A Philosophy of the Essay by Erin Plunkett;

Author:Erin Plunkett;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350050006
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2019-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

5

Possibility in Kierkegaard’s imaginative discourses

Belief and doubt are not two different types of knowledge that can be determined in continuity with each other, because neither of them is a cognitive act; they are opposite passions.

—Johannes Climacus, Philosophical Crumbs, 1843–41

From what does pure thinking abstract? From existence, consequently from what it is supposed to explain.

—Johannes Climacus, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Crumbs, 18462

When Lukács includes Kierkegaard’s imaginary diaries and short stories in his pantheon of the great ‘essays of life’ one cannot help but think that Kierkegaard would have been pleased to find himself in the company of ‘Plato’s Dialogues, the texts of the mystics, [and] Montaigne’s Essays’ (1974, p. 3). Certainly, Kierkegaard saw himself as a Socrates for his age, and a brief glance at his pseudonyms – Johannes de Silentio, Johannes Climacus, Anti-Climacus – reveals the influence of the Christian mystical tradition on his writings. Though scholars disagree about the level of Kierkegaard’s direct engagement with Montaigne,3 the similarities in form and sceptical method are undeniable. Yet Kierkegaard’s writings also stand apart from the rest of the cited authors in his use of pseudonyms and fictional characters to advance his ideas. Might this move into the literary disqualify Kierkegaard as a philosophical essayist? As Lukács reminds us, essayistic writings as such already involve a literary element, which he calls, by turns, art or poetry – defined by a concern with the form of the text that is not shared by the scientific neutrality to which he opposes the artistic.4 Claire de Obaldia argues further that the ‘occasional’, polyphonic and anti-systematic nature of the essay leads to the historical development of the novel, which transforms the multiple voices of a singular writing ‘I’ into full-fledged fictional characters, dialogues and situations. In their wholly imaginative frame, novels are a natural extension of the essay’s refusal to resolve in advance different ways of seeing. Schlegel’s Lucinde and Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen were experimental novels of ideas that staged the philosophical insights of German romanticism in a dramatic way, offering an imaginative mode of reader engagement. Kierkegaard’s quasi-novelistic writings take part in this tradition of literary-philosophical hybrids that seem calculated to defy classification. By creating fictional ‘authors’ who embody particular life views, Kierkegaard advances existing strands of the essayistic, particularly polyvocality. The multiplicity of voices and the profusion of ironic, disjunctive structures within his texts furthers the anti-systematic, sceptical agenda of the texts we have already studied.

Kierkegaard is well known for his critique of ‘the System’ – a term that targets Hegelian idealism and the metaphysical tradition more broadly in its tendency to privilege being over existence or becoming, or to cover over the gap between the two. Like Montaigne and Hume, Kierkegaard worries that the temporal structure of everyday life is supressed by certain ways of speaking (philosophically), that the imposition of a conceptual structure onto lived experience can distort what one sets out to understand. Kierkegaard’s stated aim of combatting the system ‘by means of form’ (1985, p. 117) works by

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