GORDON MARINO
IN HIS brief days under the sun, Søren Kierkegaard published more than twenty books. True, there are a couple of tomes that could have profited from another draft, but overall, the otherworldly quality of his prose and the wisdom embedded on every other page are often jaw- and, yes, book-dropping. There have been many occasions in which my eye traveled across a sentence and the text simply slipped from my hands as I shook my head in wonder. For example, I lost my page on this line from Fear and Trembling:
If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath all—what then would life be but despair? (30)
And then a long sentence later a perfectly placed, “But therefore it is not thus …” Yes, Kierkegaard could move the waters of language.
These two texts, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death, written, respectively, at the beginning and toward the end of Kierkegaard’s writing career, were the best that ever flowed from his stylus.
Almost all of Kierkegaard’s classic works were written under nom de plumes. The pseudonyms refer to and critique one another. At the same time that he published a pseudonymous work, Kierkegaard would also print a religious discourse or reflection under his own name. Over the years, the professors, whom Kierkegaard fiercely detested, have grappled over the question of how to interpret the use of these pseudonyms. In his posthumously published The Point of View of My Work as an Author, Kierkegaard entreats his readers not to confuse him with his pen names. Abiding by his wish, I read the entire oeuvre as a kind of novel, with each of the pseudonyms representing a particular life perspective—and if there is one thing that the man known in his youth as “the Fork” was adamant about, it was the importance of developing a perspective on life!
Published in 1843, Fear and Trembling appears with the name Johannes de silentio on the title page. As the author’s name shouts, silence is a central motif in this work, whispering the lesson that there are choices that cannot be mediated by language and thought, such as whether to mold your life to an unseen God.
A brilliantly constructed reductio ad absurdum argument against the notion that revealed truths are within the realm of reason, Fear and Trembling works to reestablish the primitivity, the attractive and yet repugnant aspect of faith. In the New Testament, Jesus is forever pleading, “Do not be offended in me.” Kierkegaard was of the opinion that Christianity had to preserve this power to defend against those who would rationalize it into something any insurance agent could easily believe. Or again, the Danish forbearer of existentialism was on the ramparts against the fantasy that a person only needed to be fortunate enough to be born into the right place and time for the pearly gates to open. As Johannes de silentio obliquely warns, remove the possibility of offense and you crucify the possibility of faith.
Fear and Trembling is rich in lines of interpretation; still, there can be no doubt that the text rails against the idea of a cozy relationship between religion and ethics. Abraham is regarded as the father of faith, and yet, from secular perspective, in his willingness to plunge his knife into Isaac, “he is not even a tragic hero but a murderer!” (77) In sum, faith is not ethics for dummies, that is, for people who need stories to help them lead righteous lives.
But returning to the issue of nom de plumes, each of the pseudonymous texts contains hints of the perspective of the author. Though this offering is certainly about the nature of faith, Johannes reveals from the start that he is outside the fold. Taken as a whole, Kierkegaard’s authorship insists that it is impossible to understand faith from an external point of view. In fact, de silentio acknowledges, “Even though one were capable of converting the whole content of faith into the form of a concept, it does not follow that one has adequately conceived faith and understands how one got into it, or how it got into one” (24). To make matters more complicated, Johannes identifies himself as “poetically inclined.” And yet here and there throughout Kierkegaard’s writings, warnings are sprinkled that the poet, of whom Kierkegaard certainly was one, is always in danger of confusing his or her vibrant descriptions with reality. The peril of poetic powers is that they can prompt one to imagine that just by limning the movement of faith you have made the movement of faith. Not so, the author behind the authors forever reminds himself. But this being the case, how much are we to trust the robust account of faith inscribed in Fear and Trembling? I am not sure.
The author of The Sickness Unto Death, Anti-Climacus, is cut from a different cloth. Perhaps there is a family relation, going back to one of the desert fathers, St. John Climacus (circa 579-649), otherwise known as John of the Ladder. Kierkegaard breathes life into two pseudonyms with the name of Climacus—Johannes Climacus and Anti-Climacus. Both of them are eager to climb into blessedness. Johannes Climacus is Kierkegaard’s philosophical persona, and the author of the sharply chiseled Philosophical Fragments and the rollicking concluding Unscientific Postscript. From the vantage point of faith, Anti-Climacus is before and above Johannes Climacus. Indeed, the reason Kierkegaard gave for refraining from signing his name to The Sickness Unto Death is that in his own life, he was only and at best “becoming a Christian.” Thus, he did not live up to the ideals espoused by this no-nonsense doctor of the spirit. Just listen to the tenor of Anti-Climacus’s prefatory words:
From the Christian point of view everything, absolutely everything, should serve for edification. … Everything that is Christian must bear some resemblance to the address which a physician makes by the sick-bed: although it can be fully understood only by one who is versed in medicine, yet it must never be forgotten that it is pronounced beside the sick-bed. (142)
As Anti-Climacus, the physician at the sick-, which is to say, death, bed sees it, there is no time for conjuring proofs and defending against objections to Christianity. It is certain that at some uncertain time, it will be all over. The sickness unto death that we are suffering from is despair. This text is a piece of spiritual epidemiology. First, Anti-Climacus defines the illness. Then he descants on its scope and finally, in what amounts to a spiritual Diagnostic Statistical Manual he casts a vibrant portrait gallery of the forms that despair takes in this world. And that is the sheer genius of the Hamlet whom Rev. Walter Lowrie ushered into English. Unlike any other philosopher, Kierkegaard formed concrete examples from life and fairy tales to flesh out his dizzying abstractions.
In the end, The Sickness Unto death resuscitates a distinction that has been tarred over in the present age of the therapeutic, namely, the distinction between depression and despair, or again, between psychological and spiritual disorders. There is much in this demanding book to cross-examine current views of the good life.
Equally important, some of Kierkegaard/Anti-Climacus’s most enduring insights into ethics are threaded between the lines of this work. Like Kant, Kierkegaard believed that the truths about ethics were universally distributed in the guise of conscience. For that reason, we do not need ethicists or ethics to lead moral lives. In fact, it is not knowledge, or new skills of analysis, that we need. What is required is the resolve to hold on to what we know; to refrain from talking ourselves out of duties that slam us against the wall of our short- or long-term interest. On Anti-Climacus’s reckoning our moral commitments will lead to sacrifices that will prod us to talk ourselves out of those commitments, to convince ourselves that the easy path is the right path. In the end, he writes, “there lives perhaps a great multitude of men who labor off and on to obscure their ethical and religious understanding which would lead them out into decisions and consequences which the lower nature does not love” (225). We need to be honest with ourselves and abjure from self-deception, and part 2 of The Sickness Unto Death contains Kierkegaard’s matchless analysis of the self-hoodwinking process.
Like scant few philosophers and with sublimely refreshing honesty, Kierkegaard addresses what each of us is up against in ourselves. He writes like an angel, but an angel possessed of a penetrating awareness of the ongoing struggle with moods, time, and our propensity for self-obscurification. These two volumes, brilliantly bookended and rendered by Walter Lowrie, are more than the essential Kierkegaard—they are quintessential Kierkegaard. They should be read with fear and trembling. They could change your life.