Professor
John Lippitt is Professor of Ethics and Philosophy of Religion at
the University of Hertfordshire and Honorary Professor in the European
Philosophy and History of Ideas research group at Deakin
University in Melbourne. He is one of the world’s authorities
on Kierkegaard, and especially on Fear and Trembling. He
is the author of many books and papers on Kierkegaard, including the
pellucid and comprehensive Routledge Guide to Fear and Trembling
(second edition, 2016). Today he guides
us through the sections ‘Tribute to Abraham’ and ‘Preliminary outpouring
from the heart’. You are
invited to join the dialogue and form your own judgement.
This
is the third of a subseries of seven all-day seminars devoted to this one short
book, which is much cited and quoted, as well as misquoted, by existential and
other therapists, but sometimes with little understanding of, or even relation
to, the text, let alone the Biblical text it discusses. For example, the
notion of a ‘knight of faith’, taken from this book, is often
solemnly applied to a client in psychotherapy, without recognition of the comic
resonances of Don Quixote in this description of Abraham, who set
out on a donkey to sacrifice his son; and without awareness that
in the Hebrew of the Biblical story there is no mention of ‘faith’ or
‘obedience’, but only of ‘trust’ and ‘listening’. Again, it is very rare for
those who appeal to, or try to apply, the argument of the book to take account
of the fact that its author insisted that its pseudonymous narrator should not
be taken as representing his own position. These seven seminars are an
attempt to remedy this situation.
Fear
and Trembling: A Dialectical Lyric, by a certain ‘Johannes
de silentio’, was published in Copenhagen
on 16 October 1843. Our seven seminars, the first of which was on 14
October 2018, thus celebrate the book’s hundred and seventy-fifth anniversary.
The
actual author was, of course, Søren Kierkegaard (5
May 1813 – 11 November 1855), as he acknowledged in ‘A
First and Last Declaration’, the further postscript that he,
in his own name, added to Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the
Philosophical Crumbs (1846), itself purportedly written by his
pseudonym ‘Johannes Climacus’.
But Kierkegaard insisted:
‘... 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, 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 seven
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).
Venue: Durrants Hotel, 26–32 George Street, Marylebone, London W1H 5BJ
Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £132, others £165, some
bursaries; coffee, tea, Durrants rock, mineral water included; payable in
advance; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London
N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857 +44 (0) 7809
433250
E-mail: stadlen@aol.com stadlenanthony@gmail.com
The Inner Circle
Seminars were founded by Anthony Stadlen in 1996 as an ethical, existential,
phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy. They have been kindly
described by Thomas Szasz as ‘Institute for Advanced Studies in the Moral
Foundations of Human Decency and Helpfulness’. But they are independent of all
institutes, schools, and universities.
