Kierkegaard Archives - Mostly About Stories

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, like so many other thinkers of their time, saw their century as one engulfed by a crisis of faith. But whereas Nietzsche aimed to destroy the last remnants of a rotting Christianity to build a world where values might be reimagined, Kierkegaard attempted to create a new, fresh, and serious Christianity to take the place of the old and moribund one. In The Lily of the Field and The Bird of the Air we have three discourses analysing the famous biblical Sermon on the Mount. They fit into Kierkegaard’s larger goal of answering “what it is to be a human being”, especially from a “godly standpoint”, by teaching us a little about silence, obedience, and joy. Where Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous work always aims at making us think, here the goal is almost the opposite – here he wants us to act and change our lives.

I still have not decided yet whether I liked this short book. Kierkegaard places huge demands upon his listeners to act and be true Christians, demands which are unlikely to appeal to anyone who is not devout already. For those wavering, Kierkegaard has very little time. His faith is an all-or-nothing affair. But that does not mean that this work is without interest to the rest of us.

First Discourse: Silence

In the Sermon on the Mount we are called to consider, among other things, the lilies in the field and the birds of the air. From this pair Kierkegaard draws the lessons of The Lily of the Field and The Bird of the Air. The first discourse looks at the pair as a source of silence and explains why silence is important.

First, however, we are introduced to the character of the poet. The poet represents an inauthentic relationship with nature masquerading as an authentic one. Society, Kierkegaard thinks, is full of people who listen to the Bible and would like to follow its teachings. However, they do not even try to do so because they believe such a life would be impossible. The poet dramatizes the wish to live religiously, thus obscuring the fact that it is actually possible. We must stop listening to poets and start listening to the silence of the animals.

Humans are gifted with speech, but we must learn to keep silence. The reason is that “becoming silent, silent before God, is the beginning of the fear of God”. And fearing God is a good thing – it draws us nearer to Him and His kingdom. The first step to reaching God is to be silent – not to do anything other than cease talking. Our speech is dangerous, it distorts our situation. The lily suffers, but does not speak, whereas a human suffers and talks and makes their suffering all the greater. “In this silence, the many thoughts of wishing and desiring fall silent in the fear of God”. In our silence we perceive God, we remind ourselves of Him and make ourselves small before Him. Poets may talk of silence, but they seek it in order to talk about it. Their search is dishonest, the opposite of what is needful.

Ceasing to think, to speak, is to become like the birds and lilies. They live entirely in the moment, untroubled – and through silence we too can live orientated towards the moment at hand. There is a lot here that reminds me of Kierkegaard’s Repetition, which I looked at earlier. The creatures, unlike us humans, are capable of repetition – they have faith that things will repeat, without needing to worry and distract themselves from the now before them.

Second Discourse: Obedience

Silence leads to the fear of God which leads to His Kingdom – that is the idea of the first discourse. The second takes us further by confronting us with a choice – an either/or. Either God or whatever we want, but not a God who is a half-measure. For Kierkegaard, if we think we can combine God with other interests, other choices, that means that we have a false conception of Him. In fact, if we don’t give God our everything, he continues, that means we hate Him. Wait a minute, you might say, that’s ridiculous. But Kierkegaard says that what God demands is “obedience, unconditional obedience”.

The lily and the bird are teachers of obedience. They do not complain about the circumstances of their birth; instead, they accept everything as God’s will. They then blossom or flourish as best they can, given whatever situation they find themselves in. We humans complain, we despair at our brief time alive – and all this disobedience gets in the way of us becoming who God wants us to be. It also makes us vulnerable to temptation. “Where there is ambivalence, there temptation is” and “where ambivalence is… deep down there is also disobedience”.

Accepting everything our authority tells us on faith, allowing no doubts or disobedience, and trusting that later we will learn the reasons behind these injunctions – how little such suggestions must appeal to a modern reader! If you are a Christian already, Kierkegaard is describing a harsh but honest way of living in a way that pleases God; but if you are not one, then this is just sinister and authoritarian rubbish, the kind of thing we’d expect from our dictators. And if you are on the fence now, in the twenty-first century, Kierkegaard is just going to push you right off into scepticism. But perhaps that’s what he’d want.

Third Discourse: Joy

After all the business with the silence and the unconditional obedience, how happy we readers are to learn about joy! For after all, in spite of the suffering of the animals, they are actually joyous. In fact, they are “unconditionally joyful, are joy itself”. The best kind of joy for Kierkegaard is a state of being rather than a temporary state. He defines it as when one is “truly to be present to oneself” – that is, when one is silent about the future and past, and instead focused entirely upon one’s own existence within the present. He even says that “Joy is the present time”. The birds and lilies are joyous because they exist in the present.

But it is more complicated than that. After all, how could the creatures both “bear so infinitely deep a sorrow” while remaining happy? Because – and here Kierkegaard says something that sounds impressive, if nothing else – they cast all their care and sorrow upon God. With the help of faith, they offload all of their cares onto God, which empties them of their worries, and leaves only joy remaining. And even if there is only a little joy there, the absence of sorrow means that this joy will seem huge. Anyone can be happy, so long as they have no sorrow – that is the message. And from the creatures we can learn how to hurl or sorrows onto God – we can learn “dexterity”.

Conclusions

We have no excuses for not being proper, Christian Christians, in Kierkegaard’s view. Even in the midst of society one can still be a proper Christian, because birds group together, yet they still show unconditional obedience, are joyous, and are silent – and people are basically birds. If we too show unconditional obedience, unconditional joy, and silence our spirits, then we can abide in God – we can temporarily take part in the eternity which is God’s time. What a rousing conclusion, ay, readers?

As for me, I am not convinced. Or rather, I think that Kierkegaard’s description of a truly Christian way of living in The Lily of the Field and The Bird of the Air is both fascinating and repulsive at the same time. He smashes any suggestion that anything other than a life lived entirely for God can be a godly life, and for most of us wavering moderns this is a commitment far greater than what we are capable of.

At the same time, we can take away things from this piece. The value of silence is universal, and so too is the value of orientating ourselves towards the present. But as for the middle section, the authoritarianism and recommendation of political and social quietism are more curiosities, than things I hope we may actually want to learn from.

If you want more authoritarianism, you can read my comments on some essays by Thomas Carlyle. If you want more Kierkegaard, here’s my piece on Repetition.

Kierkegaard’s title is actually a typically witty joke – it refers to the number of times you need to read this stupid book to understand it. Repetition is one of the Danish philosopher’s earliest works, and as it is quite a bit shorter than Either/Or, I decided to start with it. I am very good at buying Kierkegaard’s books – I own Either/Or, Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs, Fear and Trembling, The Sickness Unto Death, Papers and Journals, and A Literary Review – but I am less good at reading them, even though I’ve always felt we would get on. After all, he’s often referred to as a foundational thinker of existentialism; at the same time, he was also a devout Christian, and I am interested in both of those things.

I suppose I was finally motivated to read Repetition because of Clare Carlisle’s fun and imaginative biography of Kierkegaard, Philosopher of the Heart, which I read last month. The biography actually turned me off Kierkegaard somewhat – I really had the impression that he was quite sickly, and it’s hard to put from one’s mind Nietzsche’s argument that good, healthy philosophy is always produced by good, healthy minds. But Carlisle’s book got me thinking about the Dane anyway, and so I decided to give him a go – Repetition’s short size didn’t hurt either.

But in all honesty, I am no philosopher. In this post I hope to explain more what is interesting about Repetition than to put forward any kind of interpretation. I cannot say I enjoyed Kierkegaard’s work, but there is a lot to take away from it.

An Overview of Repetition

Repetition is, like many of Kierkegaard’s works, written under a pseudonym – this time, Constantine Constantius. It’s wrong to think that the pseudonym simply masks Kierkegaard or provides a funny pun – the pseudonyms are themselves narrators, exploring views that Kierkegaard himself does not necessarily call his own. My copy of the book even refers to Constantine in the notes, rather than Kierkegaard. I found this a little jarring, for it is as if the fictional Constantine has burst through into reality, but it makes sense.

The work’s subtitle is “An Essay in Experimental Psychology” which means absolutely nothing because in the 19^th century people called whatever they wanted to “psychology”. In some sense it is not unlike a German novella. Repetition is a story, rather than a tract, with characters and a sense of being anchored in a world very familiar to our own. There are two central sections, framed by some philosophising by Constantine on the nature of repetition. One story concerns a trip by Constantine to Berlin, while the second, more weighty section, is about a young man who falls in love with a girl and then has to deal with some tortured consequences because he decides he needs to break the engagement off.

Both sections are influenced by Kierkegaard’s own life. The main biographical point everyone knows about him is that he fell in love with, and got engaged to, a girl called Regine Olsen. He then broke off the engagement because he decided he preferred to be unhappy and write philosophy – as you do. The reasons are, of course, slightly more complicated than that – Carlisle is good on them – but it is perhaps helpful to know that Kierkegaard had experienced similar things to his characters, even if the thoughts here are specially produced.

The “philosophy” section

You will be expecting me to tell you what “repetition” actually means. I certainly expected Kierkegaard to. The book’s theme is after all put by Constantine thus: “whether repetition was possible and what it meant, whether a thing wins or loses by being repeated.” Repetition appears to be a way of viewing the world. The Greeks saw all knowledge as recollection – what we learn we really remember. Recollection therefore orientates the one remembering towards the past. Repetition does the opposite. It is “recollected forwards”. But what does that mean?

Constantine tells us that “repetition’s love is in truth the only happy love”. It is happy because unlike hope it does not distract us from the present, and unlike recollection it is not filled with the sorrow of comparing the present to the past. Repetition is a living in the moment, but one with a kind of structure and a sense of limitations. Repetition knows not to demand too much. “Only a person who does not delude himself that repetition ought to be something new, for then he tires of it, is genuinely happy”.

Repetition accepts life’s limitations – it is not greedy. But it does require a kind of courage to desire repetition. “Repetition is actuality and the earnestness of existence”. God himself, we are told, wills repetition. To rephrase Far Cry 3’s Vaas, repetition is not the definition of insanity– it is the only way of living, aside from thinking about the past the whole time, which allows us to live without life dissolving “into an empty, meaningless noise”. Without repetition or recollection, we will struggle to live meaningful lives. And only the former lets us live happy ones.

Berlin

Constantine decides to test if repetition is possible, so he goes to Berlin. He has been there before, and he hopes to find it the same. Unfortunately, but somewhat predictably, the city has changed. His old landlord has gotten married, the theatre isn’t quite what it was the first time. He had left his home in Copenhagen because he was living “the wrong kind of repetition. My thoughts were barren, my anxious imagination constantly conjured up tantalizing memories of how the thoughts had presented themselves the last time, and the weeds of these recollections strangled every other thought.” In Berlin too, Constantine cannot enjoy things because he is recollecting them, rather than actually “repeating” them. He fails to live his own definition.

A Romance

Before and after the Berlin trip Constantine tells the story of “a young person” who considers Constantine his confidant. This person likes a girl, but unfortunately not in the right way. Constantine uses his idea of repetition vs recollection to determine what a good relationship should be like. Almost immediately, this young man is already “in a position to recollect his love.” Rather than concentrate on the girl as a human being in the present, she is already a memory-image in his mind. In a brilliant phrase, Constantine writes that the young man “had leapt right over life”. Perhaps the young man does not love her at all, only the image she created in him. Anyway, Constantine suggests ways of breaking off the engagement that will not hurt the girl too much, mostly involving been seen with other women.

After his trip to Berlin, the young man reappears in Constantine’s life, sending him letters. He has departed Copenhagen, but not followed Constantine’s advice about how to end the relationship. Constantine philosophises about him – “The girl has enormous significance for him. He will never be able to forget her. But that through which she has significance is not herself, but her relation to him. She is like the limit of his being. But such a relationship is not erotic. Religiously speaking, one could say that it is as if God had used this girl to capture him”. In any case, the young man leaves no address, simply writing his thoughts to Constantine for the latter to muse over.

And what are these thoughts? A mishmash of things, mostly centring on God and Job. “Does one no longer dare to complain to God?” the young man asks. In our age we no longer have sufficient faith to argue with Him, or perhaps we are simply afraid. The young man reads Job. “At night I can allow all the candles to be lit in my room, illuminating the entire house. Then I stand and read aloud, almost yelling, one or another passage from Job.” Me too. The young man also offers an interpretation of the bible story in the context of repetition. Namely, that Job, undergoing God’s testing, did not hope for anything, but simply lived, and then eventually things got better – they repeated. Only God can make possible repetition through his “thunderstorm”, which overcomes the tension of life.

Repetition as Philosophical Novella

I do not pretend either to have understood Repetition or to have successfully conveyed what little I did, perhaps, understand. But I would like to critique it as a philosophical novella, because I at least know how to do that. Kierkegaard’s two characters, and his story, encourage us to think. By having action in the real world, Repetition makes its philosophy something directly related to life as we live it. Meanwhile, the two characters prevent us from simply assuming that one or other is the author, and the other is someone to be disagreed with thoughtlessly. Constantine insults the young man – “it was easy to see that he laboured under a complete misunderstanding” – but that does not mean we should. As I noted, Constantine’s trip to Berlin shows he himself does not quite understand repetition as he defined it. Both characters are flawed, but both have important things to say.

But does that make Repetition a successful philosophical novella? What even is philosophical literature to begin with? Is it just a narrative that makes us think about philosophical themes? Most stories are philosophical by that definition, but we’ll go with it. Repetition has the young man’s story, with its letters and Constantine’s occasional snarky commentary. It has the Berlin trip, and it has the philosophy at the beginning and the end. Very well.

But it is not entirely successful as a work of literature. The Berlin section contains far too long a discourse on the nature of the theatre and of farce. There is a bit of humour, a lot of irony, but not enough humanity. The young man’s story suffers similar problems. Constantine notes that the girl is only an image to the young man, but she remains so for him and us too. The young man’s letters are perhaps the best example of the work’s flaws. He asks questions, “Am I lost?”, “Am I perhaps crazy?”, “Why does no one answer?” – which cannot have answers, because he does not leave a return address or even desire Constantine’s response! But that means that there is no dialogue in this text, there are only two monologues, with Constantine’s critiquing the young man’s.

Dostoevsky is often compared to Kierkegaard, but his philosophical novels are a hundred times better than Repetition precisely because they are filled with dialogue between characters. Characters engage with each other’s ideas, and nothing is settled in their world. The great Soviet critic Bakhtin notes that “Dostoevsky’s hero always seeks to destroy that framework of other people’s words about him that might finalize and deaden him”. Here, the young man cannot be in dialogue with Constantine because the correspondence only goes one way. Constantine “finalises and deadens” the young man, without the battle that would take place if they were actually in the same room. Though both characters are supposedly alive, because they have no real relation to each other it’s hard to feel they actually live.

Conclusion

I am unable to judge Repetition’s philosophy. A wiser person than I may one day note in the comments how terribly I have misrepresented it. As I understood it – this orientation towards the present, coupled with a sense of not demanding too much of life – it seems sensible enough. I appreciate Kierkegaard’s careful structuring of his text, but I think it is fundamentally misaligned with how good philosophical fiction must be.

Philosophical fiction shouldn’t just be people talking past each other – even Heidegger has essays with characters chatting, for crying out loud! Philosophical fiction has to elucidate the ideas in a way that philosophy on its own cannot, and that demands action and dialogue. Dialogue through life, rather than simply words passed between others; otherwise we could stick Repetition and some of its early reviews together and call that “dialogue”.

Latency does not make for dialogue. We need characters in the same room – we need to feel, as we feel with Dostoevsky, that at any moment the discussion could fall apart and they could start fighting each other with hands and fists. If this philosophy stuff is actually vitally important – and I’m sure Kierkegaard thinks it is – then its representation in literature demands this. Philosophical literature must make philosophy real, and it must make us feel. Alas, Repetition only just manages the former, and fails completely at the latter.

I will read some more Kierkegaard soon. For more on Job, check out my review of Joseph Roth’s novel of the same name. For more Dostoevsky, look at my thoughts on rereading the first two parts of Crime and Punishment.

Tag: Kierkegaard

Søren Kierkegaard – The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air