Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter — Issue 39: January 2000

Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter — Issue 39: January 2000

REVIEW OF

Harvie Ferguson’s Melancholy and the Critique of Modernity:

Soren Kierkegaard’s Religious Psychology

by John Lippitt

University of Hertfordshire, UK

Dave Barry once claimed that there exists a little-known law obliging all travel writers to describe Hong Kong harbour as ‘teeming.’ Similarly, one would be forgiven for thinking that a similar requirement obliged many writers to refer to Kierkegaard as ‘the melancholy Dane.’ But Harvie Ferguson’s view of melancholy makes it something far more important that an accidental feature of a particular individual’s demeanour. Rather, for Ferguson, melancholy–typically understood as ‘sorrow without cause’–is ‘the defining tone of [modern society’s] every experience’ (p. xvi). He promises ‘a book which seeks to explain why sociologists, and anyone else interested in the character of modern life, should read Kierkegaard’ (p. ix), re-reading his writings as structured around the relation between melancholy and modernity. The result is an intriguing and controversial account of the pseudonymous and veronymous authorship.

Any genuine encounter with Kierkegaard must surely take place in the first person. Recognising this, the book starts engagingly, with a account of the author’s initial, and totally accidental, undergraduate encounter with S.K. Looking for books on logic in a dark corner of Glasgow University library, he stumbled across what he thought was a slim book on ‘Refutations’. Had it not been for the unreplaced light bulb, Ferguson may never have discovered Repetition, a bewildered reading of which led to a life-long, if initiallly difficult to explain, fascination with Kierkegaard.

Certainly, Ferguson is an enthusiastic spokesman for Kierkegaard’s work. Moreover, one can give at least partial assent to the claim of the publisher’s blurb that the book ‘makes Kierkegaard’s rich and insightful writings accessible to a new audience.’ The reader new to Kierkegaard (or to certain lesser read texts within the corpus) will find much illuminating exposition. Conversely, even the most experienced reader of SK will learn something new from the intriguing historical account of pre-modern and modern views of melancholy which comprises chapter 1. Here, noting melancholy and self-absorption as an obstacle ot communication, Ferguson treats the incommunicability of melanchoy as a key to Kierkegaard’s concern with indirect communication. in chapter 2, he makes a good case for the importance of the often neglected The Concept of Irony, noting that both melancholy and irony are forms of ‘holding back from engagement with existence’ (p. 34), in that for the ironic self-consciousness which characterises the modern age, ‘no action or value seems worthwhile,’ everything having become polluted by ‘the aura of contingency, doubt and superficiality’ (p. 39). Thus, both melancholy and irony might be seen as forms of the aesthetic world-view which, according to Ferguson, characterises the whole of the pseudonymous authoriship, not just that of writers such as the author of Either/Or I. (More of this later.) Moreover, Ferguson argues that Kierkegaard came to realise that the investigation of irony is a kind of ‘false start’ for his overall project. On the one hand, Kierkegaard, along with romantics such as Schlegel, Solger and Tieck, saw that the possibility of irony–successfully communicating a message different from the literal meaning of one’s words–raises the more general problem of ‘the possibility and limitations of human communication as such’ (p. 37) which remained a life-long concern. In this sense, irony is the key to the pseudonymous project (pp. 54-5). However, it is flawed in that it synthesises views which need to be kept apart; an awareness of irony’s deficiencies shows Kierkegaard the need ‘to identify himself as closely as possible with actuality in all its diversity’ (p. 55). With this realisation, the pseudonymous authorship begins.

Hereafter, Ferguson tackes virtually the entire Kierkegaardian corpus, offering an insightful guide to the authoriship, the ‘second literature’ being viewed as at least as important as the pseudonymous work. Perhaps the most significant, yet controversial, aspect of Ferguson’s account is his claim that, throughout the pseudonymous authorship, no author gets beyond an ‘aesthetic’ view of the existence-spheres. (Others have made similar claims, but Ferguson pushes it further than many: it applies not only to the likes of Judge William and Climacus, but also to Anti-Climacus and ‘S. Kierkegaard,’ the pseudonym who writes upbuilding discourses.) Ferguson is interested on topics such as the instability of Judge William’s account of the ethical in Either/Or II, suggesting that anything which remains ‘a kind of civic arm of the religious’ (p. 101) cannot be the universal, and that it is thus illusory to think of the Judge’s version of the ethical to be any real advance on the aesthetic. However, the ways in which Ferguson uses the term “aesthetic’ throughout the book are not entirely clear. His central worry is that a progression view of the spheres risks turning Kierkegaard into some kind of Hegelian, each move being seen as a kind of Aufhebung of its predecessor. Instead, Ferguson argues that such a model takes insufficiently seriously the texts’ pseudonymity, and thus fails to see how they demonstrate ‘the modern tendency towards the progressive “aestheticization” of experience’ (p. 114). The image of movement into ‘higher’ stages is an illusion, brought about by ‘aesthetic immediacy, undergoing a series of self-generated internal transformations…all stages, in reality, remain aesthetic stages, and the aesthetic pseudonyms become trapped in a process of “experimenting” in which they are in fact drawn farther and farther away from “actuality.”’ (p. 115) But this raises a major problem: if any such writing is going to be accused of being mere ‘aestetic experimentation,’ then the problem of communicating the religious starts to appear not just incredibly difficult, but insurmountable.

All this raises some important questions. What would Ferguson make of a technique such as Wittgensteinian grammatical clarification in relation to the religious? Much of Climacus’s technique in the Postscript, for instance, can usefully be compared to a Wittgensteinian grammatical investigation. Such an approach, to be sure, falls short of religious appropriation. But does it remain mere ‘aesthetic experimentation?’ Has such clarification no religiously edifying purpose to serve? As one Wittgensteinian philosopher of religion puts the question, can’t a purely grammatical enquiry be religiously persuasive?[i] If it can, then there might be more to be said, ethically and religiously, for certain kinds of what Ferguson wants to call ‘aesthetic experimentation’ than one might initially be inclined to think. (Indeed, in explaining how the ‘topological’ perspective–that there are three spheres: aesthetic-ethical-religious–is ‘essentially aesthetic,’ Ferguson does suggest that as well as containing less than is usually suggested (‘in that is contains only different versions of the aesthetic’ (p. 86)), his reading also contains more, ‘in according to the aesthetic a more positive and flexible role in the formation of self-identity than most commentators have cared to admit’ (p. 86).)

But the cogency of Ferguson’s overall position depends upon its being clearer how he is using the term ‘aesthetic.’ For instance, all kinds of reflection ‘aesthetic?’ Ferguson’s third chapter discusses the dangers of (passionless) reflection in the Present Age. It would surely be a mistake to see Kierkegaard as being opposed to reflection per se, yet I remain unclear on exactly how Ferguson intends us to unpack his remark that Climacus is at fault for viewing ‘thought as a privileged relation within actuality’ (p. 142). I was somewhat unconvinced by Ferguson’s portrait of Climacus and the Postscript. He claims that the book ‘defines a problem, how to exist in the modern world, and claims there is an answer, to become a Christian; then annuls the answer by demonstrating that it cannot be reached, and substitutes for it a secret religion of passionate inwardness.’ (p. 167) Such a view, which immediately follows an all too brief picture of Religiousness A and B–the distinction between them being dismissively described as ‘a final dialectical flourish’ (p. 166)–hardly does justice to the complexity of the labyrinth that is the Postscript. The idea that the text offers Christianity as the ‘answer’ to a particular ‘problem’ could only be reached by privileging one, much debated, section of the text over others which have Climacus reminding us that any such talk–subjectivity as a matter of ‘answers’ to ‘problems’–is confused: misplaced objectivity. Relatedly, Ferguson fails to note that Climacus asks his question about Christianity in the first person (‘How may I, Johannes Climacus, share in the happiness that Christianity promises?’), not as an ‘objective’ ‘problem.’ In presenting Climacus as a philosopher, Ferguson seems to overlook the other
important dimensions of this many faceted pseudonym (Climacus the humorist; Climacus the urbane layabout, etc.). It is worth noting that this kind of problem is the inevitable result of any book which attempts to survey so much of Kierkegaard’s output.

Ferguson’s account has important implications for Kierkegaard scholarship. Another major question that it raises is what, on his reading, becomes of ostensibly key themes such as the ‘leap.’ He seems prepared to bite the bullet here, claiming that the ‘infatuation with the leap’ demonstrated by the ‘aesthetic authors’ ‘is the product of melancholy and provokes only a more tenacious form of despair’ (p. 197). But if we ourselves are concerned with the nature of ethical and religious transitions, and think of Kierkegaardian accounts of the leap as of importance here, it this a mere ‘infatuation’ on our part? Is someone like Jamie Ferreira, for instance, in her splendid book Transforming Vision, guilty of such ‘infatuation?’ I would like to think not.

Overall, Ferguson offers a thoughtful and thought-provoking, if contentious, reading of Kierkegaard’s work. Despite claiming–somewhat inaccurately–not to be a book ‘about’ Kierkegaard, Melancholy and the Critique of Modernity deserves a wide readership amongst Kierkegaard scholars.