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Appendix Two  Kierkegaard, Carlyle, and Silence The following comments complement both the discussion of Kierkegaard and silence in chapter 2, and the comparison of Kierkegaard and Carlyle in chapter 5. Aside from Kierkegaard himself, one of the most famous advocates of silence in Kierkegaard’s time was Thomas Carlyle, despite his being by his own admission an inveterately loquacious man.1 As one witticism has it, Carlyle considered silence to be golden and demonstrated the fact in fifty octavo volumes,2 an irony heightened by his own protestations against the verbosity of the philosophes. Reminiscent of Carlyle’s complaint about the “soul-confusing Babylonish hubbub” of the current “new Tower-of-Babel era” (“Goethe’s Works” [1832], in WTC 27:443), Kierkegaard disdains what he himself calls the “chatter” (Passiar) and “noise” (Larm) of the present age, an age he deems antithetical to the ideal silence (Pap. III A 100, n.d. 1841/JP 4:3977; Pap. V A 96, n.d. 1844/JP 4:3980).3 According to the formulation proffered in his review of the novel Two Ages (1846) by Thomasine Gyllembourg, and endorsed by the novel’s publisher, her son J. L. Heiberg,4 “to chatter [snakke]” or “to be loquacious [raisonere]” constitutes “the annulment of the passionate disjunction between being silent and speaking” or “the annulled passionate disjunction between subjectivity and objectivity” (SV1 8:91, 96/TA 97, 103; see also SV1 8:60/TA 63–64; Pap. VII1 B 127:3, n.d. 1845–46/TA, Suppl., 139–40). Even more so than Carlyle, Kierkegaard remains obsessed with notions of silence (Taushed) and quiet or stillness (Stilhed) throughout his writings. The bearing of these notions upon his struggle to reconcile inwardness and communication is expressed through his choice of the Latin pseudonyms Johannes de Silentio and Frater Taciturnus. Equally pertinent is the pseudonym Johannes Climacus . His historical namesake, the sixth-century Christian ascetic and hesychast, disparaged talkativeness (πολυλογία) as “the throne of vainglory ” (κενοδοξίας καθέδρα), exalted the mastery of silence (σιωπή) as an 315 essential step in one’s spiritual ascent toward God,5 and declared that “the start of stillness [ἡσυχίαϚ] is the rejection of all noisiness as something that will trouble the depths of the soul.”6 Kierkegaard’s and Carlyle’s multifaceted understandings of silence warrant a much lengthier comparison than is possible here. The term assumes at least five different meanings in Carlyle’s usage: the silence accompanying the act of “unselfconscious genius,” which transcends talk; the silence which should meet all inconclusive questions, including those of theology; the silence of stoical endurance; the silence befitting the worship of the “Unnamable”; and the two “great silences” of the grave and the stars. Like Carlyle, Kierkegaard must have encountered memorable allusions to silence in Jean Paul, Fichte, and Goethe, each of whom in one way or another portrays silence as the seedbed for moral action and associates it with the eternal or the divine.7 Nonetheless , silence becomes a far more complex, varied, and nuanced affair for Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms, as they construe its different forms in accordance with the varying exigencies of the stages of existence. Mark C. Taylor identifies four “sounds” of voluntary silence that typify the reflective pole of the aesthetic stage as presented in Fear and Trembling’s “Problema III” alone: comic, deceitful, heroic, and demonic silence, each of which is a binary opposite of speech. These voluntary forms are distinguishable from the involuntary silence that must characterize the pre-reflective, sensual immediate pole of the aesthetic stage (because any thought, communication, or self-expression would negate immediacy), and also from the divine silence that necessarily characterizes the religious stage (as a function of the believer’s individualized and private relation to God). While starkly contrasting with the commitment to selfexpression and disclosure required by ethical existence, the divine silence also stands in a paradoxical relation to the demonic, aesthetic silence and concealment that the ethicist condemns.8 “Silence,” says Johannes de Silentio, summing up the ethical and religious views successively, “is the demon’s trap, and the more that is silenced, the more terrible the demon, but silence is also divinity’s mutual understanding within the single individual ” (SV1 3:136/FT 88). Among these notions, the two that Carlyle definitely shares are those of heroic and divine silence. Yet Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms draw silence or stillness into literally dozens of other connections, associating it with—to give but a sampling—genius (Pap. VII2 B 261:18, n.d. 1846...

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