Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious: From the Magic Theatre to the Crucifixion of the Image

220 Pages·1992·22.95 MB·English

by  George Pattison (auth.)

KIERKEGAARD: THE AESTHETIC AND
THE RELIGIOUS
Kierkegaard:
The Aesthetic and
the Religious
From the Magic Theatre to the
Crucifixion of the Image
George Pattison
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-1-349-11820-5 ISBN 978-1-349-11818-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-11818-2
©George Linsley Pattison 1992
General Editor's Preface © David Jasper 1992
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1992
All rights reserved. For information, write:
Scholarly and Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1992
ISBN 978-0-312-06836-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pattison, George, 1950-
Kierkegaard, the aesthetic and the religious : from the magic
theatre to the crucifixion of the image I George Pattison.
P· em.
Revision of the author's thesis (Ph. D.)-Durham University, 1983.
ISBN 978-0-312-06836-3
1. Kierkegaard, Seren, 1813-1855-Aesthetics. 2. Aesthetics,
Modern-19th century. I. Title.
B4378.A4P37 1992
111 '.85'092--dc20 91-22439
CIP
ROMEO: Peace, peace! Mercutio, peace!
Thou talk' st of nothing.
MERCUTIO: True, I talk of dreams,
Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy;
Which is as thin of substance as the air,
And more inconstant than the wind . . .
Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 1.4.96--9.
THESEUS:
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination ...
Shakespeare, A Midsummer-Night's Dream, V.l.l4-18
II n'y a pas moins d' eloquence dans le ton de Ia voix, dans les yeux,
et dans I' air de Ia personne, que dans le choix des paroles.
La Rochefoucauld
Contents
General Editor's Preface viii
Preface ~
Acknowledgements xii
References to Kierkegaard's Works xiii
1 Idealism and the Justification of the Image 1
2 The Genealogy of Art 35
3 The Dialectics of Communication 63
4 Life in the Magic Theatre 95
5 Nihilism and the Novel 125
6 Reading, Repentance and the Crucifixion of the Image 155
~~ 1~
Bibliography 201
Index 205
vii
General Editor's Preface
George Pattison's careful and moving readings of Kierkegaard begin
with a series of reflections on the background to his thought and
writings in Romanticism, German Idealism and Hegel, and Danish
intellectual history in the early part of the nineteenth century. Yet the
key issues of aesthetics and religion also face forwards in time, and
the discussion continually brushes against contemporary issues in
criticism and theory. Kierkegaard is never far away from our present
uncertain, stumbling and passionate negotiations in art, textuality,
rhetoric and religion. Through his work runs the concern to commu
nicate, recognising that it is no easy task, and calls for indirection,
irony and humour in a world of the Magic Theatre, an aesthetic
shadow-world which challenges us to face the question of reality,
perceived without distortion, outside and beyond.
Is there anything outside the text of the play? The shades of
post-modem anxiety stalk the pages of this book. Religious
thinker, philosopher - however we regard Kierkegaard - his con
cerns and his energies were consistently literary. His concern with
theatre, his novels and parables, his sense of rhetoric and the
poetic, tum and tum again upon the issues of textuality, intention
ality and responsibility, the relationship between form and content.
In his reflective spirit of interdisciplinarity, Kierkegaard antici
pates Nietzsche, just as we look back, unavoidably to Nietzsche.
But his complexity may lead not to the dark nihilism of Schopen
hauerian gloom, yet rather a 'formal chaos' inviting no conclusions,
but what George Pattison describes as 'a journey from the aes
thetic, through the ethical, to the religious'. The journey in reading
makes enormous demands - an education which provides not
answers but calls for decisions. Seren Kierkegaard remains at the
heart of our debates about religion and literature, characterised as
they must be by intense, even desperate, seriousness. We are
finally called back, in the inevitable form of a question, to George
Steiner's preoccupation with a real presence in discourse and
communication, and sacrament: beyond the limits of language and
the limits of the visual image, beyond textuality and the aesthetic.
David Jasper
viii
Preface
This book has developed out of my PhD thesis, Kierkegaard's Theory
and Critique of Art: Its Theological Significance (Durham University,
1983), and Chapters 1 and 2 in particular are very closely related to
that earlier work. The discussion of Kierkegaard' s genealogical
reduction of art and the significance of angst as a defining bound
ary for aesthetic experience (in Chapter 2) represents more or less
the position I had reached at that point. Where I have moved on
has to do with having recognised the crucial role of indirect
communication (and of strategies of communication in general) in
Kierkegaard's authorship. No one can read very far in Kierkegaard
without becoming aware that there is an issue to be addressed
here, but that is a very different thing from realising its full
significance. I partly owe my awakening to this to Birgit Bertung's
analysis of the role of indirect communication in Kierkegaard' s
writings on women (B. Bertung, Om Kierkegaard, Kvinder og Kaer
lighed, Kebenhavn: Reitzel, 1987), although I do not discuss this
here, since my own concerns are primarily theological (not, of
course, that women's issues and theology are in any way mutually
exclusive - nor do I mean to imply that I agree with every detail of
Ms Bertung's argument).
It is important to my argument that Kierkegaard's theory and
practice of religious communication took the form it did because of
culturally specific factors, and I have therefore taken considerable
pains to see Kierkegaard' s work in its contemporary context, thus
acknowledging the debt which all interpretation owes to history.
This also helps to set off all the more sharply the distinctiveness of
Kierkegaard's own approach. Idealism, Romantic and Hegelian
alike, tended to see 'the image' in terms of its function as a form or
means of knowledge; that is, as a problem for epistemology.
Kierkegaard's inversion of this, whereby the image comes instead
to be seen as a masking or a mystification of the inner conflicts of
the self, is original enough, but if we go on from there and try to
see his work as an experiment in the direction of a full-scale
Christian Rhetoric, it will become clear that he has travelled an
even greater distance beyond the idealists' epistemological interests
than we might at first have judged. Yet, it might be said, we cannot
ix
X Preface
miss the cognitive charge in his later Christological writings, where
the image, specifically the image of the crucified One, serves as a
revelation of the horrific violence of which human beings are
capable. Nonetheless this should not be taken as implying that
Kierkegaard replaced his rhetorical concerns with a well-disguised
piece of knowledge-communication in a last-minute substitution.
It is rather that his need to cast theology in the mould of rhetoric
(rather than of metaphysical or historical knowledge) has much to
do with the evaluation of human life as being constitutionally
vulnerable to eruptions of violence: physical, verbal and spiritual.
My reading of Kierkegaard at this point owes a great deal to the
theory of religion and culture of Rene Girard, developed in his
Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1977) and other works. I believe, and hope to
develop on another occasion, that there is a profound congruence
between the views of Girard and Kierkegaard on many points: the
understanding of society, philosophy, Christianity and the task of
the individual-although Girard does not subscribe to any kind of
belief in a transcendent deity.
Issues of aesthetics and communication are increasingly at the
centre of Kierkegaard studies, not merely because these issues
reflect the intellectual bias of the age but also because they are
recognised to be major themes in his own writing. There are many
commentators who want to find in Kierkegaard a high evaluation
of poetry, art and the life of the imagination. A good example of
this tendency is David Gouwens, Kierkegaard's Dialectic of the Imagi
nation (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), a well-researched and clearly
argued book which overlaps with my own work at many points.
Nonetheless, whereas I stress the negative implications of Kierke
gaard's work for aesthetics, Gouwens seeks to accentuate the
abiding role of the imagination even in Kierkegaard' s account of
the religious life. Crucial to his account is Kierkegaard's own
dictum that imagination is the 'capacity instar omnium', but
although Gouwens disavows the programme of the old faculty
psychology in which such an expression would seem naturally to
belong, insisting that we must (with Kierkegaard) be attentive to
the differing contexts in which imagination is deployed (the how
rather than the what of imagination), the term itself (imagination,
that is) does seem to draw associations of such notions as 'capacity'
or 'faculty' along with it. This reinforces the impression that
Kierkegaard' s understanding of faith is as an intra-individual pro-
Preface xi
cess. By choosing instead to speak of 'the image' rather than of 'the
imagination' and of rhetoric instead of poetry, I not only highlight
the difference between Kierkegaard and the psychologically
oriented Romantic theory of the imagination but also indicate that
issues of aesthetics share important boundaries with interpersonal,
social and even political relationships. One measure of the differ
ence between us is that in my final Chapter I draw heavily on the
third 'Christian Exposition' in Training in Christianity, where Kierke
gaard offers us a child's eye view of the Crucifixion. Gouwens
looks instead to the fourth 'Exposition' and the discussion of what
significance a youthful ideal of perfection might have in a life. My
belief is that this discussion is not so much concerned with the
capacity of the imagination to produce a picture of human perfec
tion but with how the actual practice of existentially living out
one's ideals may have an educative and religiously enriching value
for the individual even if these ideals are inappropriate and un
attainable for an imperfect human being in an imperfect world - as
all ideals of perfection necessarily are (yet these are the natural
products of the imagination). The image of the crucified One, by
way of contrast, gives a much truer picture of what Christian
discipleship is about, being a picture drawn, as it were, from life
rather than from the idealising power of the imagination. A similar
point may be made in relation to all those who would argue in
favour of seeing Kierkegaard as some 'kind of poet'. For the
emphasis here must surely be on the 'kind of', since conventional
ideas of what 'poetry' involves must be stretched so far to cover
Kierkegaard that, to speak in the language of the doctrine of
analogy, equivocation wins out over univocity-at which point we
must ask why we are hanging on to the term at all?
One answer to this question (with which I would agree) is that
although Kierkegaard' s view of religion is such as to demand the final
sacrifice of poetry, art and imagination, his apologetic concern is
precisely for those who live and move and have their being in the
realm of aesthetic communication. If he was an unhappy lover of
poetry and art, he was an unhappy laver, and, as a Christian commu
nicator, a particular lover of poets, artists and 'wanderers of the great
dream' (Bloy), as Christ was a particular lover of taxgatherers, prosti
tutes, outcasts and sinners. For it was from the Christ of the Christian
gospels that Kierkegaard derived the key elements of his theory of
communication, and it was to that same Christ that his writing
sought to lead those readers who had eyes to see and ears to hear.