“The human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation which relates to itself, or that in the relation which is its relating to itself. The self is not the relation but the relation’s relating to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity. In short a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two terms. Looked at in this way a human being is not yet a self. In a relation between two things the relation is the third term in the form of a negative unity, and the two relate to the relation, and in the relation to that relation; this is what it is from the point of view of soul for soul and body to be in relation. If, on the other hand, the relation relates to itself, then this relation is the positive third, and this is the self…” etc.
— Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death
Did you find that difficult to read or understand? Many people do, including many who are named among the ranks of seasoned “Kierkegaard scholars.” This is how those of my friends who know Kierkegaard remember him, as difficult to read both in Danish and in English. I, for one, have always found the passage intriguing. Why did the Melancholy Dane choose to explain the self in that way? Was he, indeed, trying to explain it at all? Or was he, in that way of his, attempting to deceive his readier into some truth?
But realizing that it is impossible to get into the author’s mind, I have been more interested in what the effect of this passage is on myself as a reader, and on those who have shared their experience of it with me. Do these experiences build any bridges to author’s intent? This interest comes naturally to me, as I have always been a reader who has always been more interested in style than plot per se, and the 2022 SKC Annual Conference on “The Textuality of Kierkegaard’s Thought: Words, Images, Phenomena, and Concepts” was an opportunity for me to hear from a scholar who not only shares in that disposition, but makes it her business to apply it to her study of Kierkegaard’s text.
In this post, I want to share my reflections on her presentation with you. It is, of course, also my attempt to practice the discipline of repetition, a practice that I think holds the big clue to Kierkegaard’s great, but often annoying style.
Lilian Munk Rösing (b. 1967) is a lecturer in literature at the University of Copenhagen and a literary critic. Her presentation was entitled “Who Speaks: A literary perspective on voice in Kierkegaard,” but focused on the subtitle. In other words, rather than on the mind and positionality of the author, she addressed the how of his writing — the tone of voice. Reflecting that one of her first reactions to Kierkegaard was “Kierkegaard is so very funny,” his tone of voice became important to her early on. And there is a great range of this tonality in the works of the Danish philosopher. To paraphrase her, it ranges from a “monotonous tone of very earnest, insistent address, marked by almost incessant repetition…” to “the completely mind-blowing, subtly eloquent voice of a philosopher to something more of the voice of a preacher.” It embraces, citing a stylistic critic, “a paraodoxical mixture of agitation and comedy.”
She also cites a passage from Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, in which he, or rather his pseudonymous Victor Eremita, agonises over his failure to speak with the right tone. Here, I quote a little more of it to bring out the reality of his struggle:
What I need is a voice as piercing as the glance of Lynceus, as terrifying as the groan of the giants, as sustained as a sound of nature, as mocking as an icy gust of wind, as malicious as echo’s heartless taunting, extending in range from the deepest bass to the most melting high notes, and modulated from a solemn silent whisper to the energy of rage. That is what I need in order to breathe, to give voice to what is on my mind, to have the viscera of both anger and sympathy shaken. — But my voice is only hoarse like the scream of a gull or moribund like the blessing on the lips of the mute.
But why is the author so concerned with this? It is as if the content of what he is saying is not enough, and anyone familiar with Kierkegaard’s style of indirect communication realizes this. It is not enough, not for his purposes, for his purposes are not for the reader to glean some rational system, but to have a real subject experience. He does this with concepts that should not be grasped as concepts — death, existence, subjectivity itself, the actuality and immediacy of experience as well as the possibility of the eternal and absolute. Kierkegaard wants his reader to go away not with a sense of having understood what he means by them, but with an experience of what it is for them to be lived. Actually, ever and always, pertains to the individual. And as such, his text must elicit a mood, a disposition.
Having realized this, Rösing’s task is show in its true difficulty. “Can textual and stylistic analysis reach to the mood of a text?” she asks. If the mood to be experienced is in the tone of voice of the text, “can stylistic analysis sharpen our sense of hearing while reading?” Her thesis is that within limits, it can. In her reading, Kierkegaard achieves it by using devices like paradox, repetition, and dialogical address, and her presentation focused on repetition. Consider this quotation, translated from Either/Or by Howard and Edna Hong:
I don’t feel like doing anything. I don’t feel like riding the motion is too powerful; I don’t feel like walking-it is too tiring; I don’t feel like lying down, for either I would have to stay down, and I don’t feel like doing that, or I would have to get up again, and I don’t feel like doing that, either. Summa Summarum: I don’t feel like doing anything.
She reflects that such writing requires the reader to expend energy on the level of articulation, while on the level of the enunciated meaning it achieves quite the opposite. This strain is easy to see in the graphic if one looks at the original Danish, even if, like myself, one does not understand it. I’m reminded of the powerful alliteration in the Hebrew passage on the tower of Babel that is lost in the English. To speak this would definitely engage the speaking faculties. But it also has a wearing out effect that is precisely what the author means — you don’t want to speak it.
All this might be well and good for wearing out the reader, but does it help thematically? Can it, for example, help Kierkegaard show how love is present in the commandment to love one’s neighbour? Can it help one to experience the command not as a command, but as love? Rosing argues that Kierkegaard’s Works of Love suggests, not in its content but in its style, that this can be done through a change of the tone of voice. She illustrates this by showing us an excerpt of the table of contents of the work:
A. You shall love
B. You shall love your neighbour
C. You shall love your neighbour
By emphasising these different elements, the writer strives to induce a consideration of the true meaning of the commandment. But the effect is achieved also in the repetitiveness. It is not only about the imperativensess of the statement — shall — but about you, and your neighbour. Repetition allows, then, what Rosing describes as metamorphosis through redundancy. It is as though one can see the love better when the ‘commandedness’ of it is worn out through endless repetition, a repetition that then affords a shift of focus, achieved here through italicising.
It is an interesting idea. Is it Kierkegaard’s intention? We will never know, I think, but I suspect so. Repetition, of course, is one of his great hopes for his readers, that they will develop the discipline of interiority that allows experience to be deepened through reflection, through, to the extent possible, an internal reliving of it. Of course, the immediacy of any event is lost once it is over, but perhaps — and to draw from another fascinating presentation by Elizabeth Li — there is a postponement and an eternalising that is still available to the repeater.
When I heard the talk, I thought again about the passage in Sickness Unto Death. “The self is a relation which relates to itself, or that in the relation which is its relating to itself. The self is not the relation but the relation’s relating to itself…” etc. Perhaps, after all, all those friends of mine are exactly on the money on the meaning of the passage.
Perhaps, and this would be consistent with Kierkegaard’s view of the individual as living in a state of constant tension between possibility and actuality, being and non-being, perhaps the meaning of the passage is the restlessness it not so much induces, but exposes, in us. Why, after all, are we restless? We read many difficult passages in many difficult fields, especially those of us who are academics. And even when we complain of their difficulty, we nonetheless respect that often (of course, not always!) it comes with the territory.
In this case, I suspect, we feel as if the complexity is unwarranted. We are, after all, only talking about the self. It is something we all have — are, every day. We live it, and therefore think we know it. We are exasperated not merely with the impression that the passage is complex, but by a sense that it is needlessly complex. But, I suggest, if we stop and think again about our “selves” and what they are, the complexity, depth, and difficulty with which we experience our lives, we will see that the restlessness is already always there in us.
The tension exists, not always as a feeling (although sometimes in moments of extreme crisis it is experienced as a feeling), but always as a truth, a truth that we are on a journey that is hard, interesting, fraught with perils at every turn, the biggest of all being the fear of where we will arrive, or if we ever will. Whenever we sigh at the passage, or indeed at similar ones strewn across the text-world of Kierkegaard, it may just be that constant unutterable groaning inside us letting itself heard. It may just be the self, relating to itself.