‘... if it should occur to anyone to want to quote a particular passage from the books, it is my wish, my prayer, that he will do me the kindness of citing the respective pseudonymous author’s name, not mine.’
Johannes de silentio, Johannes Climacus, and the other pseudonyms are like characters in a drama written by Kierkegaard. He called it ‘indirect communication’, a dialectic of different possible perspectives through which the reader is invited to work out his or her own point of view. Much commentary on Fear and Trembling and the other pseudonymous works is therefore naive and misleading, because it ignores Kierkegaard’s urgent request that their pseudonymous nature should be respected.
Kierkegaard was the thinker who introduced, sometimes through this or that pseudonym (as he said, ‘with the left hand’), and sometimes in his own name (‘with the right hand’), the word ‘existential’ to convey the project of thinking with the whole of one’s being, as an ‘existing’ thinker, rather than constructing a ‘theory’ or ‘system’, which yet another pseudonym, ‘Anti-Climacus’, said in The Sickness Unto Death (1849) was like building a fine house in which one does not live.
Ludwig Feuerbach also sometimes used ‘existence’ in this sense, but his project was to secularise religious thinking, whereas Kierkegaard’s primary aim was to affirm authentic religion as irreducible to social ethics.
But Kierkegaard’s idea of authentic religion differed from everybody else’s. He had utter contempt for the Danish Church and for ‘Christendom’, as he called it. For him, religion meant something radically individual. But his vision of the individual was the very antithesis of an encapsulated, isolated, unsocial, worldless, reified ‘self’. Rather, as Anti-Climacus put it in The Sickness Unto Death, the ‘self’ of a true individual was a ‘relation’ which ‘relates itself to its own self’; it was ‘that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self’, while ‘resting in the [divine] power that established it’ and, as Kierkegaard insisted in his own name in Works of Love (1847), loving friends, family, spouse, children, neighbours.
Fear and Trembling is itself a foundational document for existential thinking.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Ludwig Binswanger, Karl Jaspers, Franz Kafka, Paul Tillich, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt, Abraham Joshua Heschel, W. H. Auden, R. S. Thomas, Thomas Szasz, R. D. Laing, Martin Luther King, Jacques Derrida, John Updike, David Lodge, and many others acknowledged their indebtedness to Kierkegaard. Others, such as Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, and Albert Camus, grappled with him but could not avoid him. The meaning of Kierkegaard’s pseudonym’s interplay of interpretations in Fear and Trembling, and the interplay of this interplay with the positions of his other pseudonyms, has also been the subject of a continuing comprehensive conversation by generations of theological, philosophical, and psychological scholars for one hundred and seventy-five years.
Wittgenstein, himself generally regarded as one of the most profound thinkers of the 20th century, held that Kierkegaard was ‘by far the most profound thinker’ of the 19th century’; he said: ‘Kierkegaard is too deep for me’. But Ernesto Spinelli, widely regarded as a leading existential therapist, has recently denounced Kierkegaard’s ‘dangerous folly’ in apparently admiring Abraham’s ‘self-evident lunacy’ in Fear and Trembling. This is in line with traditional clinical-psychiatric thinking, for example the psychiatrist Abraham Myerson’s 1945 diagnosis that Kierkegaard was ‘a psychiatric case’, whose writing was ‘a schizoid and certainly utterly incomprehensible presentation by a mind which is quite deviate’.
Are these important demystifying insights into a pretentious and over-rated writer? Or is the existential tradition here degenerating into abject capitulation to uncomprehending psychiatric reductionism?
Fear and Trembling is a ‘dialectical lyric’ on the Akedah, the Biblical account of Abraham’s ‘binding’ of his beloved son Isaac (Genesis, 22:1-19), fundamental for all three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The meaning of the Akedah has been debated and disputed for thousands of years by Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and (more recently) atheist thinkers. (The Qur’an does not name the son, and there has been debate in Islam as to whether it was Ishmael or Isaac, though today it is generally held to have been Ishmael.) Today, the Akedah is chanted from the Torah scroll in synagogues at the Jewish New Year, with great precision, though it is open to anyone to propose an interpretation of its meaning; in Christianity it is held to prefigure the crucifixion of Jesus; and in Islam animals are sacrificed round the world on Eid al-Adha (Festival of Sacrifice) to commemorate Abraham’s sacrifice of a ram ‘instead of his son’. The Akedah has been the basis of many great works of art, music, drama, and poetry.
Kierkegaard emphasised that the sole purpose of his entire vast authorship, both direct and pseudonymous, was religious, though he fiercely denounced institutionalised religion (such as Danish 19th-century ‘Christendom’) as a corruption and perversion of living existential religion. But ‘existential’ therapists in particular routinely ‘secularise’ his writings, as Binswanger did in his discussion of The Sickness Unto Death in ‘The Case of Ellen West’. Is this a betrayal, purporting to reduce the religious to the secular-social-ethical in precisely the way that Johannes de silentio is criticising in Fear and Trembling? Or is it a clearing away of the religious rubble to reveal the human truth of these masterpieces?
One of Heidegger’s most important early courses of lectures was on The Phenomenology of Religious Life (1920-21). But existential therapists often disparage the religious experience of their clients and are not open to its phenomenology. We shall try to show that Kierkegaard’s work is, among many other things, a fundamental investigation of the existential phenomenology of individual, non-institutionalised, religious experience, indispensable for an unprejudiced understanding of both our ‘religious’ and our ‘non-religious’ clients.
In eight seminars over three years, of which you may attend any or all, we read closely the complex argument of Johannes de silentio. You are invited to explore in depth the rich variety of interpretations of the Akedah and Fear and Trembling, and their relevance for psychotherapy; and perhaps to arrive at your own interpretation(s).
