Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter — Issue 47: February 2004

“If I have ever been on good terms with the public,” Kierkegaard observed in The Point of View, it was “in the second or third month after the publication of Either/Or” under a pseudonym (PV 37). Shortly thereafter, Kierkegaard released Two Upbuilding Discourses under his own name—and promptly lost his public following. He never regained it. By the numbers, at least, Kierkegaard was a one-hit wonder: Either/Or, the third of his thirty-odd books, remained his sole commercial success.

Kierkegaard later portrayed his fall from public favor as a decisive clash with the world. “With my left hand I passed out Either/Or into the world, with my right hand Two Upbuilding Discourses; but they all or almost all took the left hand with their right” (PV 36). This miscommunication, as it were a colossal missed handshake, soon recurred at regular intervals, as Kierkegaard released a succession of pairs of pseudonymous and “upbuilding” works. If we believe The Point of View, Kierkegaard’s aim throughout was to winnow his readership, sifting for the upbuilding discourses’ true reader, “that single individual” who would accept “with the right hand … what is offered with the right hand” (PV 36n, EUD 179).

In his fresh, masterly study, Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, theology, literature, George Pattison seeks not so much to grasp Kierkegaard’s right hand with his own as to reveal the continuity of Kierkegaard’s work, left hand and right, as only the upbuilding works show it. “These texts provide a standpoint from which best to see the unity that holds together the whole, including, necessarily and pre-eminently, the extraordinary achievement of the pseudonymous works” (9). This thesis, Pattison knows, needs vigorous defense on a number of fronts. On the one hand, he must reconcile his talk of “unity” with the distinction between “right” and “left” hands: Kierkegaard’s insistence that the upbuilding writings differ radically from the pseudonymous works. On the other hand, and more urgently, Pattison must rescue the discourses from charges dating to the 1840s: that they are boring, dogmatic, and detract from Kierkegaard’s interest to philosophy, theology, and literature. Pattison devotes his difficult first chapter to the former task; his remaining chapters attempt—and superbly accomplish—the latter.

Chapter 1 combats three Kierkegaardian claims about the signed upbuilding writings: (1) that they represent “direct communication,” as opposed to the pseudonymous works’ “indirect communication”; (2) that they are merely upbuilding, and do not reflect Kierkegaard’s sense of true Christianity; and finally, a specification of (2) due to Johannes Climacus,[i] (3) that the upbuilding discourses reflect only the standpoint of “Religiousness A,” not that of Christianity.

Claim (1) occurs prominently in both The Point of View and the unpublished lectures on communication. Pattison has long argued that “even the direct is indirect” in the upbuilding discourses, that Kierkegaard’s “best works and most fruitful insights transcend this duality.”[ii] He here presents an elaborate proof of this view, applying the motto de omnibus dubitandum to Kierkegaard’s own pronouncements (14, 16). According to the unpublished lectures, Pattison notes, all ethical communication is “indirect” (18); however, he argues ingeniously, “the concept of ethical communication set out in the lectures is exemplified in the discourses” (19), which “would seem to mark them out as indirect communication after all” (21). At the very least, Pattison concludes, this reveals a tension between the lectures and The Point of View, and gives us reason to doubt that either is Kierkegaard’s “last word” on the subject (22). Such strong claims may not be necessary: I am not certain that Pattison needs to challenge Claim (1) all—let alone attack the unpublished lectures and The Point of View—to bolster his thesis.[iii]

Claims (2) and (3), on the other hand, plainly warrant Pattison’s protests: both dismiss the discourses as works of an inferior religious character. Against Claim (2), Pattison maintains that no “qualitative distinction” can reliably be drawn between upbuilding and Christian works: “Even the most radical Christian works,” Pattison maintains, “are readable in light of the category of the upbuilding” (12). In particular, Pattison flatly denies Johannes Climacus’s Claim (3). “The apparently rigid schematization of ‘Religiousness A’ and ‘Religiousness B’ … conceals a far more dynamic picture. Religion, for Kierkegaard, is not something to be divided up between a series of hermetically sealed compartments, but is a process, something lived” (31). For Pattison, the upbuilding, too, is a process of movement, and can be read both from a religious standpoint and from a “humanistic, philosophical,” perspective (32).

Pattison proposes to demonstrate this point with a series of interpretive exercises (33); he fulfills his promise with elegance and great success. The chapters that follow disclose the upbuilding’s movement, ebbing and flowing within and across the discourses, from humanistic themes toward religious dogmas—then suddenly retreating, surrendering further movement to the reader. Pattison’s chapters mime, in form, the movement he discloses: he sets forth, then punctures and withdraws, a progression of interpretive dogmas about the discourses, leaving his conclusions to the reader.

Chapter 2, in this vein, works ostensibly to discern the psychological and anthropological content of Kierkegaard’s early upbuilding discourses, and includes an extraordinarily insightful analysis of Kierkegaard’s term “patience” (47-50). This attempt soon ends, however, in frustration with the discourses’ manifestly “mystical” content (e.g. “becoming as nothing”). Pattison points, instead, to the discourses’ “communicative form and strategy” as the locus of their deeper contributions to psychology and anthropology (63).

Next, Chapter 3 earnestly considers, and earnestly rejects, a number of alternative (that is, more conventionally philosophical) accounts of the discourses’ content, particularly the search for a Kantian “sublime” in the discourses’ talk of “becoming as nothing” (87-90). Once again, Pattison shows by his own attempt that “to use the idea of sublimity to establish a philosophical foothold in the world of the upbuilding discourses … is still to have said essentially nothing concerning the actual meaning of that world” (90-91, my emphasis).

This aporetic journey finally finds a pause in Chapter 4. Here Pattison considers the implications of a theatrical simile from “An Occasional Discourse”: the human being is like the actor, God like the audience (UDVS 124-5). The discourse, Pattison argues, cannot possibly set forth this conception of being “before God” as a dogmatic claim about human being—this, he suggests, would make Kierkegaard a perverse reflection of Sartre—but intends it, instead, as a regulative ideal a la Kant (113). As Pattison explains, regulative ideals of religion, including the “infinite qualitative difference” between God and man and the eternal “thought of death,” build us up insofar as they teach us to remove “the illusion … that we are able to achieve an incorrigible view onto the meaning of our lives” (114-5).

Over three chapters, then, Pattison runs the gamut of assumptions about the upbuilding discourses’ content, and rejects every approach that fails to explain how the discourses build up their hearers. We are left with a single explanation: Pattison’s analogy to Kant’s regulative ideals of reason. But this explanation is not so much a description of the discourses’ content as a reference to their strategy, a name for their way of building up by dismantling illusions.

Hence, by the end of Chapter 4, Pattison has readied us to accept that the discourses simply cannot be classified by content, and to follow him with alacrity as he turns to the discourses’ form. Chapter 5 analyzes Kierkegaard’s striking method, in both the upbuilding discourses and Works of Love, of reversing theological metaphors—for example, in claiming that we learn what it means to be a human father from God the Father Himself (EUD 99). Pattison explores this technique as the very essence of “upbuilding”: it is Kierkegaard’s way of using language to reveal language’s own shortcomings (137).

Chapter 6 considers the goal of such techniques. Here Pattison interprets Kierkegaard’s variety of upbuilding “rhetorics”—the way shifts among imaginary speakers, lets the discourse “itself” speak, buttonholes the reader with leading questions, etc.—as acts of interpersonal moral persuasion: “His strategy requires his readers to consider their whole game-plan for life as part of their response to the challenge of the religious address” (164). Chapter 7 makes this conclusion believable, despite Kierkegaard’s reputation for solipsism, by examining the importance of real human interpersonality—in particular, the “engagement crisis” of Søren Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen—to the meditations on love in the first volume of discourses.[iv]

To summarize, the intermediate chapters collate a working understanding of the upbuilding discourses’ content (regulative religious ideals) with a provisional account of their form (moral persuasion). With this outline in hand, Pattison finally turns to the task he undertook at the outset: demonstrating how the upbuilding discourses allow us “best to see the unity” of Kierkegaard’s corpus (8).

His last chapter fulfills this promise with creativity, grace, and thoroughness: it is the book’s great triumph. Pattison begins by taking October 16, 1843—the date Kierkegaard published both Fear and Trembling and Three Upbuilding Discourses—as an occasion to read the former in terms of the latter, so that the upbuilding discourses’ commentaries on love illuminate Johannes de silentio’s[v] confusions about the faith and trials of Abraham. Pattison next examines Kierkegaard’s upbuilding portrayal of “The Woman Who Was a Sinner” as a model of imitatio Christi befitting the rigorous standards of Anti-Climacus.[vi]

It is only at this point, having shown the upbuilding’s continuity with writings of both “lower” and “higher” pseudonyms, that Pattison plays his final card: the figure of Socrates, wending his way through works of all three categories. Socrates’ movements reflect the continuity Pattison champions between the upbuilding and the pseudonymous, between what we might otherwise call Kierkegaard’s philosophical and theological texts. “The reappearance of Socrates” hints, writes Pattison, “that the transition to a more overtly Christological understanding of religiousness [is] conceived within a framework erected on the ground of common human experience and understanding” (215). For Kierkegaard, in other words, Socrates signifies precisely what the upbuilding discloses: the juncture of Kierkegaard’s right and left hands, the “point of similarity between irony and radical discipleship,” that is, the “limit” of both philosophical and religious communication (219).

This complex, formidable argument is a marvelous contribution to English-language Kierkegaard scholarship: a book-length interpretation of the upbuilding discourses as the hermeneutic key to Kierkegaard’s corpus. For all its ambition, Pattison’s book is nonetheless careful and reasoned, cleanly written and clearly documented. It testifies eloquently to the richness of the discourses it treats. I am honored to recommend it to the Newsletter’s readers.

[i] Pseudonymous author of Concluding Unscientific Postscript. “Religiousness A” is the topic of some two hundred pages of CUP (1:387-586); on the upbuilding discourses, see 1:256-7n.

[ii] See, for example, George Pattison, “’Who’ is the Discourse? A Study in Kierkegaard’s Religious Literature,” in Kierkegaardiana 16, ed. Joakim Garff, Arne Grøn, Eberhard Harbsmeier, and Julia Watkin (Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels, 1993), 28-45, p. 43.

[iii] I find Pattison’s sense that the discourses transcend the duality of “direct” and “indirect” appealing. I am just not certain that his view requires rejection, as opposed to reinterpretation, of Kierkegaard’s claims in the unpublished lectures and in The Point of View. The unpublished lectures insist that “ethical-religious communication,” as opposed to merely “ethical communication,” is always “direct-indirect” (VIII² B 89). Meanwhile, The Point of View declares that, to portray religiousness properly, one “must begin in one swoop with simultaneously being an aesthetic and a religious author,” i.e., one must mix “direct” and “indirect” communicate strategies (PV 49). In both the unpublished lectures and On My Work as an Author, Kierkegaard announces that he wrote the unbuilding discourses precisely to ensure such a “concurrence” (VIII² B 88; PV 8).To fuse these claims together: on the level of prefaces and bylines – that is, comparing signed and pseudonymous works – the upbuilding discourses may indeed be “direct-indirect” communication about Christianity. These statements, it seems to me, are not necessarily incompatible with Pattison’s thesis that, on the level of ethical-religious content, the upbuilding discourses are themselves indirect in important ways. Kierkegaard may well have believed that, furnished with the right sort of preface, disclaimer, or revocation, a text containing indirection could nonetheless count as “direct.”

[iv] For further discussion, see the introduction to Chapter 7’s original: George Pattison, “A dialogical Approach to Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses,” in Zeitschrift für neue Theologiegeschichte, 3:185-202, p. 186.

[v] “Lower” pseudonymous author of Fear and Trembling.

[vi] “Higher” pseudonymous author of The Sickness unto Death and Practice in Christianity, two works sometimes taken to represent “Religiousness B” (as opposed to the “Religiousness A” of the upbuilding discourses; see “Claim (3)” above).