Abstract
Kierkegaard adapts conceptual resources from both early German Romanticism and Hegelianism. The adaptation in question triangulates these resources, such that certain elements of Romantic thought that are critical with regard to Hegel and certain aspects of Hegel’s thought that are critical of Romanticism combine in Kierkegaard. Specifically, he crafts a conception of dialectical transition by repurposing Romantic conceptions of irony and Hegelian conceptions of humor. Moving between what Kierkegaard calls the existential spheres involves these indirect modes of self-address, which in turn prompt “leaps” of radical self-transformation, that is, changes between types of selves.
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- 1.
Citation to Kierkegaard’s work is to Kierkegaard’s Writings, ed. H. Hong and E. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978ff.) [= KW], by abbreviated individual volume title and page number. Parallel citation is to Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, ed. Søren Kierkegaard Forskningscenteret (København: Gads, 1997ff.) [= SKS] by volume and page number. I retain capitalization of common nouns in Danish, per the orthography of Kierkegaard’s time. The following abbreviations refer to the English translations:
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CI = The Concept of Irony, KW II
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CUP = Concluding Unscientific Postscript, KW XII.1
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E–O 1 & 2 = Either/Or, KW III & IV
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FT = Fear and Trembling, KW VI
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PV = The Point of View, KW XXII
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R = Repetition, KW VI
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SLW = Stages on Life’s Way, KW XI
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- 2.
The term “shift” avoids the idea of continuous change that the word “transition” encourages. The Danish “Overgang” is cognate to the German “Übergang,” but neither resolutely avoids the slide from the idea of a shift to that of a transition. It is perhaps characteristic of the cast of Kierkegaard’s mind that he glosses the idea by deploying a tag from Greek philosophy: μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος (CUP 98; SKS 7:96–7). Metabasis has several meanings in ancient philosophy: “change of elements into one another” (Aristotle), “regressus ad infinitum” (Epicurus), and “inference by analogy” (Stoicism). The term need not refer to non-continuous transition, but its use in the tag does rely on that sense. Here the term denotes non-incremental, discontinuous, even abrupt change: a leap (Spring). In any event, what is in question in Kierkegaard’s account of shifting between spheres of existence is neither (1) mere quantitative change nor (2) dialectical change in Hegel’s sense. (2) requires further comment. It is true that Kierkegaard allows that, against the background of traditional linear accounts of change, Hegel’s view can seem to involve leaps. That is, a concept or form of consciousness undermines its initial meaning, forcing it to incorporate in that meaning what was previously taken to be definitive of what it did not mean. This “flipping” of the concept or form of consciousness is still, however, continuous, given the constraints of immanent development, the necessary connection of predecessor to successor that insures the gapless continuity of Hegelian dialectics.
- 3.
I take these terms to be synonymous.
- 4.
“Humor” in this sense (i.e., a subcategory of the comic, not a biological category) is a loan word from English. In the earliest German occurrence known to me, Lessing uses the term to describe the comic effect of Swift’s and Sterne’s novels. I am unsure whether Danish takes up the term from German or has independent connection to its English origin.
- 5.
For Hegel’s taxonomy of humor, see Werke, 14:229–31. Hegel does not mention irony in this section of his aesthetics lectures and, so, does not identify it with subjective humor. Nevertheless, given what Hegel says about Romantic irony in several of his other works, the identification is there for the taking.
- 6.
I present an extended account in Irony and Idealism, chap. 3.
- 7.
The evolution of the figure of the eirōn from the archaic to the classical, the Hellenistic, and then the Roman contexts is a complex subject. As a general matter, Kierkegaard’s presentation is correct enough.
- 8.
For example: one must “rise above and destroy in [one’s] thoughts what one adores” (“Über Goethes Meister,” in Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, 2:131). Schlegel’s views on the dialectical structure of irony are strewn throughout his various “fragments,” which are themselves ironic exercises. Perhaps the best place to begin considering his views is “Über die Unverständlichkeit” (see especially ibid., 2:363–72).
- 9.
Kierkegaard uses this term in connection with irony as early as On the Concept of Irony , before he had developed the conception of spheres of existence. See CI 121; SKS 1:173.
- 10.
The idea that a boundary is not a proper part of the region it demarcates is at least as old as Aristotle. See Metaphysics, 1022a (τὸ ἔσχατον).
- 11.
Alternatively, irony is an “existence-qualification” (Existents-Bestemmelse) (CUP 1:503; SKS 7:457). Neither the figure of the ironist nor irony as a confinium between the aesthetic and the ethical is explicitly present in Either–Or. Given the consideration of controlled irony and the use of the concept of a confinium in the dissertation and in connection with the doctrines of the spheres of existence in Postscript, I believe it permissible to use the idea of a confinium in interpreting Either–Or.
- 12.
The relation, like Hegel’s concept of dialectical relation, is not strictly reciprocal, although it is bidirectional. That is both because (1) the quality of the relation changes depending on its prospective or retrospective direction and (2) the complete description of the nature of the relation that takes both of its directions into account is not the same as the description of the two relations: the whole of the relation is greater than the sum of its directions.
- 13.
Cf. Bernard Williams’ idea of a “real option” (“The Truth in Relativism,” in Moral Luck, 132–43) and what William James called a “live option” (“The Will to Believe,” in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, 2).
- 14.
It is helpful in keeping this aspect of the idea of paradox in mind to recall that παράδοξος is not limited in meaning to logical puzzles or other forms of cognitive impossibility, but also includes the miraculous, that is, that which appears contrary to reason on account of transcending it.
- 15.
This formulation leaves open whether Kierkegaard considers Kant’s, Fichte’s, or Hegel’s brands of ethical universality to typify the ethical sphere.
- 16.
Or, his pseudonymous works. See PV 41–55, 58–62; SKS 16:23–36, 39–44. Cf. PV 41 n; SKS 16:15 n, where Kierkegaard organizes his “authorship” into aesthetic, religious, and a third, unnamed category with one member, the Postscript. It is pseudonymous, but “S. Kierkegaard” is interposed as an “editor.”
- 17.
I was taught that one may divide the history of nineteenth-century European philosophy into two camps: (1) thinkers concerned to develop models of conceptuality and conceptual demonstration geared to overcome perceived deficits in earlier models of the same (e.g., Fichte, Hegel, Marx) and (2) thinkers concerned to overturn what they regard as over-dependency on conceptual demonstration by turning to myth (e.g., Schelling, Nietzsche). “Myth,” in this sense, deviates from the common understanding of the term as referring to cosmogonic-heroic stories, leaning closer to the Greek source-term μῦθος (“what is said”). In his later period, Schelling holds the “presentation” (Darstellung ) of exemplars to be mythic in virtue of their instantiation of the universal in the particular. Such presentations are non-conceptual in that experiencing the universal (i.e., the exemplar) does not involve application of rules. In his estimation, art provides this kind of knowledge. But philosophy can be structured mythically as well, that is, around extended concrete examples that display a matter rather than run through it argumentatively. On the one hand, Kierkegaard endeavors to subvert Hegelian dialectic by ringing changes on it. So, one might think he is of the first party. But these inversions often are housed in elaborate appropriations of biblical and literary narratives that do not involve “argumentation” in its standard sense. Instead he takes exemplary tales, slyly alters them so that they are uncanny. He calculates that he can turn the reader inside-out by doing likewise with the texts. This experience of the out-of-sync yet exemplary is disorienting, breaks down convention, thereby opening up the possibility for recasting one’s thought. Defamiliarization is of course a stock in trade of Romantic irony.
- 18.
See also R 204; SKS 4:72, where Constantius forwards Job as inhabiting a confinium , by implication one that must be humor.
- 19.
See FT 58–9; SKS 4:152–3. Kierkegaard operates with the version of the story from Euripides, in which Artemis whisks Iphigeneia away at the last second and substitutes a deer in her place. Aischylus’ Agamemnon assumes a completed sacrifice. Perhaps Kierkegaard opts for the Euripides on account of the better narrative parallel with the Abraham and Isaac story. Or perhaps the choice is controlled by the fact that the sacrifice is not part of the dramatic action in Aischylus: the filicide is posited as one of the grounds for Clytemnestra’s revenge-killing of her husband, the real concern of the work. In truth, the softening of the myth matters little, as Kierkegaard’s point is that Agamemnon is fully committed to the carrying out of the sacrifice.
- 20.
One of the senses in which Anti-Climacus is anti-Climacus is that he is explicitly Christian (and not a humorist). Kierkegaard is not entirely consistent on this point, see note 21 and accompanying text.
- 21.
Climacus at times speaks of humor as a confinium between the ethical and the dawning of the religious, Religiousness A (CUP 1:291–2; SKS 7:265–7); at other times, he states that it is “Christian,” implying a connection to Religiousness B (CUP 1:272f.; SKS 7:248f.). I do not consider this to be problematic. Religiousness A overlaps considerably with the ethical sphere. In what follows, I understand humor to be the confinium between the shared structure and Religiousness B.
- 22.
Like irony, humor can present what is beyond it merely negatively, by imagining a world in which transcendence of suffering is impossible through gentle examples of thwarted escape. While the humorist cannot release herself from the idea that the expiation of suffering is possible through the ethical good, she can actively enter into a frame of reference that, while inchoate, still allows her to see the fact that she is doing this, thereby at least sparing herself the full force of the delusion. That the means for this humor is “aesthetic” in the broad sense—that is, art—is an irony not lost on Kierkegaard. This is another indication that, far from being a defunct and discarded mode of existence, elements of the aesthetic continue to play a basic role in the ethical and the passage to the religious.
- 23.
Thanks to Michael Forster, Kristin Gjesdal, Dalia Nassar, and Dieter Sturma for very helpful comments on a prior version of this chapter.
Works Cited
Hegel, G.W.F. Werke. Edited by E. Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1970.
James, William. “The Will to Believe.” In The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York: Dover, 1960.
Rush, Fred. Irony and Idealism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Schlegel, Friedrich. Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe. Edited by E. Behler et al. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1958ff.
Williams, Bernard. “The Truth in Relativism.” In Moral Luck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. 132–43.
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Rush, F. (2020). Romantic Self-Transformation in Kierkegaard. In: Forster, M., Steiner, L. (eds) Romanticism, Philosophy, and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40874-9_11
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