de silentio alludes to Hegel’s “Good and Conscience” lies in On the Concept of Irony. As we saw in chapter five of this study, Kierkegaard makes careful use of Hegel’s “Good and Conscience” in his discussion of Schlegel. For this is where Hegel argues that Schlegelian irony is an example of the worst form of subjective thinking, “the supreme form of moral evil.” Hegel’s calls the ironist the “particular individual” who refuses to accept the restrictions of any moral or ethical standard which does not originate in the particular desires and interests of the individual him- or herself. For him, an egoist like the ironist is nothing less than “evil.” In essence, de silentio refers to “Good and Conscience” to support his claim that if we use Hegelian ethics to judge Abraham, we must admit that insofar as Abraham places his own subjective convictions about right and wrong above those we all accept as rational, Abraham is no different that the ironist who also places his or her subjective particularity higher than ethics. De silentio’s next move, though, is to call the sufficiency of the Hegelian view into question—and in a sense, he begins to nuance his own position outlined in On the Concept of Irony. While Kierkegaard could use Hegel to argue against the egoism of irony, he cannot use him to explain the position of faith. Hegelian ethics cannot excuse the faithful individual like Abraham who is willing to break moral and ethical law at God’s command since Hegel requires the particular individual to act in accordance with universal principles. There is no room for a justified suspension of ethics. It becomes apparent here that the aim and result of de silentio’s break with the Hegelian position is to uncouple faith from ethics. He calls attention to the difference between a faithful worldview in which submission to the will of God is an uncompromising absolute, and an ethical worldview in which submission to the demands of ethics is central. For de silentio, God and the Good are not identical, and he forcefully insists
PR § 140, 184 / Jub. 7, 222.
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on holding the two apart: in the case of faith, the individual is absolutely committed to God regardless of the possible ethical judgments of the human community. In the case of the ethical person, an individual ought to be fundamentally committed to the common good. To use de silentio’s own terminology, there is a crucial difference between an individual who is “related absolutely to the absolute,” and an individual who is “related absolutely to the universal.” In other words, de silentio breaks with Hegel here because, as he sees it, Hegel presupposes the ultimate harmony of just human laws and divine law. For Hegel, at their core, they are one and the same. Ethical principles are grounded in a divine rationality which orders and supports the universe, a divine rationality which is capable of being understood and articulated by the human mind. For de silentio, Hegel’s position resembles that of the Greeks insofar as both assume an immanent theology. De silentio writes, “If the ethical life is the highest and nothing incommensurable is left over in man, except in the sense of what is evil…then one needs no other categories than those of the Greek philosophers or whatever can be deduced from them. This is something which Hegel, who has after all made some study of the Greeks, ought not to have kept quiet about.” In short, de silentio places Hegel’s anthropology within the Greek tradition since for Hegel, the truth about the aims and goals of human life are immanently available. The truth about how one ought to live, the ethical truth, is rational and available for every seeker, even without divine revelation. By contrast, de silentio wants to hold open the possibility that the task of existing as a human being is more complicated. God’s truth does not have to be identical with a rational conception of the ethical truth. But as de silentio pulls faith apart from ethics and makes the subjective relation to God central, one might wonder if another distinction becomes less clear, namely, that which holds ironic subjectivity apart from faithful subjectivity. In other words, when the demands of ethics are made relative, it is no longer clear by what authority ethics can demand that the particular subject respect the demand of the universal. Is it possible to distinguish the ironist, who “suspends the ethical” for the sake of his own interests, from the person of faith, who “suspends
FT 84 / SKS 4, 149.
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the ethical” at the command of God? What is the objective difference between these positions now that Hegel’s objective criteria have been made relative? De silentio recognizes, of course, that he is in an odd position. When considered objectively—or as he puts it, when the “form” of the suspension of ethics is viewed “ideally” —the ironist and the person of faith cannot be distinguished. Viewed objectively, they are both in a state of sin or temptation. Objectively, the kind of faith de silentio advocates is in “ordinary company, it belongs with feeling mood, idiosyncrasy, hysteria and the rest.” In other words, from an objective perspective, it belongs to the same class of emotions as irony. Despite the objective similarities, however, de silentio is insistent that viewed from within the psyche of the individual subject, there is a decisive distinction between the closed, self-sufficient subjectivity of the ironist and the open, dependent subjectivity of the person of faith. There are at least two ways de silentio holds these two subjective positions apart: 1) first, he simply posits the claim that an ethical seriousness is a precondition for faith. In a more subtle argument 2), however, he reveals that pride and humility are the key factors. De silentio’s first argument 1) is an appeal to a sort of developmental psychology which reveals that de silentio does not relinquish the notion of ethical discipline. He argues that the internal seriousness which accompanies an ethical worldview is a prerequisite to faith. A respect for the universal demands of the sort attributed to Hegel—and to the Greeks—is not in itself problematic. De silentio praises the ethically oriented person for taking up the task of self-examination and the search for an ethical mission. He is careful to note that the individual who has not disciplined him- or herself by following the dictates of the universal can never become a person of faith. In order to underscore his point, each time he describes the formal structure of the suspension of the ethical, he repeats that this can only take place after the particular individual has gone through the phase of ethically disciplining him- or herself under the universal:
FT 90 / SKS 4, 155. FT 97 / SKS 4, 161.
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Faith is just this paradox, that the single individual as the particular is higher than the universal, is justified before the latter not as subordinate but superior, though in such a way, be it noted, that the single individual who, having been subordinate to the universal as the particular, now by means of the universal becomes the individual who as the particular stands in an absolute relation to the absolute.
De silentio holds on to a central aspect of Hegel’s critique of the Schlegelian ironist. Ethical discipline comes prior to an absolute relation to the absolute. One must take the demand of ethics seriously before the move to faith takes place and thus before one can be authentically reconciled with actuality. But this first way of explaining the difference between the “ironic suspension of the ethical” and the “religious suspension of the ethical” does not allow de silentio to give a full inventory of faithful subjectivity. At this juncture, de silentio has simply asserted that ethical seriousness is a precondition to faith. There are other features of faithful existence which have not yet been explicitly identified that will make the differences between ironic subjectivity and religious subjectivity unmistakable. De silentio’s second way of explicating these differences sets the critical movement of faith into relief—and it is here we see the critical distinction made in On the Concept of Irony between the closed, self-sufficient position of irony and the open humble position of the “religious” individual. These are the decisive categories. For by framing the issue in terms of closure vs. openness or self-sufficiency vs. divine dependency, de silentio can show how the attitude of “faithful” subjectivity is different not only from the category of “particular” subjectivity, but how it is different from any other non-faithful position he has mentioned, whether it be the ironic or the ethical. With the category of self-sufficiency, he can show that only through a dependence upon God can one find value in a world which has been stripped of meaning, that only through an openness to the divine does a genuine reconciliation with actuality take place. To see this most clearly, let me return to de silentio’s discussion of “resignation vs. faith” and examine them in light of the category of self-sufficiency. I begin with resignation.
FT 84-85 / SKS 4, 149; my emphasis.
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De silentio knows resignation intimately—for this is his own worldview. He claims that it takes great strength to resign oneself to an existence for which meaning and value are concentrated somewhere outside actuality. It is hardly a simple matter, he says, to give up all one’s finite hopes and interests for something greater than the finite world, even if that something greater is “the infinite,” God’s love. Many human relationships are immensely important to us, he admits, and relativizing these immediate loves to such a degree that one could live without them requires heroic discipline. In fact, the pain of such a maneuver colors every aspect of finitude, making it impossible for the resigned person to ever fully enjoy the world. De silentio’s most intriguing example is de silentio himself. He claims to have understood the pain of disappointment and to have understood the alienation of ironic skepticism. And he claims that despite his loneliness and pain, he receives an abstract consolation in the love of God. His otherworldly relationship with the infinite is the center of his existence. But de silentio also claims to have a good idea of what faith is. He understands it far enough to know he does not have it. But he claims not to have faith, and I think he also has a good idea of why he does not have faith. And he admits it. The important aspect of de silentio’s resigned worldview for my purposes here is his description of how he makes the movement of resignation, or more specifically, a description of the source of his strength for making this difficult move. Importantly, de silentio admits that he does not receive strength from a divine source. God’s love is his consolation, but not an active element in his existence. He resigns his happiness in the world on his own. He goes to the infinite on his own, and when he cultivates his soul enough to sense the infinite, he takes consolation in this abstract spirituality. But he never claims that he relies on a divine being to help him make that move. He emphasizes repeatedly that he—like other knights of resignation—makes the movement of renunciation by his own human strength. A knight of infinite resignation is self-sufficient: In infinite resignation there is peace and repose; anyone who wants it…can discipline himself into making the movement which in its pain reconciles
FT 63-64 / SKS 4, 128-129.
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one to existence. Infinite resignation is that shirt in the old fable. The thread is spun with tears, bleached by tears, the shirt sewn in tears but then it also gives better protection than iron and steel.
Anyone can inoculate him- or herself from actuality with the pain of disappointment or disillusionment. Anyone can build up a defense against the arbitrariness of finitude. Everyone can understand this move. On this note, de silentio knows that despite his ethical seriousness, he shares something essential the romantic ironist: self-sufficiency. The ironist takes control of his own life when he recognizes that conventional ethical systems are questionable. He consciously creates a provisional value system based on his own desires. As Kierkegaard describes it in On the Concept of Irony, the ironist tries to become reconciled with actuality by transforming it creatively. Unlike the ironist Kierkegaard describes, however, de silentio will admit that the consolation of self-sufficiency pales when compared with a religious reconciliation, when compared with faith. He is amazed at the knight of faith who, like himself, “infinitely renounces the claim to love which is the content of his life.” But then in a movement which de silentio cannot himself make, he receives the world again. Or perhaps one ought to say that de silentio will not receive the world again. For he knows he is proud: I do not burden God with my petty cares, details don’t concern me. I gaze only upon my love and keep its virginal flame pure and clear; faith is convinced that God troubles himself about the smallest thing. In this life I am content to be wedded to the left hand, faith is humble enough to demand the right; and that it is indeed humility I don’t, and shall never, deny.
Faith demands the “right hand,” he writes. That is, faith demands a transformation of the actual world so that finite relationships become meaningful. But this “demand” is at the same time the most profound expression of humility. De silentio is not humble enough to accept the FT 74 / SKS 4, 140. FT 75 / SKS 4, 141. FT 64 / SKS 4, 129; my emphasis.
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offer of a world endowed with meaning. When it comes to the final movement of faith, de silentio is as closed and self-reliant as the romantic ironist. Let me return to Hegel’s “Good and Conscience” and de silentio’s interest in this particular section of text. As noted, Kierkegaard can use Hegel’s discussion of irony because he agrees that the practical result of Schlegel’s literature is an ethically self-sufficient individual. In other words, Kierkegaard and Hegel agree that an ironic lifestyle is a kind of sickness: the particular individual who views all moral and ethical principles as bankrupt egoistically closes him- or herself off from the sphere of actuality. But Kierkegaard and Hegel do not agree on the treatment of the ailment. They offer different paths back to actuality, so to speak. For Hegel, an egoistic “suspension of the ethical” is refuted by a demonstration that the ethical life is rational. The “reconciliation with actuality” is complete when the particular individual again acts in accordance with the universal demands of ethics. De silentio argues, however, that a faithful person might be compelled to “suspend the ethical” for a higher purpose. In such a case, the world cannot be taken back through ethical discipline but must be given back. I have argued that de silentio contrasts the resigned figure with the faithful figure in order to show that faith ultimately requires an individual to sacrifice all worldviews which are grounded in self-sufficiency, whether that self-sufficient worldview is satisfied with a Schlegelian aesthetic construction of actuality, or a Hegelian rational understanding of actuality. For de silentio, a reconciliation with actuality is a personal and subjective matter, as it is for the ironist. But unlike the ironist, the power to bring about that reconciliation is not within the subject’s creative capacities. The individual is not in a position to self-sufficiently make a home in the actual world, it must be given as a gift.
C. Creating the Self in The Sickness unto Death
The problem of ironic self-creation, reappears most obviously in Kierkegaard’s anthropological study, The Sickness unto Death. The book is, of course, about “despair” understood as an imbalance in the potentially healthy self. This imbalance can arise if the individual orients himself
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incorrectly to any of the essential relationships which constitute the self. The result of correcting the imbalance, he writes, is a realized “primitive” self: “For every individual human being is “primitively organized as a self, characteristically determined to become himself.” We see the hallmarks of romantic irony in Anti-Climacus’ discussion of the “despair of infinitude” and the “despair of possibility,” which are described as existential positions that lack a proper relationship to “finitude” and “necessity,” respectively. The despairer who lacks finitude is said to be governed by an “abstract” imagination; i.e., like the ironic consciousness, this form of despair arises because the individual is not attentive to his own concrete relationships and finite context. By power of artistic genius or the “imagination,” one becomes a “fantastic self.” Similar descriptions are found in his discussion of a despair which lacks necessity, or limits: What is really missing is the strength to obey, to yield to the necessary in one’s self, what might be called limits. Nor therefore is the misfortune of such a self not to have become anything in the world; no the misfortune is that he did not become aware of himself, that the self he is, is a quite definite something, and thus the necessity. Instead, though this self ’s fantastically reflecting itself in possibility, he lost himself.
The most explicit treatment of the power of self-creation, however, is found in the section called “Despair considered with regard to consciousness.” Here Anti-Climacus looks at despair from the “inside,” i.e., he charts an increasing awareness of the problem of selfhood from a psychological perspective. After describing what he calls “unconscious despair”—where there is no proper concept of a “self ” since the idea of an self is missing from one’s understanding of human anthropology —Anti-Climacus speaks of various forms of “conscious despair.” It is in a discussion of the most reflective form of despair, the despair Cf., SUDP 45-46 / SV1 9, 130-131. Cf., SUDP 63 / SV1 9, 146. SUDP 60 / SV1 9, 144. SUDP 66- 67 / SV1 9, 149. SUDP 72-77 / SV1 9, 155-159.
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of “defiance,” that Kierkegaard’s analysis of romantic thought reappears. In short, for the defiant despairer, interpreting the self is a continuous process in which one consults oneself about who and what the self is and ought to become. One interprets the “self ” on one’s own terms—which means, of course, that the original self that resides beneath the inauthentic, self-defined “self ” is never realized. Here, the threat to the self is not that “one does not want to become oneself,” but rather just the opposite: that one “wants to become” a self one “creates.” Indeed, the despairer is reflective enough to realize that he is capable of defining something that he calls a self; like the romantic ironist, he has discovered that a conception of self can be poetically constructed in the space opened up by negative reflection. This capacity to “create” a self-conception in this empty space is here called a “consciousness of an infinite self ” or a consciousness of the “most abstract form of the self.” He writes: In order to want in despair to be oneself, there must be a consciousness of an infinite self. However, this infinite self is really only the most abstract form of the self, the most abstract possibility of the self. And it is this self the despairer wants to be, severing the self from any relation to the power which has established it, or severing it from the conception that there is such a power. By means of this infinite form, the self wants in despair to rule over himself, or create himself, make the self the self he wants to be, determine what he will have and what he will not have in the concrete self. His concrete self, or his concreteness, has indeed necessity and limits, is this quite definite thing, with these aptitudes, predispositions, etc. in this concrete set of circumstances, etc. But by means of the infinite form, the negative self, he wants first to undertake to refashion the whole thing in order to get out of it such a self as he wants, produced by means of the infinite form of the negative self—and it is in this way he wants to be himself. That is to say, he wants to begin a little earlier than other people, not at and with the beginning, but “in the beginning;” he does not want to don his own self, does not want to see his task in his given self, he wants by virtue of being the infinite form, to construct it himself.
SUDP 99 / SV1 9, 179
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It is also apparent from this passage that Anti-Climacus is attuned to the critical spiritual move Kierkegaard discussed in On the Concept of Irony: the defiant despairer must detach himself from the conception of a higher power, a rival deity as it were, that would threaten his creative autonomy. Defiant despair “recognizes no power over itself.” As AntiClimacus sees it, the defiant despairer says to himself: I will define myself exactly as I want. For I am a better creator than a god if indeed a god has created the flawed individual I am. Anti-Climacus describes this form of despair in language similar to that of Kierkegaard’s thesis written almost ten years earlier, when he spoke of the ironist’s tendency to appropriate the creative powers that “bind and unbind” heaven: The negative form of the self exerts the loosening as much as the binding power; it can, at any moment, start quite arbitrarily all over again…The self is its own master, absolutely (as one says) its own master; and exactly this is the despair, but also what it regards as its pleasure and joy [Nydelse].
And in the end, Anti-Climacus would agree with the following analysis from On the Concept of Irony: “the ironist most often becomes nothing, because what is not true for God is true for man—only nothing can be created from nothing.” For as Anti-Climacus sees it, the self-creative despairer rules over an empty self, over “nothing”: All these experimental virtues look very splendid…Yes they do that for sure, and beneath it all there is nothing. The self wants in despair to savour the full satisfaction of making itself into itself...it wants to take credit for this poetic [digteriske], masterly project, its own way of understanding itself. And yet what it understands itself to be is in the final instance a riddle; just when it seems on the point of having the building finished, at a whim it can dissolve the whole thing into nothing.
SUDP 100 / SV1 9, 180. SUDP 98-105 / SV1 9, 178-185. SUDP 100 / SV1 9, 180. CI 281 / SKS 1, 317. SUDP 101 / SV1 9, 180-181.
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One final important parallel with Kierkegaard’s discussion of irony ought to be mentioned. Though the discussion of the religiosity required for authentic selfhood was described cryptically in On the Concept of Irony— and is still incomplete in many of the early pseudonymous works—AntiClimacus adds more detail concerning what he considers the authentic religious consciousness to be. In short, Anti-Climacus suggests that the refusal to become oneself, before God, is precisely what sin is—and thus the cultivation of faith, the counterpart to sin, is the path toward a reconciliation to actuality and the self. Sin is not an epistemological problem, he says, solved via a proper rational understanding, nor is it an ethical problem solved by living virtuously. It is a problem bound up with the will. The root of the problem is said to be that the individual will not to open him- or herself to the will of the creator—and here the creator’s will can be summarized simply as the demand that the creature willingly realize the potential self it was created to become. Even here, Kierkegaard has not said his last word here about overcoming the sin of self-creation or the cultivation of faith. But it is apparent, I hope, that the issues tied to irony that Kierkegaard addressed as a student are very much alive in the later authorship. His assertion in On the Concept of Irony that the only true reconciliation happens “for me” in “religious” openness is a conclusion that becomes a premise for his authorship as a whole.