Kierkegaard Part Ii

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 poetic lyricism to the edge of incoherence, Kierkegaard also and simultaneously 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, or pre-ethical humanity, according to the Kierkegaardian scheme of existential spheres.

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, or self-will. 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, as 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? I will be returning to address these thoughts at the end of this presentation, in the light of what remains to be said.

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 or sensuous 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, or a mere wish-fulfilment, nor statically and manipulably objective. Hence we can begin to see why human imaginative resources must be turned inward and transformed to enable an entry into the sphere of revealed faith, as Kierkegaard sees it, and that this role for imagination in paradoxical faith is a need intrinsic to the direction of Kierkegaard's thought.

Nevertheless, Kierkegaard remains content to deny any religious significance to purely artistic, externalised creativity. I believe that this is a critical weakness in Kierkegaard's thought, and at the end of this presentation I shall briefly present my specific objection to this entirely negative evaluation of artistic creativity and appreciation, arguing that it causes a structural inconsistency at the heart of Kierkegaard's project. But first I need to examine more precisely Kierkegaard's understanding of the role of imagination in human receptivity to truly transcendent revelation, as opposed to the range of pseudo-sacred secularisations of Christian beliefs, ecclesiastical and otherwise, that were identified earlier.

M. Jamie 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 takes this role.

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 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 dependent upon infinite alterity, and therefore not a straightforwardly immanent choice, amenable to universal norms, 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. I will explain what this means, and how it comes to pass.

The will can want to see reality in the light of faith, to respond to an 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, as when interpreting ambiguous puzzle-pictures. In a situation in which a 'Wittgensteinian' gestalt shift can occur, initially we can see only one possibility (for example, two facial profiles in silhouette); 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 chalice between the silhouettes) comes into focus. Through metaphorical transformation, as Douglas Berggren suggests, one is actively receptive to genuinely new imaginatively interpretive insights. A decisive threshold is crossed due to such a re-contextualisation of gestalt, transformed meaning emerging in 'a creative, imaginatively sustained interaction between diverse perspectives which cannot be literalised or disentangled without destroying the kind of insight, truth or reality which the metaphor provides'. 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.

Through metaphorical transformation, a decisive threshold is crossed due to a permanent re-contextualsation of reality. Metaphorical transitions have a permanent standing in consciousness since they involve one concept being grasped in terms of another through imaginative activity: an activity of holding the two meanings together in a creative tension, without harmonising them, or dissolving the tension of opposites in a higher, romantic resolution or Hegelian sublation. The opposition of God and man is an infinite one, and thus calls for infinite imaginative passion as an interpretive 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, on the other hand, this transformation of vision is also a change which one must actively appropriate through imaginative activity over a lifetime, (unlike the decisive finality of a fiat or sovereign act of will), as one strives to respond to revelation. Moreover, there is no univocally communicable way of telling that the quality of faith motivates the actions of a person in such an objectively unmediated relationship to God.

Such a person is described by Kierkegaard as a 'knight of faith', in Fear and Trembling. Here, Abraham finds himself in the situation of having continuously to refuse the possibility of objective intelligibility, or direct communicability, as a surrogate for faith. 'Infinite resignation' denotes a temptation: it is a refusal of paradoxical transcendence, as the last possible means by which Abraham could make his action intelligible to his social peers. When faced with the demand to sacrifice his son, Abraham is constantly tempted to idealise his relationship to Isaac, and thereby to accept the surrender of his love as a real relationship of ethical concern. But to idealise a love relationship is to forego or resign love as an actuality, to infinitise the reality of the loved one as an unattainable ideal to which one devotes an eternal fidelity. By means of such an idealisation, one transfers one's interest to a mere concept of the loved one, whose eternalised status is merely the eternal un-changeability of a thought-object. Such infinite resignation of reality is thus the last possible way through which one can buy into the illusion of an achieved and communicable understanding of one's existence, through the failure or unwillingness to recognise the intrinsic indefiniteness of subjective human becoming. To resist this temptation to define one's own horizon of being in terms of prevailing immanent norms - in flight from one's true, created status - is to render oneself potentially open to the approach of transcendence, to the possibility of becoming truly open to unclassifiable, or un-pre-thinkable interpretive possibilities in relation to an infinitely transcendent divine approach. As Kierkegaard puts it, such possibilities would be opened up to one on the strength of the 'absurd', as it would appear from the perspective of the objective understanding.

The apparent absurdity of revelation will not cease to be paradoxical when faith has been embraced. Faith does not become something assimilable to the life-view prevailing before revelation, described in Fear and Trembling as the ethical 'universal'. Rather faith transforms one's relation to one's world. The understanding's judgement of the paradoxical absurdity will still stand, meaning that the understanding, through imaginative activity, will be simultaneously affirmed and suspended, judging and desisting. As in Berggren's account of metaphor, the understanding will be both active and passive in imaginative tension, or suspension. Customary and universally intelligible judgemental tendencies are present as suspended. In Fear and Trembling, in the context of a teleological suspension of a universally communicable norm for ethics, I suggest that this imaginative suspension of the understanding takes the form of a persistently repeated refusal of the universal intelligibility of an idealistic 'infinite resignation': a refusal of the romantic approach of a poeticising, objectively 'eternalising' natural supernaturalism, just as it is a refusal of Hegelian absolute objectivity.

Such a philosophical or poetic objectification of Christian faith remains in the aesthetic sphere of existence, as Kierkegaard understands the term, as there is no 'reduplication', or personal appropriation of the content of faith through what Kierkegaard describes as 'second immediacy': a return to the living process of interactive life on the transformed basis of a receptive activity of imagination, re-interpreting one's world in relation to a paradoxical revelation that resists objective, conceptual mediation. Kierkegaard regards idealistic philosophy and related poetical strategies as curiously absent-minded: in reaching eternal conclusions Hegelian philosophers forget their own on-going and intrinsically problematic lives, lives that cannot and should not be thought away for the sake of the false security of a merely conceptual eternity. In a similar avoidance strategy, the resistant face of reality is arbitrarily and irrationally wished away through empty rhetorical assertion by the fideistic 'revivalist' we met earlier. The self-willed wish-fulfilment involved in such strategies is, as we have seen, very far from what Kierkegaard means by the leap of faith, as an imaginatively mediated openness to transcendence in attentive receptivity. As against Kierkegaard's approach, the others remain in the aesthetic, or self-objectifying sphere of existence. In the Kierkegaardian case, the ego is de-centred, on the periphery; in all the multi-form varieties of the aesthetic approach that we have come across from the first part of this paper onwards, the interests of the ego are the true end aimed at, regardless of all the differences in ideological content with which that egotism is cloaked.

It is through Kierkegaard's imaginatively re-interpretive reduplication that the aesthetic aspect of human being finds a place in genuine faith. We have seen that Kierkegaard's criticism of an objectifying relation to truth, whether through conceptually determinate or imaginatively indeterminate judgement, applies also to the formulaic lip-service of nominal ecclesiastical Christianity, and the zealotry of enthusiasts and pseudo-evangelical revivalists. True transcendence, as Kierkegaard sees it, lies beyond any objectively univocal account of the sacred, while the various post-Enlightenment understandings of the sacred are merely the immanently intelligible, or secular, in fancy dress: re-tailored as natural supernaturalism.