The Role of Irony in Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments

The Role of Irony in Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments By C. Stephen Evans Abstract Recent authors have suggested that Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings are funda- mentally ironical, and that it is mistaken to see them as containing philosophical and theological claims. Rather, the point of these writings is to show that the really important theological and philosophical truths cannot be expressed. I argue that such interpreters are correct to see pervasive irony in Kierkegaard’s writings, but wrong about how this irony works from a literary perspective. Philosophical Fragments is analyzed as a test case to see how Kierkegaard uses irony, and to show that this use of irony is con- sistent with the advancement of substantive philosophical and theological claims. Many authors, beginning with Kierkegaard himself, have seen the writings attributed by Kierkegaard to the Johannes Climacus pseudonym as having a central place in the Kierkegaardian authorship. In The Point of View for My Work as an Author Kierkegaard says that Concluding Unscientific Postscript is “the turning point in the whole authorship.”1 To signal its special place in the authorship, as a book that is, strictly speaking, neither esthetic nor religious, Kierkegaard says that it had to be attributed to a pseudonym, “although I did place my name as editor, which I have not done with any purely esthetic production – a hint, at least for someone who is concerned with or has a sense for such things.”2 Of course, Postscript is a postscript to Philo- sophical Fragments, albeit a rather long-winded one, and since Kier- kegaard had already placed his name on that earlier volume as “editor,” we are probably safe in assuming that the same kind of “hint” is being offered in the case of Fragments as with Postscript. 1 SFV, SV1 XIII, 542. 2 SFV, SV1 XIII, 523. 64 C. Stephen Evans But what kind of hint is being offered? There is a long tradition of reading Fragments and Postscript as Kierkegaard’s definitive treat- ments of theological and philosophical topics. This tradition has re- cently been criticized by literary-minded commentators, who argue that to read Kierkegaard “straight” as a philosopher/theologian is to misunderstand him. Roger Poole, for example, criticizes what he calls the tradition of “blunt reading” of Kierkegaard in North America.3 Poole attempts to explain this “blunt reading” as due to the fact that the first two prominent interpreters of Kierkegaard in North America were Walter Lowrie and David Swenson. Lowrie, according to Poole, was a retired minister with a “plain, honest mind,” and Poole misiden- tifies David Swenson as a “professor of religion at the University of Minnesota.”4 Thus, Kierkegaard was initially seen in North America through religious eyes, and this “emplacement within theology is the reason why Kierkegaard was translated as he was, and also translated as an orthodox Christian believer…in a manner that paid extraordi- narily little attention to the contours of what Kierkegaard obsessively used to refer to as his ‘indirect communication.’”5 In reality Swenson was a philosopher in one of the most secular de- partments and secular universities in the United States; there was no department of religion at the University of Minnesota at that time or even today.6 However, this mistake on the part of Poole is probably not important, since he sees most philosophers as equally “blunt” in their readings of Kierkegaard as the theologians.7 The real problem 3 Roger Poole “The Unknown Kierkegaard: Twentieth-Century Receptions” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. by Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998, pp. 48-75 (abbreviated “The Unknown Kierkegaard”). See particularly pp. 57-66. 4 “The Unknown Kierkegaard,” pp. 59-60. 5 “The Unknown Kierkegaard,” p. 59. 6 There is, however, currently a program of “Religious Studies” that is housed in the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies. 7 Poole singles out my own work as an especially bad example of “blunt reading,” taking special exception to the subtitle of my book Passionate Reason, which is “Making Sense of Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments.” (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press 1992.) Poole apparently takes the subtitle to imply that Kierke- gaard’s book is confused and needs to be “rescued.” However, my book is a sustained argument that Fragments is philosophically clear and coherent, though the philosophical content is packaged in a humorous and ironical form; some contemporary readers may need help but that is more a comment on today’s educational system than a cri- tique of Kierkegaard. Curiously, Poole praises Robert Roberts’ Faith, Reason, and History to the skies, as a great contrast to my work. If he had read both my book and The Role of Irony in Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments 65 seems to be that philosophers and theologians have taken Kierke- gaard to be offering claims or views on various issues, and even as sup- porting such claims with arguments. Poole claims that such an ap- proach is doomed to failure, because “Kierkegaard’s text does not offer itself to be the object of the question, ‘What does it mean?’ It of- fers itself as the proponent of the question ‘What do you think?’”8 Now one might reasonably think that a false dilemma is here as- sumed and ask whether or not Kierkegaard’s texts could inspire new thinking if they have no meaning of their own that we could understand and respond to. However, Poole claims that such a question be- trays a failure to understand that the Kierkegaardian texts “demon- strate to a nicety the Lacanian perception that all we are ever offered in a text is an endless succession of signifiers.”9 If we read Kierkegaard in this Lacanian way, we will see that “Kierkegaard writes text after text whose aim is not to state a truth, not to clarify an issue, not to pro- pose a definite doctrine, not to offer some meaning that could be di- rectly appropriated.”10 To avoid blunt reading, commentators such as Poole stress that one must pay special attention to Kierkegaard’s use of pseudonyms and the role irony plays in the authorship. And quite a few writers have done so. James Conant, for example, has written a series of articles in which he compares Kierkegaard to Wittgenstein, arguing that the “Revocation” attached to Concluding Unscientific Postscript is for- mally analogous to the famous ending of the Tractatus Logico-Philo- sophicus, in which Wittgenstein affirms that the content of the book is nonsense: “My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them – as steps – to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the latter after he has climbed up it.)”11 Conant argues that the “Revocation” attached to Postscript by Johannes Climacus functions in the same way as Wittgenstein’s oracu- lar “conclusion,” identifying what has gone before in the book as 8 Roberts’ book carefully, he would have learned that Roberts and myself are close friends and shared many ideas in the writing of both books. While Roberts and I certainly disagree on some points, the two books are in basic and broad agreement. 8 “The Unknown Kierkegaard,” p. 62. 9 Roger Poole Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication, Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press 1993, p. 9. 10 Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication, p. 7. 11 Ludwig Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1961, p. 151. 66 C. Stephen Evans “nonsense.”12 If irony as a rhetorical form consists in part in saying something entirely different from and even opposite of the surface meaning of the text, then on Conant’s reading the Climacus writings are ironical through and through; the irony consists in the fact that the texts apparently express what is in fact inexpressible.13 The real point of Kierkegaard according to Conant is that religious truth cannot be expressed but only lived, and the attempts on the part of Climacus to express this truth cannot help but be nonsensical. That generations of philosophers and theologians have read the works without perceiving the nonsense is itself what one might call a deep situational irony. The tradition of taking Kierkegaard seriously as a philosopher and theologian is certainly not confined to North America, however, and Lowrie and Swenson hardly deserve all the blame (or credit) for this tradition. The late Niels Thulstrup surely provides an excellent example in his “Commentary” on Fragments. Consider, for example, Thul- strup’s judgment on the question of the pseudonymity of Fragments: “The work is both thought and written in Kierkegaard’s own name and therefore cannot be considered a truly pseudonymous work.”14 Since the work is not truly pseudonymous, Thulstrup feels free to regard the book as the one in which Kierkegaard gives “the outline of his dogmat- ics.”15 Fragments is seen as a book in which “Kierkegaard raises philosophical and Christian problems one after the other and gives his solutions, which open one’s eyes to ever-widening perspectives.”16 Poole would surely judge this account of Fragments as an “outline of dogmat- ics” replete with “problems and solutions” to be blunt reading indeed. In this paper I want to argue that the literary scholars are quite right to call attention to the ironical character of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous literature, including the writings attributed to Johannes Clima- 12 Probably the clearest of these articles of Conant’s is “Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Nonsense” in Pursuits of Reason, ed.

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