Kierkegaardian Faith And Romantic Aesthetics

I propose to discuss Kierkegaard's stance towards artistic creativity and the nature of imagination in relation to the Hegelian and romantic currents with which his thinking interacted. I shall move on to discuss the centrality of imagination to an adequate understanding of Kierkegaardian faith, and will end by noting my perception of an important structural inconsistency in Kierkegaard's negative attitude to the arts from the perspective of faith, a perception which forms the focus of my current research.

An understanding of Kierkegaard's position in The Immediate Erotic Stages, a section on musical aesthetics in the first part of Either/Or, depends not only on an awareness of Kierkegaard's project of indirect communication, but also of the ambiguous relation in which the author stands as an indirect communicator to Hegelian philosophical aesthetics, as espoused by his anonymous pseudonym 'A', or 'the aesthete'. I have argued elsewhere that a form of romantic-ironic discourse is utilised in this passage - in a doubled irony against itself - to express Hegelian aesthetic tenets (focusing upon Mozart's opera, Don Giovanni), thus combating romantic ideas about the quasi-religious significance of 'absolute music'. But with a further twist, and in the context of Kierkegaard's anonymous authorship as a whole, I suggest that this literary counterpoint is ultimately invoked in the interests of Socratic, as opposed to romantic irony, as an indirect communication of the very un-Hegelian nature of revealed truth.

In his Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel's concern is with the intrinsic significance of an artwork's content. Hegel sets himself against Friedrich Schlegel's ironising romanticism, which regards aesthetic form as the sole criterion of an artwork's merit, conceived as pre-eminently an expression of creative subjectivity. Adapting Fichte's version of transcendental idealism, Schlegel held that - not only in art, but in life - no objective content can be of any lasting significance in its own right, as only the momentary expression of a self-creative ego. As far as their intrinsic value or content is concerned, human acts and achievements become merely ephemeral outpourings from an infinite ground of selfhood, in an un-end-able voyage of aesthetic self-invention and celebration. Kierkegaard agrees with Hegel in opposing the nihilistic ethical consequences of such a relativistic outlook. Thus, in the Immediate Erotic Stages, or the Musical Erotic, as I shall subsequently refer to it, Hegel is for once a partial ally, as Kierkegaard attacks a certain conception of romantic subjectivity through its own modes of speech.

I believe, however, that Kierkegaard's ultimate irony is Socratic, rather than romantic. Interpreted as one facet in the inter-play of aspects which constitutes Kierkegaard's 'aesthetic' work as a whole, I suggest that, in the Musical Erotic, Kierkegaard uses a romantic-ironic style to communicate a conception of religious truth as only apprehensible through subjective commitment. The ironic style of writing is thus deceptive. By attracting the 'aesthetic', educated reader with the appearance of a sophisticated and sparkling intellectual entertainment, free of the slow-paced trammels of seriousness and commitment, Kierkegaard is at the same time catching him unawares with an indirectly communicated and personal invitation to perceive the opposite for himself. Kierkegaard indirectly enables the possibility of a personal embrace of the Christian life to be imaginatively glimpsed through the interpretative effort his texts demand. A maieutic strategy of Socratic irony hopes to awaken in the reader an inner openness to revealed truth, through a tour de force display of lightly-worn and detached erudition in the fashionable mode of romantic irony. Kierkegaard utilises Hegel's insights and dialectical approach, but in the end this, too, is tongue in cheek. Hegel and Kierkegaard are irremediably opposed concerning the nature of the truth which each seeks to promote, as transcending the viewpoint of an ethically irresponsible, aesthetic subjectivity.

Kierkegaard also seeks to attack another romantic current: a theory of the sublime, regarding music as the most concrete manifestation of the ground of being. As an expressive medium with no determinate significance, romantic theorists held that musical form is its own indefinite and therefore infinite content, enshrining an inner kernel of divine intimation in the form of endless yearning. Healing wholeness cannot be possessed; rather a dynamic and ontologically constitutive, prior unity of subjective and objective reality manifests as a haunting, presence-in-absence through musical form. What is intimated wordlessly is an indeterminate yet overwhelming yearning, inseparable from the concrete temporal unfolding of organic musical structure. While Hegel and Kierkegaard both see verbal meaning as essential to the communication of divine truth, and thus oppose a romantic conception of music as a sublime intimation of absolute reality, they completely differ in their conception of the creative principle or arche of reality. The Hegelian logos is a metaphysically self-constructing logic, proceeding through self-negation to self-realisation (an epistemic 'realisation' masquerading as an ontological one, for Kierkegaard), while Kierkegaard's logos - Christ - is the infinite paradox of an eternally significant, and thus qualitatively unique, spatio-temporal and personal communication.

In the Musical Erotic the author writes about Mozart's music in a lyrically poetic and evocative style, thus, importantly, placing himself on the very boundary of the possibilities of verbal significance. Kierkegaard highlights the linguistic difficulty of presenting purely indeterminate musical content. Kierkegaard tries to trace the semantic contours of music, as that which lies beyond the frontiers of verbal discourse, from a position necessarily within the borders of referentially determined language. The shape of the musical territory is suggestively intimated through a profusion of unrelated and sometimes conflicting linguistic figures. So by stretching lyricism to the edge of incoherence, Kierkegaard also delineates the limits of verbal language.

Music emerges as the one, completely adequate medium for the expression of sensuous immediacy. Pre-conceptualised vitality is held to be music's own-most content, rather than the apophatic truth, transcending conceptuality, of romantic theory. Mozart's Don Giovanni is thus seen as the unsurpassable evocation of aesthetic, pre-ethical humanity.

In The Musical Erotic, sensuous immediacy is seen as the pre-rational ground of meaning on which linguistically determinate meaning depends, and as such, the basis in reality that forms a foundation for the emergence of human self-consciousness. This foundation in reality, a pre-condition of all thinking, is simply passed over by Hegel, who never emerges from a purely hypothetical, conceptual realm to engage with actual existence. Again, in Kierkegaard's later book, Johannes Climacus, reality is recognised by thought as its own substratum, as something that self-consciousness depends on, although thought can never reach such immediate reality 'in itself', but always translates reality into conceptual ideality through linguistic representation. Language necessarily mediates reality, and in translating it, turns it into what is other than itself, thereby introducing the possibility of doubt and error. In both accounts, self-consciousness is seen as a collision between ideality and reality. Reality is pre-supposed by, but unsayable as reality within consciousness. Reality, or sensuous immediacy is thus made known with the awakening of self-consciousness as that which self-consciousness posits as necessarily lying outside of thought as its own substratum.

For Kierkegaard, then, the meaning which music alone can adequately express is not above linguistic thought, but its sub-rational basis. Music expresses human meaning at the level of selfish desire. The paradigm of such representation is Mozart's Don Giovanni, a symbolic embodiment of sensuous immediacy, and thus 'the flesh' incarnate. 'The flesh', as a concept denoting consciousness of sin, only exists for us as a recognised category in light of revelation, and Kierkegaard, utilising Hegelian conceptuality, expresses this by saying that sensuous immediacy is posited by Spirit as that which it excludes: as that which lies outside Spirit. According to St. Paul in Romans (ch.7, v.7), consciousness of sin has only been available to reflective awareness since the revelation of the Law. In light of the Law, wilful selfishness can finally be aware of itself for what it is. This is why ethical self-consciousness can recognise a trace of its own basis in the un-assuage-able involutions of self-will through a musical temporality conceived as essentially un-end-able repetition.

For Kierkegaard's anonym in the Musical Erotic, (and here, I suggest, there is a reflection of Kierkegaard's own theological position regarding the arts), music mediates an un-redeemed sensuous immediacy, while language, the vessel of revealed Spirit, can only grope at the limits of incoherence to express this, its own, sensuous, condition of possibility. But is not the point of divine Incarnation the redemption and transformation of natural energies? In suggesting that music manifests a sensuality that is only posited by Spirit as that which it eternally excludes, Kierkegaard seems content to leave sensuous immediacy outside of redemption, still in an external relation to revealed Law. Could it be that Kierkegaard does not actually allow the paradox of the redemption of the flesh through divine incarnation to take place?

Steven Shakespeare helpfully suggests that Kierkegaard's pseudonymous works mutually correct one another. As an inter-play of many partial aspects, each individual voice needs to be assessed in the context of the whole. We have seen Kierkegaard's anonym recognise that the musical embodiment of sensuality is already, as an expression, an interpretation, and thus already a 'spiritual qualification' of immediate reality. On this basis, and in the context of Kierkegaard's wider pseudonymous work, Shakespeare holds that just as music, in order to communicate pre-rational life, must idealise sensuous immediacy, so the communication of faith as an existential orientation towards truth must exploit the poetical possibilities inherent in language for a 'musically indirect' style of communication. Such conceptually indeterminate meaningfulness is possible because ideality is always already dependently rooted in reality, (against Hegel). Just as music reaches a basic level of existential communication by disclosing the inner, pre-objective reality of 'felt immediacy' un-objectively and wordlessly, so verbal language, to communicate an irreducibly paradoxical divine reality, (as opposed to a mere thought of God), must make use of its capacity for poetic communication: its capacity for 'musical indirection'. Paradoxically dynamic divine reality can only be indirectly communicated, therefore, as itself neither purely subjective, nor statically and manipulably objective. Hence we can see why human imaginative resources must be turned inward and transformed to enter the sphere of revealed faith. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard remains content to deny any religious significance to purely artistic, externalised creativity.

In the remainder of this presentation, I would like to look at some further implications of Kierkegaard's belief in the importance of imaginative activity for the communication of Christian truth.

M. J. Ferreira offers a 're-conceptualisation of the transition to faith', as presented in Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscri pt under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus. Ferreira suggests that the terms 'leap' and 'passion', which are used to describe this transition from the human perspective, are intrinsically related. They 'mutually and substantively' correct and qualify one another. The customary model of the 'leap of faith', in which the will is held to decide arbitrarily against the understanding, is deemed inadequate to the complexity of Climacus's presentation, in which, it is claimed, imagination plays a vital role as a mediator of opposites (such as subject and object, infinity and finitude, activity and passivity), in an unrelenting tension. Simply for the sake of clarity, in this presentation I shall henceforth refer to the pseudonymous author as Kierkegaard.

Faith in Christ is a paradox uniting contradictories, as opposed to co-implicating polar contraries. Idealist conceptual mediation of the paradox is thus ruled out, since faith is not knowledge, but precisely 'an offence' to the understanding. Whilst, therefore, there can be no simply objective mode of relating to the impossible object of faith, neither can faith be purely arbitrary, as if depending entirely on subjective decision. Ferreira points out that there must be an element of constraint or passivity in the faith-relation, since, far from being an exercise in purely subjective construction, Christian faith is an encounter with an actual otherness in the unique form of an impossible objectivity. This passive element in the faith relation is described as an infinite 'passion' by Kierkegaard. But the term passion is itself used ambiguously, since, on the one hand, it denotes affectedness by an infinite otherness, while on the other, and in the reality of conversion, this passive affectedness is inextricable from the passionate nature of the active, leaping activity of reaching out, or opening up dis-possessively towards one's own salvation. Passion is thus central to faith as a unity of active and passive elements, and therefore the 'aesthetic' sphere of human being is central to the living appropriation of faith. But what enables this tension of activity and passivity? According to Ferreira, the imagination.

Kierkegaard's use in the Postscri pt of the term 'passion' as a corrective to 'leap' is explained as a holding together of opposites in imaginative activity or hermeneutical effort. And it is in this sense of a sustained tension of imaginatively interpretative mediation, rather than as signifying an unmediated, spontaneous decision, that Kierkegaard's uses the term 'will'. Kierkegaard describes the effort of ethical passion, a tension of activity and passivity, as the driving of a pair of horses as quickly as possible, one of which is a Pegasus, while the other is a worn out nag. The art of balancing Pegasus and the nag, steering a course with opposite tendencies, represents the relation of finitude and infinity, of eternity to time, that is inherent in the passion of paradoxical faith.

As not a matter of simply choosing, the leap of faith is not a quantitatively discreet act. Rather it is a qualitative transition, the decision of faith being an abrupt and passively experienced 'gestalt' shift; a 'cision' in consciousness that manifests the dawning of a changed world-orientation, or transformed subjective perspective. The will can want to see reality in the light of faith, to respond to the infinite personal address, but it is not directly capable of the transition. From the purely human side of conversion, the new mode of 'seeing' will be something passive, something that just does or does not happen to one. Ferreira explains: In a situation in which a gestalt shift can occur, initially we can see only one possibility (for example [Wittgenstein's] 'duck' figure; at some point, after concentrated attention, and perhaps coaxing and guidance [ - the kind of indirect assistance that Kierkegaard offers through his indirect authorship - ] another alternative (a rabbit figure) comes into focus for us.

I have not time to indicate in any detail the other, metaphorical, aspect of imaginative interpretation that renders conversion more than the possibility of seeing the same phenomenon as a different content, which after it has been learned, can be reversed arbitrarily. But through metaphorical transformation, a decisive threshold is crossed due to a re-conceptualisation of reality. This is what gives permanence to metaphor, as one concept is grasped in terms of another through imaginative activity, an activity of holding the two meanings together in a creative tension. The opposition of God and man is an infinite one, and thus calls for infinite imaginative passion as an interpretative response to a revelation that one cannot straightforwardly decide to take up for oneself. On the contrary, a new, infinite mode of relating actually happens to one, while this transformation of vision is also a change which one must actively appropriate through imaginative activity over a lifetime, (unlike the decisive finality of an act of will), as one strives to respond to revelation.

I will make just one final point. In my continuing research I am looking for an answer to a problem, a perceived inconsistency in Kierkegaard's stance towards the religious significance of the artistic imagination. Imagination works inwardly in the appropriation of faith, while art is concerned with external representation, and thus for Kierkegaard belongs to the lowest existential 'sphere', remaining outside faith.

In the Musical Erotic, we have seen that Kierkegaard opposes the claims advanced by theorists (from Wackenroder and Schopenhauer to Wagner and the early Nietzsche) for a romantic conception of music as revelatory of the ground of reality itself. Kierkegaard writes: 'I have never had any sympathy...for that purified music which thinks it can do without words'. What 'believes itself the highest', is merely the lowest reflection of sensuous immediacy. Yet Kierkegaard's entire project of Socratic irony is aimed at an 'aesthetically oriented' reader - one who lives outside himself, in arbitrary objectifications of his own being. Kierkegaard's maieutic strategy attempts, indirectly, to enable such a subject to truly see himself for the first time, and thereby, to open up to divine truth as a personal possibility. This project depends crucially on Kierkegaard's own 'musically indirect', and often poetically charged aesthetic creativity, which is set to work throughout Kierkegaard's authorship in response to what he himself perceived as a divine vocation. This vocation could only be fulfilled, however, by invoking to the full his considerable powers of artistic insight and creativity. I propose that Kierkegaard's withholding of a possible religious significance to creative art and its appreciation is belied by the very nature of his own artistically and theologically powerful work. The theological project of an indirect communicati