Abstract
Kierkegaard’s avowed role as a Socratic gadfly to Danish Christendom can be viewed as an instantiation of Hegel’s idea of the romantic humorist. Comparing Kierkegaard’s manner of “awakening the Christians of Christendom to Christianity” with pertinent sections of Hegel’s Aesthetics, Lectures on Fine Art makes this apparent. It shows that Kierkegaard’s running critique of leading Danish Hegelians was not only of the speculative nature and conventional content of their positions, albeit ethical and religious, but also of their aesthetic form, namely, Hegelian classicism. In challenging the neat, refined and comprehensive form of their thought in a manner befitting Hegel’s romantic humorist, Kierkegaard maintained that such classicism no more led to authentic living than did romanticism’s morally-vacuous aesthetic individualism. Kierkegaard used Hegel’s romantic humor, then, as an anti-aesthetic aesthetics in order to call for a suspension of Hegelian classicism so that a truer form of existential art, namely, the ongoing creation of human being in “co-operation with God,” might emerge.
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Notes
- 1.
Entries cited from this translation of Kierkegaard’s journals and papers (Papirer) follow the convention of the Hongs (Kierkegaard 1967–78), which begins with an abbreviation of the title (JP), followed by the topic number to the referenced entry as assigned by the Hongs (e.g., 1688), and completed by the multiple-part notation found in the definitive Danish edition (e.g., II A 627 n.d., 1837). So, for example, the full citation referenced here is: JP, 1688 II A 627 n.d., 1837.
- 2.
For more on Hegel on romantic art and humor, see Rutter (2010) 217–226 and Lydia Moland’s essay in this volume.
- 3.
- 4.
Pattison addresses Kierkegaard’s acceptance of the distinction that Hegel makes between classical and romantic forms of art, particularly as Kierkegaard moved away from the Hegelian circle of Pattison (1992, 43–56). He also acknowledges Kierkegaard’s appropriation of Hegel’s idea that as Spirit, romantic art points beyond itself, and in doing so signifies the end of art—a transcendence of both Heiberg’s and the German romantics’ apotheosis of art (1999, 49–50, 174–86). In doing so, though, he does not identify Kierkegaard as a romantic humorist on the order of Hegel’s romantic writer. This is the point that this essay seeks to make.
- 5.
Cf., for example, Ricks’ remarks on Sterne’s optimism in Tristram—a point, I might add, in the midst of Tristram’s pointlessness—with CUP, 1:140.
- 6.
The Hongs translate the way that Evans handles the Danish for “in the final analysis ‘get equally far’” as “viewed eternally, go equally far.” The latter translation is what appears in CUP, 1:582, not what Evans provides in his strategic quoting of Kierkegaard.
- 7.
Climacus’ elaboration of the psychological dynamic around Religiousness B also anticipates what Anti-Climacus, Kierkegaard’s stringent, Christian, pseudonymous author, re-presents in his discussion of Christ and the believer in Practice in Christianity (PC, 40–68, 85–144, 192–9).
- 8.
The phrase “what time of night it is” closes a speech that Sojourner Truth gave in 1853 at Broadway Tabernacle in New York City as part of the Woman’s Rights Convention. By “night,” she meant the low and dark state of American society under slavery and gender oppression, particularly as revealed in the tenor of the opposition that she and others encountered in advocating for blacks’ and women’s rights. As her and her colleagues’ opponents seemed not to be fully aware of the moral darkness or hell that they were supporting, Truth took it as her task to awaken them. See Cady Stanton et al. 1887, 1:567–8. Truth’s expression is apropos to the discussion here because the lack of awareness that Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous poet of the religious Johannes de Silentio saw in the cultured leaders of Copenhagen parallels the lack of awareness that Truth encountered in her situation. Just as her challengers had no understanding of the moral darkness that they were representing and supporting, so cultured Copenhageners seemed to Kierkegaard’s de Silentio to have no understanding of the darkness or difficulties that the religious could create for them in their conventional lives or the darkness that was their conventional lives from a religious perspective. See the transcription of this speech, often entitled “What Time of Night It Is,” in Stanton et al. 1887, 1: 567–568.
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Robinson, M.C. (2018). ‘What Time Is It? . . . . Eternity’: Kierkegaard’s Socratic Use of Hegel’s Insights on Romantic Humor. In: Moland, L. (eds) All Too Human. Boston Studies in Philosophy, Religion and Public Life, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91331-5_8
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