This is in part a followup to a post from two weeks ago on irony. Irony is the object of Kierkegaard's first major work, The Concept of Irony, and then disappears from view as a direct object of discussion in Kierkegaard's writings. That is not to say that irony disappears from Kierkegaard, but the criticisms of Romantic Irony in The Concept of Irony give an indication of why Kierkegaard did not want to take irony as a major theme, which is that the Romantic understanding (referring to the Jena Romantics in the last few years of the 18th century) of irony leads towards a self-destructive subjectivity. The irony cannot be understood as just belonging in literary texts, including Socratic dialogues, but must be thought of as the way in which the subject communicates itself. As a matter of the history of ideas, this is to some degree a reference to the way that the Romantic Ironists were drawing on Fichte’s ideas of subjectivity in the first two editions of the Wissenschaftslehre (often, but misleadingly, known in English as The Science of Knowledge).
Kierkegaard’s attitude it also determined by his own tendency to think of philosophy, as a part of writing, as a form of communication of the subject. We can think of the importance of antique philosophy and Christian spiritual texts here, as well as Kierkegaard’s encounter with German Idealism here. Kierkegaard shapes these themes in his own way, which includes a deep commitment to writing as a simultaneous communication of himself and of the essentials of Christianity. Kierkegaard’s sermons and most ‘directly’ religious texts, such as Works of Love, are full of a literary style, which in some degree uses irony, to deal with the apparent paradoxes of Christianity, which include the inadequacy of writing to the absolute nature of God, and a related inadequacy of the finite subject. What he does not want to is make any suggestion that subjectivity and writing can fall into a vortex of constant self-ironisation. A discussion of the bad, or negative, infinite in Hegel is probably apposite, but I will just leave the idea as a suggestion here.
There is some tendency for Kierkegaard commentary to polarise between an existentialist-aestheticist absorption in paradox and style on one side, and a narrative ethical-religious position on the other side. This is a bit of a simplification, but not an outrageous one. In the first version Kierkegaard is an close to an example of the self-refuting Romantic Ironist criticised in The Concept of Irony, while in the second version all the variations in Kierkegaard’s style and focus are unified in a narrative, or narratives, of ascent from aesthetic subjectivity to a religious point of view, via ethics.
However, the narrative force in Kierkegaard is greater when writing from the ‘aesthetic’ point of view, as in Either/Or I, Stages on Life’s Way, Repetition, and so in the various ways in which narrative appears in, or dominates, various texts of Kierkegaard. The narrative-ethical aspects of Kierkegaard, most obvious in Either/Or II are parodic of a well meaning voice, which in some ways is more ‘mature’, more integrated into marriage, family life, and social forms, more so than the more aesthetic ironic voices, but in some ways does not really appreciate subjectivity. It is a voice that does not appreciate that ethics is as much about the subjective experience of a self-relation, which takes subjectivity out of an aestheticised absolutely ironic isolation, because the self-relation means some recognition of what is external to the subject with regard to time, God, interpersonal relations, and so on.
The most religious voice, or voices, in Kierkegaard, are most removed from a narrative of integration, and are more subjective than the ethical voices. The ethical voices are ironised to show the limits of narrative, just as the aesthetic voices are shown to ironise themselves out of life. The experience of being close to the limit of lived subjectivity is essential to the religious in Kierkegaard. What he writes should not be taken as having a very teleological narrative model of ethical-religious experience and learning, any more than it should be taken as following a model of metaphysical theology. There is a suspicion of aesthetic or ironic absolutism, and a belief in a need narrative homilies, but in a way that means that narrative homilies should lead to a self-doubt and self-encounter, which is close to the moods of aesthetic ironic despair.
The morally improving narrative is itself ethically limited, with reference to Kierkegaard’s understanding of ethics, as what is part of religion, presuming it is rooted in subjectivity and an encounter with the superiority of God as transcendence to ethical rules and communally approved forms of living. In some respects this removes Kierkegaard from the more communal integrating educational understanding of the 19th century novel. On the other hand it may give insight into the 19th century novel beyond any tendency to see it as simply an expression of the acceptance by the hero of the way of the world.
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