Você está na página 1de 28

British Journal for the History of Philosophy 16(2) 2008: 393 419

ARTICLE

THE IRONY OF IT ALL: SREN KIERKEGAARD AND THE ANXIOUS PLEASURES OF CIVIL SOCIETY
Darren C. Zook
With Kierkegaard, everything is dierent.1 To read the works of Kierkegaard, to delve into their linguistic games and lexical mazes, is to set out on a journey of what might be called enlightened exasperation. In one moment Kierkegaard tells us we should strive ethically for truthfulness; in another, Kierkegaard reveals that sometimes truthfulness is best achieved through deceit. Much of Kierkegaards philosophical archive is written under various pseudonyms, each with a dierent world-view and motive; quite often, that motive is to critique or undermine what the other pseudonymous authors have written.2 Many a scholar has mined the works of Kierkegaard to understand the impressive and prescient contributions Kierkegaard has made to elds ranging from existentialist philosophy, linguistics, psychology, religious studies, and even literary criticism. But Kierkegaards specic contributions to the history of political philosophy, and more specically to the idea of civil society, while perhaps not
All citations in the text refer to both Danish and English editions of Sren Kierkegaards writings. For the Danish versions, the abbreviated references are as follows: SV3, followed by volume and page number, refers to the third edition of the Samlede Vrker (1962); SKS, followed by volume and page number, refers to the critical Danish edition Sren Kierkegaards Skrifter (1994); Pap. followed by entry number refers to Sren Kierkegaards Papirer (190948; 196970). As is customary, English versions are taken from the standard edition Kierkegaards Writings (KW), edited by Howard V. Hong, Edna H. Hong et al. (1978). Individual works from the English edition will be abbreviated in this paper as follows: The Sickness Unto Death (KW XIX) SUD; Either/Or (KW III and IV) EO I and EO II; Prefaces (KW IX) P; Concluding Unscientic Postscript (KW XII.1 and XII.2) CUP; Works of Love (KW XVI) WL; Stages on Lifes Way (KW XI) SLW; Judge for Yourself (KW XXI) JFY; For Self-Examination (KW XXI) FSE; The Point of View for my Work as an Author (KW XXII) POV; The Concept of Irony (KW II) CI; and The Concept of Anxiety (KW VIII) CA. There are two exceptions to this: P/J Alastair Hannays edition of Kierkegaards Papers and Journals: A Selection (Harmondsworth, 1996); LR Hannays translation of A Literary Review (Harmondsworth, 2001). 2 In this paper I have tried to simplify things hopefully without distorting them by referring simply to Kierkegaard except where it is strictly necessary to point out which pseudonymous author is speaking. On the issue of Kierkegaards pseudonymous authors, see generally, Kierkegaard: pseudonymitet, edited by Birgit Bertung, Paul Mu ller, and Fritz Norlan (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1993).
1

British Journal for the History of Philosophy ISSN 0960-8788 print/ISSN 1469-3526 online 2008 BSHP http://www.informaworld.com DOI: 10.1080/09608780801969191

394

DARREN C. ZOOK

completely ignored, have certainly been undervalued.3 In recent years, a growing number of scholars have tried to remedy this unfortunate neglect and to defend Kierkegaard against the charge that his political ideas were hopelessly complex or impractical to the point of futility. Scholars such as Mark Dooley, Merold Westphal, Bruce Kirmmse, George Pattison and Martin Matustik, to name a few, have already contributed in creative and productive ways to the project of rehabilitating Kierkegaard in the realm of political philosophy and practice. Here I hope to add to this larger and ongoing project by focusing specically on Kierkegaards philosophy as it relates to the idea of civil society. One of the goals of this paper is therefore to re-examine Kierkegaards place in the history of civil society as a philosophical concept and additionally to explain why Kierkegaards lesser-known version of civil society took the form that it did. In more specic terms, I argue rst, that Kierkegaards political musings oer a substantial and productive addition to the evolutionary archive of philosophical conceptions of civil society; and second, that these musings were meant to provide a complex and radically innovative blueprint for the reconciliation of inner-directed subjectivity and outer-directed sociality that responds to the contradictions and lacunae Kierkegaard perceived in the works of his predecessors and contemporaries. By starting with Kierkegaards conception of self and focusing on its intricate formulations, and then moving to Kierkegaards vision of the self as it moves through (and sometimes against) society, I will suggest that Kierkegaard can be read as a pragmatic and elaborate response to other, more abstract theories of political evolution and social complexity in circulation at the time. The apparent radicalness of Kierkegaards vision of civil society a radicalness that is generated by a relentless disavowal of the temptations oered by more settled and standardized frameworks of political vision stems from his own perception that he was living in a time of unsettling turmoil and transition, and that the decay and decline generated by the historical age could only be overcome through extraordinary and profound measures.

SITUATING KIERKEGAARD: THE CIVIL SOCIETY DEBATE Like so many other philosophers of his time, Kierkegaard was writing in a moment that seemed saturated by a sense of grave crisis.4 This sense of crisis
The exceptions to this are discussed in the text below. Here I will only note that, for instance, two central overviews of the history of civil society, Adam B. Seligmans The Idea of Civil Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) and John Ehrenbergs Civil Society: The Critical History of an Idea (New York: New York University Press, 1999), do not contain even a single reference to Kierkegaard. 4 To understand Kierkegaard in context, the most useful texts would be Joakim Gar, SAK: Sren Aabye Kierkegaard En Biogra (Copenhagen, 2000), now available in an English
3

THE IRONY OF IT ALL

395

originated in what appeared to be a hopelessly irreparable misalignment of the connective forces of society, composed as they were of a conceptual matrix of elements such as interpersonal ethics, religious tenets, political values, social norms, and civic virtues. For Kierkegaard, much of the crisis could be traced to an obsession with living only in-the-present-moment (nutiden), an aiction that was seen as peculiar to modernity, and an aiction whose aective correlate, as George Pattison points out, often takes the form of melancholy, a sense of loss, emptiness or absence[.]5 Kierkegaard himself found evidence of this general sense of non-reective, in-the-moment living nearly everywhere he looked, particularly around the supposedly cosmopolitan city of Copenhagen. The forces of the reading public are concentrated in Copenhagen, he noted, and yet this concentration has nothing to do with strength but only with uproar and noise and racket and ocious busyness in all external endeavors (SV3 5, 209; P 15). Why the citizens of Copenhagen seem to be permanently distracted by external endeavors, and why they seem unaware of the latent, potential power in their midst, are generative questions that would become for Kierkegaard the entry-points rst to a general critique of the crises wrought by a nascent modernity and then to an exploration of the slumbering potential embedded in civil society to serve as a corrective antidote to those crises. Kierkegaard was not, of course, the rst philosopher of his age to grapple with the practical or conceptual complexities of civil society. Then, as now, the idea of civil society had dierent meanings to dierent interpreters. In the rst half of the nineteenth century, several formulations of the idea of civil society were competing in an intellectual debate about the proper relationship between the formal politics of the state and the normative (civic) bonds of public society. One of these formulations of civil society could be traced back to Locke, for whom the term referred to the collection of individuals outside the state who, through the establishment of bonds of interpersonal trust, had managed to provide a voluntary source of legitimacy for the state and to create an autonomous space to pursue a proper Christian life.6 Another formulation one associated with several
translation by Bruce H. Kirmmse as Sren Kierkegaard: A Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Other useful works are Harald van Mendelssohn, Sren Kierkegaard: Ein Genie in einer Kleinstadt (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1995); and Maria Veltman, Sren Kierkegaard: Een biograsche schets aan de hand van zijn geschreven nalatenschap (Assen/ Maastricht: Van Gorcum, 1987). For an interesting and remarkably intimate portrait of Kierkegaards familial context and the strained and often vituperative relationship with his brother, see Flemming Chr. Nielsen, Ind i Verdens Vrimmel: Sren Kierkegaards ukendte bror (Viborg: Holkenfeldt, 1998). 5 George Pattison, Kierkegaard, Religion and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 20. 6 John Dunn, The contemporary political signicance of John Lockes conception of civil society, in Civil Society: History and Possibilities, edited by Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 3957.

396

DARREN C. ZOOK

luminaries of the Scottish Enlightenment and one that brings us closer to the contributions of Kierkegaard could be traced to the moral philosophy associated with the rise of the market and commercial relations, which supposedly oered opportunities for the secularization of interpersonal relations and the liberation of those relations from particularistic and kinbased networks, thereby creating a genuinely autonomous public.7 It was Hegel, however, who created the most ambitiously systematic rendering of the idea of civil society, a rendering against which Kierkegaard would construct much of his own contrary version. The general concept of civil society in Hegels philosophy has been extensively covered elsewhere in the voluminous secondary literature and need not be summarized here.8 Here I would like to emphasize only those aspects of Hegels writings on civil society that prompted Kierkegaards response and inspired his own vision of civil society. To do that, however, it is necessary rst to situate and explain Hegels particular vision as a partial and perhaps indirect response to the writings of Adam Ferguson, in particular his Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767).9 One of the generative elements of Fergusons Essay is the idea of recapturing and restoring the virile competitiveness of political life and the cultivation of what he calls the arduous virtues.10 Through a form of non-violent but aggressively spirited and competitive interaction, citizens cultivate both normative bonds and civic virtues; together these bonds and virtues give the citizens a source of oppositional power against the state to prevent the latter from accruing to itself or appropriating from the citizens the preponderance of political power. Civil society, in other words, cannot be understood without the concomitant presence of the state and formal politics. Kierkegaard, as we shall see, saw this tendency to understand civil society only as it relates to the state as a violation of the autonomy of civil society and as a debilitating element of dependency which would ultimately undermine the bondedness of civil society. As is well known, Hegel borrowed from Fergusons work, at times heavily, although signicantly, and crucially for understanding the Kierkegaardian response, Hegel translated, or perhaps mistranslated,
John Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment at the Limits of the Civic Tradition, in Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatie, Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of the Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Richard Boyd, Reappraising the Scottish Moralists and Civil Society, Polity 33 (Fall 2000) No. 1: 10125. 8 ber die Rolle der For a general introduction, see, for instance, Rolf-Peter Horstmann, U bu rgerlichen Gesellschaft in Hegels politischer Philosophie, in Materialen zu Hegels Rechtsphilosophie, edited by Manfred Riedel (Frankfurt, 1974) vol. 2, pp. 276311. 9 On understanding Ferguson in context, see Jose Harris, From Richard Hooker to Harold Laski: Changing Perceptions of Civil Society in British Thought, Late Sixteenth to Early Twentieth Centuries, in Civil Society in British History: Ideas, Identities, Institutions, edited by Jose Harris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) 1337 (see esp. 246). 10 Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, edited by Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 243.
7

THE IRONY OF IT ALL

397

Fergusons idea of civil society in such a way as to distort the general emphasis on citizens in Fergusons vision into one that focused almost exclusively on merchants (or more generally, the bourgeoisie).11 Indeed, Hegel himself species his own conation of citizen to mean bourgeois in his Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts: In right the object is the person, in the moral viewpoint it is the subject, in the family it is the family-member, and in civil society in general it is the citizen (as bourgeois).12 Aside from thereby excluding non-bourgeois actors from the benets of civil society, Hegel also abstracts and, particularly insidious from Kierkegaards point of view, institutionalizes the way in which these bourgeois citizens relate to the formal politics of the state. First, such citizens are to form themselves into groups or corporations that serve to educate their members into their civil obligations and to provide recognition and verication of their status in relation to their fellow citizens. In turn, these corporations also provide the means by which civil society ultimately coalesces with the idea of the state, without which civil society, or any type of reasoned existence, cannot exist: The state is in and of itself the ethical whole, the actualization of freedom, and it is the absolute goal of reason that freedom should be actualized.13 For Hegel, institutions are necessary for the actualization of personal freedom and are necessarily created by the state for the good of its citizens; in return, citizens express their gratitude to the state for creating these enabling institutions through the loyal sentiment of patriotism. This would be a major point of departure for Kierkegaard: in opposition to Hegel, Kierkegaard remained deeply mistrustful of the institutionalization of civic life and the presumed reliance on the state for the exercise of personal freedom. As we shall see, Kierkegaard responded by proposing his own vision of civil society imbued with playful forms of everyday subversion to resist and challenge the potential drift of civil society into moral ossication, ethical passivity, and ultimately, institutional subservience to the totalitarian state. Whereas for Hegel, civil society in essence needed the state to realize its own identity and freedom, for Kierkegaard, only an inauthentic, incomplete, or otherwise distorted civil society needed the state, at least in the Hegelian sense. Patriotism was therefore not regarded as a civic virtue by Kierkegaard, as it implied a form of narcissism expressed through loyalty to what was in essence a closed, national community. Since the closure of communities was a corollary to their institutionalization, an authentic civil society would and must continuously render its boundaries open.
11 On Hegels debt to Ferguson and other Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, see Norbert Waszek, The Scottish Enlightenment and Hegels Account of Civil Society (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988). For the origins of and precursors to Hegels acts of interpretive translation, see Fania Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment: Scottish Civic Discourse in EighteenthCentury Germany (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). 12 Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, in Werke in zwanzig Banden, vol. 7 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970) x 190 (p. 348) (hereafter cited as PR). 13 Hegel, PR x 258 (p. 403).

398

DARREN C. ZOOK

Interestingly, this would transform Kierkegaard into an advocate of an enhanced if not altogether revised version of Kantian cosmopolitanism. Mark Dooley has used this quality of openness as a starting point to reconstruct a politics of responsibility out of Kierkegaards philosophical projects. According to Dooley, Kierkegaards writings seem to presage the corpus of Derridas works devoted to the ethical obligations of establishing empathetic bonds with outsiders and marginalized others by continually reaching across boundaries that would otherwise occlude our moral vision. What Kierkegaard and Derrida both oppose, in Dooleys view, is the propensity of communities and political totalities to establish rigid borders that maintain a culture of closure toward the other.14 I am certainly sympathetic to the argument oered by Dooley, but I am less interested here in understanding how Kierkegaard anticipates Derrida than in how Kierkegaard crafted his responses in his own contemporaneous moment, in particular as rejections of signicant parts of the formulations of civil society oered by Hegel and by Ferguson. From a dierent angle, the ethical incitement toward openness also invites a review of Kierkegaards mischievous penchant for using a variety of pseudonymous authors in parts of his literary corpus. How can we be certain, one might ask, as to what Kierkegaard meant for civic actors to do in public life, or how can we even be sure that Kierkegaard meant it? Roger Poole has argued against the idea of understanding what Kierkegaard meant in any denite way, whether about civil actions or about anything, on the grounds that Kierkegaards complex matrix of real and pseudonymous authors intentionally precludes any denite reading. When read as a literary endeavour, Poole suggests, Kierkegaards literary works remain elusively mysterious: I shall suggest that the mystery is impenetrable to the end, and that is because Kierkegaards writing has made all solutions impossible.15 By rendering his own texts perennially open, Kierkegaard supposedly frustrates any attempt by the reader and interlocutor to nd closure in the form of any one particular meaning. As with Dooley in terms of philosophy, Poole suggests from a literary perspective the ways in which Kierkegaard anticipates Derrida and other postmodern writers. Yet Pooles argument produces two unintended consequences that inadvertently suggest that it is in fact possible to decant a relatively clear picture of civil society from Kierkegaards writings. First, we may not know exactly who Kierkegaard is or what he said or meant, but that also implies that we cannot say for certain what he did not say or mean. When we nd, for instance, in the midst of Either/Or, the claim that our hero, then, works for a living (SKS 3, 281; EO II 297), the secondary literature on Kierkegaard
14 Mark Dooley, The Politics of Exodus: Kierkegaards Ethics of Responsibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001) 226. 15 Roger Poole, Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993) 1.

THE IRONY OF IT ALL

399

would tell us this: since the claim is made by Author B, writing from the ethical viewpoint, and since Kierkegaard himself regarded the ethical view as superior to the aesthetic view, this statement is perhaps closer to something that Kierkegaard would seriously propose rather than something he might oppose.16 Yet the only way we can evaluate the validity of the statements made by the pseudonymous authors of Either/Or is to compare them to Kierkegaards point of view; to do this, we would need to know for certain what Kierkegaards viewpoint actually is, something Poole says is textually impossible. What this means, however, is that at a minimum we are not in fact prevented from conjecturing that the statement about the hero working for a living might imply that Kierkegaard allows room for the common, working person as a central actor in his own view of civil society. In and of itself, it might seem a bit shaky to base the possibility of a Kierkegaardian framework for civil society on something that can neither be conrmed nor denied. That is where the second unintended consequence of Pooles argument can be put to constructive use. Pooles argument that one right nal reading is impossible for Kierkegaards texts is based on Kierkegaards alleged acts of intentional literary subversion. Yet there is no reason to believe that this subversion is merely or exclusively a literary device; it can also itself be a philosophical one, intended as an instrument of indirect edication. For Kierkegaard to have closed (or to have allowed others to close) the meanings of his texts would have been to institutionalize them, to have made them answers, and to shut out pre-emptively other possible answers that a reader may have derived. Given Kierkegaards animus against institutions and institutionalization (discussed in more detail below), this would in fact make his literary endeavours and his philosophical musings, particularly as they relate to civil society, uniformly consistent and open. As has already been hinted, Kierkegaards opposition to closed, institutionalized frameworks of civic interaction stems from their tendency to relieve civic actors of their ethical burdens and responsibilities, thereby weakening the bonds that hold together civil society. Kierkegaard does not provide the answer to what civil society is; rather, he only oers raw materials and possible frameworks that the morally responsible reader might utilize in helping to build such a civil society. Kierkegaards subversively impenetrable mysteries might in fact have an eminently practical application. Having situated Kierkegaard in the civil society debate of his own time and in the textual debate of our own, we can nally return to the task of reconstructing Kierkegaards vision of civil society. The Kierkegaardian
16 For one attempt to reconstruct Kierkegaards view in the midst of the awareness that Kierkegaard may not want his view reconstructed, see Birgit Bertung, Det etiske stadium Kierkegaards etik? in Studier i Stadier, edited by Joakim Gar, Tonny Aagaard, and Pia Sltoft (Copenhagen, C. A. Reitzel, 1998) 10216.

400

DARREN C. ZOOK

moment in the history of civil society is very much a product of his search for the proper alignment of citizens in relation to one another and in relation to the political structures that governed their communities and with which they could not help but interact. Like many of his contemporaries, Kierkegaard assumed that establishing the right alignment would quite possibly x the crisis. Kierkegaards writings on this topic are full of the awareness of change, but they are also imbued with a sense of frustration and melancholy at the inability of the morality of his age to adequately confront the implications of this momentous change. Terry Pinkard has characterized Kierkegaards sense of disillusionment by arguing that Modernity itself, so it seemed to Kierkegaard, had simply failed.17 I would argue for a slightly dierent interpretation: it was not that modernity itself had failed, but rather that, for Kierkegaard, modernity had failed to show how it was uniquely dierent and better than any other historical age at addressing the challenges and crises generated by its own characteristic temperament. Kierkegaards project, in some sense, is to make modernity live up to its potential or to call its blu: that is, to nd a way to salvage the subjective individual, and to nd a way to remain true to the self in a time of great slippage the essence of the perceived sense of crisis between external events and internal elements of self-conscious, reective identity. In other words, Kierkegaards goal in constructing his image of society was to nd a way to make modernity at once deeply personal and socially meaningful.

DESPAIR INTO ACTION: THE ETHICS OF SELFDETERMINATION In order to understand Kierkegaards peculiar vision of civil society, one must rst understand the process by which the fundamental unit of that society the authentic individual is constructed. This is a process that has been extensively addressed in the secondary literature on Kierkegaard, so here the goal is not to challenge this literature directly but merely to revisit the many elements of the Kierkegaardian self and to reorient them toward the context of the civil society debate. I start, then, with a question: What, for Kierkegaard, are the sources of self-hood?18 Or more fundamentally,
Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy 17601860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 355. 18 The philosophical inuences on Kierkegaard in constructing the Kierkegaardian self are a matter of some complexity. Michael Weston, Kierkegaard and the Origins of the Postmodern Self, European Journal of Philosophy 10 (December 2002) No. 3: 398412, for instance, argues that Kierkegaard engages in a systematic misreading of Schlegel (406) in constructing his vision of self-hood. See also Alastair Hannay, Having Lessing on Ones Side, in International Kierkegaard Commentary, edited by Robert L. Perkins 12: Concluding Unscientic Postscript to Philosphical Fragments (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997) 20526 (reprinted in
17

THE IRONY OF IT ALL

401

why would an individual choose to pursue authentic self-hood? The answer is not intuitively obvious. This is, after all, Kierkegaards world, a place where, for instance, if there is a potential calamity even worse than death itself, it is to live (SKS 2, 214; EO I 220), not exactly aspiring counsel to those in search of an authentic life. Nevertheless, for Kierkegaard, the initial call to self-hood is part of ones life trajectory: all individuals at some point will feel the gravity of the call to self-hood. In these moments, there is a certain dizziness of freedom (SKS 4, 365; CA 61), and a palpable sense of despair and anxiety generated by the awareness of freedoms uncertain potential and expansive endlessness.19 The good life, as it exists for Kierkegaard, consists of the engaged struggle with this spirit of anxiety, and of the desire to confront and embrace the moment of realization when one becomes aware that something more and something greater can be created of the self, that the self is somehow incomplete and entangled in its current form. All human beings will experience this emotional tremor at some point in their lives; as humans, we are compelled to self-hood as a characteristic of our nature. Every human being, says Kierkegaard, no matter how slightly gifted he is, however subordinate his position in life may be, has a natural need to formulate a life-view (SKS 3, 175; EO II 179). The pull toward self-hood may be a common and universal impulse, but Kierkegaard is quick to admit the possibility of an incomplete or inauthentic awakening to self-hood. While there may be many people who think themselves called, Kierkegaard notes, the stark reality is that, given the ponderous demands of authentic self-hood, few are the chosen (SKS 2, 214; EO I 220). The phrasing here is a bit cryptic, but given Kierkegaards fervid antipathy to fatalism and ascriptive elitism, the chosen most likely refers to those who are self-chosen, who have chosen the self. The alternative to a life of grappling with the demands of anxiety, however, is not a life of pleasure and comfort; rather, it is a life governed by an all-consuming sense of despair. Despair comes from the gnawing realization that the actual self is not the true or authentic self; that is, it is a constant reminder of the misrelation of self (SV3 15, 76; SUD 16). The life of despair is in fact the
Hannay, Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays (London: Routledge, 2003) 4963). For an interesting reading on whether Kierkegaard himself was authentically his own self, see Lis Lind, Sren Kierkegaard sja lv: Psykoanalytiska lasningar (Stockholm: Carlssons, 2000). See also, in general, Arnold B. Come, Kierkegaard as Humanist: Discovering My Self (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1995); and Arnold B. Come, Kierkegaard as Theologian: Recovering My Self (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1997). 19 Or, in the words of Jrgen Husted, Wilhelms brev: Det etiske iflge Kierkegaard (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1999): In despair, the individual nds his self and its eternal validity (153). Axel Hutter, Das Unvordenkliche der menschlichen Freiheit: Zur Deutung der Angst bei Schelling und Kierkegaard, in Kierkegaard und Schelling: Freiheit, Angst und Wirklichkeit, edited by Jochem Henningfeld and Jon Stewart (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), Kierkegaard Studies: Monograph Series 8, pp. 11732, argues that Kierkegaards ideas on anxiety and dizziness reveal the inuence of Schellings ideas, among them the unprethinkable foundation of human existence.

402

DARREN C. ZOOK

inauthentic life, and for Kierkegaard, it is the life that the majority of humankind will experience, simply because they nd the experience of despair less taxing than the uncertain and unending struggle with anxiety.20 The crisis of the age by Kierkegaards reckoning is a crisis that starts with the individual; the misrelation of society is a collective reection of the misrelation of self. Those who settle for the life of despair, who in their weakness or myopia seem satised with inauthentic and incomplete self-hood, may nd a sense of solace and comfort in the outward conformity to social norms, an option that does not reduce or eliminate the despair but merely provides momentary (or in-the-moment) respite in the illusion (or delusion) of fullment and contentedness. Such conformity may be comforting, but it is, in eect, little more than a passive act of commiseration with other despairing selves. Those who heed the call of self-hood, however, will shun outward conformity and will instead seek out the constructive spirit of inwardness. The elements of the real self, of the authentic self, are found only in the interior architecture of subjective experience; inwardness establishes subjectivity, and subjectivity, as an experiential occurrence, is truth.21 (SKS 7, 191; CUP 209). Subjectivity is discovered and cultivated through a process of inwardness and introspection, a process in which solitude and silence are essential components.22 Solitude is essential for the discovery of self-hood, but it only contributes to authenticity and subjectivity if the solitude is self-imposed and voluntary choice is absolutely essential here. This is why Kierkegaard condemned the enforced silence of solitary
One of the central elements of Kierkegaards philosophy is the idea of the stages or spheres in the life of the individual. While these are often referred to as the three stages the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious there is far more complexity here than the trajectory from least to most authentic and meaningful would suggest. There does seem to be a purposive and dialectical trajectory in the progression from stage to stage, but Kierkegaard continuously grapples with the question of whether the process of moral upbuilding and ethical evolution is a self-willed, voluntary process or one propelled by grace (allowing also for the possibility that self-will itself is a product of grace). Generally speaking, there is more despair in the earlier stages than in the later, though despair pervades each of the stages in dierent ways and in varying degrees. Despair can generate both religious and moral/ethical consequences; Kierkegaards theological perspectives on upbuilding have been studied in detail, but it is the moral-ethical consequences that are of central concern in civil society. On the stages, see, for instance, Anders Kingo, Analogiens teologi: En dogmatik studie over dialektikken i Soren Kierkegaards opbyggelige og pseudonyme forfatterskab (Copenhagen: GEC Gad, 1995); Birgit Bertung, Den dialektiske svven: studier i Sren Kierkegaards begreber om dialektik, tro og vilje (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1998), esp. 308. 21 Cf. Silvia Saviano Sampaio, Kierkegaard: A ambigu a a o, Trans/Form/Ac o idade da imaginac 26(1) (2003) 8796: It is the category of inwardness that allows the imaginative-passion of the aesthetic to be transformed into the concrete imaginative-passion of the subjective thinker, because it is inwardness that directs the passion not toward an external innity but toward an innity within the self (93). 22 For a more in-depth study, see Stephen N. Dunning, Kierkegaards Dialectic of Inwardness: A Structural Analysis of the Theory of Stages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
20

THE IRONY OF IT ALL

403

connement in prisons (Pap. 47 viii I A 40; P/J 258; SKS 7, 11; CUP 8) and why he argued against the obligatory, institutionalized silence of monastic retreats23 (SV3 17, 60; FSE 15). Solitude and silence are antidotes to the endless waves of anxiety freedoms disclosure to itself as possibility (SKS 4, 413; CA 111) and the necessary tools for learning that subjectivity is truth and subjectivity is actuality (SKS 7, 314; CUP 343). Yet inwardness is not necessarily a site of complacency, refuge, or comfort: inwardness and spirit is indeed always like a stranger and a foreigner in a body (SKS 7, 218; CUP 240), and hence, one is constantly thrown o guard and disoriented by the unpredictable challenges that anxiety, as the uncertain potentiality of freedom, continually presents. Signicantly for Kierkegaard, because the call to authentic self-hood is generally a human compulsion, it is a process and experiential pathway that should be open to all, regardless of class or gender. The single individual can be anyone and everyone (SV3 18, 160; POV 115), and so the realm of selfhood has no predestined group, no elect, and no exclusive class basis. Kierkegaard does point out that both men and women have an equal capacity for the rigours of inwardness, even if they may not actually exhibit that capacity in practice (SV3 12, 136; WL 138). Kierkegaard also employs his irascible sense of humour to refute many of the objections of his contemporaries about the presumed inferior capacities of women in obtaining authentic self-hood.24 A woman, many of his contemporaries argue, is only half a self, or half a person, who must nd completeness in matrimony with her husband, who is presumably a whole self. Kierkegaard lampoons this idea by pointing out the comic sight of a man courting a
23 The choice of the prison and the monastery is signicant, as Kierkegaards inwardness and the subjectivity it generates have both a secular and a religious component, which would seem to be inseparable. Yet Kierkegaards civil society is not, as we shall see, a community of believers, and it does not need the institution of the church any more than it needs the institution of the state. What Kierkegaards civil society requires are individuals who cultivate subjectivity through the practice of inwardness; the personal element of religious devotion that inwardness produces need not impinge upon or compromise the simultaneous expression of inwardness as public, civic behaviour. The two elements in fact act as complementary attributes of the public and the private spheres in Kierkegaards civil society. 24 There is an ongoing and unresolved debate on whether or not Kierkegaards views on gender are egalitarian and liberating, or patriarchal and oppressive. Irena Makarushka, Reections on the Other in Dinesen, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, in Kierkegaard on Art and Communication, edited by George Pattison (New York: St Martins Press, 1992) 1509, for instance, argues that Kierkegaards world-view rejects women and suppresses dierence in order to sustain the single-minded duty-bound commitment to the patriarchal order of universal truth (158). On the other hand, Wanda Warren Berry, Finally Forgiveness: Kierkegaard as a Springboard for a Feminist Theology of Reform, in Foundations of Kierkegaards Vision of Community: Religion, Ethics, and Politics in Kierkegaard, edited by George B. Connell and C. Stephen Evans (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1992) 196217, argues that Kierkegaards views on gender are profoundly liberating for women. See also the collection of essays in Feminist line Le on and Sylvia Walsh (University Park, Interpretations of Sren Kierkegaard, edited by Ce PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).

404

DARREN C. ZOOK

woman, a process in which the man, who has enjoyed social esteem as a whole man, in fact betrays that he is but half a person (SKS 6, 46; SLW 43). As in matrimony, so too with inwardness are men and women equally incomplete selves in search of completeness and authenticity. Still, Kierkegaard is no radical feminist. Humour aside, about all we can say with any certainty is that Kierkegaards vision of authentic self-hood, and along with it of civil society, appears to be far more open and accessible to women (and other non-dominant groups) than those of either Ferguson or Hegel. Even if an individual were able to withstand the anxious depths of inwardness required to establish a nascent sense of self-hood, Kierkegaard makes it clear that the process of maintaining self-hood, once established, is no less arduous. The lapse into despair is a continuous threat to all individuals, regardless of what stage of self-hood they may have obtained; and since no self can actually achieve perfection or an absolute point of completion there is no perfect human being the process of selfmaintenance creates a responsibility that is a heavy, continuous, and lifelong burden (SV3 15, 110; SUD 54). Self-maintenance is also more than mere mental reection; it is additionally a pattern of concrete action. That is, inwardness may be a contemplative state, but thought-reality must never be confused with experiential actuality (indeed, this is one of the points that Kierkegaard makes in a critique of Kant)25 (SKS 7, 299300, 303; CUP 328, 3312). What sorts of things can one do to maintain and strengthen the self? Generally speaking, since the inauthentic life of despair is also a life of seductive comfort in the shell of social conformity, one must continually resist and shake o that which is habitual, ritual or socially comforting. One should speak a foreign language, for instance, merely to disorient [entfremdet] the self from the habit of speaking ones own language26 (Pap. 41 iii A 97, 41 iii A 155156; P/J 138, 141). Or else one could cultivate the subjective virtue of arbitrariness: One sees the middle of the play, for example, or one reads the third section of the book (SKS 2, 288; EO I 299). Random acts of arbitrariness, even when as here they are invoked by the unenlightened aesthete, complement Kiekegaards insistence that authentic civic actors must resist the feigned completeness of totalizing forms of discourse or the tendency of humans to devolve into fatalistic
25 See Ronald M. Green, Kierkegaard and Kant: The Hidden Debt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), who argues that Kierkegaard, though he rarely mentions Kant and when he does it is in a critical voice, in fact borrows heavily from Kant, and may even intentionally or unconsciously have tried to conceal this debt. 26 This is not as odd or eccentric as it may at rst seem. It can be compared, for instance, with Thomas Franck, The Empowered Self: Law and Society in the Age of Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), who argues that ethical selves do not identify an alien other; they identify with the alien other (1). The continual cultivation of consciously chosen characteristics and of empathetic bonds with dierent others is, for Franck, the foundation of a just social order based on human rights principles.

THE IRONY OF IT ALL


27

405

creatures. Indeed, the advice or the ramblings of the aesthete are of some value here and are not to be discarded or ignored. Kierkegaards opposition to strict hierarchies (on the grounds that they institutionalize fatalism) and to elitism and segregation (on the grounds that they deny equal access to the tools of upbuilding) stems from the belief that anyone, even the aesthete, is ultimately redeemable. The dierence is not that the aesthete is incapable of meaningful action, but rather that he or she remains unaware of the profundity and potential of such action. Above all else, the maintenance of the self is predicated on utilizing the moments of freedom liberated by inwardness to make new and voluntary choices; each act of voluntary choice furthers the development of the integrated self, and over time, the collective bundle of such choices evolves into a system of personal ethics.28 Self-maintenance and self-cultivation may become easier over time, but they can never become patterns of unconscious habit.29 Put dierently, any system that does not allow for, indeed require, voluntary choice, or any system in which the evolution of self-hood becomes a matter of automatic or habitual evolution, can produce neither a sense of ethics nor an authentic self. This, in fact, is the very essence of Kierkegaards pointed critique of the entire Hegelian philosophical project.30 The main problems with the Hegelian system, from the point of view of the Kierkegaardian self, are that: rst, the level of abstraction necessary for Hegels analysis is so vague and impersonal that it allows only for objectivity and hence precludes the development of the essential element of subjectivity; and second, the driving
27 On Kierkegaards views toward fatalism, see Julia Watkin, The Idea of Fate in Kierkegaards Thought, in Kierkegaard and Freedom, edited by James Giles (New York: Palgrave, 2000) 105 20. 28 Here, too, there is a concomitant religious catalyst for a secular ethics: the idea of imitatio Christi, or of Christ the Redeemer as an exemplary pattern of behaviour, is central to Kierkegaards works. There is a paradox at work here (as is often the case with Kierkegaard), and Kierkegaard engages the interface between civic ethics and religious beliefs by way of this paradox: the Christian believer, for instance, is bound to conform to the pattern of Jesus, and yet Jesus was also, for Kierkegaard, the ultimate non-conformist. The idea of imitatio Christi thus asks the believer to conform to non-conformity, and thus to make choices. This in turn raises the question of whether Jesus made choices so that followers did not have to (and thus could simply follow his model), or so that his followers would understand that making choices was integral to religious faith. On this, see David R. Law, Kierkegaard as Negative Theologian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) 182205; M. Jaime Ferreira, Transforming Vision: Imagination and Will in Kierkegaardian Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) 534; Robert Gibbs, I or You: The Dash of Ethics, in The New Kierkegaard, edited by Elsebet Jegstrup (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 2004) 14160. 29 See, in particular, Arne Grn, Subjektivitet og Negativitet: Kierkegaard (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1997) 17981. 30 See Jon Stewart, Kierkegaards Relations to Hegel Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Stewart argues convincingly that Kierkegaards attack on Hegel is not so much an attack on Hegel himself, with whom Kierkegaard often engages and from whom he often borrows, but rather a relentless critique against various Hegelians in Denmark, such as J. L Heiberg and H. L. Martensen.

406

DARREN C. ZOOK

force behind the progressive evolution of the Hegelian system is nothing other than the mechanistic motions of historical time, a process which obviates the potential for human agency and freedom.31 Kierkegaard is thus staunchly opposed to any kind of automatic historical transition, and states rmly that to become subjective, one must disregard . . . the idea that becoming world-historical is quantitatively dialectical (SKS 7, 131; CUP 141). Kierkegaard also rejects what he perceives to be the Hegelian suppression of the individual to the greater interest of the nation-state. Because Hegel supposedly abstracts humanity to the aggregate level of the (national) crowd, the spark of individuality and self-hood found in subjectivity is dulled and dampened, and hence the individual is lost, and along with him/her, any possibility for true ethics. The automatic historical telos of Hegelianism is therefore literally de-moralizing. As Kierkegaard points out, any blockhead [ethvert F] can shout slogans of the crowd or of the nation an act which requires neither inwardness nor freedom (SKS 7, 136; CUP 146). Kierkegaard also cannot help but point out what he feels is the inhumanity of the Hegelian system, since in terms of historical time, it is necessarily predicated on a useless, divine squandering of multiple generations, just to get the dialectic moving (SKS 7, 147; CUP 158). In the end, Kierkegaard sums up his critique and his own alternative blueprint for authentic self-hood by an inversion of the Hegelian project:
[The] Hegelian can say with all solemnity: I do not know whether I am a human being but I have understood the system. I prefer to say: I know that I am a human being, and I know that I have not understood the system. (SKS 7, 283; CUP 311)

The Hegelian system thus fails in its promise of a better and morally improved world, according to Kierkegaard, because it is based on a selfdeception that allows the individual to evade responsibility for any social malaise or to blame objective determinants for ones own lack of moral responsibility, without which there cannot be a subjective, authentic self. Kierkegaards authentic self is one that remains as open-ended as the texts he writes. From the Kierkegaardian point of view, the Hegelians err greatly because they seek to institutionalize the construction of the self, rendering it

In other words, by abstracting humanity, Hegel supposedly confuses essence with existence. Kierkegaard may have been borrowing from other well-known critiques in reaching this conclusion, rather than addressing Hegels ideas directly. According to Lore Hu hn, Sprung in bergang: Kierkegaards Kritik an Hegel im Ausgang von der Spa U tphilosophie Schellings, in Kierkegaard und Schelling: Freiheit, Angst und Wirklichkeit, edited by Jochem Henningfeld and Jon Stewart (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), Kierkegaard Studies: Monograph Series 8, pp. 13383, Schellings later critique of Hegel is in some ways the foundation for Kierkegaards, even though Kierkegaard eventually became disenchanted with Schelling and ultimately parted ways with his ideas.

31

THE IRONY OF IT ALL

407

closed and thus complete. In Kierkegaards world, the burdens of self-hood can never and should never end.

THE JOKE IS ON YOU: THE SELF IN SOCIETY The principled and exhaustive act of individual self-determination may be one of the central themes running throughout Kierkegaards vast textual archive, but it is never, in and of itself, the endpoint of moral endeavour; that is, the authentic self, as a work in progress, always has a larger purpose or plan toward which to aspire. A great deal of analytical work has been dedicated to the moralistic, evolutionary trajectory that supposedly marks the progress of the Kierkegaardian self as it aspires toward the ecstasy of religious life. Far less attention has been given to the practical ethics of the Kierkegaardian self, and the way it is meant to circulate through and within society at large on an everyday basis. This, however, is of central importance, for it is here that Kierkegaards response to the crisis of culture of his own time begins to take shape. Kierkegaards ideal society was not a contemplative elite, a select group of philosopher-kings continuously pondering profound answers to eternal questions. Kierkegaard meant for the authentic self to be not only a life worth living, but also a life that was possible to live attainable for commoner and noble alike.32 The individual who answers the call for authentic self-hood must of necessity enter, or re-enter, society continually to rene the task of ethical self-hood namely, to transform himself into the universal individual (SKS 3, 2489; EO II 261). The universal individual is usually assumed to coincide with the religious life, but as I shall argue, it can also be the foundation for the enlightened citizen of civil society.33 The individual self may have to withdraw from society initially to seek out the contemplative nature of inwardness, but to remain in such a state would be to push beyond the state of self-awareness and even self-love and into the realm of self-intoxication and narcissism (SV3 17, 132; JFY 97). The authentic self is tempered and restrained, in fact, through the cultivation of authentic social virtues, so that for the self, the objective is not only a
32 Without doubt, the best argument in favour of Kierkegaards non-elite vision of philosophical life is Jrgen Bukdahl, Sren Kierkegaard og den menige mand (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1961), recently made available in an English translation by Bruce H. Kirmmse under the title Sren Kierkegaard and the Common Man (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001). 33 Yet enlightenment for Kierkegaard is not necessarily synonymous with rationality. If, as is pointed out by Johs. P. Almar, Sren Kierkegaard: Eksistenslosoen, Eksistenspdegogikken og Eksistentialpdegogikken (Odense: Universitetsforlag, 1986), the result of the humanities will be the absorption of humankind into an existence that is governed by rational comprehension (155), then Kierkegaard is either not a humanistic thinker or else represents a dierent, less rational path to the same end.

408

DARREN C. ZOOK

personal self but a social, civic [borgerligt] self34 (SKS 3, 250; EO II 263). This is not the realm of a Robinson Crusoe type of individualism, where a person can exist as an island and shun all human contact.35This is a realm where the self is required to interact with and impinge upon the social motions of civil society, a place to break the silence of inwardness and articulate the self into society.36 Note, however, that given Kierkegaards association of the despairing life with the outer shell of social conformity, this aspect is not an invitation merely to go through the motions of polite society. Indeed, for Kierkegaard, [t]he principle of sociality is precisely illiberal (SKS 7, 12; CUP 8), by which he means that the non-reective and habitual sociality prevalent in his time, by being neither voluntarily chosen nor consciously experienced, is in fact self-destructive.37 The loneliness of inwardness, even in its moralized form oered by Kierkegaard, may be partially alleviated by social, civic interaction; but such interaction can never be entirely comfortable, and the self can never completely assimilate to sociality, for to do so would be to lose the very individuality that authentic self-hood requires. Put dierently, to be comfortable is to be closed. How, then, is one to engage in the practice of everyday life without compromising the project of self-determination? If the mode of the individual self is inwardness, then the mode of the self in movement through society is irony. There are multiple varieties of irony in Kierkegaards writings, and all of them have a correspondingly varied (though not equally eective) manner of social engagement. Regardless of the type of irony, however, irony remains, for Kierkegaard, a way of life, a
Note that in spite of Kierkegaards dierences with and opposition to the Hegelian schools, the Danish word borgerligt (fr. German burgerliche) is retained. 35 Perhaps not Crusoe, but Quixote may work as a model for Kierkegaards civic hero: see Eric J. Ziolkowski, Don Quixote and Kierkegaards Understanding of the Single Individual in Society, in Foundations of Kierkegaards Vision of Community, edited by Connell and Evans, 13043. 36 lez, La voix transgure e, in Kierkegaard aujourdhui: Recherches Cf. Dar o Gonza kierkegaardiennes au Danemark et en France, edited by Jacques Caron (Odense: Odense University Press, 1998) 12541: To break the silence is in this case to render it ambiguous, to linger for a few moments in its interior in order to recognize the impossibility of a pure silence and to place it in opposition to hermetic silence and to religious silence. (132) Kierkegaard here shares in common with Ferguson and Hegel an intolerance of the idea of politeness as an empty, unreective ritual; signicantly, however, all three arrive at this position for dierent reasons. For Ferguson, politeness lacks the necessary vigor required for competitive civic interaction, and hence leads to an eeminate, weaker form of civil society. For Hegel, ritual politeness is a form of Moralitat, the excessively subjective, formalized adherence to norms, as opposed to the intersubjective (and objective) cultivation of Sittlichkeit (ethics) necessary for his proper vision of civil society (PR x 33). For Kierkegaard, non-reective politeness is a wasted opportunity for self-cultivation and a useless waste of time for all concerned; hence it is, for him, illiberal (if not in fact anti-social).
37 34

THE IRONY OF IT ALL

409

way of continuously engaging and disengaging the social patterns of civic interaction and social discourse. It engages civic discourse to the extent that irony in speech requires one to speak in a common idiom that is shared by both the speaker and the listener.38 At the same time, the use of irony undermines the pretence of control or power over the meaning of civic discourse and social parlance, thereby disengaging the speaker as a civic participant and freeing her or him from the proclivity to conform to social practice and from the hegemony of social ritual. Social interaction is thus a sort of game, or a form of play, in which the authentic self simultaneously participates in and disengages from society as a necessary part of the authenticating process. Since social interaction is necessary for everyone as a sort of school of self-cultivation, social and civic interaction thus benets not only the self but all others potentially engaged in the process of selfdetermination. Kierkegaard is always aware of the danger of the seductive powers of conformist society, and continually cautions against the decline into formulaic behaviour or the need for social recognition. The phrase know yourself means: separate yourself from the other (SKS 1, 225; CI 177), says Kierkegaard, and irony is the mode that ensures that such separation will occur.39 Without irony, there is no separation or disengagement, and without separation or disengagement, one merely returns to the despairing life of social conformity and ritualistic civility. Irony may be a sort of game that shows a lack of seriousness in the ways of social and civic interaction, but it is not always and necessarily a form of deceit; irony is not the same thing as lying. Irony is dierent and distinct from humour, though both play an important role; that is, irony alone is not enough, and humour is its necessary complement. Nevertheless, as a sort of game, it may also be a source of amusement, which for Kierkegaard means that one way the individual can arm the ironic mode and guard against the seductive powers of social conformity is to behave in such a way as to elicit laughter.40 Indeed, according to Kierkegaard, this should be one of the goals for the cultivated ironist, for laughter is necessary for legitimacy and authenticity in self-hood, and to be able to get others to laugh at oneself is a
38 rede Odysseus: Kierkegaard og subjektivitetens genese According to Adam Diderichsen, Den sa (Copenhagen, Hans Reitzels, 1998), irony thus opens the potential narrow-mindedness and solipsism of inwardness. Such an ethical recognition of the other requires the subject to be able to open the self for the other in communication. Only in so far as the subject opens his world for the other can a common world be established (191). 39 For a detailed look at the inuence of Hellenistic philosophy (know yourself) on Kierkegaards ideas regarding (Socratic) irony and religiosity, see Sophia Scopetea, Kierkegaard og grciteten: En kamp med ironi (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1995), esp. 31119 (on distance and sympathy, or the need to disengage in order to engage). 40 On this, see John Lippitt, Humour and Irony in Kierkegaards Thought (New York: St Martins Press, 2000). For an interesting interpretation of Kierkegaards humour in action, see the thesis by Peter Vogelsang, Oprecht veinzen: Over Kierkegaards Over Het Begrip ironie, vooral met betrkking tot Socrates (Groningen: Groningen University Press, 1999), who argues that Kierkegaards Concept of Irony is intentionally a parody of Hegel and his philosophy.

410

DARREN C. ZOOK

form of tutoring (SV3 18, 159; POV 11415). This is not the type of laughter associated with silly guaws or the ability to tell a popular joke; this is a complex laughter that rearms for the self that one has exposed a crack in the fac ade of social conformity and ritualistic politeness, and hence has revealed another moment of freedom, another moment of anxiety, and another moment where the ethics of self-hood can be cultivated through voluntary choice. A complex sense of humour reminds the self that it is always a participant and a spectator to civil society, and that engagement with civil society must always remain a voluntary choice (for otherwise it would be merely a compulsion) thus a complex sense of ethics requires a complex sense of humour. The ability to elicit this laughter from others without feeling bitterness or the shame of ridicule is an armation of true self-cultivation. Much of Kierkegaards humour has its roots in the humour of the ironist (which is to be distinguished from that of the jester):
An ironist who is in the majority is eo ipso a mediocre ironist. Wanting to be in the majority is a wish that springs from immediacy. Irony is suspect to both left and right. A true ironist has therefore never been in the majority. Unlike the jester. (Pap. 46 vii I A 64; P/J 211)

Yet there is also a realm of humour beyond that of irony that seems to imply that laughter is a force to be taken seriously in the construction of self and society. Obviously, then, there is a subversive quality to the ironic mode, if done properly, and to the cultivation of laughter, both of which would seem to compromise the very idea that Kierkegaard would in any way support the idea of civil society. Yet as we have seen, Kierkegaards hero has never been only an isolated individual; the authentic self has always had a larger mission, which has been to engage and re-engage society to pursue the endless task of social reform and civic reconstruction. Self-determination may be the essential antecedent to this larger project, but self-hood is in no way to be conated with unbridled individualism, nor is it meant as a licence for the anarchic impulse to dismantle or destroy the elements of public life. Transgressing social norms, causing oence, and eliciting laughter are certainly meant to destabilize the ritualistic patters of civic and social engagement, but they are also done in order remoralize society by calling attention to the conformity and collectivization of social life and to the retrogression of civic (and Christian) society into an empty display of bourgeois-philistinism [spidsborgerlighed] (SV3 17, 219; JFY 199). Kierkegaards vision of a re-moralized and ethically rejuvenated civil society is every bit as demanding as the renovation of the interior architecture of the re-christened authentic self: one distances oneself from social norms to simultaneously undermine and rebuild them; one simultaneously obeys and ridicules social norms to interrogate them, to shake them to their

THE IRONY OF IT ALL

411

foundations, and to separate ethical substance from hollow ritual. Uncertainty, and the anxiety it evokes, are necessary elements in the construction and cultivation of a truly principled civil society. (As with the individual self, so, too, with society: certainty and comfort remain indicators of the closure.) Yet this is not the uncertainty of violent revolution or wanton anarchy. Indeed, what is quite clear from Kierkegaards writings on the process of social reconstruction is that it is a process that will only work in the context of a society which tolerates and even encourages dissent.41 In other words, in spite of the seemingly irreverent nature of many of Kierkegaards prescriptions, he remains in the end, even if he does not say it explicitly, a staunch proponent of classic liberalism.42 Perhaps the central text in Kierkegaards archive that illuminates this point is his short treatise entitled A Literary Review [En literair Anmeldelse]. The main object of critique in this treatise is the social phenomenon known as the crowd [mngde].43 As Kierkegaard has stated in many of his works, the crowd is nothing other than the collection of inauthentic selves that constitutes public or, more accurately, polite society.44 That sort of public society, however, is an illusion, for true civil society requires individuality, a characteristic of authentic self-hood, and since authentic self-hood is based on subjectivity, and since subjectivity is truth, the crowd is therefore the manifestation of untruth (SV3 18, 152; POV 106). The authentic self can move through and even participate in society, but should never be concerned with approval or disapproval of the crowd because that would imply dependence and even enslavement to the crowds conformist,
41 Cf. Pattison, Kierkegaard, Religion and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Culture: What Kierkegaard seems to be oering now is no longer the unnameable mystery of a sublime void at the heart of the city, but the prospect of exodus and a call to counter-culture (219). 42 As Kirmmse, Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, points out, where Kierkegaard appears critical of liberalism, he is not attacking liberalism per se but rather the way in which the term is used by the self-declared liberals of Copenhagen. There is an interesting parallel here: Kierkegaard does not attack Hegel so much as the way the Danish Hegelians put Hegel to use, and similarly does not attack liberalism but merely the way Danish liberals allegedly misuse and misunderstand it. Still, Kirmmse is probably most accurate in stating that Kierkegaard here is best seen neither as liberal nor as conservative, but merely as radical (278). 43 Kierkegaards crowd should not be confused with the crowd of collective action that proved so worrisome to conservatives in the nineteenth century. Kierkegaards crowd includes individuals of all classes who interact in public; the menacing spectre of the collective-action crowd consisted of the dangerous classes. Two classic studies of such crowds and the fears they produced are Louis Chevalier, Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses (Paris: Perrin, 1992 [reprint]); and George Rude, The Crowd in History: a Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England 17301848 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1981). 44 As George Pattison, Poor Paris! Kierkegaards Critique of the Spectacular City (Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, 1999), Kierkegaard Studies: Monograph Series 2, also points out, the crowd is obviously an urban phenomenon, and so in many ways Kierkegaards critique is specically a critique of urban life. Pattison describes the de-moralizing power of the urban crowd: Events unroll as the result of a sequence of evasions and abdications of responsibility, underlying which is the intimidating presence of the statistical, the numerical mass, the undierentiated crowd, the public (37).

412

DARREN C. ZOOK

anti-individualistic norms.45 Truth can only be an individual, and never a collective phenomenon, and hence the authentic individual shuns the crowd more than the young virtuous girl shuns a low dancehall (SV3 18, 155; POV 109). The authentic self therefore serves as an intentionally unsettling reminder to others of their own inauthenticity and despair; the authentic self therefore accepts the heavy burdens of always being simultaneously a part of and apart from civil society.46 The extended critique in Kierkegaards Literary Review does not denounce and excoriate the very idea of civil society, but rather seeks to provide a solution to save civil society from its current state. Kierkegaard, in other words, wants to oer an alternative plan that can reconstruct civil society and transform it from its current manifestation as an undierentiated, conformist crowd into a collocation of authentic, individual selves. That, suggests Kierkegaard, is what civil society was meant to be. The revolutionary transformation proposed by Kierkegaard, however, is not a violent one, but must be necessarily a civil, non-violent transformation.47 Indeed, Kierkegaard oers a critique of violent political behaviour that condemns revolutionary action as unprincipled, uncivil and self-destructive.48 In moments where individuals relate to an idea merely en masse (that is, without the individual, inward-directed singling out), we get violence, unruliness, unbridledness . . . People then push and shove, and rub up against each other in futile outwardness. There is none of that modesty of inwardness that decently distances the one from the other (SV3 14, 589; LR 55). Revolutionary violence is therefore not possible in societies in which
On this point there is another crucial dierence with Hegel. Hegel proposes that members of civil society be grouped into corporations based roughly on profession and trade; doing so provides not merely added security, but also public recognition from others and hence honor (PR x 253). For Kierkegaard, both the institutionalization of the corporation, and the need for public recognition, undermine the possibility of an authentically civil society. 46 Klaus M. Kodalle, Die Eroberung des Nutzlosen: Kritik des Wunschdenkens und der Zweckrationalitat im Anschlu an Kierkegaard (Paderborn: Ferdinand Scho ningh, 1988), goes so far as to say that Kierkegaards version of civil consciousness is thus structurally schizophrenic (170). 47 Cf. Niels Thomassen, Ulykke og lykke: Et livslososk udspil med stadigt hensyn til Sren Kierkegaard (Copenhagen, Gyldendal, 2001): Conict is the central ethical problem, that is, the concern of the ethical can be identied as the prevention and the resolution of conict through civilized means (151). There is also here a not-so-indirect attack by Kierkegaard on another school of thought that was on the rise at the time: communism. According to Anton Hu gli, Kierkegaard und der Kommunismus, in Materialen zur Philosophie So ren Kierkegaards, edited by Michael Theunissen and Wilfred Greve (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979) 51138, Kierkegaards understanding of communism was based on popular press and newspaper accounts, and not on any of the central texts of the chief ideologues. This would accord well with the observation of Kirmmse, Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, that Marxism and communism had not yet made signicant headway into Copenhagens political atmosphere (271). 48 See, on this point, Charles K. Bellinger, The Genealogy of Violence: Reections on Creation, Freedom, and Evil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), which is more centrally about Kierkegaard than the title would suggest.
45

THE IRONY OF IT ALL

413

meaningful bonds of civility are created and maintained between authentically realized and dierentiated self-citizens. The crowd, or the public, however, as it existed among Kierkegaards contemporaries, seemed in fact to militate against the very possibility of such a virtuous civil society. Keeping in mind that the majority of society for Kierkegaard was composed of those who lived despairing lives made bearable only by the hollow comforts of conformity, we can begin to see the potentially compounded dangers when despairing, conformist individuals congregate:
Someone who, with actual persons in the contemporaneity of the actual moment and situation, has no opinion of his own adopts the majoritys opinion, or, if more inclined to be combative, the minoritys. But note that the majority and the minority are actual human beings, and this is why resorting to them is supportive. The public, however, is an abstraction. (SV3 14, 84; LR 82)

The public is an abstraction because it has no dierentiation within, and it has no dierentiation because it has an insucient number of authentic selves to give it a self-reective identity. To conform to the publics opinion, whether of the majority or the minority, is therefore nothing less than treacherous consolation. An inauthentic civil society, then, as the undierentiated crowd or public, is not just philosophically problematic, it is pragmatically unsettling. The crowd is deceptively simple it can become the very opposite and is still the same (SV3 14, 84; LR 82) and also self-consuming and dangerous: The public is all and nothing, it is the most dangerous of all powers and the most meaningless . . . [It is] the cruel abstraction by which individuals will be religiously educated or destroyed (SV3 14, 85; LR 83). There is thus an added sense of urgency and necessity for those who have made the leap to embrace the anxiousness of authentic self-hood: certainly self-determination and self-cultivation are their own rewards, but the fruits of such actions exist in contemporaneous social practice by resisting the drift toward social and revolutionary violence among the people or the tendency toward authoritarian violence by the state. How does self-determination play out in practice in this regard? In spite of Kierkegaards suggestion that the authentic individual should exhibit behaviour that elicits laughter from the public crowd, the ironic mode of social interaction is, for all its all its aura of disengagement, a serious and intentional act of reciprocal interaction. An ironist can only be understood and eective if he or she is comprehensible, at least in part, to an interlocutor, who may or may not be also an ironist, but who is nevertheless a necessary part of the ironic exchange.49 The ironic
49 Indeed, irony without an interlocutor becomes narcissism, and the ironist who remains enclosed in the comforts of interior silence becomes what for Kierkegaard is the demonic personality. See, for instance, Steven Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, Language and the Reality of

414

DARREN C. ZOOK

mode of communication, by questioning or subverting ritualistic modes of communication, introduces an element of meaningful discourse into a social realm which is normally suused by idle chatter, gossip and rumour.50 In human discourse the inwardness of silence is the condition of cultivated speech, says Kierkegaard, but to chat [at snakke] is inwardnesss twisting, inside-out extroversion, lack of cultivation (SV3 14, 901; LR 89). The uninformed, uncultivated opinions of public discourse, opinions which in Kierkegaards view also pollute the majority of the popular press, are partially deated by the introduction of ironic speech. Irony, in other words, creates rhetorical space for the possibility of meaningful discourse.

KIERKEGAARD AND THE CIVIC NEIGHBORHOOD The act of creating rhetorical space for the introduction of meaningful discourse quickly raises the specic issue of the ironists motive. If social interaction is useful and necessary for the advancement of the project of selfdetermination, then is the ironists participation in the social world of the crowd and the public really a civil act? Is it not merely a self-centred act, a self-serving exploitation of the despairing multitude to further what is in essence a selsh project? Is the civic actor also restrained by religious faith? Kierkegaard addresses such concerns by writing extensively on the proper demeanour of the authentic individual when moving through and within the public realm. In moments of social interaction, the authentic individual is not to fall prey to feelings of smugness or satisfaction or even of pity, for such sentiments would require an assumption of superiority that would undermine true inwardness. Nor is the authentic individual to confuse the disengagement of irony with the cynical triumph of schadenfreude of derision toward those who for whatever reason remain mired in inauthentic lives of despair. The experience of despair is in fact necessary to develop the capacity of empathy and compassion, of the ability to comprehend suering (SKS 7, 3945; CUP 434). This capacity is absolutely essential for the authentic individual to properly orient her or his moral compass. The authentic self struggles against instances of inhumanity, which are rather
God (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), ch. 5 (Signicant Silences), on this point. J. Kellenberger, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche: Faith and Eternal Acceptance (New York: St. Martins Press, 1997), argues (among other things) that Kierkegaard would probably have seen Nietzsche as an example of the demonic (self-absorbed) type. 50 Here, Kierkegaard pregures much that is found in the political and social philosophy of Ju t und Geltung: Beitra ge zur rgen Habermas. See, in particular, Habermass Faktizita Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des Demokratischen Rechtsstaats (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992); Die Postnationale Konstellation: Politische Essays (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998); and Moralbewutein und kommunikatives Handelns (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983). See also Martin J. Matust k, Postnational Identity: Critical Theory and Existential Philosophy in Habermas, Kierkegaard, and Havel (New York and London: Guilford Press, 1993).

THE IRONY OF IT ALL

415

interestingly dened by Kierkegaard at one point as an individuals not wanting to have any concrete idea of what for most people is the reality of their lives (SKS 6, 162; SLW 174). The authentic individual, then, is not to judge the despair of others, but to understand it with compassion and ultimately to oer assistance for its alleviation. Kierkegaards emphasis on compassion and empathy is one of the strongest points of divergence between his own views on civil society and those of Hegel and Ferguson, a point that can be best discerned perhaps by looking at each authors dierent approach toward the idea of poverty. For Ferguson, civil society requires strong, virile, and competitive actors whose spirited interaction strengthens the bonds between them and provides for a collective voice with which to address and petition the state. Though Ferguson often seems sensitive to the plight of the poor and seems to lament the augmented inequality produced by modern nation-states and civilized economies, he resigns himself to the exclusion of the lowest orders on the grounds that their corruption and baseness, even if not of their own fault, renders them perennially illiberal and unt for the type of interaction a virtuous civil society requires.51 Hegel sees poverty as an unfortunate but necessary by-product of the expansion of civil society through economic specialization; the process of impoverishment ultimately transforms the degraded and demoralized poor into what Hegel refers to as the rabble [Pobel]. The rabble mentality is a criminal mentality, one that is outraged at the system that created these dire circumstances and therefore dedicated to undermining its existence, rendering the rabble inherently uncivil. Hegel opposes private charity to relieve the plight of the poor on the grounds that generous charity would allow the poor to maintain a dignied life without having to work for it (which would violate the principles of what makes society civil), and that the prevention or alleviation of poverty is in some sense unnatural, since poverty is a natural outgrowth of the rise of civil society.52 Kierkegaard, by contrast, will not tolerate such exclusionary tactics, precisely because of his ethics of neighbourliness and his insistence on empathy as a fundamentally compelling sentiment of social interaction. Empathy is in many ways the precise opposite of Fergusons arduous virtues; and Kierkegaards empathetic neighbourliness insists on the acceptance of individual responsibility both for creating and alleviating poverty. Consistently opposed to the alleged Hegelian tendency to institutionalize the elements of civic life, Kierkegaard rejects the suggestion that poverty is an inevitable by-product of the expansion of civil society. He does this because such an interpretation blames a process or a system and thereby avoids and evades the agency and personal responsibility of individual civic actors to confront the suering created by imperfect and

51 52

Ferguson, Essay, 1768. Hegel, PR x243 (creation of poverty), x244 (rabble), x245 (charity).

416

DARREN C. ZOOK

inauthentic patterns of civic practice. Private charity is therefore essential in Kierkegaards vision of civil society. For Kierkegaard, then, while the authentic individual approaches society in an ironic mode, he or she also does so with a sense of compassion and even (spiritual) love that regards other individuals, authentic or not, rich or poor, as civic neighbours.53 Here, again, there is a crucial dierence between Kierkegaards vision of civil society and that of Hegel and Ferguson. For Hegel and Ferguson, the necessary counterpoint to civic interaction is the relation to the state itself; for Kierkegaard, the focus remains continuously on the bonds that link selves to others in the civic neighbourhood. Kierkegaards neighbourhood, however, is a rather large one, for neighbour is often the same as human being, and for Kierkegaard, human beings are duty-bound (religiously in fact) to love their neighbours universally and humanly (SV3 12, 140; WL 143). This would seem to push Kierkegaard in the direction of (Kantian) cosmopolitanism. Signicantly, a crucial distinction is made here between neighbours on the one hand and friends on the other. Friendship, as well as erotic love for that matter, is a form of preferential love [forkjrlighed], and preferential love is inferior to universal love because preferential love is inherently discriminatory; it is dependent upon the construction of closed boundaries that include some and exclude others (SV3 12, 58, 62; WL 53, 57). Neighbourly love, as nonpreferential love, is also the basis for a re-moralized civil society. It is not the case that one cannot have any real friends. On the contrary, though Kierkegaard cautions the authentic individual to guard against the perils of friendship, he also points out that ethical friendship is not only possible but necessary for the further advancement of self-determination. The person who views friendship ethically sees it, then, as a duty. Therefore, I could say it is every persons duty to have a friend (SKS 3, 304; EO II 322). Ethical friendship is permissible because it creates an open boundary between the categories of friend and neighbour Kierkegaard even rephrases his claim that it is every (ethical) persons duty to have a friend as it is every human beings duty to become open (SKS 3, 304; EO II 322) and loving all individuals as neighbours is necessary to prevent the closing of the boundary and creating an exclusive realm of preferential and selsh (narcissistic) love (SV3 12, 49; WL 44). There is one nal criticism to consider in evaluating the virtues of Kierkegaards vision of civil society. As Peter George points out, the duty to love ones neighbours can also be seen as cold and emotionless, as more about the self than the neighbour: A person can act in a loving way towards
53 Kierkegaards emphasis on love, and its relationship to inwardness and sociality, remained a central theme in existentialist literature. See Walter A. Davis, Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity in/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, and Freud (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989): If love asks us to root out our inauthenticities, it also shows us how powerfully they are already implanted, not as external forces, but as integral to the core of our self-relation (125).

THE IRONY OF IT ALL

417

his neighbour out of a sense of duty, but he cannot feel love towards his neighbour, only from a sense of duty.54 Civil society requires that all actions of civic actors be purely voluntary, and so Kierkegaards insistence on duties seems to create a situation in which we are compelled to volunteer a rather egregious contradiction, at rst glance. Yet the compelling power that holds us to our duties does not emanate from the state or some other external actor, but rather from the cultivation of authentic self-hood, making it a self-imposed duty and therefore allowing for a reconciliation with the requisite principle of voluntarism. Kierkegaards continual emphasis on empathy and compassion as motives for civic engagement also guards against cold, impersonal interaction and indeed seems to require of all civic actors an exhausting degree of continual emotional commitment. The key element remains for Kierkegaard the idea of openness both of self and of society. Civil society is only possible in its full and meaningful sense when its various boundaries remain open and uid.55 Kierkegaards vision of civil society is thus a collection of individuals whom we would treat equally as neighbours and all of whom would have the equal opportunity to become our friends. Put dierently, the authentic individual can still maintain social relations, even deep and meaningful ones, but such an individual should avoid circulating only within an exclusive group of friends (or any other closed group such as ethnic, racial, etc.), for not only would the authentic individual fail to develop any further, but also, the moral and ethical potential of civil society would be greatly weakened for all individuals.56
Peter George, Something Anti-social in Works of Love, in Kierkegaard: The Self in Society, edited by George Pattison and Steven Shakespeare (New York: St Martins Press, 1998) 73. See also on this point Louise Carroll Keeley, Subjectivity and World in Works of Love, in Foundations of Kierkegaards Vision of Community, edited by Connell and Evans, 96108; and Jason Wirth, Empty Community: Kierkegaard on Being with You, in The New Kierkegaard, edited by Elsebet Jegstrup (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004) 21423, characterizing neighbourly love as a love fraught with the earthquakes of singularity and the impossibility of love taking stock properly of all its responsibilities (220). 55 Kierkegaards argument here resonates with many contemporary debates in political philosophy. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), for instance, argues that group rights are essential to protect minority cultures, for those cultures provide the necessary elements to make life meaningful for individuals within those minority cultures. Kymlicka does impose various conditions: individuals within those communities must have the right to leave their minority cultures, for instance, and minority cultures must not engage in illiberal behaviour that undermines the rights of other communities. One could argue, then, from Kymlickas or Kierkegaards point of view, that minority cultures can be authentic or entitled to rights only to the extent that they remain uid and open. 56 See, on this point, Martin J. Matust k, Kierkegaards Radical Existential Praxis, or, Why the Individual Dees Liberal, Communitarian, and Postmodern Categories, in Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity, edited by Martin J. Matust k and Merold Westphal (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995) 23964. In the same vein, Bruce H. Kirmmse, Kierkegaard and MacIntyre: Possibilities for Dialogue, in Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative, and Virtue, edited by John J. Davenport and Anthony Rudd (Chicago: Open Court,
54

418

DARREN C. ZOOK

CONCLUSION Kierkegaards framework for a reconstructed and re-moralized civil society, based as it is rst on the project of an authentic, subjective, individualistic self-hood and second on the mutual and ironic interaction of that self with public society, is a framework that requires exhaustive dedication and commitment as well as ponderous ethical burdens. Yet the arduous demands requested from the individual, demands that may at rst glance appear to be haplessly impractical products of Kierkegaards idiosyncratic world, may also be traced to the sense of urgency and crisis in the face of another rival claimant for the subjectivity of the self: the encroaching state. As Tine Damsholt points out, the Danish state, like so many other European states, had been directing its energies in earnest at capturing the hearts and minds of concrete individuals at least from the latter half of the eighteenth century, largely through practices of ceremonial ritual and institutional discipline aimed at transforming subjects of the self into subjects of the state. A central element in the subjectivizing process, Damsholt notes, was the formation of the patriotic gaze that could undermine the judgment of the concrete individual.57 Kierkegaards warnings against the ritualization of civic life, and his radical designs to keep the self awake to the process of self-determination, may have been formulated with the design of rendering the self perpetually open and independent against the attempts of the state to render the self closed and hence dependent. Whereas Hegel is searching for the underlying unity between civil society and the state, Kierkegaard eschews such unity as evidence of non-reective conformity, and indeed, seems to provide an indirect critique of nationalism; and whereas Hegel opines that ultimately the contradictions created by the evolution of civil society will resolve into new and useful categories, Kierkegaard embraces such contradictions for they are precisely the obstacles needed to prevent the closure of social boundaries. From another angle, this helps to explain why Kierkegaard, in contrast to the Hegelians, believed that only an inauthentic or incomplete civil society needed the state to cultivate its collective identity. Kierkegaard argued adamantly and passionately that his ideas were meant to be lived, and not merely read or pondered. Trying to fashion an individual who was more than merely an abstract Hegelian cog in the dialectical machine, and more than a Fergusonian crafty competitor in the spectacle of public power-struggles, Kierkegaard crafted a counter-hero who actively and consciously struggled internally and externally for
2001) 191210, concedes that Kierkegaards vision of self-hood was perhaps too radical and too demanding, but argues that critics such as MacIntyre who write o Kierkegaard as yet another apologist for the (destructive) rights of self over community misunderstand Kierkegaards concerns for the structure and stability of community life. 57 Tine Damsholt, Fdrelandskrlighed og borgerdyd: Patriotisk diskurs og militre reformer i Danmark i sidste del af 1700tallet (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanums Forlag, 2000) 340.

THE IRONY OF IT ALL

419

authentic self-hood in everyday life. Kierkegaards vision of a morallycharged and functional civil society is one which strives for a sense of balance between freedom and responsibility: the single prerequisite for the possibility of authentic self-hood is freedom, and the single prerequisite for freedom is subjective responsibility. The balance between freedom and responsibility also parallels the balance between the autonomous inwardness of subjectivity and the interdependent irony of civility.58 Kierkegaards emphasis on everyday life and the process of selfcultivation also intertwines in an unexpected way with Kierkegaards musings on another pervasive element in everyday life boredom. In an oftquoted phrase from the hapless aesthetic narrator in Either/Or, a phrase , we are told, quite that has almost become a Kierkegaardian cliche concisely: Boredom [Kjedsommelighed] is the root of all evil (SKS 2, 275; EO I 285). Might one of the merits of an authentic civil society be to draw even the aesthete away from his narrow-minded pursuits and into the more rewarding realm of civic interaction? If the aesthete seeks among other things to nd pleasure and avoid boredom, then there is at least the possibility that authentic self-hood and civil society, which are their own rewards for the ethical ironist, might in essence be elaborate antidotes to the corrosive inuence of boredom for those whose lives are burdened by despair. Civil society may in fact be an inducement for the call to self-hood and ultimately, participation in the civic neighbourhood. Kierkegaard, it seems, may be trying to solve the crisis of his time by simultaneously trying to save the individual from despair, from the state, and from boredom. We are then left with the amusing conclusion that the struggle against boredom might at least in part be the catalyst for the heroic project of the simultaneous rejuvenation of self and society. In suggesting such a conclusion, perhaps Kierkegaard, as was his style, has found a way to add one more subtle joke to the narrative; if so, one can only laugh at the irony of it all. University of California, Berkeley

58 See Gregory R. Beabout, Freedom and its Misuses: Kierkegaard on Anxiety and Despair (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1996): . . . part of the key to Kierkegaards analysis of freedom is that an overemphasis on freedom from ends up making real freedom impossible. Freedom from external constraint leaves one bound up within oneself (137).

Você também pode gostar