Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter — Issue 40: August 2000

Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter — Issue 40: August 2000

Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript. By Merold Westphal. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1996. 261 p. $38.95.

John Lippitt

University of Hertfordshire

United Kingdom

Written in the engaging style which one has come to expect from Merold Westphal, this highly lucid and enjoyable study will benefit readers of Kierkegaard at every level from undergraduates upwards. Becoming a Self eschews the dangers of biting off more Kierkegaardian text than one can hope adequately to chew between the covers of one book, and limits itself to detailed commentary on the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Westphal’s approach, announced at the outset, is to focus on Johannes Climacus’s connections with postmodern thinkers, as well as his confrontation with Hegel. The result is a running dialogue with such figures as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and Levinas, as well as Hegel. Amongst the themes which Westphal stresses is the essentially relational nature of the self, and that Kierkegaard’s alleged ‘irrationalism’ is in fact a protest against ‘exorbitant claims made on behalf of human thought that wishes to deify itself’ (p. ix). While these claims are hardly new, the case for them is argued clearly and well, and it is worth making given that ‘individualism’ and irrationalism’ are charges upon which Kierkegaard so often finds himself in the dock. This book is part of the Purdue University Press Series in the History of Philosophy, the expressed aim of which is to offer ‘well-edited basic texts to be used in courses and seminars and for teachers looking for a succinct exposition of the results of recent research’. In this respect, for the most part Westphal’s work succeeds admirably. Students will find him a helpful guide both to central themes of the Postscript, and to its place in, and in relation to, the pseudonymous authorship as a whole. The latter theme is set up by the first three chapters, which locate the Postscript in relation to Kierkegaard’s biography (Chapter 1), the pseudonymous authorship (Chapter 2) and the existence-spheres (Chapter 3). There then follows a detailed commentary on successive sections of the text (Chapters 4 to 13), chapter headings being keyed into the Hongs’ translation. Finally, we get a concluding Chapter 14 which suggests how Kierkegaard, in texts such as Works of Love, goes ‘beyond’ Climacus’s Religiousness A and B to a ‘Religiousness C’ which expands his focus on the self’s relation to God to the importance of relations to the neighbour, thus supporting Westphal’s own text, the book concludes with a huge chunk of the Postscript itself (the chapter on ‘Subjective Truth, Inwardness; Truth is Subjectivity’). This strikes me as unfortunate. While the reason for its inclusion is presumably that this is one of the most commonly ‘taught’ sections of the Postscript, the experienced reader of that text knows – and the intelligent student reader of Westphal will soon discover – that each section of the labyrinthine Postscript sheds light on all the others. Thus immediately to flag one part as being more important than another – which, whether intended or not, will be the result of the inclusion of this ‘Part 3’ – seems a questionable move.

Becoming a Self has many virtues. The chapter on pseudonymity, for instance, will be very useful to readers approaching this issue for the first time, and the links between Kierkegaard and Hegel, on the one hand, and postmodernism, on the other, are very illuminating. But inevitably, there are points with which one might want to take issue. One key matter which some recent work on the Postscript has made much of is the peculiar structure of the book. Westphal is alive to this, and he is often illuminating on the authorial strategies of various sections. However, I suggest that his focus on the book’s structure does not go as far as it might, and in particular, Climacus’s status as a humorist – and what effect that might have on what he tells us about his ostensible subject – is not fully probed. Of Climacus’s revocation of the text, Westphal remarks: ‘since we have no reason to think that he places them [the ideas of Postscript] before us ironically, we can assume that he wants to place them before us at face value.’ (p. 193). But there is a long tradition of giving reasons for reading the Postscript ‘ironically,’ of which perhaps Henry E. Allison[i] is the grandfather and James Conant the most influential recent exponent.[ii] The two external appendices – Climacus’s ‘An Understanding with the Reader’ and Kierkegaard’s ‘A First and Last Explanation’ – together with the internal appendix, ‘A Glance at a Contemporary Effort in Danish Literature’, are the pivot around which Conant’s reading revolves. Westphal treats these structurally crucial sections too briefly. For instance, despite acknowledging the ‘Glance’ as important, he spends barely more than a page on it. Moreover, just before this, the ‘graveyard scene’ in which Climacus tells how he came to his ‘task’ of aiming to ‘find out where the misunderstanding between speculative thought and Christianity lies’ (CUP 241) is described in parentheses as ‘a story that speaks for itself and needs no commentary’ (p. 129). Really? At least one commentatory in the Allison-Conant tradition, Stephen Mulhall, considers this scene to be of singular importance. It is, for Mulhall, the ‘give-away’ which is intended finally to reveal to us what we may have come to suspect: that Climacus’s project is not what it seems; that he is prey to the same philosophical confusions about the religious that he warns us against, and therefore becomes (deliberately, according to Mulhall) as comical a figure as the Hegelians he caricatures.[iii] I do not myself in the end side with this interpretative tradition, but it is one that deserves to be considered, not least because it usefully draws our attention to just how important the stylistic and structural dimensions of the Postscript are, and just how much might hinge on Climacus’s being a humorist. Climacus’s problematic sense of himself could go far deeper than Westphal’s reading allows.

Another point that made me uneasy is that there seems to be a tension in Westphal’s account of the Climacean leap. I think he is right to want to resist the caricature of a leap that is ‘blind,’ and also to resist – along with commentators such as C. Stephen Evans and M. Jamie Ferreira – direct volitionalist interpretations. Yet in doing so, he at one point claims that ‘one leaps in the full knowledge of both the leap itself and its hope for destination’ (p. 78, my emphasis). This last phrase puzzles me, and it does not seem to sit happily with Westphal’s overall account in this section. Westphal acknowledges that in the case of Christianity ‘the landing site is held to resist conceptual mastery by virtue of its paradoxical character’, but points out that Climacus does ‘everything [he] can to make the paradox as conspicuous as possible’ (p. 78). But pointing up the paradoxicality of a destination can hardly be conflated with having ‘full knowledge’ of it. Suppose we find persuasive the idea that the existential destination of the leap might only fully be available to one after the leap has been made or – as Ferreira suggests – that it is ‘not a case of seeing before you leap, or leaping before you see [but rather that] the new seeing is the leap in understanding.’[iv] Such readings seem more plausible: could a full existential ‘understanding’ of a Chirsitian worldview be available to someone not oriented to a Christian way of being-in-the-world? It seems to me crucial to understanding the Postscript to see that there are aspects of religious –especially Christian – existence that remain an enigma to Climacus.

Nevertheless, even if these criticisms are fair, they should not be allowed to detract from a fine, detailed and in places genuinely witty commentary, which admirably manages to provide something for readers from college level up to specialist researcher. Westphal’s book should be highly commended.