Irony on Occasion: From Schlegel and Kierkegaard to Derrida and de Man

5. Fear and Trembling: “Who Is Able to Understand Abraham?”

121 f i v e Fear and Trembling: “Who Is Able to Understand Abraham?” Just how serious was Socrates when he claimed to know nothing? “When Socrates said that he was without knowledge [uvidende],” Kierkegaard writes, summing up his treatment of Socratic irony near the end of his thesis, “he nevertheless did know something, for he knew about his ignorance [Uvidenhed]; on the other hand, however, this knowledge [Viden] was not a knowledge of something.”1 At stake, as always for Kierkegaard, is therefore the degree to which the negativity of irony—its own nothingness—is serious; is to be, or can be, taken in earnest. And wherever the knowledge in question is one that has to do with historical actuality, or existence, then the possibility of irony, or nothingness, has to be considered to be among the most serious questions for whatever subject is able, like Socrates, to ask about it in this way. Why is it, then, that Kierkegaard will follow his 1841 thesis with the publication of what he called his “aesthetic” works—works that in fact aim to treat the most serious questions, but do so in a seemingly nonserious manner, duplicitously, and under the false pretense of literary pseudonyms? There is something odd, something paradoxical about the way Kierkegaard deals in 1841 with the philosophical question of irony in accordance with “serious” conventions; 122 Romantic Irony in other words, by respecting an institutional framework that requires him to follow clearly defined rules and to speak in his own name. Just a few years later, however, from 1843 to 1846, he will write about religious questions in the string of books for which, in addition to the thesis on irony, he is most justly remembered—Either/Or, Repetition, Fear and Trembling, Philosophical Fragments, The Concept of Anxiety, Prefaces, Stages on Life’s Way, and Concluding Unscientific Postscript—in an aesthetic mode of pseudonymity that, at least in appearance, takes itself even less seriously than the less seriously religious mode of academic philosophy. If, as Kierkegaard also claimed in The Concept of Irony, historical actuality, den historiske Virkelighed, always stands in a twofold relation to the subject— partly as a gift from the past and partly as a task for the future—then why, exactly , when Kierkegaard makes his own transition from his past (as a student of Hegel’s philosophy) to his future (as a religious thinker) does he not undertake this task in his own name? The question of transition, moreover, cannot be restricted here to the empirical journey that the person named Søren Kierkegaard is in the process of making for himself between 1841 and 1843, and by which he would complete the passage from philosophical scholar to religious witness, since it constitutes at the same time the essential difference that the impersonal and pseudonymous authors standing in for Kierkegaard are elaborating in their writings between philosophy and religion as two related but nonidentical modes of taking existence, Tilværelsen, seriously. Transition (Overgang), or more properly speaking, mediation (Mediation), is the category by which modern philosophy—in other words, Hegelian philosophy —has understood, though in distorted manner, mistakenly, and thus misleadingly, what Kierkegaard will designate in Repetition as “repetition.”2 According to Repetition’s dissimulated author, Constantin Constantius, the Hegelian concept of mediation, Vermittelung, covers over rather than brings to light (ikke forklaret) how mediation actually takes place (fremkommer). That is, Hegel’s philosophy does not explain whether mediation is to be conceived as a motion (Bevægelse) wholly accounted for by two factors, the way, for instance , a cause is always implied and even contained in its effect and vice versa; or whether something entirely new has to be added, and if that is the case, how this might be understood to happen. Constantin Constantius, repeating something he had already suggested on the very first page of Repetition, suggests that the Hegelian concepts of mediation and transition should both be considered contemporary versions of what the Greeks attempted, more originally than Hegel, to think under the rubric of kivnhsi~—kinesis as motion and “Who Is Able to Understand Abraham?” 123 movement, but also as change. Speaking through his pseudonym, or disguise, Kierkegaard is therefore saying that we must rethink the Greek concept of kinesis in order first of all to dislodge Hegel’s distorted understanding of it as mediation, so that we can prepare the way for something...