Abstract
Modernity has been recognized as a time of crisis at least since Immanuel Kant announced in the pages of the Berlinische Monatschrift in November of 1784 that the ‘age of enlightenment’ was one characterized by ‘the human being's emancipation from its self-incurred minority’ (‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’ Yale University Press, 2006, p. 17). As Kant recognized in the very same essay, this ‘emancipation’ trailed the shadow of anxiety over the loss of old foundations, instructing the newly freed to ‘argue as much as you want and about whatever you want, but obey!’ (ibid., p. 23). But obey what? And why? Having witnessed the violent contest of authorities vying for obedience in the centuries that followed Kant's announcement, Michel Foucault sympathetically appraised the inadequacies of Kant defining ‘enlightenment’ in ‘an almost entirely negative way, as an Ausgang, an “exit”, a “way out”’, and he urged those afflicted with the modern ‘impatience for liberty’ to pursue it by means of the ‘patient labor’ of ‘diverse inquiries’ into ‘concrete practices’ (‘What is Enlightenment?’ Pantheon, 1984, pp. 34, 50). One model of such patient labor and diverse inquiry suggested by the three excellent books under review here is Søren Kierkegaard, who obsessively meditated on various concrete forms of life across his vast corpus in an attempt to account for the dissonance that arises from the fact that, as Anthony Egan puts it, ‘despite our relativism, we cannot shake the deep feeling that there is an absolute truth lurking somewhere, a cosmic judge or jury, even though our vision has been obscured and we know not where to look’ (p. xiv).
The question of finding a place to ‘look’ for a ‘vision’ that might provide an authoritative model for modern life is for Eagan as well as Richard McCombs and Carl S. Hughes a central concern of Kierkegaard's authorship. Each of these studies takes stock of Kierkegaard's attempt to find aesthetic criteria for judging what or who might be worthy of obedience in an age of enlightenment that has left purported certainties behind. For Eagan, it is the category of the ‘interesting’ that dominates our modern quest for, what one of Kierkegaard's pseudonyms calls, ‘aesthetic validity’ (Either/Or, Part II, Princeton University Press, 1987, esp. pp. 3–154)—a category and mode of validity that, in Eagan's estimation, is ‘insufficient’ to the task of grounding a life (p. xvii). For McCombs, Kierkegaard's aim is named in ‘the very first sentence of his dissertation, The Concept of Irony’, when he ‘speaks of what “must be praised”’, which, McCombs argues, suggests that the category of the ‘praiseworthy’ is the governing principle for living in obedience to a modern ‘vocation’ that is primarily ‘doxological’ (p. 1). Finally, for Hughes, one's life is authorized not by finding an appropriate model judged by the right criteria. Rather, at his best, Kierkegaard wants us to be obedient to nothing more than the vision of ourselves that we find in the mirror that his writings and, ultimately, the words of Scripture, hold up to us. The question for Kierkegaard, according to Hughes, ‘is how you see yourself’ (p. xix, original emphasis).
Each of these recent books, then, provides a Kierkegaardian prescription for discovering what to obey as one embarks on the distinctively modern task of becoming a self, a task that Kierkegaard, according to these authors, saw as an aesthetic one—that is, as Hughes defines it, subjective, immediate, and apophatic (p. 171). It is subjective insofar as it concerns an individual human life in all its irreducible particularity. It is immediate to the extent that it focuses on, what Foucault above called, ‘concrete practices’ that cannot be easily abstracted into universal principles. And, finally, it is apophatic because it is an ongoing process that cannot be given a final, determinate shape and, therefore, turned into an unchanging archetype to be manifest in all times and places by all persons. In what follows, I will treat each of these books in turn with a focus on the ways that each of them uses Kierkegaard to address the modern anxiety that ‘there is an absolute truth lurking somewhere’, if only we had the eyes to see it.
Turning to Eagan, the definition of the aesthetic just offered elides an important philosophical problem, which brings us back to Kant, namely that the realm of the particular, the concrete, and the indeterminate is one that seems to refuse the very emancipation that Kant had announced in his brief essay on enlightenment. Famously, this is the realm of phenomena, which is only indeterminate from the perspective of the outside observer. To the one looking at nature, there is endless activity extending to infinity, but from within nature, one's activity is only too determined by what came before and what will come after. In his Critique of Judgment, which deals with aesthetics, Kant called this space between the ‘supersensible’ reflection upon nature and the ‘sensible’ experience of oneself acting within nature ‘a great gulf’, and it is this ‘gulf’ to which Eagan refers in his subtitle (p. 2). For Eagan, the task of aesthetics and, therefore, the aesthetes that populate the first volume of Kierkegaard's pseudonymously published blockbuster first book, Either/Or, is ‘to establish criteria for judgements regarding the perceptible world that show an intimate connection between free human intention and strict causality’ (p. 4). In short, how can we experience freedom within nature? Or, in the terms put forward above, how can we be emancipated and obedient selves, at once autonomous and secured?
For Kant, it is the ‘disinterested pleasure’ that we express when we judge an object to be beautiful, as determined neither by our perception of the object's relation to what caused it or what it causes, that gives us this experience of freedom within nature. For the German Romantics, like Friedrich Schlegel, who came after Kant, however, this ‘disinterestedness’ did not sufficiently capture the power that art has to change and shape an individual human life. Far from being free of effects, for these theorists, the beautiful overwhelms our senses and our emotions, inspiring inner states that are ‘more capacious than a physical world that operates through pure causal necessity’ and ‘a society that … shapes us’ (Eagan, p. 15). Aesthetic judgment, therefore, is not undetermined, but it is overdetermined, driven by a force more powerful than natural or social causation, a force that is awakened by the beautiful object, but seems to be coming from within us. And instead of leaving us disinterested, this hidden power coaxed however slightly out into the open by aesthetic experience piques our interest.
For Kierkegaard, ‘the interesting is a border category, a confinium between esthetics and ethics’ (Eagan, p. 27, original emphasis), precisely because how we respond to the hidden power that art inspires within us constitutes our chief ethical task. Will we allow this awareness to license our manipulation of this similar power in others, or will it cause us to reverence their hidden power as the source of their dignity and autonomy as we do our own? The first volume of Kierkegaard's Either/Or is valuable, on Eagan's reading, for its many examples of how one can get this task wrong. The pseudonymous author of this text, identified only as ‘A’, is Kant's so-called emancipated modern who ‘turns to classic works of art in order to linger in the universal fold of unreflective experience, to inhabit a place absent the pains and disorientation of a subjectivity in tension with the objective world—to escape the “boundless chaos”, as A calls it’ (p. 45). In these works, A finds characters who model a similar escape.
Don Giovanni, the eponymous hero of Mozart's opera, for instance, escapes the task of shaping his hidden power into a responsible form of subjectivity by retreating to the animal pleasures of serial seduction, thereby reducing himself and his targets to mere objects. Ancient and modern tragic figures from Sophocles’ Antigone to Margarite in Goethe's Faust, escape into forms of suffering either fated or inflicted that ultimately render their subjectivity as shadowy ‘silhouettes’ (Eagan, p. 110) cast by the destiny or deception that rendered them victims. The only honor possible for these characters is the dubious title of ‘The Unhappiest One’ (p. 121). But to be declared the ‘unhappiest’, our suffering silhouette would have to be distinct enough in her features to be understood as a subject of unsurpassed suffering and, yet, in being so understood, would have to always trail the one who was even more unhappy for not having been so understood. Here, on Eagan's account, A's pursuit of ‘the interesting’ as the criteria for a free, yet stable life has undergone a reductio ad absurdum, whereby the earnestness of human suffering has been rendered tedious and trivial.
At this point A comes to, what Eagan claims, is the proper ethical concern that animates his aesthetic inquiry, arguing ‘that boredom is the root of all evil’ (p. 166). A goes on to say, in Eagan's approving summary, ‘Every evil act, from the first sin of Adam and Eve, to the murder of Abel by Cain, to the building of the Tower of Babel, is here attributed to the human tendency to look for rewarding content beyond what is present or immanent, or, in other words, to look for what is meaningful in what is not present’ (Eagan, p. 166, original emphasis). Eagan argues compellingly that, while A has correctly identified the problem, his solution is to avoid boredom by approaching every experience as if for the first time and to bend it to his interest. This is dramatized in perhaps the most famous section of Either/Or I, ‘The Seducer's Diary’, which recounts the exploits of one Johannes who styles himself as a more enlightened Don Giovanni, carefully planning his seductions with a certain regard for the desires of his targets in order to make himself truly desirable to them, rather than simply saying whatever he can to convince them to give themselves to him. For this reason, Eagan grudgingly admits, ‘Johannes is in love in his pathological way. His loving feeling can be likened to the desire to engage with the inward truth of another human being combined with a doubt that such engagement has durability’ (p. 199, original emphasis). Johannes is not a deceitful lover, like Don Giovanni or Faust. He is an insecure one, but this makes him no less inconstant and, therefore, no less harmful. More importantly for Eagan's study and for the question of this review essay, Johannes’ insecurity brings us back to the problem of whether art can give us access to a freedom within nature that is ‘durable’ enough to ground a concrete ethical way of life.
Offering the promise of a future close reading of the second volume of Either/Or, Eagan suggests that what we need is not A's ‘excavation of what is hidden’ (p. 108), but the performance of transparency that we find with Judge William, A's ethical correspondent, who recommends to his floundering pen pal the clear stabilizing influence of marriage, family, and steady employment. And yet, as any reader of Kierkegaard will remember, Either/Or ends with both A and Judge William coming under divine condemnation in the form of a sermon preached by a simple country pastor declaring that ‘in relation to God we are always in the wrong’ (Either/Or, Part II, pp. 339–54). For Kierkegaard, Judge William is not as transparent as he would have A believe, and that despite outward ethical appearances, a hiddenness remains. To excavate this hiddenness, we turn to McComb's study of praise in Kierkegaard, which suggests a role for the aesthetic that comes on the other side of the ethical.
McCombs opens his fascinating book with an aesthetic character not unlike A: ‘the typical poet’, who ‘has the serious defect of not striving to put the ideals that he praises into practice, and even uses his admiration and praise of things as a substitute for striving’ (p. 3, original emphasis). On Eagan's reading, what A got right was the imperative to find meaning in the present, to seek one's reward in the beauty of the everyday, to find the ordinary praiseworthy. The problem was the insecurity coming from the suspicion that this world is not enough and that the things of this world were to be used, like the seducer's prey, to bootstrap one's way to transcendence. Like A, then, the ‘typical poet’ praises the world as a means of getting beyond it, consuming it in his own process of self-creation. Kierkegaard, on the other hand, claims to be an altogether different, ‘singular kind of poet’ (p. 3).
Unlike Judge William, Kierkegaard does not assume that the praiseworthiness of a concrete ethical practice is clear and definite, and, yet, in contrast to A, Kierkegaard believes that such an accounting can be given. It is just such an accounting that Kierkegaard gives, according to McCombs, in Works of Love, but before coming to this text, McCombs turns to the praise of faith that Kierkegaard's pseudonym Johannes de Silentio offers in Fear and Trembling. The object of praise in Fear and Trembling is Abraham, who is commanded by God to sacrifice his son. Silentio praises him not for following this command, but for the hidden anguish in his faithfulness. Silentio's analysis gives us an Abraham that we can understand as a type, the ‘Knight of Faith’, but because Abraham is not like A's ‘unhappiest one’, who tragi-comically holds up his inscrutable suffering for all to praise, it remains unclear how one might imitate Abraham. According to McCombs, this is strategic on the part of Silentio, who is trying to navigate between making faith seem too ‘ethically rigorous’ or, worse, sanctimoniously ‘portraying himself as the morally upright man’ (p. 35) and making faith seem ‘trivial and easy both to acquire and to understand’ (p. 45). Silentio's ironic claim not to understand Abraham even as he goes on for pages praising him performs a nonthreatening doxology, inspiring admiration without demanding imitation. But this irony also seems to mask the kind of insecurity that we saw in A's Johannes, and like him, Silentio ends up only seducing his audience, seeing their genuine inward desire for free and concrete commitment, but never quite believing that such commitment is possible. The task of Works of Love, then, will be to overwhelm the reader with an earnestness so winsome in its praise of love that one cannot help but become a practitioner of its works.
Unlike Eagan, who painstakingly comments on Either/Or I in the order in which the author presents it to his reader, McCombs takes his reader right to the center of Works of Love with Kierkegaard's claim at the beginning of the ‘second series’ of essays that ‘love builds up’ (Works of Love, Princeton University Press, 1995, p. 209). Inspired by St. Paul's ‘renowned’ encomium to love in 1 Corinthians 13, McCombs argues that Kierkegaard regards love as having ‘a characteristic manner, or style’ (p. 52), without which, as Paul says, even the best intentions are spoken as if one is ‘a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal’ (1 Cor. 13:1). This style, McCombs goes on to show, is rooted in the confidence that the speaker has in the love that is present in one's neighbor, who is the proper object of love. In contrast to A's seducer and the Johannes of Fear and Trembling, the true lover proceeds without the doubt that makes one self-conscious in love, always testing to see if the love shown is working to inspire love in the other. Such insecure love is a love that continually challenges the neighbor to prove that she is worthy of love by responding with a love that is judged to be equal to the love received. This love discourages, rather than builds up, the beloved.
To illustrate the upbuilding activity of true love, in perhaps the most innovative move of this study, McCombs turns to Alyosha in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Dorothea in George Eliot's Middlemarch. Both characters, McCombs shows, are ‘ethical artists of everyday life’ to the extent that they can ‘discern beauty in every face’ (p. 73), seeing despite compelling evidence to the contrary, in the case of Alyosha, that his avaricious bother Mitya is not capable of murder and, in the case of Dorothea, that the similarly grasping Lydgate is also innocent. The aesthetic genius of the lover, then, lies not in seeking out those who are obviously praiseworthy, whether for goodness or beauty, but in finding something to praise in those who have been condemned and, in doing so, making it possible for the condemned to discover and build up what is worth praising in themselves.
This version of the aesthetic, then, is relational in its subjectivity, immediacy, and apophasis. It is concerned with an individual, though not oneself but the other. It is invested in the concrete capacities and activities of the other, and it is committed to the indeterminacy of this other, who is never to be defined once and for all by past actions or present attitudes. McCombs goes on to consider the consequences of love's interpersonal artistry for the life of a loving community, which will be characterized, he argues, by ‘forgiveness, reconciliation, and peace-making’ (p. 79). It is here, however, that McCombs wavers slightly in his praise for the unconditional nature of Kierkegaard's account of love. McCombs begins to worry that Kierkegaard's genius lover is too assertive in attributing lovability to the other, especially in situations where the latter has wronged the former. Following the analysis of the philosopher Charles Griswold, McCombs claims that ‘forgiveness and reconciliation require in the best case a cooperation of apology and forgiveness. Moreover, there is, or should be, art in apology’ (p. 88). For all his belief in the power of love, McCombs argues, Kierkegaard must know that the lover and the beloved are sinners, and as such must, at times, apologize. The problem with apology, though, is that it opens a space for self-consciousness and doubt, which leads back to the ironic style of Silentio and the seductive style of A's Johannes.
The baleful effects of this insecurity manifest themselves in McCombs’ later chapters, in which he explicitly associates the aesthetics of praise with the interesting. In his chapter on ‘The Praise of Love’, he writes, ‘This talk of the tension between concealment and disclosure reveals love as something interesting; it alluringly invites us to look for signs of hidden love in our neighbor, and appeals to the artist in us that might wish to become interesting by revealing with visible fruits the hidden life of our own love’ (p. 102, original emphasis). At this point, the spell of McCombs’ otherwise confident praise of love breaks, and it is difficult not to read him as seeking the ‘alluring’ possibility of love in the other as a way of ratifying his own status as an ‘ethical artist of everyday life’. This self-consciousness also comes through in his final chapter, when McCombs worries that Kierkegaard's ‘bliss’ at the ‘thought … of human equality … promotes mediocrity’ (p. 131). To save Kierkegaard from such a boring conclusion, McCombs turns approvingly to the novels of Iris Murdoch, whom he holds up as a fellow ‘ethical artist’ for ‘making a good man interesting’ (p. 148). The point for Kierkegaard, though, seems to be precisely to avoid rendering love interesting, lest it become the possession of the few and not, as McCombs’ beloved George Eliot would have it, ‘owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs’ (Middlemarch, Harper, 2015, p. 838).
Despite these faults, McCombs’ study is valuable for showing that ‘esthetics is not the opposite or the inevitable enemy of ethics and religion’ (p. 162). Specifically, McCombs gives us an aesthetic that is subjective, immediate, and apophatic, while being other-oriented, communicable, and articulate in its processual indeterminacy. It is this last quality, though, that seems to be a source of insecurity and impatience for McCombs. He would prefer to have clearly praiseworthy exemplary lovers in the way that A wanted to have models after which to mold his own self-fashioning, but having heroes is more often a source of self-doubt or, worse, overconfidence, and both tend toward the kind of inconstancy in love that we found in the Johanneses. Better, perhaps, to say with Bertolt Brecht: ‘Unhappy is the land that needs a hero’ (Galileo, Grove, 1966, p. 115). This is a sentiment with which Hughes, the author of the third book under review in this essay, would wholeheartedly agree, and it is for this reason that he provides, among other things, the most compelling account of the role of the aesthetic in the ethical and religious life.
As his subtitle indicates, Hughes’ book is explicitly about ‘revelation’, which as he says in his first sentence, tends to make Christians ‘think they have something others don’t’ (p. xv, original emphasis). The significance of this in the context of the crisis of modernity, with which this essay began, is clear. While the secular modern finds oneself unmoored from those traditions that once gave one a source of obedience and authority to guide concrete ethical ways of life, the Christian remains tied to God's Word. For Hughes, the virtue of Kierkegaard is that he troubles this smug certainty, and in doing so, presents a form of Christian life that is closer to the experience of most Christians, who, living in the modern world as they do, are not immune from its demands.
Perhaps because of his status as one of the modern heroes who first made these demands, Hughes devotes his first two chapters to a creative and compelling rereading of Martin Luther, who has been variously credited or blamed for modernity's predicament and who was also the architect of a theology to which some have turned to protect us from it (pp. 6–12). This prepares the ground for his turn to Kierkegaard, who is valuable, according to Hughes, not least because he is ‘a Lutheran critic of Lutheranism’ (p. 79). He embraced the themes that made Luther modern—‘most importantly, the orientation to subjectivity, Christological apophaticism, and aesthetic immediacy’ (p. 81)—while rejecting those that Luther and the Danish Lutherans of Kierkegaard's own time thought made them Christian—universal creeds, Christological clarity, and ethical abstraction. Hughes argues that when read together, the pseudonymous authors of Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments and Practice in Christianity with the complementary names Climacus and Anti-Climacus present a Christianity that is at once ungeneralizable and practicable.
On the one hand, Climacus radically particularizes the Christian life by rooting it in the subjective encounter with Jesus. As Hughes says, ‘In the same way that one's love for a beloved is elicited by the nature of the beloved, rather than being a rational choice one makes oneself, so too faith has its source entirely in the god-man’ (p. 88). The life of love makes no sense apart from the concrete relationship with the beloved, and the actions and attitudes that constitute such a life can only be given in and through this relationship with this unique beloved and cannot be abstracted and transferred to another. On the other hand, Anti-Climacus affirms that such a life still provides a framework for judging whether it is, in fact, love that is being lived. By focusing on the extreme commands of Christ, Anti-Climacus suggests that love ‘must in fact jack up the price so frightfully that the prototype is the very thing that teaches hum[an] beings to take refuge in grace’ (p. 92). The life of love is to be judged by how it fails. Grace can only be a refuge for those who have already ventured out to attempt the impossible and found themselves in constant need of the forgiveness of the beloved. The need for this forgiveness is so radical that it is not something that can be earned with an apology, which will always be subject to the manipulative tendencies of the human heart. Being forgiven is, rather, the constant state of living with the beloved, who looks at the lover with a mercy so great that it obviates all apologies.
The goal of Kierkegaard's authorship, as Hughes argues, is to invite his readers into such a relationship. This is why in those texts that he published under his own name, Kierkegaard often addresses himself to ‘that single individual’ (Works of Love, p. 3), whom he hopes will assess his work not on the cogency with which it presents some abstract doctrine or how clearly it draws its characters, but as to whether it builds you up with a merciful gaze and thereby ‘deepen[s] your faith’ and ‘increase[s] your love for God and neighbor’ (p. 130, original emphasis). Kierkegaard is not writing for those, like A and Silentio, who are looking for heroes to emulate; he is writing for you, who are already embarked on your own impossible life. This direct address gives Kierkegaard's writing the aesthetic immediacy that our emancipated modern seeks, but it is risky both for the reader and the author. One never knows how either will read or be read. Depending on the circumstances into which the text lands in the life of the reader, the same words may lead to vastly different concrete ways of life. Hughes writes, For some of us, following Christ may indeed involve self-sacrifice. For others, it may be a call to claim one's own agency and self-worth. In the cross, some of us will see a mirror of our own suffering, finding comfort in God's solidarity with us in the depths of our pain. Others of us may be forced to grapple with seeing ourselves in Jesus's executioners, recognizing how our actions or indifference continue to crucify God's children anew. (p. 162)
Each of the books under review in this essay attempts to mine Kierkegaard for resources to address the uniquely modern predicament of rootlessness, which Kant diagnosed nearly 250 years ago. While it is difficult to call a problem with such a lineage ‘new’, it is nevertheless fitting that these studies appear in the relatively young book series ‘New Kierkegaard Research’. As Foucault argued in his essay on Kant's answer to the question concerning enlightenment, there is more than one way to be ‘new’, and while Eagan, McCombs, and Hughes may not be contending with ‘a transition toward the dawning of a new world’ (Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ p. 34) in temporal terms, they do present Kierkegaard as a point of departure for engaging contemporary challenges. In this sense, they each provide ‘a way out’ for Kierkegaard and his readers from narrow interpretations that only have ‘the goal of historical accuracy in mind’ (Hughes, p. 171). For Eagan, this means ‘explor[ing] how the aesthetic attitude’ fares as ‘one of a series of possible responses to the crisis I believe we have still not gotten beyond’ (p. xxi). Similarly, McCombs expresses broader ambitions for his reading of Kierkegaard by going outside of the latter's texts to show how authors like George Eliot and Dostoevsky might illustrate and extend his view ‘that ethics and religion are not complete unless they include art and esthetics as essential’ (p. 17). Finally, and most explicitly, Hughes hopes that we might read Kierkegaard (and Luther) ‘as living voices bearing Christ to our world in constantly evolving ways’ (p. 171)—a Christ ‘who calls you to a life no church can contain’ (p. 174, original emphasis). In terms of answering the specific questions with which this review essay began—Obey what? And why?—I have expressed a preference for the aesthetic criteria developed by Hughes, but each of these books provides valuable insights for anyone seeking to better understand Kierkegaard and his continuing relevance for we emancipated moderns.