Subjectivity and Kierkegaard
Stephen Watt writes on his struggles with 21st Century Catholicism and Kierkegaard in this weeks Crombie Burn Reader Edition.
Over the last few months we have had the pleasure of Dr Stephen Watt writing on the importance of Philosophy in the thinking life of Catholics in Scotland. For Easter he spoke of the Atonement through the works of 19th Century Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. If you would like to know more about this particular philosopher please click on the following link that takes you to the Britannica page on him.
In my last article, I gave an account of Kierkegaard’s views on the Atonement. That prompted some very supportive feedback, including a request for a suggestion of which of Kierkegaard’s works would be the best one to start by reading. If you look back to the comments on the article, you’ll see my reply, but you’ll also see that I struggled to give an answer! So this article is going to be a rather more personal reflection on why I struggled and some thoughts about Kierkegaard and twenty-first century Catholicism which were prompted by that struggle.
I tried to read Fear and Trembling and Either/Or when I was a teenager. I remember the disgusted feeling of reading too much contorted, self-obsessed prose. I also remember reading the analysis of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac in Fear and Trembling and thinking that it all sounded pretty immoral. I gave up on Kierkegaard, went away and studied philosophy at university and, as a good analytic philosopher, for a long while never paid him a second thought.
What went wrong? Well, thinking about this was one of the things that made selecting a single work of Kierkegaard for someone approaching him for the first time so difficult. Speaking very roughly, Kierkegaard is all about the subjective reaction: how one lives honestly and authentically. And while he is very good indeed at turning over and over the hidden places of our souls to ferret out the lies and tricks we play on ourselves to distance ourselves from that authenticity, there has to be some sort of meeting of minds to benefit from this. Crudely speaking, he and I were just not in the same place. When I tried to read Kierkegaard, I was not at all religious and came from a family that was not at all religious: he wrestles with a background of Lutheranism and a deep personal commitment to Christianity. I was a typically sexually frustrated teenage male who really just wanted a girlfriend: he wrestles with a deep romantic attachment and scandalously breaks off his engagement. I was desperately trying to get into university, having left school early and with few qualifications: he deliberately avoids a career as a scholar and undertakes a lifelong feud with academic theology and philosophy. Quite apart from a radical difference in background, if I had read Kierkegaard in a superficial way -and what other way could I have read him at that age?- I would probably have destroyed my life by rejecting three elements which have made it worthwhile: institutional religion, marriage and academic work. The differences between our subjectivities were just too great to be answered by finding precisely the right book of his to read: at that time, there simply wasn’t one. That, I think, is why I found it so difficult recommend a single work for someone who hasn’t read Kierkegaard before: so much depends on your own subjectivity, what’s happening in your own life. And for some, perhaps many, the correct answer is not to read him -at least not yet.
Let’s step back a bit. Much of Kierkegaard’s life and reflections are dominated by three troubled relationships to institutions: with the Lutheran Church in Denmark, with marriage and with academia. It’s very easy to read Kierkegaard as simply rejecting those institutions. Indeed, many of those I’ve met over the years who have valued Kierkegaard have taken precisely that lesson from him and come to see these as simply oppressive institutions from which one has to escape and help others escape. It fits rather neatly into the officially approved British counter-culture of the sixties and seventies encapsulated in films such as If or TV shows such as Monty Python where much of the satire is directed against stuffy clergy, stuffy women and stuffy education. Although some of the specific flavour of that early counterculture has moved on, the fundamental pattern of the licensed critique has remained quite consistent across different western cultures and generations since the sixties: finding authenticity is a struggle against institutionalised religion, sex and education. And the fundamental, approved solution is not to bear with them, but to burn them down.
Undoubtedly bits of Kierkegaard can be read as in sympathy with that sort of emancipatory approach, simply because, at times, those institutions are oppressive and, also at times, Kierkegaard does reject them. He does pretty much walk away from the Lutheran Church, from marriage and from academic life and certainly regularly pours scorn upon aspects of them. I felt as much as understood that negative critique when I was younger, and, quite rightly given my personal situation at the time, fled it like poison. Analogously, in modern Scotland, for many people, the problem is not oppressive structures but the absence of structure: institutional religion is rapidly declining; marriage is disappearing; education, certainly at the university level, while not exactly disappearing, is nevertheless troubled, particularly in the central disciplines of the humanities and theology. From a Catholic analysis, sensitive to the need for external, social structures to support human flourishing, the main problem of our modern age may well be seen to be the destruction of institutions rather than the suppression of authenticity by them. Less need of Kierkegaard and more need of Aristotle, perhaps.
And yet. One of the philosophers I’ll probably tackle in a future article will be Foucault. And one of his key themes will be that social power and control do not disappear but simply reshape themselves: Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. We do not live in a Scotland where fundamental human goods such as the relationship between the sexes, procreation of children, contemplation of divine things and worship no longer exist or exist outwith institutional control, but where such things exist within new institutions and new controls. Even if they are good institutions -and many are not- the problem of how to live authentically within those changed institutions reappears. Returning to Kierkegaard and his reflection on the sacrifice of Isaac in Fear and Trembling, one of the things that gets in the way of understanding his fundamental point is that sacrificing a son is not a live option for us: if I thought God was telling me to sacrifice my son, to the extent that I maintained any sanity whatsoever, I would disregard it simply as a delusion. But there are other, modern situations that express the heart of the analysis in Fear and Trembling: ‘Abraham cannot be mediated; in other words, he cannot speak.’ How does a Catholic live authentically in a society where the institutions of the Church are at odds with the institutions of society? (In most cases, nothing analogous to the comfortable accommodation between the Lutheran Church and nineteenth century Denmark exists between the modern Catholic Church and, say, the modern Scottish state.) But also, how does one live within the institutional Church? (If you think there is an easy formula for that, wait and see.) The specific nature of the institutions within which we live in Scotland is radically different from nineteenth century Denmark, but the central human problem of living authentically remains within those altered institutions. Despite all the changes, Kierkegaard still has helpful, articulated observations about such difficulties, but also highlights the central issue that, in the end, there is only a holy silence in which such decisions have to be lived out.
Over his lifetime, Kierkegaard wrote much and responded to changes in his own circumstances and subjectivity: as a result, I struggled to recommend one book helpful to everyone at every stage of life. (Which is why, in the end, I suggested a selection of his writings as probably the best choice.) Perhaps his greatest importance is not so much the detail of his thought –those details may help, but equally it’s easy to get dragged into the scholarly Kierkegaard industry which can ironically itself get in the way of interiority- but rather his identification of an unavoidable problem for human beings: how to live authentically in important institutions which deal with central human goods. And to that there is no simple, one sized answer: neither always walking away, nor staying; neither letting it all hang out, nor (to borrow a term from Pope Francis) ‘rigidity’.
Dr Stephen Watt
I’m getting a lot out of these thoughtful pieces on why Catholic Scots should take an interest in philosophy. By encouraging ordinary Catholics to make truths taken on authority their own, and by considering the place of philosophy in personal quest and transformation of the self, you are doing serious intellectual spadework, whilst inviting readers to do some for themselves. It was pleasing and interesting to read about how you arrived at an encounter with Kierkegaard having touched on this matter with me on Twitter in the past. I cheekily suggested that it was better to arrive at Kierkegaard later rather than not read him at all.
I fancied I had arrived at him at just the right time when I was an undergraduate philosophy student, volunteering at a suicide crisis line and struggling with some of very conscious forms of despair described by Kierkegaard in The Sickness Unto Death. Early at university I took a course on Existentialism, which focused on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Where I am today, almost twenty years later, and having read some works of K and N since then, is in agreement with you on ‘less need of Kierkegaard and more need of Aristotle, perhaps’, but I still wonder whether we might require something of both.
I’m looking forward to reading upcoming reflections on Catholic Social Teaching (and hopefully something on Foucault soon!). There’s a distinctly late Foucault flavour to some of this, if you don’t mind me saying. Of course, there is a glaring incongruity in the work of Foucault when he moves from a focus on regimes of truth, the disciplinary society and all-pervasive capillary power to talking about the possibilities of radical self-invention later on. But perhaps this might have something to do with ‘the problem of how to live authentically’ within institutions that are not always great, leaving aside questions about the extent to which Foucault was led astray in his own life by a Nietzschean quest beyond good and evil.