I even took pleasure in inciting him to begin his philosophical instruction - a little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down the pants in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard

If nothing else I have learned to take Kierkegaard ironically, and once I do that I can enjoy his grim humor:

There was a man whose chatter certain circumstances made it necessary for me to listen to.  At every opportunity he was ready with a little philosophical lecture, a very tiresome harangue.  Almost in despair, I suddenly discovered that he perspired copiously when talking.  I saw the pearls of sweat gather on his brow, unite to form a stream, glide down his nose, and hang at the extreme point of his nose in a drop-shaped body.  From the moment of making this discovery, all was changed.  I even took pleasure in inciting him to begin his philosophical instruction, merely to observe the perspiration on his brow and at the end of his nose.  (56)*

Kierkegaard’s humor often comes from his inventiveness, as he pursues an idea, for example describing a true “knight of the faith” as an accountant who walks “as sturdily as a postman” and “thinks about the special hot dish which his wife has been preparing for him, a grilled lamb’s head garnished with herbs perhaps” – given the chance, “he will discuss it with a passion” (107), the grilled lamb’s head, a classic Danish dish which you should not Google if you do not want to see a photo of a grilled lamb’s head.  I am still not exactly sure what a “knight of the faith” is meant to be.

In a discussion of “demoniac despair,” Kierkegaard invents a sentient clerical error:

perhaps it was no error but in a far higher sense was an essential constituent in the whole exposition – it is then as if this clerical error would revolt against the author, out of hatred for him were to forbid to correct it, and were to say, “No, I will not be erased, I will stand as a witness against thee, that thou art a very poor writer.”  (158)

I suppose I should be pulling out some sharp aphorisms, too, but Kierkegaard is no G. C. Lichtenberg, and I find his inventions, these little characters than emerge, more amusing than his sayings, although those are not bad either.

The characters are part of the one part of Kierkegaard that I feel I misunderstand most fruitfully, the “Exordium” to Fear and Trembling in which he retells the story of Abraham and Isaac in four different ways, each with a variation not in action but in the psychological outcome.  Abraham, for example, is intentionally cruel to his Isaac in order to protect his son’s faith, to direct Isaac’s doubt or despair onto himself (so Abraham sacrifices not his son but himself).  Or in another version, the reverse:

But Abraham prepared everything for the sacrifice, gently and quietly, but when he turned aside and drew the knife, then Isaac saw that his left hand was clenched in despair and that a shudder passed through his body – but Abraham drew the knife.

Then they returned home and Sara hastened to  meet them; but Isaac had lost his faith.  No word of this has ever been mentioned in the world, and Isaac never spoke to anyone of what he had seen and Abraham never suspected that anyone had seen it.  (100)

So Abraham’s entirely human and understandable – almost necessary (that’s another one of the variations) – moment of doubt is destructive.

Kierkegaard immediately turns these scenarios to a complex argument about faith, dread, and despair that I did not understand at all.  Whatever fragments Auden used went unrecognized, except for the four stories themselves; whatever idea I was supposed to be following was replaced by an idea about narrativity, about how stories imply other stories, with especially rich stories implying many other stories.  Once each new story is recognized – told, written, imagined – it becomes a permanent part of the original story.  Maybe it was invented, maybe it was there all along.

Meanings accumulate, too, complementary or contradictory, but unresolvably so, because as stories they may well all be true.  Or many of them may be true. Or none. Who knows.

In other words, I recognized in Fear and Trembling the Kierkegaard of Borges and Derrida, or a simple outline of such a creature.  I read Kierkegaard, and all philosophy, as if it were literature, and perhaps too much as if it were about literature, but in this narrow case it really was.

*  Page numbers from The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard, so I have no idea which book this is from.

Neither more nor less than pure nonsense - I did read Kierkegaard

I read a bit of Søren Kierkegaard rather than Hegel.  Actually, understanding Kierkegaard is another reason to read Hegel, another place Hegel kept popping up, even in the strange mangled hybrid book I read, The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard (1952). 

If Hegel had written his whole Logic and in the Preface disclosed the fact that it was merely a thought experiment (in which, however, at many points he had shirked something), he would have been the greatest thinker that has ever lived.  Now this is comic.  (125)

I disagree on one point.  It would be funnier to make the disclosure in the afterward.  Even funnier, never disclose that it was merely etc.  Pretend you mean every word.  The greatest prankster that has ever lived.

Kierkegaard came to English-language attention fairly recently.  A major translation effort brought his major works into English in the 1940s.  W. H. Auden plundered these books to create his.  It was supposed to introduce Kierkegaard to a wider audience.  Did it?  I don’t know.

However useful the book is, it has two massive problems.  First, any possibility of coherent argument is destroyed.  A three page excerpt from one book is followed by a paragraph from another.  Which books?  Which bits are from published texts and which from private journals?  Auden does not say.

Then, second, the hilarious Kierkegaard pseudonym system is destroyed.  Fear and Trembling (1843) was written by Johannes de Silentio, The Concept of Dread (1844) by Vigilius Haufniensis, other books by Hilarius Bogbinder, H. H., and Anti-Climacus.  Kierkegaard had books that contradicted each other published on the same day.  Either/Or (1843) has various authors arguing with each other within the book.  What a shame to throw out all of this.  To a book blogger of a certain temperament, it is practically the best part.  Some of what we now blithely call “Kierkegaard” is a pose or a parody or fiction.

Auden’s book gives no hint of dates either.  Just glance at those above.  Kierkegaard spent a decade working privately, and then kaboom, this amazing mass of published material in the 1840s and on to his death in 1855.  Of course this is why there are so many anthologies of mangled Kierkegaard excerpts.

Even chopped up (or because), I found much of Kierkegaard’s (or Anti-Climacus’s) thought to be difficult or beyond comprehension, such as a concept of subjectivity that went well beyond ordinary English usage, or a sharp distinction between the “aesthetic” and “ethical” that appeared arbitrary in its either/or divisions.  I would be surprised if I got something out of one page of five.

An author writes a clear, consistent, connected, fully matured presentation of some thought, perhaps the fruit of many years’ labor.  Nobody reads it.  But a [book blogger] reviews the book; in the course of half an hour or so, he writes something that is neither more nor less than pure nonsense.  This is then supposed to be the purport of the author’s book; moreover everybody reads it.  The significance of an author’s existence thus becomes evident: he exists for the sake of affording some journalist an opportunity to write nonsense for everybody to read.  (31)

Now that I understood.   I am doing my part to prove Kierkegaard right.

And honestly, one page out of five is a success.  If I thought I could hit that mark with Hegel, I would read him too.  So tomorrow, thought experiments, Kierkegaardian comedy, philosophy as a form of play.  Some of the parts I think I understood.