On Søren Kierkegaard: dialogue, polemics, lost intimacy, and time

Ars Disputandi ISSN: 1566-5399 (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjpt17 On Søren Kierkegaard: Dialogue, Polemics, Lost Intimacy, and Time Claudia Welz To cite this article: Claudia Welz (2008) On Søren Kierkegaard: Dialogue, Polemics, Lost Intimacy, and Time, Ars Disputandi, 8:1, 159-164, DOI: 10.1080/15665399.2008.10819991 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/15665399.2008.10819991 © 2008 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis. Published online: 06 May 2014. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 127 View related articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rjpt20 Ars Disputandi Volume 8 (2008) : 1566–5399 Claudia Welz    ,  On Søren Kierkegaard: Dialogue, Polemics, Lost Intimacy, and Time By Edward F. Mooney Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007; 276 pp.; hb. £ 55.00, pb. £ 18.99; : 978–0–7546–5820–7/978–0–7546–5822–1. As the readers get to know in the Preface, the chapters assembled in this book are a record of wrestling with Kierkegaard’s central themes: passion, irony, subjectivity, ethics, prayer, repetition, Augenblick (Øieblikket), poetry, self-articulation, words, responsibility, the restless heart, requited and unrequited time, love. Mooney’s investigation reviews a panorama of themes and a plurality of approaches to Kierkegaard’s vast work. As he rightly remarks, there are many Kierkegaards (or many of his inventions) one might meet here, where theology and philosophy, literature and ethics can mingle in mutual attractions and interanimations. The book is divided into three Parts, containing thirteen Chapters altogether. Part One (Chapters 1–4) is entitled ‘Kierkegaard: A Socrates in Christendom.’ It focuses on the central role that Socrates and his thought have played for Kierkegaard’s own way of thinking. In Part Two (Chapters 5–9) on ‘Love, Ethics, and Tremors in Time’ Mooney unfolds his hermeneutics of charity by analyzing two recent Kierkegaard biographies and the early pseudonymous writings from 1843–44. Part Three (Chapters 10–13) is dedicated to ‘Plenitude, Prayer, and an Ethical Sublime’—with special consideration of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript and Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses. The initial chapters circle around Socrates, who is presented as Kierkegaard’s exemplar first to last, a figure who embodies and testifies to a way of becoming at once poetic, ethical, and religious. The vista of Mooney’s attention in Part One is the ‘broad setting or ambiance of Kierkegaard’s conspectus’ (8). Chapter 1 introduces Kierkegaard as a new Socratic midwife, mentoring us in the interest of setting free. His literary experiments and sketches of contrasting ways of life provoke and puzzle us. ‘As we allow Kierkegaard to engage us existentially, scholarly Kierkegaard-interpretation becomes interlaced with the intimacies of self-examination.’ (6) He is guiding us through the trajectories of our own becoming, through the pain and joy and danger of transformation, in search for the self or soul, the vital core and confluence of the virtues, moods and passions that give life. We are underway, a labyrinth in flux, as Mooney puts it poetically: ‘Like an ever-changing riverbed, the self’s terrain is constantly under reconstruction’ (9). ‘Knowing’ myself seems as impossible as catching myself in motion, as stepping c August 6, 2008, Ars Disputandi. If you would like to cite this article, please do so as follows: Claudia Welz, ‘Review of On Søren Kierkegaard: Dialogue, Polemics, Lost Intimacy, and Time,’ Ars Disputandi [http: //www.ArsDisputandi.org] 8 (2008), 156–161. Claudia Welz: Review of On Søren Kierkegaard: Dialogue, Polemics, Lost Intimacy, and Time in the same river twice. Kierkegaard appears similar also to Heraclitus, the poet of flux and strife and instability (cf. 11). In this context Mooney notes that, while the term ‘appropriation’ in English still carries overtones of theft or seizure, for Kierkegaard, being appropriated by the truth is the other side of taking up with it in an invested way (cf. 10f, n. 12). Yet, final ignorance is inescapable. Like Plato, Kierkegaard reanimates the gadfly of Athens and steps aside to let another respond, which makes his writing deeply dialogical (cf. 12). Because we resist to the truth of ignorance, experiencing the breakdown of rational interrogation might be the only way to learn its limits. Even as the method fails, a surprising good arrives: contact with an exemplary person who passes virtue on: visceral knowledge of love (cf. 14f, 18). Chapter 2 in a first step describes the Socratic allure or seduction: Socratic life speaking eloquently, convincing by the demonstrative living out of one’s convictions (cf. 25). In a second step it interprets Kierkegaard’s startling statement that his vocation has been ‘the Socratic task of revising the definition of what it means to be a Christian’—while not calling himself a Christian, since the bar for being Christian must in his view always be higher than anyone’s actual accomplishment (26f, cf. 34). Mooney’s Kierkegaard affirms a collaborative identity, with Christ and Socrates in the crucial roles, each of utmost importance, without them being rank-ordered (cf. 28–32). Chapter 3 explores Kierkegaard’s double vocation, admixtures of the Socratic and the Christian, the uncertain and the affirmed, the critical and the compassionate. Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms pose questions: what is an author, and who is responsible for these sentences? In Mooney’s opinion, Kierkegaard has not divorced Athens from Jerusalem (cf. 39f–44), and the ‘hard-edge contrast between Socratic Eros and Christian agape, so often insisted upon by Kierkegaard, can be softened too’ (45). Further, he claims that Kierkegaard is interested in how the Christian-pagan, pagan-Christian differences get lived out, but denies any fractious incompatibility (cf. 48). As he sees it, Socratic and Christian commitments do not represent contesting paths, since their qualitatively different magnitudes make a comparative judgment impossible (cf. 49f). So Socrates becomes Christian – despite doctrinal reserve, pursuing goods beyond knowledge, riches, power, or pleasure – honoring divinity (cf. 54–58). Chapter 4 focuses on the classical question: what kind of life is best? With it, ‘lost intimacy’ becomes an issue: the disenchantment, estrangement and depersonalization of modernity, the lamented loss of inwardness, of contact with oneself and access to another (cf. 61f). While Cartesian subjectivity defines a non-public epistemological space, Kierkegaard’s receptive subjectivity defines a broadly moral space, an openness to be affected by, or subject and responsive to, demands and invitations of all sorts (cf. 63f). To lose subjectivity is to lose the sense that things matter, that something summons the heart. ‘As Climacus would say, where things matter most, we operate with objective uncertainty.’ (80) Kierkegaard’s wish for knowledge that will come alive in us is linked to the polemics with the detached and dispassionate knowledge of his age, with abstract academic training and fashionable Hegelianism. True knowing does not exclude the factual and theoretical Ars Disputandi [http://www.ArsDisputandi.org] 8 (2008) | 157 Claudia Welz: Review of On Søren Kierkegaard: Dialogue, Polemics, Lost Intimacy, and Time but gives them the dimension of intimacy, of knowing by contact: To know poetry I must be touched by words, to know a child I must be touched by her smile or his cry, to know rivers, I must enter their flow. The initiation in such knowledge is non-coercive. One cannot, by didactic proof or preaching, force another into wonder or love or accord (cf. 81–86). In Part Two Mooney applies these insights to his reading of Kierkegaard’s writings. Like Kierkegaard in Works of Love, he in Chapter 5 takes love as ‘lenient interpreter’ and makes his case for the primacy of trust and affirmation (cf. 89f). This is illustrated by his sharp analysis of Garff’s SAK in contrast to Hannay’s 2001 Kierkegaard biography. Criticizing Garff’s hermeneutics of suspicion, Mooney works through ‘the dubious assumptions’ implicit in the search for ‘cracks in the granite of genius’—for why should we assume that genius is always flawed but pretends hardness, and why should we expose fragility or fault and thereby lock us in a primal predatory-prey scenario (cf. 91f)? Mooney maintains that any viable interpretation will bottom somewhere. His answer to scepticism is not theoretical refutation but a practical acknowledgment of our ties (cf. 97). Further, he points out that the very task of self-revelation requires a phase of trying out a role, trying on a persona, experimenting with what we could call a mask, much of which occurs behind our back, since the self is not a pre-existing fixed glassy essence hidden by the mask (cf. 99f). On the contrary, we know more by seeing the mask. Mistrust, however, hides what is profound about pseudonyms or masks: ‘that they don’t just hide, but can reveal’ the complexity of self (101). Mooney concludes that even documented shames or scandals are worth retelling only if their revelation serves a charitable end; otherwise, they seem to just feed a voyeuristic impulse (cf. 105). Chapter 6 turns to The Concept of Anxiety and the motif of Øieblikket, of history starting in the glance of an eye. Especially love that we know through lack illuminates our deepest need as persons: unmixed recognition, bestowed through another’s gaze. The shock of death or of love lost will generate the need for new beginnings, the need to reconfigure and to be transfigured. This idea leads to another motif Mooney unfolds later, namely ‘repetition.’ Chapter 7 examines Either/Or and the ‘perils in polarity’ (117) prompted by Kierkegaard’s deployment of positions and counter-positions. Mooney attempts to cross the aesthetic-ethical divide, mainly in discussion with MacIntyre, who in After Virtue draws the lesson that resolution on reason is impossible, assuming that reasoning requires a disinterested appeal to universal principles (cf. 119–124). Emphasizing the reader’s will and reason, Mooney asserts that ‘Kierkegaard won’t hand a decision to us on a platter – which would be to take the decision from us’ (126). Instead, Kierkegaard aims to bring us to our better selves (cf. 129), be it by making and achieving or by infusion and inspiration in moments that presuppose cessation of active will, making subjects receptive patients. Since Kierkegaard values release from striving, which is the condition of letting an alternative passion take hold, ‘he will be disqualified from membership in any version of virtue ethics that puts exclusive stress on the pursuit of virtue’ and endless striving (131). Mooney identifies indirection and disguise as tactics pertinent to the contrast Ars Disputandi [http://www.ArsDisputandi.org] 8 (2008) | 158 Claudia Welz: Review of On Søren Kierkegaard: Dialogue, Polemics, Lost Intimacy, and Time between truth we grasp and truth that grasps us, disarming our will. Other than the planned pursuit of virtue, passions overtake us; we undergo them, and go with them. We cannot maneuver love, trust or hope to have it live in us (cf. 132f). Chapter 8 concentrates on Fear and Trembling and its veils of irony, calling into question any gestures toward conviction that might secure a single point of view; hence the experience of dizziness and disorientation in reading. The serious point of the book is the difficulty of distinguishing faith from its simulacra, ‘theatrics of spectacle and hero worship’ (140). Mooney suggests ‘placing Moriah in Tivoli,’ casting the pseudonymous author Johannes de silentio as ‘a part-time carnival barker’ (143)—in order to learn that the immediately attractive path is illusory. While Johannes’ complaint is serious, the tone is light and the critique entertaining. The mood-setting sections introduce a sequence of Abrahams who fail as fathers of faith (cf. 145). Faith demands not the protected excitement of spectating, but the risks of decision and doing. Johannes’ first misstep is conceiving of Abraham as a hero one admires but need not follow. Further, instead of a biblical tale, we start with a fairy tale of a man remembering one (cf. 149–151). Yet, an exemplar of faith cannot be captured like an archeological find (cf. 154). Perhaps, for Johannes de silentio, irony is faith’s incognito (cf. 156). In Chapter 9 the theme of sudden loss and wondrous restoration recurs— with regard to Repetition, which was published on the same day as Fear and Trembling. Mooney terms ‘repetition’ as requited time, the gift of world-renewal, the return of the beloved (cf. 157–160). Repetition, Hegelian mediation, and Greek recollection are alternative solutions to the problem of transition. For Plato, a good becomes accessible in a backward glance to timeless eternity, whereas Kierkegaard offers a forward, future-oriented move toward God or a good of open possibilities. God appears to Job in a whirlwind to breath life in things that had died. Repetition is a waiting for reception, for meaning (cf. 161f). Abraham does not labor to retrieve his son; he can only be ready to receive him (cf. 163). As Mooney remarks, sometimes ‘value lost is reacquired precisely when we stop trying to gain it,’ and we cannot control the outcome of this adventure (164). He contrasts repetition as a task with repetition as a gift: ‘[. . . ] sometimes we’re performers and sometimes auditors in the music of creation and self-development’ (167). Repetition is more than an ethical achievement or a self-initiated project; rather, it is an other-initiated grant, received at the border of the wondrous—at the threshold of the sublime (cf. 171f). The sublime is the theme of the third and shortest part of Mooney’s book. Chapter 10 explores ‘other ethics’ that is not an ethics of fixed norms or virtues but an ethics of becoming that has us under revision (cf. 177). It is an ‘ethics of the self responsively striving to become its ever-elusive self’—in a passionate motion toward what it can be (188). Mooney takes Postscript-subjectivity as a moral ideal, mapping out the drama of realizing personality (cf. 178f). He unravels six strands of subjectivity that is to (1) live out relational patterns of personal concern, (2) aspire to inhabit the ethico-religious stage of existence, (3) exercise practical moral agency that makes responsibility paramount, (4) show a style, (5) take up something as its own project or commitment, and (6) embrace trust or faith and Ars Disputandi [http://www.ArsDisputandi.org] 8 (2008) | 159 Claudia Welz: Review of On Søren Kierkegaard: Dialogue, Polemics, Lost Intimacy, and Time imagination (cf. 182). Mooney draws on Abraham’s story to exemplify an anxious and an ethical sublime: ‘[. . . ] the binding of Isaac is the unbinding of Abraham from any pretense to have mastered whatever value undergirds his life’ (198). Chapter 11 explains how we learn from vibrant examples. By enacting an intimate communication their artistry has transformative impact. Mooney clarifies that the transfer of an affect, capacity, virtue or existential orientation is nothing like the transfer of information or propositional content—animadverting that it only muddies the waters to label this sort of communication an instance of indirect communication, since non-propositional content can get directly communicated, though not as a sentence (cf. 202). Resisting paraphrase, it ‘shows up in a change in my way of being’ (203). Subjectivity is awakened, engaged and enabled non-discursively, in a bloom of increased life (cf. 204–208). However, Mooney’s conclusion is not compulsive: that direct communication is ‘affectless (virtueless)’ and as such in polar contrast to indirect communication (208). Pace Mooney, the transfer of belief is not necessarily opposed to the transfer of commitment. It is easier to admit that subjectivity is ‘an opening within which substance or content can be appropriated and expressed, and not itself a transferable substance or content’ (210) and that carrying on an exemplar’s light means therefore to move without a manual of directions or set of patterns to repeat (cf. 212). An exemplary life speaks through more than uttered words (cf. 214). Chapter 12 considers Climacus’ gesture of revocation at the end of the Postscript. Mooney understands the revocation as a provocation, reminding us that it is time to leave securities, intellectual presumptions and thought experiments behind (cf. 218). Once we have climbed, we can kick the Climacean ladder aside (cf. 220). The revocation is a benevolent abdication (cf. 222–226). It does not take back central claims, but any doctrinal weight or self-important gravitas that might become attached to them. As an existential enactment of Kantian cognitive humility, it refuses a Faustian drive for total mastery. It reminds us not to shy from decision. The final chapter is devoted to the early Upbuilding Discourses—writings to be read as sermons. Mooney feels that their intent and spirit are violated if they are treated only academically. Although we are doubtlessly ‘full-time human beings even as we’re professional academics,’ it seems not compelling that the ‘academic heart and mind is put at odds with the religious mind and heart’ (228). After all, academics too have only one heart, which needs not in any case be double-minded. But be that as it may, it is correct that Kierkegaard’s discourses instill silence and invite us ‘to a place of liturgy, worship, and prayer’ (231). The practice of prayer is, of course, not to be reduced to reflection about it. ‘Discourse about worship is to worship as ornithology is to birds.’ (241) Mooney describes faith as felt conviction that is non-loquacious. Giving up our turn to speak creates the space where another can speak to and through us (cf. 239–242). Here we encounter a strength that is weakness, a hope that is madness, and a pain buoyed by delight. . . As announced on the cover, Mooney traces a path through Kierkegaard’s writings and gives a close reading of several important texts. His book is much Ars Disputandi [http://www.ArsDisputandi.org] 8 (2008) | 160 Claudia Welz: Review of On Søren Kierkegaard: Dialogue, Polemics, Lost Intimacy, and Time more than an introduction into the work of Kierkegaard. Even those familiar with his work and secondary literature can find a lot of thought-awakening judgments, a bunch of fresh formulations, and beautiful interpretations. The strength of this well-written, easily readable book is that it does not engage in Kierkegaardian navel-gazing, but opens up the Danish thinker’s universe, showing its significance in both historic and contemporary contexts. Mooney brings Kierkegaard together with Thoreau, Cavell and Dickinson, Hamlet and Heidegger, associates Tivoli and Las Vegas and links the quest for personal identity and a meaningful life in past and present times. As stimulating as that is, it also entails the risk of losing the thread. The subtitle of the book and the wordy headings of its sections indicate that it is not so much a monograph as a collection of short studies on a number of recurrent topics that are dealt with more or less in depth. Apart from few minor errors,1 sometimes the breadth of the topics covered seems to be at the expense of thorough explanations and a systematic line of argument. Nonetheless, Mooney’s book is recommendable—not least because it provides us with interesting insights in Kierkegaard’s ways of writing as well as in aesthetics of reception, revealing how Kierkegaard’s works affect and interact with their readers. 1. It does not correspond to the story told in Repetition that the young man ‘suffers unrequited love’ (164)—it is him who abandons his beloved in order to follow another vocation. Typing or spelling errors can be found at the following places: p. 5 n. 4 (Vigilius Haufniensis), p. 120 n. 8 (Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Hermann Deuser), p. 167 n. 44 (Aristotle’s kinesis), p. 173 n. 72 and p. 246 (Gilles Deleuze), p. 252 (Kierkegaardiana). Further, it seems superfluous that the complete bibliographical references appear not only in the bibliography at the end of the book, but also up to five times in the footnotes, e.g. the reference to Furtak’s Wisdom in Love (pp. 7, 44, 85, 115, 191; only on p. 198 a short title is used). Ars Disputandi [http://www.ArsDisputandi.org] 8 (2008) | 161