The Being Of Beings Or The Music Of Paradox? Kierkegaard`s Aesthetic Of Inwardness

THE BEING OF BEINGS OR THE MUSIC OF PARADOX? KIERKEGAARD'S AESTHETIC OF INWARDNESS

In this paper I am going to examine Kierkegaard's relation to a post-Enlightenment re-envisioning of transcendence in terms of 'Natural Supernaturalism' (as Thomas Carlyle described it), or transcendence-in-immanence, that can be discerned as a basic, conceptual pattern which is common to both romantic and idealist authors of the first half of the nineteenth century. Loosely speaking, this amounts to a panentheistic scheme mediated by concepts of dialectical identity or ontological polarity and process. I suggest the theological inadequacy of such thinking, from the perspective of Kierkegaard's critique of aesthetic and philosophical religious substitutes. Moreover, in light of Kierkegaard's critique of 'Christendom', I suggest that genuine transcendence, as Kierkegaard understands it, challenges prevailing ecclesiastical, as well as artistic and philosophical assumptions concerning the distinction between sacredness and secularity. Kierkegaard discloses an essential similarity among diverse nineteenth century understandings of both the sacred and the secular, which share in being manifestations of merely 'aesthetic', or ethically and religiously inauthentic human experience, according to the Kierkegaardian scheme of existential 'spheres'. Common and superficially divergent post-Enlightenment notions of the sacred, ecclesiastical and otherwise, are really nothing more than secularisations of traditional religious concepts. Such concepts are related to in an external, or objective manner, in an aesthetic attempt to re-enchant lives whose truly effective springs of action are hedonistic and utilitarian or calculative. Genuine transcendence, Kierkegaard holds, is beyond both the secular and the sacred as these are immanently understood from a post-Enlightenment perspective. Kierkegaard locates transcendence on the far side of secularity and sacredness, insofar as both are immanently intelligible classifications. I shall examine Kierkegaard's position in relation both to secular translations of Christianity, and objective mis-relations to the Gospel, characterised by Kierkegaard as 'Christendom' and 'revivalism'. The realms of the 'secular' and the 'sacred', as commonly understood, are neither of them aware of transcendence, since neither relate to the truth as a paradox to be subjectively appropriated, and not to be understood - that is objectively comprehended - or directly and fideistically asserted as rhetoric. In order to uncover Kierkegaard's own conception of transcendence, I will be engaging in some depth, later on, with romantic patterns thought, Hegel's critique of them, and Kierkegaard's critique of both Hegelianism and romanticism. First, however, I will give an introductory overview of the main positions involved, and their flawed inter-relations as discerned by Kierkegaard.

Romanticism could be viewed as a post-Enlightenment 're-enchantment' of the world of mechanistic scientism. In his book, Natural Supernaturalism, M. H. Abrams examines this romantic development in detail, maintaining that such a re-enchantment should be regarded as a secularisation of inherited theological ways of thinking. The title, 'Natural Supernaturalism', is borrowed from Thomas Carlyle as an apt definition of the method of romantic secular re-enchantment as Abrams sees it, suggesting that romantic writers 'undertook to save' traditional schemes of relation between Creator and creation. Nature and super-nature are re-formulated in terms of a prevailing post-Kantian polar logic, harmonising opposites such as subject and object, ego and non-ego, spirit and nature, as differentiated identities.

Against this, Kierkegaard's subjective or existential conception of truth is elaborated in the Concluding Unscientific Postscri pt as a mode of relating to the truth through its living appropriation. Subjective truth, as a process of embodying truth, is deemed a necessarily un-finishable task, since one's existence is always in the process of becoming, and never an achieved accomplishment. Kierkegaard's guiding authorial concern is with how his readers relate themselves to his message, and are modified by it in their way of life. Hence he communicates indirectly, so as to promote a learner's own appropriative effort. Kierkegaard encourages the reader to inhabit his message and to begin to discern it as a personal possibility.

Kierkegaard in general seeks to reorient his contemporaries to what is taken for granted, but this is especially the case with regard to Christian faith, which he believes is only an adjunct or nominal profession for most of his contemporaries, whose lives are really governed by secular norms of conduct and motivation. Christianity is professed externally, but is seldom of infinite inward significance. But for Kierkegaard, Christianity is only properly concerned with inwardness, with the salvation of one's own, unfinished and fallen becoming. Kierkegaard can only re-orient people to the real implications of beliefs which they think that they already know all about, and which they even think they have surpassed through Hegelian metaphysics, as members of the progressively 'scientific nineteenth century', by making Christianity strange to them all over again. To this end, Kierkegaard utilises the fashionable secular modes of discourse of his time, romantic and philosophical, but subverts them from within in the interests of thus indirectly communicating Christian truth, the indirectness of which communication ensuring that people have to work to hear the message, and do not even suspect that it could be coming. This oblique, personal style of communication bypasses the customary forms of preaching, thus disabling a modern reader's pre-conditioning tendencies to dismiss or pass over Christianity on objective, 'scientific' or historico-critical grounds, so that he is surprised at what he hears authentically for himself for the first time. Christianity is made strange in order to be heard afresh, glowing in its original colours, and not merely functioning as the faded wallpaper or background of a cultural space devoted to secular aims. Kierkegaard believes that, for most of his contemporaries, Christian truths have become merely threadbare vestments worn in a rite of external lip service.

Thomas Carlyle, from whom Abrams borrows the concept of natural-supernaturalism, took up this concern over outworn symbolism is his book, Sartor Resartus, or the 'Tailor re-Tailored', but from the side of a romantic harmonisation of opposites, rather than through the indirect communication of ultimate Christological paradox. Nature can be submitted to conceptual calculation as a mirror of its reductive programme, or can interact in polar, imaginative relation with subjectivity, as potentially a symbolic window on a deeper, qualitatively irreducible dimension of reality, that is more than, but inclusive of both subjectivity or objectivity. The same reality that can be calculated can reveal itself to an ethically rejuvenated approach as a creative miracle, as miraculously dynamic as the freedom of the will. Nature is thus itself described as supernatural, but for Carlyle, this deeper meaning in nature is only open to purified feeling, and can never be known systematically. The Kantian subjective forms of space and time, in which the epistemologically relative, causal order of phenomena is clad, are regarded by Carlyle as veils hiding a natural miracle of dynamic creativity. A revelation of a 'thing in itself', in Kant's terms, is possible, only what is revealed is not a thing, but of the same order as human will: a dynamism, or living power in nature; natura naturans, as opposed to its product, the 'dead' phenomenal order of natura naturata. Phenomena are regarded from one perspective as a deceptive veil, concealing a living kinship with nature, but also as potential symbols, capable of disclosing their creative ground. But for Carlyle, specifically Christian symbols have lost their force to reveal the living Being of beings.

Against this approach, Kierkegaard holds that, like objective historical investigation, romantic aesthetics and philosophical speculation are irrelevant to the question of religious truth. Such thinking remains detached and hypothetical, and thus, in itself, can never be decisive, since the decision concerning one's own eternal well-being can only be a matter of concerned, appropriating activity in the midst of inevitable uncertainty, and not of dispassionate cognitive assent. Christian faith, as the drive to relate to one's own eternal happiness, is a matter of subjectivity's infinite interest in a wholeness of personhood. One's personal manner of relating to the truth is key.

But in the Concluding Unscientific Postscri pt, Kierkegaard also characterises the pseudo-evangelical 'revivalist' as one who falsely relates to paradoxical revealed truth as if he has objectively understood it, missing the point that the Chalcedonian paradox is not something divisive, segregating those who can from those who cannot understand, but is 'connected essentially with being a human being'. Similarly, in his articles in The Fatherland, Kierkegaard claims that organised ecclesiastical Christianity remains in the aesthetic sphere of existence, since its principle is extension rather than subjective inwardness. Mirroring his condemnation of a contemporary secular dissolution of any awareness of subjective ethical reality in terms of the journalistic category, 'the public', Kierkegaard claims that the Church, too, is guilty of estimating the strength of Christian witness by a head-count of nominal affirmers of creedal formulae. The secular world objectifies human identity in terms of an impersonal journalistic 'public', just as the supposedly 'sacred' sphere preaches an aestheticised, objectively assimilable message and estimates the power of Christian witness by a principle of extension, by a head-count. Both positions fall within what Kierkegaard describes as the aesthetic relation to existence, in which interest is invested outside of subjectivity, a subjectivity which is itself inauthentic, as self-objectified.

If the nineteenth century romantics and idealists sought to re-enchant through a programme of secularisation of Christian themes, then 'Christendom', or a contemporary inauthentic faith, was itself already falling well short of any genuine relation to Transcendence. Kierkegaard's argument in the Fatherland suggests that contemporary religious belief is a merely nominal and external relation to thought-objects, to a so-called sacredness that is itself a symptom of secularisation.

Since, as will be shown, Kierkegaard's conceptually paradoxical transcendence is not graspable within conceptual forms, it resists classification in terms of an opposition between sacredness and secularity. Transcendence will be shown to transform quotidian reality in and through the living of it in imaginatively open receptivity. Thus I now move to suggest that for Kierkegaard, a genuine receptivity to revelation occurs through an imaginative effort of interpretation, holding together conceptually un-reconcilable opposites. Such interpretive receptivity lies on a further shore, beyond both the sacred and the secular as these are commonly understood. To establish this claim, I will need, now, to take a closer look at Kierkegaard's critique of romanticism and Hegelianism. This refinement of focus will also serve to exemplify what I have been describing as Kierkegaard's essentially maieutic strategy of conceptually indeterminate, or indirect communication as it gets to work. Through an engagement with Kierkegaard's critique of romantic philosophical aesthetics in relation to music, his own, unique conception of transcendence will come into view as one that, while irreducible to the canons of the logic of identity and non-contradiction, also rules out a higher harmony of opposites through the trichotomous, polar logic of romantic and Hegelian thought.

As a first step, therefore, towards establishing these claims, I propose to discuss Kierkegaard's stance towards artistic creativity and the nature of truth, in relation to the Hegelian and romantic currents with which his thinking interacted. Here we will be looking at musical aesthetics as presented in Kierkegaard's book, Either/Or. I shall move on to discuss the centrality of imagination to an understanding of Kierkegaardian faith, as a receptivity to a real, un-pre-thinkable transcendence, 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 adequate 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'. In the passage under discussion, a form of romantic-ironic discourse is utilised - 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. However, Socratic irony must be sharply distinguished from the metaphysical objectivity of Plato's intellectual anamnesis, of which Hegelian absolute objectivity is a modern variant.

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 holds 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 are regarded as 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. As indicated earlier, Kierkegaard's 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 possibilities of fulfilment through commitment 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 challenge 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 hold 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 mysteriously 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 the music of Mozart 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: he shows that there is nothing finite or determinate that music could be said to be about. Music is all connotation, and no denotation, so to speak. 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. And by stretching