Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter — Issue 41: February 2001

Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter — Issue 41: February 2001

Both/And: Reading Kierkegaard from Irony to Edification. By Michael Strawser. New York: Fordham University Press, 1997. xl + 261 p. with index. $17.00

ISBN 0823217019

Mark Lloyd Taylor

Seattle University – Seattle, Washington

Michael Strawser’s Both/And joins an impressive list of excellent books on Søren Kierkegaard published in English during the 1990s, contributing after its own fashion as rich resources to a fuller understanding of Kierkegaard as Bruce Kirmmse’s historical-cultural study Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, Sylvia Walsh’s thematic-analytic Living Poetically, or Roger Poole’s deconstructive-literary Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication. This contribution is all the more remarkable given the comparative brevity of Strawser’s book. Put most simply, Both/And insists that Kierkegaard’s writings must be read (that is, with careful attention to their textual features), that they can be read as a whole, and that such a holistic reading need not impose an alien system upon them. As he attends to the Kierkegaardian texts, Strawser manages admirably to avoid dead-ends to which certain interpretive disjunctions, certain either/ors, have led in past Kierkegaard scholarship.

Despite Kierkegaard’s rejection of much of the modern philosophy of his day and despite the problematic status of philosophy in our postmodern age, Strawser attempts what he calls a philosophical reading of Kierkegaard. This means, first of all, a sustained and comprehensive interpretation of the whole of Kierkegaard’s writings. Strawser refuses to work exclusively with, or to grant priority to, either the pseudonymous books or the veronymous writings (his term for the signed religious works). Moreover, instead of untying various dialectical knots, Strawser seeks to tighten them thereby maintaining “the tension pervasive throughout Kierkegaard’s writings” and “preserv[ing] the differences and inconsistencies” they present (pp. xxi-xxii). In particular, this involves attending to both the aesthetic and the religious features within each and every work, pseudonymous as well as veronymous. Ultimately, because “texts alone are available for interpretation, evaluation, and criticism,” to read philosophically means: “beginning at the beginning of Kierkegaard’s writings, beginning from the ground up, proceeding (reading) slowly without prejudgments and without a pre-(con)text” (pp. xviii-xix); it means reading Kierkegaard “openly (allowing for all possibilities, even that of being uplifted) and closely (and, if possible, in his native language)” (p. xxv); and it means reading him “seriously and playfully” (p. xxv). I especially appreciate the playfulness of Both/And, for it taps into the immense playfulness of Kierkegaard’s texts even as it leads Stawser to behave with delicious irreverence toward the orthodox (but textually suspect) dogmas of many “Kierkegaardologists” (his term).

Strawser contrasts his philosophical reading, which highlights the role of Socrates within Kierkegaard’s writings, to an aesthetic one (verging on “the ridiculous”), that locates their meaning in a biographical retrieval of Søren’s relationship to Regine Olsen (p. xviii). More importantly, he takes issue with religious readings (linked to the heritage of Kierkegaard’s father), which Strawser considers “unwarranted” or all-too-familiar or “overbearing” in the way they cut Kierkegaard up into “nourishing” pieces while ignoring “his warnings about the dangers of direct communication” (pp. xvii-xviii). And yet Strawser also distinguishes his approach from a deconstructive reading that denies there is any stable, identifiable point at all to Kierkegaard’s writings, especially those by pseudonyms. Unfortunately, as I will suggest later, the most serious weakness of Both/And lies in Strawser’s handling of the specifically Christian texture of Kierkegaard’s texts. His contribution needs to be balanced and complemented by such recent books as David Gouwens’ Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker, Timothy Polk’s The Biblical Kierkegaard, Harvey Ferguson’s Melancholy and the Critique of Modernity, and George Pattison’s Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious.

The both/and of Strawser’s title refers first and foremost to the two key terms of his subtitle: irony and edification. His point is that throughout all Kierkegaard’s writings the reader encounters both irony and edification. One cannot identify the pseudonymous works alone as practicing indirect communication, for the veronymous texts are full of literary devices and need to be read and interpreted. On the other hand, the point of the pseudonymous works, like the veronymous ones, lies extra-textually in the life of the reader. So, the name S. Kierkegaard on the title page of a book does not signify the lack of ironic indirection, while a pseudonym does not exclude the goal of building up the reader personally and existentially.

Strawser begins his sustained reading of the whole of Kierkegaard’s writings with a series of three chapters on books written before Either/Or and the inception of the pseudonymous authorship: From the Papers of One Still Living, Concept of Irony, and Johannes Climacus. He argues that already in the first, a signed work, one has indirect communication and that in the dissertation on Socrates and irony one finds nothing less than a “buried treasure map” for Kierkegaard’s subsequent authorial practice (pp. 94-95). These chapters are quite original and helpful, giving prominence to works under-represented in the scholarly literature. Next, in the second of the book’s three parts, Strawser moves to a consideration of irony and edification in the pseudonymous writings. Passing over the earlyl pseudonyms, he takes up Kierkegaard’s “First and Last Declaration” at the end of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, then focuses on the themes of truth, subjectivity, and maieutics in the books by Johannes Climacus and Anti-Climacus. This strikes me as the least helpful and original portion of Both/And. While I appreciate his debunking of the aura of seriousness surrounding the theory of stages in the Climacus texts, much of the material here reiterates insights gained many years ago by Louis Mackey (Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet, 1971) and Josiah Thompson (Kierkegaard, 1973). But then in the brilliant third part of the book Strawser reveals the indirect character of Kierkegaard’s veronymous writings (here treading common ground with the books by Pattison and Ferguson mentioned earlier). He shows that the truth in such signed religious writings is as extra-textual as that in the pseudonymous books, and as little didactic, resting in the personal appropriation of the reader; and offers an account of the intertwining of edification and love from the sermon at the end of Either/Or, through the edifying discourses of 1843-44 and Works of Love (1847), to Christian Discourses (1848). Finally, in a concluding chapter, he addresses (the posthumous) Point of View in connection with postmodernist thought and postmodernist interpretations of Kierkegaard, urging that Kierkegaard’s texts hardly need a deconstructive reading insofar as they already practice in advance their own postmodern gambit.

Beyond the primary contribution of the book, which is the careful and sustained reading of Kierkegaard just outlined, Strawser offers his reader a wealth of specific insights. Some are narrow in scope; for example, that the phrase “one still living” in the title of Kierkegaard’s first book, far from having to do with losses in his own personal life (as Walter Lowrie claimed over fifty years ago), actually represents one more satiric dig at Hans Christian Andersen. Others apply more broadly, such as Strawser’s well-constructed argument that the term hiin Enkelte, that single individual, so prominent in Kierkegaard, is an inclusive, not an exclusive, term, signaling the equal intimacy of any and every reader to the text and to edification, not some secret code meant for Regine alone, or his insistence that Point of View is a text that must be read and interpreted like all the rest, not a privileged direct utterance “somehow mysteriously lying outside the Kierkegaardian corpus” (pp. xxviii). In a most salutary way, Strawser avoids granting Point of View a (falsely) comprehensive finality in the understanding of Kierkegaard. As current a book as Hibib Malik’s Receiving Søren Kierkegaard (1997), regrettably, testifies to the relevance of Strawser’s work in this regard.

Because I find Strawser’s call for an open and close reading of Kierkegaard’s books so compelling, I want to suggest that his own reading could be both closer and more open at several crucial points touching on gender and the presence of Jesus Christ in Kierkegaard’s texts.[i]

While I endorse Strawser’s strong claim that Concept of Irony embodies Kierkegaard’s “original point of view,” I find it telling that his treatment of the dissertation “begin[s] near the end” of the text (pp. 27, 28). By beginning near the end, he overlooks or underestimates both the first and last paragraphs of Concept of Irony. The first paragraph, it seems to me, figuratively frames the issues of the entire essay in terms of the possible demeanors or deportments with which the masculine philosopher might approach the feminine phenomenon. Eventually, four such demeanors get articulated and analyzed: the way in which Hegel rapes the phenomenon, imposing his own positive principles on the negativity, the irony, of Socrates; that of Socrates himself, the voyeuristic (male) midwife whose love of younger men confounds the usual sexual schema, insofar as he refuses to give himself (femininely) to others and yet cannot engender (or father) new life, but only watches/assists the labors of others; the self-absorbed autoeroticism of the romanticists which drains the (feminine) world of body, actuality, and history of any significance whatsoever; and the demeanor of the eroticist (S. Kierkegaard himself?), who accomplishes a fruitful intercourse of male and female principles, even while respecting the integrity of the latter – a demeanor consistently fleshed out in Christian theological language. Strawser’s one brief mention of gender comes in a footnote concerning pronouns, Rorty, and Derrida (n. 8 to p. 30).

The dissertation’s last paragraph turns on allusions to Christian notions of the incarnation, allusions that finally help piece together a series of marginal and parenthetical references throughout the text to Jesus Christ, including the first of fifteen Latin theses S. Kierkegaard was required to append to his Danish dissertation, which asserts that the similarity between Socrates and Jesus Christ consists in their dissimilarity.[ii] Kierkegaard himself provides, in Concept of Irony, a figure for portraying this relationship of similarity/dissimilarity: an engraving of Napoleon’s grave in which there is nothing to see except two tall trees shading the burial site, nothing, that is, until one realizes that the empty space between the trees outlines Napoleon’s own features. Once seen, one cannot make Napoleon disappear. Just as Kierkegaard uses this picture to illustrate Socratic irony, so I would argue that once Jesus Christ has appeared in the marginalia of the dissertation, he moves to fill the empty spaces between and within the discussions of Hegel, Socrates, and the romanticists, as well as the demeanors of the rapist, the voyeur, and the autoeroticists. In contrast to the world historical validity of Socrates, Jesus Christ represents irony’s external validity; in the further realm of humor, beyond Shakespeare and Goethe’s poetic/existential mastery of irony, Jesus Christ bodies forth true love. And so the final irony in the dissertation on Socrates and irony is that by indirection everything about Socrates (especially his impotence and negativity) points toward Jesus Christ (who functions both as midwife and mother). Strawser’s discussion of the end of Concept of Irony turns instead to the question of whether Kierkegaard was a Hegelian when he wrote the dissertation.

Now Strawser is not unaware of the tendency of Kierkegaard’s treatments of Socrates to move in a Christian direction. Throughout Both/And he draws on a remark in Point of View to ask “how did Socrates become a Christian?” (see pp. 54, 131, 242-245). But although Strawser develops wonderfully the formal similarity between Socrates and Jesus Christ in Kierkegaard, he understates the importance of their material dissimilarity within the texts. For example, he understands Climacus to envision a “leap into divine madness,” a “passionate inwardness or faith in the objectively uncertain” where “the object of faith is the infinite, the unknown” (p. 132). It seems to me that already in Climacus (and not just later in Anti-Climacus) the ultimate breach with immanence takes place, ironically, within and not beyond finitude, for it is the fullness, corporeality, and presence of God-in-time, Jesus Christ, that constitutes the divine madness, the paradoxical, offensive unknown with which human reason collides. Similarly, Strawser asserts that Socrates the ironist falls short of the hidden inwardness characteristic of religious existence (at least its humoristic border territory). In fact, the Climacus of Postscript distinguishes both the hidden inwardness of a (male figure like Quidam in Stages on Life’s Way and the (male) subjectivity of Socrates from an inwardness (a subjectivity) that is directed outward toward another, Jesus Christ; the latter re-calls a mode of subjectivity identified as female earlier in the text and most closely approximates Christianity (at least as far as the non-Christian humorist Climacus can make out). I am not contesting Strawser’s point that Climacus refuses to didacticize or proselytize in his books; the reader must indeed become personally active in living out this “non-philosophy.” Nor am I interested in ferreting out what Kierkegaard himself believed/lived (à la M. Holmes Harsthorne). But I would insist that the texts show Kierkegaard leading the reader by edifying indirection/ironic edification to face the possibility of becoming Christian, not just becoming subjective or human in an abstract or generic sense.

Strawser is correct to point out that Kierkegaard’s edifying discourses ironically and maieutically treat “the disclosure of the divine love of Jesus Christ, who is, nota bene, not always nominally present” (p. 201). But he goes on to claim that “Jesus” is employed more frequently than “Christ” and that the former reflects a more immanent and less distinctively Christian outlook than the latter. Now Kierkegaard writes about Jesus Christ in seven of the eighteen discourses of 1843-44.[iii] In these passages, I count seven occurrences of “Jesus,” seven of “Christ,” as well as a number of other christological titles and phrases: “the Lord,” “the Savior,” “the child,” “the expected one,” “the one who was to come after,” “the Son of Man,” even “he/him.” What is most striking, and missed by Strawser, is the textual context of Kierkegaard’s usage. All seven occurrences of the name “Jesus” can be found in just two contiguous discourses. Both carry the same title, “Love Will Hide a Multitude of Sins,” and both foreground women from the gospels: the woman, seized in the act of adultery by the Pharisees, who receives forgiveness and not judgment from Jesus (John 8) and “the female sinner” (Synderinden), who anoints Jesus’ feet as he eats dinner in the home of a Pharisee and likewise is affirmed not condemned by Jesus (Luke 7). By contrast, the title “Christ” appears in connection with a blind man, John the Baptizer, the Apostle Paul, and the (male) disciples; references to “the child” occur in a discourse devoted to Anna (Luke 2), the aged widow who recognizes and praises the infant Jesus in the Jerusalem temple. There is a privileged link between women and Jesus Christ in these texts. Hence, I would amplify Strawser’s reflections on Kierkegaard’s postmodern gambit by remarking on its sexually, socially, economically, and culturally marked character. When Kierkegaard strives to deconstruct the values of a culturally elite (fornem) group of males, he does not do so through the negativity of pure aesthetic play, but with resources available to the simple and unsophisticated (eenfoldig) classes. Kierkegaard communicates indirectly, he says the unsayable and unsays the said, through something, not nothing: gospel stories even (especially?) 19^th century Danish women, peasants, and children would recognize.

The role Point of View plays in Both/And puzzles me in light of such attentiveness to gender and Jesus Christ in Kierkegaard’s texts. To read Kierkegaard from irony to edification finally means for Strawser to read him from Concept of Irony to Point of View. What is lacking here, what leaves his book something less than a truly comprehensive or holistic reading of Kierkegaard, is consideration of the veronymous texts coincident with, and subsequent to, Point of View (completed in 1848) and Anti-Climacus’ Practice in Christianity (1850): 1) a series of discourses for Friday communion in which the

female sinner (Synderinden) of Luke 7 provides the privileged picture (Billede) and pattern (Forbillede) of approach to the life-giving body and blood of The Pattern, Jesus Christ; and 2) the short pieces published in Fæderlandet and Øieblikket from 1854-55 in which Kierkegaard takes the Danish state church and its leadership to task. Figuring out the relationships between these ultimately up-building and down-tearing writings, as well as their connections to the preceding authorship(s), seems to me to pose the severest test of any both/and reading of Kierkegaard. Strawser manages to avoid facing this interpretive crux altogether.

But to conclude, I trust the foregoing critical comments concerning the need to explore additional texture and architecture in Kierkegaard’s texts finally serve to commend Strawser’s book and the fruitful conclusions that result from reading Kierkegaard seriously and playfully, openly and closely.