Secret Agents: After Kierkegaard's Subject

One ought to be a mystery, not only to
others, but also to one’s self . . .

—Either/Or

Every so often, and driven by a slightly different critical impulse in each case, a new collection of essays dedicated to the writings of Søren Kierkegaard appears. One can hardly doubt the enduring importance of Kierkegaard for literary and philosophical study, yet identifying this significance with any genuine precision, much less consensus, has proven to be a task as elusive as it is repetitive. At stake always seems to be the same issue of what, finally, can be learned from Kierkegaard. And, of course, nothing could be more appropriate to the production of academic criticism and scholarship than asking what, exactly, its object of study is still capable of teaching us. There is something odd, though, about devoting an academic study to an author like Kierkegaard in the first place, for it immediately encounters Kierkegaard’s own virulent resistance to academic institutions to which publications like this one necessarily belong, whether they like it or not, whether they admit it or not. Indeed, it is difficult to know just how to proceed with a thinker who considered academics in general to be “a pack of robbers who, in the guise of serving the idea, betray the true servants and confuse the people, all for the sake of paltry earthly advantage.” ¹ As a teacher, then, Kierkegaard hardly invites us to become students of his writings in an orthodox manner, bequeathing to us professional commentators a legacy that resembles a curse far more than a blessing: “Were there no hell, it would have to be created in order to punish the professors, whose crimes are such that they are barely punishable in this world . . .” (Journal, 3:653). The prospect of immediately becoming a thieving money-grubber, a betrayer of ideas, a source of confusion for the general reader, well, that doesn’t really constitute much of an incentive to write on Kierkegaard, does it?

And then there is another side to Kierkegaard’s resistance to commentary. Even if one somehow managed to avoid the hellish tendencies of the professors, an ideal that is not inconceivable in itself and surely worthy of our best efforts, there is still no guarantee that the results would ever satisfy the desire to pierce the innermost secrets contained by his texts. In another Journal entry that has not failed to produce precisely the type of exegetic divinations that it both foretells and dooms to failure, Kierkegaard assures us that, “no one will find in my writings the slightest information (this is my consolation) about what really filled my life . . .” (Journal, 5:226). That Kierkegaard, who definitely did write, and wrote quite a bit about himself at that, finds this outcome a “consolation,” suggests that the real reason for reading his writing, whatever secrets he might have left to teach us about, have little or nothing to do with providing us with information about what filled his life.

This rather inauspicious beginning, though, offers at least two possible insights with respect to how not to write about Kierkegaard. These two most common recipes for the failure to read Kierkegaard would therefore be: looking for information about Kierkegaard himself, or using Kierkegaard’s texts as a pretext for pedagogical purposes. But what exactly does that leave? If one cannot read Kierkegaard in order to learn something about Kierkegaard—since, ultimately, there is nothing essential of him left there—and one cannot read Kierkegaard in order to teach others about anything—since in so doing one would only confuse people and betray the very ideas one pretends to be writing about—what can one possibly do when one reads Kierkegaard and then writes about it?

To take a hint from Kierkegaard, one can perhaps only ask oneself over and over again the very same question, which is also the question about what, exactly, one can ever learn at all. The book that states this question most directly is, of course, Philosophical Fragments: “How far does the truth admit of being learned? With this question let us begin. . . .” ² The...