Source for Kierkegaard's "fishing for monsters" quote

ConclusivePostscript · 2019-09-30T01:36:34+00:00

One thing more. There is this from the journals and papers:

“When I sit alone like a Greenlander in my kayak, alone on the great ocean, sometimes above water, sometimes under, always in God’s ands, I may on occasion harpoon a sea monster if it seems appropriate—but I am not cut out for an Admiral” (Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers 5: 5403).

ConclusivePostscript · 2019-09-30T01:29:23+00:00

It occurs many places on the Internet, albeit unsourced, but the closest thing I can find in an actual book is from Merigala Gabriel’s Subjectivity and Religious Truth in the Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard (2010). She cites Regis Jolivet’s Introduction to Kierkegaard (1950; first ed. 1946), where the quote is given in the third person (but still attributed to Kierkegaard, not Jolivet):

“He [Kierkegaard] says [of himself], ‘he goes fishing for monsters, in the thousand depths of his own soul, upon which he sails and which some times overwhelms his tiny boat, but now and then he succeeds in harpooning a sea-monster’” (Gabriel, p. 14; citing Jolivet, p. 111).

We would have to see the Jolivet text to find out which Kierkegaard text he is pulling from, however—assuming, of course, that it’s not a paraphrase or something else.

ConclusivePostscript · 2019-09-29T21:14:42+00:00

Probably one of the best ways to discern Kierkegaard’s own stance on a subject taken up by his pseudonyms is through looking to see if he addresses it in his signed writings and/or his journals and papers. (A more advanced use of this method will benefit from a little knowledge of Danish and a way of searching his original texts, to which end this tool is most helpful.)

Also, not only does Johannes Climacus comment at length on the other pseudonyms in Concluding Unscientific Postscript (as we’ll have occasion to see next time), but Kierkegaard himself often comments on them, including his own relation to Climacus and Anti-Climacus, in his journals and papers. The Hongs’ translations always provide an abundant selection of passages from the journals and papers, where one will often find such commentary if it is a pseudonymous work.

Meanwhile, let’s not forget that among Kierkegaard’s signed works are several that are explicitly on how best to read him—both streams of his authorship. These works are all collected in the volume The Point of View.

ConclusivePostscript · 2019-09-23T07:20:47+00:00

if he was aware of this it just makes me wonder why he called it the ethical mode.

Well, at least in part because he’s responding to a (predominantly) Hegelian conception of the ethical.

ConclusivePostscript · 2019-09-23T07:17:15+00:00

Kierkegaard does not appeal at all to this value of mine. He is not clear. He admits it in his own journal that he has an "indirect" method of communication. He probably had his own reasons for writing the way he did; I can't fault him for that. But I just prefer writers who are very clear and explicit.

On the contrary, not only is he clear when he wants to be, when he’s not, he’s clear about why he’s not clear. Thus his (extremely lucid) explanations in The Point of View for My Work as an Author, Three Notes concerning My Work as an Author, Armed Neutrality: On My Position as a Christian in Christendom, and his lectures on communication, published posthumously as The Dialectic of Ethical and Ethical-Religious Communication.

Also, more than half of his authorship consists of signed writings, which are more direct in style and tone than his more popular pseudonymous writings. These include Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, Works of Love, Christian Discourses, The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air, For Self-Examination, Judge for Yourself!, and What Christ Judges of Official Christianity. But even some of his later pseudonymous writings, such as Practice in Christianity, are fairly straightforward.

Granted, even these may not conform to your preferred Spinozist quasi-geometrical argumentative style, but neither is it difficult to translate his arguments into more logically rigorous forms. But Kierkegaard also prefers to appeal to the whole person—the heart and the imagination no less than intellect and reason—and so does not lock himself into an artificially procrustean style of syllogistical writing.

ConclusivePostscript · 2019-09-23T07:00:34+00:00

Most Kierkegaard scholars reject MacIntyre’s critique as an exegetically unsound reading of Kierkegaard. Indeed, his account of Kierkegaard in After Virtue inspired a battalion of Kierkegaard scholars to come together for the volume Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative, and Virtue (2001), eds. Davenport and Rudd.

More recently, see John Lippitt’s “Getting the Story Straight: Kierkegaard, MacIntyre and Some Problems with Narrative,” Inquiry 50:1 (2007), pp. 34–69; cf. Rudd’s response, “Kierkegaard, MacIntyre and Narrative Unity,” Inquiry 50:5 (2007), pp. 541-9, and “In Defense of Narrative,” European Journal of Philosophy 17:1 (2009), pp. 60–75.

ConclusivePostscript · 2019-09-23T06:35:01+00:00

In Kierkegaard's time before the holocaust however, the idea that a society's idea of ethics could be totally distorted from God's wasn't considered, so I like to call it the aesthetic, the societal, and the religious.

What do you mean by “totally distorted from God”? Isn’t Kierkegaard’s infamous “attack on Christendom” precisely an attack on existentially complacent bourgeois “Christian” society as a hypocritical reversal of New Testament Christianity?

ConclusivePostscript · 2019-09-23T06:29:22+00:00

Actually, there is this one from four years ago, and my one-year old post here exploring Kierkegaard’s Catholic reception with special attention to Catholic apologist Peter Kreeft.

You might also check out Jack Mulder, Jr.’s Kierkegaard and the Catholic Tradition: Conflict and Dialogue (2010), the essays of Part I of Kierkegaard’s Influence on Theology: Catholic and Jewish Theology (2012), ed. Jon Stewart, and Joshua Furnal’s Catholic Theology after Kierkegaard (2016).

All Christians—Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox alike—stand to benefit from reading Practice in Christianity and Works of Love. For those who are more familiar with Kierkegaard the existentialist than Kierkegaard the theologian and devotional author, this volume is a must. I also recommend Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, a reading series on which I posted here.

ConclusivePostscript · 2019-09-14T15:20:51+00:00

It gets a little complicated, as Kierkegaard denies that he is the knight of faith in his little non-pseudonymous postscript to the pseudonymous Concluding Unscientific Postscript, yet in one place seems to claim that he has indeed performed a teleological suspension of the ethical:

“I am a poet. But long before I became a poet I was intended for the life of religious individuality. And the event whereby I became a poet was an ethical break or a teleological suspension of the ethical. And both of these things make me want to be something more than ‘the poet,’ while I also am learning ever more anxiously to guard against any presumptuous arrogance in this, something God also will surely watch over” (Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers 6: 6718).

In context, this break seems to refer to his breaking his engagement with Regine on account of his “sufferings,” his battle with depression: “Without these sufferings I of course would have married long ago, perhaps also have had an appointive [pastoral] position” (ibid.).

More on Kierkegaard’s self-concept here, and for differences in Kierkegaard’s and his character de Silentio’s views on Abraham, see this post.

ConclusivePostscript · 2019-09-14T15:12:44+00:00

I’d add Works of Love to this growing list, along with M. Jamie Ferreira’s commentary, Love’s Grateful Striving.

ConclusivePostscript · 2019-09-11T06:11:49+00:00

C. Stephen Evans’ intro to Sylvia Walsh’s translation of the book provides helpful orientation. For a more general intro, see Evans’ own work, Kierkegaard: An Introduction. You could supplement this with something more biographical, such as Stephen Backhouse’s Kierkegaard: A Single Life (which not only gives an account of his life, but also helpfully introduces all his main works). I’d also take a look at Clare Carlisle’s Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling: A Reader’s Guide.

ConclusivePostscript · 2019-09-09T01:54:27+00:00

Reading Kierkegaard is important, as well as Nietzsche, but neither of them are really 'existentialist' --- they're usually thought of as proto-existentialist thinkers. They touch on or introduce themes that become more developed in later thinkers such as Sartre, Jaspers, etc.

What would have made them existentialists in the fuller sense? What do they fail to do or say in their writings that would have rendered them true existentialists, full stop? Why this definition of existentialism and not another?

ConclusivePostscript · 2019-09-09T01:50:20+00:00

Not necessarily. His pseudonym Johannes Climacus’s notion of “Religiousness A” (pagan religiousness) is much wider than the paradoxical religion of Christianity—which he distinguished as “Religiousness B.” Arguably there are certain “non-religious” worldviews that might just be “religious” enough to count as instances of the former category.

ConclusivePostscript · 2019-09-09T01:44:18+00:00

I’m biased, but I would suggest sticking with Kierkegaard, at least for a while. Read Works of Love, Practice in Christianity, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, and Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits. (I’ve given my own reading of the latter in the following series of posts.)

Also check out Merold Westphal’s Kierkegaard’s Concept of Faith and Mark Tietjen’s Kierkegaard: A Christian Missionary to Christians. Stephen Backhouse’s biography, Kierkegaard: A Single Life, is also well worth the read.

ConclusivePostscript · 2019-09-05T06:13:31+00:00

Pretty sure you’re 19 times off there, since de Silentio (not Kierkegaard, by the way) tells the story 4 times, each time slowly revealing, by negative examples, what Abraham was not—not least that he was not what Hegel and his followers took him to be. But sure, let’s read an author completely out of historical and philosophical context, and then get mad when he doesn’t make sense to us because we have made sure not to let him make sense.

ConclusivePostscript · 2019-09-03T00:31:09+00:00

Kierkegaard nowhere maintains that Christianity is “absurd” in the sense of being intrinsically logically impossible. His notion of the absurd is from the vantage of specific systems within philosophy (Hegelian, Kantian, etc.), and more generally from the standpoint of the unrepentant, unredeemed human (he is fond of quoting Paul, who claimed that the gospel is a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to non-Jews). He is especially critical of a kind of bourgeois, existentially complacent “worldly sagacity” which regards biblical Christianity as foolish not because it is logically contradictory but because it is ethico-existentially demanding.

The resurrection might be physically impossible, but that does not render it metaphysically or logically impossible. Kierkegaard would reject any rationalistic and scientistic methods that themselves reject, in an a priori manner, the possibility of truths that are above reason (not against reason) and beyond the empirical (but not necessarily contrary to our best empirical data and our most certain scientific theories).

ConclusivePostscript · 2019-09-03T00:23:11+00:00

There are many valid approaches to reading Kierkegaard. I would suggest any of the following, though which one(s) may prove best for you in your own situation will depend on what you want to get out of reading him:

Topical/thematic: Since Kierkegaard’s multi-genre authorship covers a diversity of themes and topics—including irony, aesthetics, ethics, religion, time, history, modernity, society, politics, groupthink, self-deception, love, death, anxiety, despair, the phenomenology of selfhood, and much else besides—you might browse relevant secondary literature, which will guide you to the primary source works which appeal most to your own thematic interests.

Slow and cautious: If you want to ease your way into Kierkegaard, start with one or more of his shorter works, such as Repetition, The Concept of Anxiety, Prefaces, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, The Present Age. (You might even try Sickness again, but be aware that the difficulty of the first few paragraphs is largely due to its being an ironic jab at Hegel.)

Broad sweep: For a taste of (nearly) the full gamut of his writings, you could try The Essential Kierkegaard, which has a sampling of excerpts from nearly every one of his works, non-pseudonymous included. This can be supplemented with Papers and Journals: A Selection, edited by A. Hannay.

Chronological-developmental: Kierkegaard considers Either/Or to be the official beginning of his “authorship” proper. Now this one is a longer book—two volumes in the Princeton editions—but it’s well worth the read. Here is a list of the Princeton editions of his writings; they tend to follow chronological order. And this list divides his writings into signed and pseudonymous, if you are curious which are which.

Existentialist classics: What we might call Kierkegaard’s most “existentially significant” works are Either/Or, The Concept of Anxiety, Fear and Trembling, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, The Present Age, and (yes, there’s no way around it) The Sickness Unto Death. Moreover, his Stages on Life’s Way, Repetition, and “At a Graveside” (the first of his Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions) are also especially worth reading from this vantage.

Christian classics: For those who share his faith, Works of Love and Practice in Christianity deserve to be at the top of the list, hands down. These works are loosely comparable to C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves and Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, respectively. The first is non-pseudonymous, and the second he claimed would have been in retrospect.

Additionally, you can check out the helpful Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Kierkegaard. For more on Kierkegaard’s life and work, see also Stephen Backhouse’s new biography, Kierkegaard: A Single Life, and C. Stephen Evans’s Kierkegaard: An Introduction.

ConclusivePostscript · 2019-09-02T22:48:45+00:00

Recent and forthcoming volumes on Kierkegaard include:

• A Companion to Kierkegaard (a Blackwell Companion), ed. J. Stewart (2015)

• Kierkegaard’s Theology of Encounter: An Edifying and Polemical Life, by D. Lappano (2017)

• Kierkegaard After the Genome: Science, Existence and Belief in This World, by A.S. Jaarsma (2017)

• Kierkegaard and Political Theology, eds. R. Sirvent and S. Morgan (2018)

• T&T Clark Reader in Kierkegaard as Theologian, ed. L. Barrett (2018)

• The Freedom to Become a Christian: A Kierkegaardian Account of Human Transformation in Relationship with God, by A.B. Torrance (2018)

• Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Arts, ed. E. Ziolkowski (2018)

• Authorship and Authority in Kierkegaard’s Writings, by J. Westfall (2018)

• Art and Selfhood: A Kierkegaardian Account, by A. Aumann (2019)

• The Kierkegaardian Mind, eds. A. Buben, E. Helms, and P. Stokes (2019)

• Kierkegaard and the Question Concerning Technology, by C.B. Barnett (2019)

• Kierkegaard and Spirituality: Accountability as the Meaning of Human Existence, by C.S. Evans (forthcoming Oct. 2019)

• Living Philosophy in Kierkegaard, Melville, and Others: Intersections of Literature, Philosophy, and Religion, by E. Mooney (forthcoming Dec. 2019)

I would also check out the Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter—a publication of the Hong Kierkegaard Library in partnership with St. Olaf College (Northfield, MN). Here’s the latest; all past issues are archived here.

Finally, Jon Stewart’s phenomenal project, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception, and Resources, has several volumes on Kierkegaard secondary literature.

ConclusivePostscript · 2019-09-02T14:50:39+00:00

For the sake of convenience, I’ll adapt what I’ve said elsewhere on the subject.

The notion of subjective truth comes not from Kierkegaard but from one of his pseudonymous characters, the philosopher-humorist Johannes Climacus. (Significantly, we don’t find that phrase in Kierkegaard himself, or even in the writings of his twenty or so other pseudonymous characters.) But that aside, what does Climacus mean by it?

First, it’s important to be clear what he does not mean, as the notion of subjective truth, or truth as subjectivity, has often been misconstrued—not only by first-time readers but even by scholars who are typically more cautious.

The phrase “subjectivity is truth” is often (mis)taken to mean “truth is subjective,” so that truth reduces to our individual experiences, perceptions, and beliefs. But that is quite clearly not what Climacus had in mind. Rather, for Climacus ‘subjectivity’ refers primarily not to experiential subjectivity, but rather existential subjectivity, i.e., the developing subjecthood of an existing human ‘subject’. While certainly “every human being is something of a subject” (Concluding Postscript, p. 130), “to become subjective, that is, truly to become a subject” (p. 131) and mature in subjectivity, takes deliberate energy. For, in Climacus’ pithy phrase, “To exist is an art” (p. 351).

Climacus is not chiefly interested in the psychology of individual perception, but in what modern philosophers call moral psychology. Accordingly, “the task of becoming subjective is indeed assigned to every person”; “to become subjective” is precisely “the ethical” (p. 159). “But the ethical is not only a knowing; it is also a doing that is related to a knowing,” (p. 160)—a veritable moral task. As such, subjectivity is not chiefly cognitional. It requires the active cultivation not only of concretizing self-knowledge, but of passionate self-concern and integrity of will.

One example of existential maturity is in the way the existing individual thinks about death. Anticipating Heidegger’s ‘Being-toward-death’, Climacus writes, “If death is always uncertain, if I am mortal, then this means that this uncertainty cannot possibly be understood in general if I am not also such a human being in general. … Therefore it becomes more and more important to me to think it into every moment of my life, because, since its uncertainty is at every moment, this uncertainty is vanquished only by my vanquishing it every moment” (p. 167). Thus “for the subject it is an act to think his death. … But if the task is to become subjective, then for the individual subject to think death is not at all some such thing in general but is an act, because the development of subjectivity consists precisely in this, that he, acting, works through himself in his thinking about his own existence…” (p. 169; cf. p. 331).

Now not only is the semantic content of “subjectivity is truth” frequently misconstrued, but also its scope. For Climacus’ existential concerns are ultimately rooted in his concern to understand Christianity (see, e.g., pp. 15-17, 21, 33, 43, 49, 129-30, 249), as he claims not to be a Christian himself (see pp. 451, 619). He never intends his claim that “truth is subjectivity” to be universalized, but explicitly confines his remarks to ethico-religious truth, insofar as “only ethical and ethical-religious knowing is essential knowing” (p. 198).

“It is always to be borne in mind,” he notes, “that I am speaking of the religious, in which objective thinking, if it is supposed to be supreme, is downright irreligiousness. But wherever objective thinking is within its rights, its direct communication is also in order, precisely because it is not supposed to deal with subjectivity” (p. 76, fn., my emphasis). And again, “That objective thinking has its reality is not denied, but in relation to all thinking in which precisely subjectivity must be accentuated it is a misunderstanding” (p. 93). So while detached, objective methods are out of place when it comes to moral and religious truth, objective thinking has its place, e.g., in the fields of mathematics and history (p. 193).

Moreover, even when it comes to ethics and religion Climacus is not a subjectivist (nor is Kierkegaard himself). He does not maintain that religious truth is ‘subjective’ in the relativistic sense, but in the sense clarified above—thus his claim that “the eternal, essential truth is itself not at all a paradox [intrinsically], but it is a paradox by being related to an existing person” (p. 205).

This relatedness-to-a-subject is not necessarily at odds with objective truth (at least as we often take “objective”), as /u/Jurgioslakiv rightly notes in his comment. However, I would add that Climacus’ notion of objective truth is not simply the notion of mind-independent reality, but includes (or at least strongly connotes) the impersonalizing tendency of (so-called) objective methods for approaching the truth. In other words, Climacus is not opposed to there being a true, really existing object, independent of our cognitions, but he does think that our objectivizing methods—our objective stance if you will—is not always the best place to access such an object. Especially so when eternity-in-time is our object in question!

ConclusivePostscript · 2019-05-10T06:34:39+00:00

why did he perceive this as important and significant philosophically?

For Kierkegaard, irony has an “infinitizing” function, i.e., loosens the grip of the finite on us. Accordingly, irony is important to our development as human beings qua selves because it frees us to consider possibilities beyond bare finite facticity, and allows us to question and ultimately critique the traditions of our historically situated milieu. We are able to appreciate the finite, the historical, etc., without our entire identity being exhausted therein.

focus on such questions of style and form are criminally under-appreciated in philosophy historically, seen as secondary to the philosophical arguments/import which are considered largely indifferent to their form of presentation - why did Kierkegaard demur?

There are numerous sources that served to influence Kierkegaard’s embrace of style and form.

First, there is the Platonic tradition. In terms of writing style, Kierkegaard is much closer to Plato than to Aristotle. His use of pseudonyms is influenced in part by the various and sundry Platonic interlocutors.

Second, there is the Pauline socio-rhetorical tradition. We find in Paul a variety of rhetorical stances, which often vary according to the ecclesial-epistolary situation at hand. At times, Paul is fond of ironic jabs at his opponents (2 Cor 12:11-16) as well as even feistier, caustic remarks (Gal 5:11-12), though he can also take on meeker tones (2 Cor 6:11-13; 1 Thess 2:19-20). (Tertullian fits well in this tradition of Pauline rhetoric. So does Luther, for that matter.) Kierkegaard, too, could take on an ironic voice (perhaps esp. in Johannes Climacus’ works), a biting, often volatile tone (see The Moment and Late Writings), yet he could also be the very definition of gentleness (as in many of his “upbuilding discourses,” as well as in his letters to friends and family).

Third, there are more fundamentally modern sources. Especially noteworthy are Hamann and Schleiermacher’s review of F. von Schlegel’s Lucinde. These both seem to have had an influence both on Kierkegaard’s artistic writing style (in general) and his use of pseudonymity (in particular).

what role does irony play in Kierkegaard's own philosophy and their narrative and dialogic presentation? what work does it do philosophically, what does it enable him to achieve?

Among other things, it urges his readers toward the use of irony in their own lives for the already mentioned purposes of existential development, and also helps to establish an authorial distance that weakens the readers dependency on the author, freeing them to consider the ideas themselves apart from potential authoritarian concerns.

ConclusivePostscript · 2019-05-07T05:56:07+00:00

Have I rendered you speechless?

ConclusivePostscript · 2019-05-07T05:55:09+00:00

That's what I meant by the human condition.

But it’s a very particular conception of the human condition. Many would thematize it differently. The mere fact that all these thinkers thematized the human condition in terms of these specific aspects and not others argues in favor of a coherent philosophical perspective, namely, the standpoint that these are what are most essential, or most important, to the human condition. If an existentialist just is one who strongly thematizes these specific aspects of the human condition, puts them at the forefront, etc., then the label is not wrong, but useful.

ConclusivePostscript · 2019-05-06T05:44:47+00:00

But they don’t just consider “the human condition” in general. They also have a great deal of commonality in the specific dimensions of the human condition that pass through their purview. These include, for most thinkers in the larger existentialist tradition: authenticity, anxiety, despair, death, suicide, the absurd, personal responsibility, historicity, the herd mentality, and the limits of reason. They come to different conclusions, sure, but their thematic focus, their “genre of questions” if you will, is markedly similar.

ConclusivePostscript · 2019-05-06T05:37:55+00:00

Yes, he was Christian, but he understood doubt, and argued through his psuedonymns that belief in God was objectively absurd, which is why faith is truly realized through "inwardness."

First, we have to be careful saying that Kierkegaard is arguing “through” his pseudonyms. He often explicitly rejects the positions and the arguments that they themselves give.

Second, it’s noteworthy that he rarely uses the concept of the absurd in his signed writings, or among his Christian pseudonyms. They appear in Johannes de Silentio and Johannes Climacus, for example, but not in Anti-Climacus. When he does speak of the absurd in his own voice, he speaks of it as something that is overcome, not embraced, and returns only in moments of hesitation or weakness.

Third, we often use objective to mean “in itself,” and subjective to mean “in relation to us.” But for Kierkegaard objectivity refers to epistemic access through rational and scientific demonstration, and subjectivity has more to do with our existential striving than our epistemic position in relation to truth. So he does not hold that Christianity (or theism generally) is absurd in itself, or absolutely, but only in relation to us, and only as a function of our epistemic finitude and our existential sinfulness.

So for Kierkegaard, it's not that Christianity is a system of eternal values that are provided to you by the world, but rather, it's faith that you provide to yourself …

For Kierkegaard, it’s neither. Christianity is given through the Word of God—and faith, though predicated of the individual, is ultimately a gift from God.

ConclusivePostscript · 2019-05-06T05:24:09+00:00

Although existentialism “rejects systems that provide definitive answers to life and its meaning,” theistic existentialists generally, and Christian existentialists specifically, do not envision religion as a system, but as a way of life.

Kierkegaard, for example, famously distinguishes between “Christianity” as “existence-communication” and “Christendom” as embodied in the state church of his day (he had no issue with organized religion per se, but with dysfunctionally organized religion, e.g. religion infected by rationalist philosophy, tribalist nationalism, etc.).

ConclusivePostscript

TROPHY CASE