The Ethics of Authorship: Communication, Seduction, and Death in Hegel and Kierkegaard

1. A Question of Style

1. A Question of Style Every profound thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood. friedrich nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil To be honest, I rarely understood [Hegel]. . . . I believe he really did not want to be understood. heinrich heine, Geständnisse I give you advance notice that there will come moments . . . when I . . . must set between ourselves the awakening of misunderstanding. søren kierkegaard, Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers kierkegaard defines his authorship in a negative space in relation to Hegel, the Great Philosopher, who serves as the ground against which the figure of Kierkegaard emerges and takes on his own identity. At the heart of this project of identity formation through contrast is the distinction Kierkegaard draws between styles of authorship. Hegel, we have seen, philosophizes with a megaphone —a ‘‘giant speaking trumpet’’—perfecting the authoritarian voice of the Father, laying down the Law of objective truth for all to hear (and obey). Kierkegaard speaks in a whisper, with a voice so soft that it disappears into silence, leaving the reader with no option but to reconstruct the text for herself. Hegel’s voice is direct: He gives directions to the reader. Kierkegaard’s voice is indirect: He leaves the reader to find her own direction. 14 a question of style ‡ 15 Jokes At first glance, there is something rather funny here: Kierkegaard, such a beautiful, lucid writer, depicts his style as elusive and oblique; yet Hegel, so famously impenetrable and opaque, is portrayed as a ‘‘direct’’ communicator. But there is a deeper joke. Mere opaqueness does not make for ‘‘indirection’’ in Kierkegaard’s sense; indirection requires art, subtlety, irony, and masquerade. The confusing and serpentine character of Hegel’s texts is not due to art but to an abstruse scientization of existence. Hence the joke is on Hegel: He is trying to be direct, trying to compel his readers to accept the objective certainty of his logically derived truths, yet he is so poor a stylist that he botches it. However funny this joke, there is something pathetic as well to be found in the picture of Hegel so ardently and humorlessly struggling to broadcast the Truths of his system, yet becoming famous among his students for the inchoate character of his lectures. One student speaks of Hegel’s ‘‘lame, dragging lectures, interrupted by eternal repetitions and irrelevant filler words,’’ and another records his impressions of Hegel’s performance in this way: Exhausted, morose, he sat there as if collapsed into himself, his head bent down, and while speaking kept turning pages and searching in his long folio notebooks, forward and backward, high and low. His constant clearing of his throat and coughing interrupted any flow of speech. Every sentence stood alone and came out with effort, cut in pieces and jumbled.1 Even outside the lecture hall, Hegel was known to so bewilder his companions with his ‘‘oddly complicated grammatical forms’’ and ‘‘peculiarly employed philosophical formulas’’—as Goethe’s daughter -in-law reports of a luncheon at Goethe’s house—that he would ‘‘reduce [his guests] to complete silence without [Hegel’s] even noticing ’’ (Letters 711). As for Kierkegaard, we have the reverse situation, a brilliant speaker and writer whose eloquence is turned to the service of secrecy and hidden plans. His entire pseudonymous authorship is produced as an ‘‘enigmatic mystery,’’ filled with ‘‘double entente,’’ 16 ‡ a question of style ‘‘ambiguity,’’ ‘‘riddle,’’ and ‘‘duplicity’’ (PV 5, 8, 10). Everything is ‘‘so complicated,’’ as Victor Eremita, the pseudonymous ‘‘editor’’ of Either/Or, admits, that one meaning is ‘‘enclosed in another, like the parts in a Chinese puzzle box’’ (E/Or 1:9). Thus whereas Hegel, the obscure author, nevertheless philosophizes with a megaphone, Kierkegaard, the dazzling author, philosophizes with, . . . well, we might say ‘‘silence’’—with what remains unsaid in any explicit way—or with a mask or an ironic smile. In what follows, I want to suggest that there is a yet deeper joke to be found here, a joke within a joke. However funny the picture of Hegel industriously striving to be direct but having his unintelligible style of speech get in his way, funnier still—and incomparably more interesting in terms of the opportunities for dialogue with Kierkegaard—is that Kierkegaard’s project of distinguishing between his own form of communication and that of Hegel is largely a misdirected effort, since Hegel’s philosophy itself is a consummate...