Kierkegaard presents
his pseudonymous authorship as a dialectical progression of existential
stages. The first is the aesthetic, which gives way to the ethical, which gives way to the religious.
The aesthetic stage of existence is characterized by the following: immersion in sensuous
experience; valorization of possibility over actuality; egotism; fragmentation of the subject of
experience; nihilistic wielding of irony and scepticism; and flight from boredom.
The figure of the
aesthete in the first volume of Either-Or is an ironic portrayal of German
romanticism, but it also draws on medieval characters as diverse as Don Juan, Ahasverus (the
wandering Jew), and Faust. It finds its most sophisticated form in the author of "The Seducer's
Diary", the final section of Either- Or. Johannes the seducer is a reflective aesthete,
who
gains sensuous delight not so much from the act of seduction but from engineering the possibility
of seduction. His real aim is the manipulation of people and situations in ways which generate
interesting reflections in his own voyeuristic mind. The aesthetic perspective transforms
quotidian dullness into a richly poetic world by whatever means it can. Sometimes the reflective
aesthete will inject interest into a book by reading only the last third, or into a conversation by
provoking a bore into an apoplectic fit so that he can see a bead of sweat form between the
bore's eyes and run down his nose. That is, the aesthete uses artifice, arbitrariness, irony, and
wilful imagination to recreate the world in his own image. The prime motivation for the aesthete
is the transformation of the boring into the interesting.
This type of aestheticism
is criticized from the point of view of ethics. It is seen to be emptily
self-serving and escapist. It is a despairing means of avoiding commitment and responsibility. It
fails to acknowledge one's social debt and communal existence. And it is self-deceiving insofar
as it substitutes fantasies for actual states of affairs.
But Kierkegaard
did not want to abandon aesthetics altogether in favor of the ethical and the
religious. A key concept in the Hegelian dialectic, which Kierkegaard's pseudonymous
authorship parodies, is Aufhebung (sublation). In Hegel's dialectic, when contradictory
positions are reconciled in a higher unity (synthesis) they are both annulled and preserved
(aufgehoben). Similarly with Kierkegaard's pseudo- dialectic: the aesthetic and the ethical are
both annulled and preserved in their synthesis in the religious stage. As far as the aesthetic stage
of existence is concerned what is preserved in the higher religious stage is the sense of infinite
possibility made available through the imagination. But this no longer excludes what is actual.
Nor is it employed for egotistic ends. Aesthetic irony is transformed into religious humor, and
the aesthetic transfiguration of the actual world into the ideal is transformed into the religious
transubstantiation of the finite world into an actual reconciliation with the infinite.
But the dialectic
of the pseudonymous authorship never quite reaches the truly religious. We
stop short at the representation of the religious by a self-confessed humorist (Johannes
Climacus) in a medium which, according to Climacus's own account, necessarily alienates the
reader from true (Christian) faith. For faith is a matter of lived experience, of constant striving
within an individual's existence. According to Climacus's metaphysics, the world is divided
dualistically into the actual and the ideal. Language (and all other media of representation)
belong to the realm of the ideal. No matter how eloquent or evocative language is it can never
be the actual. Therefore, any representation of faith is always suspended in the realm of ideality
and can never be actual faith.
So the whole dialectic
of the pseudonymous authorship is recuperated by the aesthetic by virtue
of its medium of representation. In fact Johannes Climacus acknowledges this implicitly when at
the end of Concluding Unscientific Postscript he revokes everything he has said, with
the
important rider that to say something then to revoke it is not the same as never having said it in
the first place. His presentation of religious faith in an aesthetic medium at least provides an
opportunity for his readers to make their own leap of faith, by appropriating with inward
passion the paradoxical religion of Christianity into their own lives.
As a poet of the
religious Kierkegaard was always preoccupied with aesthetics. In fact,
contrary to popular misconceptions of Kierkegaard which represent him as becoming
increasingly hostile to poetry, he referred increasingly to himself as a poet in his later years (all
but one of over ninety references to himself as a poet in his journals date from after 1847).
Kierkegaard never claimed to write with religious authority, as an apostle. His works represent
both less religiously enlightened and more religiously enlightened positions than he thought he
had attained in his own existence. Such representations were only possible in an aesthetic
medium of imagined possibilities like poetry.
1. David Borenstein
