chapter 5

K ierkega ard and Romanticism

w illiam m c d onald

‘First of all I must protest against the view that the Romantic can be captured in a defi nition, for the Romantic lies essentially in fl owing over all boundaries’

(Pap. I A 130 [JP3 3796]).

Kierkegaard has an ambivalent attitude toward the Romantics. On the one hand, in his master’s dissertation, he savages the concept of irony in the work of the early German Romantics Friedrich Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck, and Karl Solger. In Either/Or he satirizes Friedrich Schlegel’s novel Lucinde , and in his pseudonymous authorship he relegates the aesthetic, which he takes to be almost synonymous with Romantic (Söderquist 2008 : 222) , to the lowest stage on life’s way. On the other hand, in his literary reviews Kierkegaard borrows some of his key critical tools from Schlegel. He also models the structure of Either/Or partly on Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Confi dential Letters On Lucinde (Crouter 2005 : 110–17) , and he borrows other elements from the late German Romantic Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff (Purver 2008 : 42–3) . But most importantly, Kierkegaard engages vigorously with Romantic aesthetics, analysing, playing with, and critically transforming some of its central concepts, such as irony, the interesting, refl ec-tion, the individual and love, as well as some of the early Romantics’ key questions. Th ese include how to distinguish ancient from modern poetry and drama, how to communi-cate ethical and religious views, how to understand the relative importance of feeling, reason, intuition, sensation and imagination, and how to use the multifarious art of style implicit in the form of the novel to subvert the Bildungsroman (Garff 2006 : 83–99) and to represent the unrepresentable, how to rejuvenate religion, and how to become a self in the present age. He shares a love of Socrates and Plato, an admiration for Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Goethe, and a fascination for the mythology of the Middle Ages. He also takes seriously the early German Romantics’ view that literature should ultimately serve ethics and religion.

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Most of Kierkegaard’s explicit references to Romanticism in his authorship occur early, particularly in Th e Concept of Irony and Either/Or . Most references in his Journals and Notebooks are restricted to an even earlier period, from 1834 to 1837. On the other hand, references to some individuals associated with Romanticism—such as Adam Oehlenschläger, Jens Baggesen, Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Henrich Steff ens—are spread much more widely across both his published and unpublished works. However, these are oft en in the form of allusions or quotations rather than extended discussions. It seems, on the face of it, that Kierkegaard engaged vigorously with Romanticism only in his youth, indeed, in that period of his life when he cultivated the image of the fl âneur, alternating public displays of wit and irony with private melan-cholic self-absorption, in a quest to live poetically.

Th is appearance is misleading. Although Kierkegaard’s explicit discussions of Romanticism are restricted in his authorship, the metaphysical, aesthetic, ethical, and religious questions posed by the Romantics continued to occupy him. Th is essay will lay out some of the central themes and concepts framed by the Romantics and show how Kierkegaard responded to them. In pursuing this task it will pay particular attention to the work of the early German Romantics, especially Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis). However it will not repeat Kierkegaard’s critique of Romantic irony, since that has been dealt with extensively in the literature (cf. Behler 1997 , Söderquist 2008 , Söderquist 2003 , Stewart 2008 ). 1 But fi rstly we will locate Kierkegaard in the context of Romanticism in Denmark.

I. Romanticism in Denmark

By the time Kierkegaard began publishing in the late 1830s, Romanticism as a cultural movement was in decline and many of its progenitors were dead. Kierkegaard himself wrote of it as though it belonged to the past. It had been subjected to serious criticism by Hegel and Danish Hegelians such as J. L. Heiberg, and early Romanticism was dismissed by ‘Young Germany’ as reactionary and anti-rational (Heine 1961 , 5: 72–5) . While Jena Romanticism had been a heady mix of philosophy, poetry, science, literary criticism, politics, and religion, by the 1830s Danish Romanticism was largely confi ned to litera-ture, painting, and music, although there were important exceptions in the philosophical

1 Very briefl y, Kierkegaard criticized Romantic irony as nihilistic. It oscillates arbitrarily, in Friedrich Schelegel’s words, between ‘Selbstschöpfung und Selbstvernichtung’ [self-creation and self-annihilation] ( Stoljar 1973 : 49 ), in pursuit of ‘the interesting,’ instead of being subordinated to an ethical-religious end. Its ‘absolute, infi nite negativity’ is an empty repetition of Socratic irony, but lacks the latter’s world-historical signifi cance. Romantic irony runs wild in subjectivity, so that it loses touch with actuality. It elevates the category of possibility at the expense of the category of necessity, although (ironically) because of the Romantic emphasis on fate and chance, necessity is what actually rules it, while it retains only the fantasy of freedom. Whereas Socrates’ irony was a standpoint of negative engagement with the world, Romantic irony is a detached attitude . Kierkegaard’s strategic use of mastered irony, by contrast, is an existential commitment . For more on irony, see Brian Söderquist’s essay in this volume.

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aesthetics of F. C. Sibbern (cf. Pattison 1999 : 7–9) and in Poul Martin Møller’s Strøtanker [ Scattered Th oughts ]—a Romantic combination of aphorisms and Socratic dialogue (Th ielst 2003 : 47–48) . While early Danish Romanticism sought the roots of national identity in folktales and folk music, from the mid-1820s Danish Romanticism was inspired by the ‘naturalistic Romanticism’ of Byron, Heine, Victor Hugo, and their asso-ciated schools. Naturalistic Romanticism was characterized by individualism, passion, exoticism, and rebellion (Hertel 2003 : 362–3) . Almost from the outset Kierkegaard took these later forms of Romanticism to be symptomatic of deeper problems which origi-nate with early German Romanticism, in particular its aestheticism. Th erefore his criti-cisms are aimed primarily at the latter.

Th e inception of Danish Romanticism is usually dated from the lectures given in Copenhagen by Henrich Steff ens on the study of philosophy in 1802 and on Goethe’s poetry in 1803. Among the most receptive members of the audience were Adam Oehlenschläger and Steff ens’ cousin N. F. S. Grundtvig. Steff ens had obtained his doc-torate in mineralogy at the University of Kiel in 1796, but also studied the philosophy of J. G. Fichte and F. W. J. Schelling before he befriended Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich von Hardenberg, and the Schlegel brothers in Jena. Steff ens was therefore particularly dis-posed to emphasize the philosophy of nature to be found in the Jena school (Albeck 1965 : 18–21) . 2 Both Oehlenschläger and Grundtvig then went on to create literary works imbued with Romantic elements, notable for their use of Norse mythology. However, the tracing of the origins of Danish Romanticism to Steff ens’ lectures is itself something of a myth, since Oehlenschläger at least had already produced clearly Romantic works as early as 1800 (Shailer-Hanson 2003 : 234–5) .

One mark of literary Romanticism, both in Germany and in Denmark, was fascina-tion with folktales and myths from the Middle Ages. In the mid-1830s, while at the University of Copenhagen, Kierkegaard began an intense study of literature. During this time he became fascinated by the fi gure of Faust. Th is in turn led him to an interest in the fi gures of Don Juan and Ahasverus, the Wandering Jew. Each fi gure represented an essential idea for Kierkegaard: scepticism (Faust), sensuality (Don Juan), and despair (Ahasverus). In his journals, Kierkegaard played Hegelian variations on the possible dialectical relations among the three characters. He tried Ahasverus as the synthesis of Faust and Don Juan. He tried Faust as the synthesis of Don Juan and Ahasverus. He also framed this dialectic in terms of Hegel’s and Heiberg’s aesthetics, with Don Juan to be depicted lyrically, Ahasverus epically, and Faust dramatically (Fenger 2003 : 305) . But even in Denmark Kierkegaard was far from alone in this interest. Carsten Hauch had published a tragic drama, Don Juan (1828–30), and Paludan-Müller had written Dandserinden [ Th e Ballerina ] inspired by Byron’s story of Don Juan and his young Greek lover Haidee (1830). Ahasverus appears in Hans Christian Andersen’s debut book, A Journey on Foot from Holmen’s Canal to the East Point of Amager (1829), and again in his

2 Although the philosophy of nature was an important part of Jena Romanticism, and of Danish Romanticism through Steff ens, Sibbern, and H.C. Ørsted, Kierkegaard engages with it directly only to make a few dismissive remarks. However, Kierkegaard does criticize Romantic pantheism and religious immanence, and counters its compatibilist position on freedom and determinism by following Schelling’s development of the notion of freedom as spontaneity (cf. Kosch 2006 : 87–121; 139–78 ).

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1847 drama Ahasverus . In 1837 Kierkegaard unhappily discovered that his project to write on Faust had been anticipated in an essay by H. L. Martensen on Lenau’s Faust in Heiberg’s journal Perseus (Pap. II A 597/JP5 5225). Although Kierkegaard shelved his immediate plan to write an essay on Faust, the themes represented by Don Juan, Faust, and Ahasverus ultimately appear and reappear in Kierkegaard’s authorship from Either/Or to Th e Sickness Unto Death . Th ese themes form part of a wider set, which Kierkegaard shared with the early German Romantics and the Danish Romantics.

II. Literary Criticism

Kierkegaard’s fi rst public foray into the realm of Romanticism came in the form of liter-ary criticism. In 1838 he published a lengthy review of Hans Christian Andersen’s novel Only a Fiddler . It seems that Kierkegaard’s main purpose in publishing the review was to gain admission to the Heiberg literary circle. He had originally aimed to have the review published in Heiberg’s journal Perseus , but that ceased publication in August 1838 (Watkin 1990 : p. vii). Whatever his personal motivation for writing it, the review was an occasion for Kierkegaard to practice his skills as a literary critic. In the process, he intro-duced themes that are central to his authorship. Th ese themes include the questions of what makes for good and bad authorship in the present age, and how authentic commu-nication is to be achieved to address the spiritual demands of the age. Th ese themes overlap considerably with those introduced in the literary theory of the early German Romantics, particularly in the Athenaeum-Fragments .

Literary criticism, as theorized and practiced by Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel in the Athenaeum-Fragments , comprised a number of diff erent approaches. Th ey include, fi rstly, the approach of the reviewer, who guides and informs the public with respect to new works. Th is is not central to Kierkegaard’s review of Andersen, even though Only a Fiddler had been published just the previous year. Much of Kierkegaard’s discussion of detail from Andersen’s novel occurs in footnotes. Secondly, there is the approach which tries to discern the qualities of great works of art, especially through comparative studies of acknowledged masters with modern authors, with a view to work-ing out how great literature might emerge in modernity. Kierkegaard pursues a modifi ed form of this, in which he compares Andersen’s work unfavourably with that of some con-temporary Danish authors, whose work he tries to demonstrate is masterful. Th irdly, there is the critical evaluation of particular works in order to develop new aesthetic prin-ciples that can inform future literary eff orts. It is this approach in particular, which informs Kierkegaard’s review. He takes the review as an occasion to introduce his con-cepts of life-view and life-development, as well as to make some remarks about the nature of genius. Th e Romantics, too, spilled a lot of ink on the nature of genius, and on the notion of Bildung [cultivation, formation], which Kierkegaard subsequently attacked and for which his notions of life-view and life-development provide early alternatives. Finally there is the purely theoretical approach in which the Romantics sought to establish a new poetic form of criticism, which would combine the artistic sensitivities of the poet with

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critical detachment (cf. Stoljar 1973 : 111–12) . Kierkegaard positions himself as a poetic critic in his assessment of Andersen as an author who lacks a life-view and a life-develop-ment. He writes with the detachment of one who knows what these are, and can also point to their existence in other contemporary literature, such as the cycle of short novels, which began with En Hverdagshistorie [ A Story of Everyday Life ], published anonymously by Heiberg’s mother Th omasine Gyllembourg in 1828 (SKS1: 20–22/EPW: 64–6).

Kierkegaard spends almost the fi rst quarter of his essay on playful polemics against the idea of beginning with nothing, which characterizes ‘the whole newer development’ (namely, Hegelian speculative philosophy), together with the more positive examples in Danish litera-ture of En Hverdagshistorie and the poetry of Steen Steensen Blicher, before he even mentions ‘the not unfavorably known poet Mr H. C. Andersen’ (SKS1: 25/EPW: 69). As if damning with faint praise were not enough, Kierkegaard continues by observing that even in ‘the few really fi ne lyric productions of his early youth’, Andersen is not ‘authorized by a deep-feeling sensibility for a larger totality, or as a full-toned voice for a folk-consciousness’, or by force of nature (SKS1: 25/EPW: 70). Each of these characteristics, which Andersen is said to lack, is recognized by the Romantic critics as grounds for literary authority. Kierkegaard then goes on to accuse Andersen of having failed in his development as a writer, since aft er the lyric stage of his work he has ‘skipped over his epic’ stage (SKS1: 26/EPW: 70). 3

Th e main theme of Only a Fiddler , according to Kierkegaard’s review, is ‘the power of genius and its relation to unfavorable circumstances’ (SKS1: 43/EPW: 88). Andersen depicts genius as something that needs cosseting rather than as something with the inner strength and courage to resist the demands of fashion. For Kierkegaard, the strength of genius, won from experience, is woven into a life-view, which has the aspect of totality, so that further experiences can be incorporated into it and explained from its point of view. Andersen’s novel, by contrast, is episodic and suff ers from the ‘misrelations’ of incidental mood , inciden-tal knowledge , and incidental association of ideas (SKS1: 44–50/EPW: 89–94). Th ese are inci-dental in so far as they are not subordinated to a total life-view, and so remain ‘undigested and poetically (not commercially) unused, unappropriated, unfi ltered’ (SKS1: 39/EPW: 83).

Kierkegaard then extends his critique of Andersen’s novel to Andersen’s personality. Th e work refl ects the author to reveal that ‘Andersen himself has not lived to the fi rst power with poetic clarity since the poetic to the second power has not achieved greater consolidation in the whole and is not leached out enough in detail’ (SKS1: 39/EPW: 83–4). Th is terminology of ‘fi rst and second powers’ echoes Friedrich Schlegel’s and Novalis’s uses of notions such as ‘the poetry of poetry’, ‘the philosophy of philosophy’, and ‘logological’ to indicate a simultaneous immersion and detachment, which enables a higher and more penetrating point of view (Stoljar 1973 : 15) . In two footnotes Kierkegaard clarifi es his remark by comparing Andersen’s fi rst power to ‘the fl owers with male and female on one stalk’, so that there is not enough ‘cleavage’ to ‘demand a

3 Hegel had placed the historical-dialectical development of poetic genres in the order epic, lyric, dramatic, whereas Heiberg argued it should be in the order lyric, epic, dramatic. Kierkegaard concurred with Heiberg’s ordering. While unity of character can be sustained in lyric poetry by mood , the epic requires character development . Th e dramatic introduces the further element of dialectical development of character.

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deeper unity.’ Implicit in this criticism is the Romantic insistence that greatness in a work of art, as indeed in a person, is measured by unity-in-diversity (Crowe 2010 : 66) . Kierkegaard goes on to say that Andersen, both as a person and a poet, grows only super-fi cially, by accretion rather than by suff ering the self-diremption which makes ‘the poet inwardly freer, richer, more sure of himself ’ (SKS1: 39/EPW: 84).

Th e extension of literary criticism to existential critique of personality is already explicit in Romanticism. For Friedrich Schlegel there is a parallel between the structure of a literary work and the structure of an integrated individual: ‘Some of the most excel-lent novels are compendia, encyclopedias of the whole spiritual life of an individual of genius. . . . Every human being who is cultivated and who cultivates himself contains a novel within himself. It is not necessary that he express it or write it’ (cited in Crowe 2010 : 67) . Furthermore, Schlegel compares the formation of a work of art with ‘the edu-cation of a young Englishman’ by means of ‘ le grand tour ’. Th e expansion, of work or individual, ‘gives its spirit more freedom and inner versatility, and thereby more auton-omy and self-suffi ciency’ (cited in Crowe 2010 : 67) . Kierkegaard’s footnote on Andersen is almost a paraphrase. Moreover, Kierkegaard snidely suggests that Andersen, rather like a young Englishman, ‘is better suited to rushing off in a coach and seeing Europe than to looking into the history of hearts’ (SKS1: 55/EPW: 100–1).

However, there is more to Kierkegaard’s review of Andersen than sycophancy towards Heiberg and rivalry with Andersen. As Bruce Kirmmse has argued, much of the review can also be regarded as Kierkegaard’s self-criticism (Kirmmse 2006 : 16–17) . Kierkegaard’s journals make clear that he suff ers from the very failings of which he accuses Andersen, including having a style like ‘graduate student prose’ (SKS1: 23/EPW: 67), creating liter-ary works instead of developing himself, seeming like one of his own literary characters, lacking a life-view, and being too clever by half (Kirmmse 2006 : 16) .

On the face of it Kierkegaard’s published review is a savage ad hominem attack on Andersen, ‘a sniveler who is declared to be a genius’ (SKS1: 43/EPW: 88). Kierkegaard might be defended against this appearance by arguing that Andersen’s failings represent more general tendencies in the present age—failings which even affl ict Kierkegaard. Th erefore his analysis is a form of culture-criticism encapsulated in a case study. In favour of such an interpretation is that this is precisely Kierkegaard’s approach in two other major works of criticism: Two Ages (1845) and Th e Book on Adler (1846). Th e former reviews the novel Two Ages by Th omasine Gyllembourg, and is an occasion for Kierkegaard to refl ect on the decisive diff erences between the present age and the pre-ceding age. Th e Book on Adler reviews the work of Pastor Adolf Adler, a Hegelian author of books in speculative theology who claimed to have had a personal divine revelation. His claim was investigated by the Danish People’s Church and dismissed, with Adler being pensioned off as mad. Kierkegaard’s book, which he withheld from publication during his lifetime (possibly out of consideration for Adler), investigates the relation-ship between genius, authority, and revelation. In the preface, Kierkegaard claims that Adler stands in for ‘the confusion of the age’ (Pap. VIII 2 B 27/BA: 4).

In this use of exemplary individuals, Kierkegaard is indebted to Friedrich Schlegel’s notion of ‘characteristic’. On the one hand ‘characteristic’ is a technical term in Schlegel’s

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literary criticism to signify the immanent critique of a work according to the internal standards of its author, in contrast to judging a work on the basis of purported universal standards of aesthetic judgment (Beiser 2003 : 127) . In addition Schlegel uses the term for ‘the theory of the art of living’ (Schlegel 1981 , XVI: 141). In his ‘characteristics’ of great men, including Voltaire, Herder, Goethe, and Lessing, Schlegel searched for the unifying pattern which individuates the men and makes their lives exemplary (Crowe 2010 : 70) .

Kierkegaard’s use of exemplary individuals goes well beyond his literary reviews. His whole authorship could be said to be guided by their lights, starting with Socrates and ending with Christ. Th en there is his self-examination, and the use of himself as exem-plar. In his retrospective refl ections on his work as an author, Kierkegaard regards his authorship as an exemplary intervention in the present age and also as a process in which Governance has brought him up (SKS16/PV: 77). He regards himself as a ‘singular uni-versal’, in the same sense as Socrates, that ‘his whole life was personal preoccupation with himself, and then Governance comes and adds world-historical signifi cance to it’ (SKS21/KJN5: NB:10 185 [JP6: 6388]).

In his literary criticism, Kierkegaard seems more concerned to develop his own ideas than to account for the texts he reviews. He even remarks in his journal: ‘A thesis: great geniuses cannot really read a book; when they read they always develop themselves more than they understand the author’ (SKS17/KJN1: BB: 46). Th is is certainly the case with his review of Th omasine Gyllembourg’s Two Ages , where Kierkegaard devotes the last half of his text to a discussion of his own categories for distinguishing the present age from the previous age. Th e present age, he claims, is characterized by refl ection as opposed to the passion of what Gyllembourg refers to as the ‘age of revolution’. Passion, according to Kierkegaard, entails inwardness and immediacy, both of which are missing in refl ection. Furthermore, Kierkegaard introduces the categories of levelling , the public , and the press , all of which lead to passionless, abstract refl ection, which lacks concrete existential engagement. None of these categories appears in Gyllembourg’s work (Nun 2003 : 293–4) . When Kierkegaard sent a copy of his review to the author of Two Ages , through J. L. Heiberg, Gyllembourg wrote him a charming letter, in which she recog-nizes that her work is largely an occasion for Kierkegaard’s own creativity: ‘ . . . when I compare my novel with your book, so richly equipped with such profound, such apt, and such witty observations, then my work appears to me a simple romance from which a poet has taken the subject and wrought a drama’ (cited in Nun 2003 : 295) .

III. Irony, Reflection, and Self-Development

Th is self-development of the genius by means of critical misprision is at the heart of Kierkegaard’s literary criticism. It is also arguably at the heart of his appropriation of Romanticism. In order to understand an historical individual, claims Johannes

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Climacus, one must fi rst understand oneself (SKS7: 136/CUP: 146–7). But in order to understand oneself, according to Kierkegaard and the Romantics, one must refl ect on oneself. To refl ect one must split oneself into subject and object of refl ection, that is, one must detach or alienate oneself from oneself. Detachment can be achieved by projecting oneself on to another, fi nding oneself refl ected in another or in another’s work, or even by representing oneself in one’s work. For Hölderlin, the gap of self-diremption is opened inevitably by means of judgement, in the opposition of subject and object, as he argues in ‘Urtheil und Seyn’ [Judgement and Being]. Making the most of a pun or bogus ety-mology, Hölderlin claims that judgement is ‘the very sundering which fi rst makes Object and Subject possible, the Ur-Th eilung’ [judgement or originary division] (Harris 1972 : 516) . Any judgement, including aesthetic and moral judgement as well as judgements about oneself, presupposes a division between the subject who judges and the object judged. Th is poses a problem for the unity of the self in self-consciousness—a problem recognized and addressed by Hölderlin, Isaak von Sinclair, and Novalis (Frank 2004 : 94–7) . It is also a problem that occupies Kierkegaard in an authorship abounding in fragmentary self-portraits.

To be split refl ectively into subject and object opens a gap between the real and the ideal, where both self-development and self-deception can fi nd free play. Between the immediacy of the real and the possibility of the ideal lies ‘interest’—a being-between [ inter-esse ], which Kierkegaard identifi es with both the actuality (SKS7: 286–87/CUP: 314–15) and the subjective consciousness (Pap. IV B 1/JC: 170) of the existing individual. Th is is the space of refl ection in which imagination generates possibilities. Possibility is a necessary condition of freedom and brings with it the anxiety of responsibility. It includes the possibilities of doubt [ Tvivl ] and despair [ Fortvivelse ], but also the possibil-ity of earnest inwardness—all of which contain an implicit doubling of the subject in refl ection.

Refl ection opens the space between the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’, where intimation of a discrepancy creates ‘the interesting’. Friedrich Schlegel introduced the interesting as the distinguishing characteristic of modern poetry in his essay On the Study of Greek Poetry —as noted by Kierkegaard in 1836 (Pap. I A 219). For Schlegel, ancient poetry rep-resents ideal forms rather than concrete individuals and therefore is universal and objec-tive. It has character sketches, but not character development (Heiberg 1843 : 80) . Modern poetry has lost this universality and objectivity and instead appeals to the sub-jective aesthetic force of the interesting, which is explored through character develop-ment. Th e interesting can be either a substantive category of individual character or a relational category between subject, object, and observer—that is, a character can be intrinsically interesting, or interest can be aroused in an observer because of curiosity about the relationship between the subjective and objective aspects of a character (Koch 1992 : 39–40) . 4 Modern poetry is not superior on this account. On the contrary, ancient

4 Kierkegaard explores the permutations of ‘the interesting’ extensively in ‘Th e Seducer’s Diary’, which can also be read as a satire on Schlegel’s Lucinde . I will not elaborate on Kierkegaard’s treatment here, since it has been discussed at length elsewhere (cf. Koch 1992 , Stokes 2010 ).

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Greek poetry, for Schlegel, had a ‘natural’ literary perfection, whereas ‘artifi cial’ modern poetry can only strive for perfectibility (Schlegel 1979 I: 253). Th e development of indi-vidual character is always a striving for perfectibility, never its attainment. Its gaps and fl aws may be prised open by irony to enlarge the separation between inner and outer, thereby augmenting the interesting. 5

Irony as a rhetorical trope operates on the basis of a discrepancy between what is said and what is meant, between an ‘insider’ meaning and a ‘public’ norm. Schlegel is cred-ited with radicalizing the concept of irony, which he equated with Socratic dialectics, understood as ‘thought and counterthought as a progressive movement of thinking’ (Behler 1997 : 16) . In contrast to irony as a rhetorical fi gure, which is applied only to par-ticular speech acts, Schlegel’s new concept of irony pervades a whole discourse. Schlegel asserts that ‘only poetry can also reach the heights of philosophy in this way, and only poetry does not restrict itself to isolated ironical passages, as rhetoric does’ (cited in Behler 1997 : 17) . In its thought and counter-thought irony alternates between self- creation and self-annihilation, and thereby imbues poetic creativity with refl ective self-criticism (Behler 1997 : 17–18) . Schlegel applied this conception in his critical prac-tice, as in his review of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister . Here his irony operates not only in its critical detachment from Goethe’s novel, but Schlegel later refl ects ironically on his own refl ections in an attempt to unite the subjective and objective aspects of his relation to Goethe’s novel in ‘the one act of creative criticism’ (Stoljar 1973 : 120) .

Th is ‘irony of irony’ is an attempt at unifi cation of the split self by means of double refl ection. Novalis had proposed a similar solution in his consideration of self-con-sciousness as a form of ‘refl ection’. If we take this metaphor literally, to be a mirroring of the self, then we should expect that the image we perceive of ourselves is inverted. In order to perceive ourselves aright, we need a double refl ection, to invert the inversion. 6 However, what is revealed for Novalis in this double refl ection is a double illusion (Frank 2004 : 97–8) . His starting point for this thought experiment is Fichte’s notion of an abso-lute, transcendental ‘I’ which cannot be known but can only be posited precognitively on the basis of intellectual intuition. Intellectual intuition is supposed to pre-empt the division between subject and object. But, not being a judgement, intuition can never grasp [ begreifen ] the absolute as a concept [ Begriff ]. Rather it is a perpetual longing for the absolute, which it implicitly takes as its point of departure. Novalis characterizes this

5 Th e aesthete A devotes a section of Either/Or to the question of the diff erence between ancient and modern tragedy. He considers a modern Antigone, who diff ers from her ancient counterpart precisely by having an undisclosable secret, which marks an irreducible diff erence between inner and outer. She suff ers from tragic guilt as a result of this secret, but is not thereby beyond being an epic fi gure. She becomes a dramatic fi gure by falling in love with someone who reciprocates her love, but to whom she cannot reveal her secret, thus deepening her sorrow with a dialectic twist. Her tragedy is still interesting, and therefore within the category of the aesthetic. Otherwise hereditary guilt becomes a matter of the ethical (SKS2: 152–62/EO1: 153–64).

6 Th is strategy is also pursued by Hegel who criticizes Solger’s notion of irony for only taking the fi rst step of dialectics, namely, the step of negating. Hegel’s dialectics require the further step of negating negation.

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longing as the ‘illusory striding from the fi nite to the infi nite’. 7 When we reverse this image by doubling the refl ection, we get the ‘illusory striding from the infi nite to the fi nite’ (cited in Frank 2004 : 98) . But this double illusion still does not deliver the unity of self-consciousness.

Novalis identifi es the problem in the metaphors of refl ection and representation in Fichte’s attempt at transcendentally deducing the unity of self-consciousness. Intellectual intuition cannot objectify, know or represent the absolute. In order to fi nd the unity of self-consciousness, we need to abandon these metaphors. In their place, Novalis posits feeling . We feel our intuition of the absolute. For Novalis, feeling is ‘a type of receptive conscious-ness to which something must be given.’ Furthermore, ‘the limits of feeling are the limits of philosophy’ (cited in Frank 2004 : 99) and these limits reveal that philosophy is inadequate to represent the unrepresentable. Beyond the limits of philosophical knowledge only the work of art can create meanings adequate to the receptive consciousness of feeling.

Kierkegaard, too, criticizes attempts to objectify or represent the absolute—though he seems concerned not so much with Fichte’s absolute ground of self-consciousness as with God. Nevertheless, in his understanding of selfh ood as the relating of oneself to oneself, God is the ground of self-consciousness (SKS11: 129–30/SUD: 13–14). Moreover, double refl ection is the means by which the inadequacies of representation of the absolute are exposed, and feeling (the passion of faith) is the means of preparing to receive the absolute.

Kierkegaard’s quest for selfh ood through self-relating draws heavily on exploring self-consciousness through feeling (mood, emotion, passion) in his characterization of vari-ous existential types. Moods, emotions, and passions are used to confer unity on existential types. Th e mood of boredom, for example, characterizes the aesthete, whose pursuit of the interesting can be seen largely as fl ight from boredom. 8 Virtue-emotions—such as courage, patience, hope, and love—are explored in the Edifying Discourses , those works Kierkegaard invariably addresses to ‘that single individual’ [ hiin Enkelte ] (cf. SKS16/PV: 37). Th e category of the single individual, Kierkegaard claims, has a dialectic ‘continually . . . made equivocal in its double movement.’ On the one hand it is used aes-thetically, to indicate ‘the outstanding individual’; on the other it is ‘someone every human being is or can be’. Th is confronts the reader with the possibilities of pride in the one thought and humility in the other, thereby demanding emotional self-relation (SKS16/PV: 115). Faith, the lynchpin of Kierkegaard’s self-relating self, is a passion. Each mood, emotion, and passion has its exemplars, in the form of fi ctional or biblical char-acters. For Kierkegaard, as for Schlegel, mood is adequate for unifying character only in lyric poetry (Schlegel 1979 I: 240–1). Ethical character, developed through other-directed emotions, must be unifi ed epically, that is diachronically in action. Religious character must be unifi ed dialectically, that is dramatically, through repetition of the passion of faith. Kierkegaard uses art as a means of going beyond the limits of philosophical repre-sentation to open a space of subjective meaning in which these feelings emerge to unify

7 Hegel characterizes it in Th e Phenomenology of Spirit as ‘Unhappy Consciousness’ ( Hegel 1977 : 126–38 ).

8 For an extended discussion of Kierkegaard’s analysis of boredom, see McDonald 2009 .

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character. Fiction thereby provides an ‘apprenticeship in the art of living. Th rough care-fully planned experiments one becomes familiar with its principles and acquires the skill to act according to them as one wishes’ (Novalis 1997 : 23) .

Of course Kierkegaard did not just adopt the Romantics’ position on the role of feeling in accessing the absolute. Rather, he criticized it and adapted it. For Kierkegaard, as for Hegel, the characteristic romantic feeling is longing or yearning. Th e most poignant example of this feeling, for Kierkegaard, occurs in Esaias Tegner’s Frithiof ’s Saga , when Ingeborg, unhappily harbouring the secret that she is to be married to someone else, gazes longingly out to sea as the boat bearing her beloved Frithiof disappears (SKS27: Pap. 128:1[JP3: 3800]). 9 A romantic yearning, which has an impossible intentional object, can lead only to unhappiness. Nostalgia for an imagined future and hope for a fantastical past are forms of romantic longing for the impossible, which defi ne ‘the unhappiest one’ in Either/Or . Th en, by ironic inversion, the unhappy romantic embraces this unhappiness as the highest happiness, falling in love with his own melancholy (SKS2: 223/EO1: 230). In Kierkegaard’s adaptation, romantic longing is transformed into ethical striving. 10

In Kierkegaard’s self-development, the ultimate goal is a ‘higher immediacy’ on the other side of doubt and despair, in which the redoubling of refl ection is replaced by a return to the simplicity of faith. Th is is a goal for Kierkegaard both as an author and as a person. Th e pivotal point is aft er the publication of Concluding Unscientifi c Postscript . As an author he retreats from the convoluted redoubling in parody and satire of Romantic aestheticism and speculative philosophy, which constituted his ‘fi rst author-ship,’ to the more straightforward communication of deliberations, reviews, and dis-courses published under his own name in the ‘second authorship’. As a person, he had aimed to give up being an author altogether, to ‘withdraw to the country and in quiet unobtrusiveness to sorrow over [his] sins’ (SKS 20/KJN4: NB5: 51 [JP6 6157]).

Kierkegaard’s development in the ‘fi rst authorship’ follows the Romantic and Hegelian journeys from immediacy, through ironic self-alienation to refl ective self-formation. In the process, however, Kierkegaard appropriates key concepts in his own peculiar ways. He masters irony, mirrors the refl ective surfaces of aestheticism to the point of aporia , uses satire in the direction of a cure, dons the masks of ethicist and reli-gious exegete, and revokes his masks with humour 11 and retrospective self-accounting

9 For an extended discussion of this scene and its importance for Kierkegaard’s notion of the moment [ Øieblikket ], see Eriksen 2000 : 69ff .

10 Note that for Schlegel modernity is characterized by constant striving for an infi nite reality ( Stoljar 1973 : 46–7 ), but Hegel sees in that the symptom of his fi gure of the Unhappy Consciousness. Even Steff ens seems to have understood the Jena Romantics in terms of yearning, which he interprets as presentiment [ Ahnelse ] (cf. Pattison 1999 : 51 ).

11 One of the masks Kierkegaard uses is the incognito of jest to disguise seriousness. Th is is tantamount to Schlegel’s defi nition of Witz [wit] in number 108 of the Lyceum-Fragments ( Stoljar 1973 : 48 ). Schlegel also takes wit and sentimentality to be the two essential elements of the Roman [novel] ( Stoljar 1973 : 125–6 ). Schlegel took wit to be important in establishing bonds of fellowship, especially in the collegial collaboration he called ‘ Symphilosophie ’, which Kierkegaard parodies with the Symparanekromenoi [fellowship of buried lives] (SKS2: 163/EO1: 165). Christian fellowship, by contrast, is founded on shared faith, suff ering, and love.

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in a manner which not only parodies Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (McDonald 1998 ) but also exemplifi es Friedrich Schlegel’s concept of the literary ara-besque. In his trajectory from redoubled refl ection to simplicity, Kierkegaard aims to be receptive to the absolute through the passion of faith and to become as nothing before the God of love. His Romantic movements are punctuated by critiques of Romanticism and twisted through the demands of indirect communication and the ‘inverse dialectic’ of Christianity.

IV. Religion, Love, and Indirect Communication

Schlegel, too, appropriated concepts and terminology for his own ends. Th is is the case with his use of the term Roman [novel], from which the word ‘Romantic’ is in part derived. He regarded the Roman as ‘the absolute work of literature,’ which was to be the vehicle for his vision of a new bible. Th e new bible, in turn, was to embody an allegory of the organic universe (Stoljar 1973 : 124) . Th e concept of Roman also allows mixtures of poetry and prose, though it is better suited to epic than to dramatic structures, because epic enables the use of historical materials, such as memoirs and diaries. Th e incorpora-tion of real and historical materials is one of the hallmarks of modern poetry for Schlegel (Stoljar 1973 : 128) . Schlegel took Roman to be synonymous with Romantic poetry, which was not bound to the form of a single genre. In his Brief über den Roman [Letter on the Novel], Schlegel assimilated the notion of Romantic poetry, and therefore of the Roman , to the concept of the arabesque. Th e arabesque enables structural eclecticism, so that the Roman might embrace various genres, framing devices, quotations, confessions, inter-ludes, and points of view (cf. Strathausen 2000 : 376) . Th is is exemplifi ed in Schlegel’s own Roman , Lucinde , with its ‘cultivated chaos’ [ gebildetes Chaos ] (Stoljar 1973 : 130) . 12

Lucinde comprises letters, confessions, reminiscence, and dialogue. It was meant to be a religious book, in the sense that it was to be ‘a new mythology, a new morality, and a new philosophy’ rolled into one, with its protagonists Julius and Lucinde as its priest and priestess (Firchow 1971 : 23) . Th e heart of this new religion is love. As such, love pro-vides the unity of self-consciousness. Th e divisions into subject and object, self and other, spirit and sense, which characterize self-consciousness, are embodied in male and female respectively and are reconciled in the greater whole their love comprises (Pattison 2002 : 118) . Love as the ‘ecstasy of the unconditioned’, in which the individual attains self-realization only in conjunction with another, is averred not only by Schlegel, but also by Hölderlin, Novalis, Schleiermacher, Schelling, and even Schiller (Frank

12 While Kierkegaard takes music to be the medium of sensual immediacy (as in Mozart’s Don Giovanni ), and poetry to be the medium of refl ection, we might think of the arabesque as a medium of refraction.

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2004 : 87–9, 129–30) . As Schelling puts it: ‘It is the mystery of love, that it bonds in such a way, that each can be for itself, but neither is nor can be without the other’ (cited in Frank 2004 : 89) .

The wholeness given by heterosexual love is an end in itself for Schlegel. For Schleiermacher, on the other hand, love is not the fulfi lment of religion but its presuppo-sition (Pattison 2002 : 122) . Although Schleiermacher’s Confi dential Letters on Lucinde generally defends Schlegel’s Roman by criticizing its critics, it also contains the trenchant criticism of Lucinde that it is too abstract and analytical in its depiction of love (Pattison 2002 : 124) . Th is detracts from the possibility that Lucinde is the fi rst gospel of a new bible, as Schlegel thought it was (Firchow 1971 : 38–9) , since it looks more like empty fantasy than revelation. Kierkegaard is much more scathing in his assessment of the religion of love contained in Lucinde , though he took it seriously enough to refl ect its shortcomings in ‘Th e Seducer’s Diary’. Kierkegaard’s Seducer is not someone drawn into a greater whole by love of another, but a narcissist who uses others to gratify his aesthetic pursuit of ‘the interesting’. Judge Wilhelm, on the other hand, the ethicist who writes letters to the aes-thete, defends the aesthetic validity of marriage—an institution in which one humbles oneself and one’s love under God (SKS3: 101/EO2: 99). Ultimately for Kierkegaard, religious love is a duty rather than an erotic attraction. It should be practised as self- sacrifi cing agape as opposed to the self-interested eros favoured by Schlegel. Nor is there a simple continuity between eros and agape , a scala paradisi modelled on the ascent to the divine in Plato’s Symposium (cf. McDonald 2003 ). Christian love, for Kierkegaard, requires one to become as nothing so that divine love can shine through in works of love. An author should not presume to put his name to works of love, since the only author of such works is God. Th erefore, in the conclusion to Works of Love , Kierkegaard erases his name with a dash, to make way for the words of the Apostle John (SKS9: 367/WL: 374). 13 Self-sacrifi ce and self-erasure, then, are the end point of the Christian quest for self-reali-zation, in marked contrast to Romantic self-realization through love.

Th e subtitle of Lucinde is ‘Confessions of a Blunderer’, where this refers to the persona of Julius. Schlegel made a great deal of the concept of persona, which he traced to the device of parabasis in ancient Greek comedy, in which the chorus addresses the audi-ence directly in the name of the poet (Firchow 1971 : 29) . Th is interruption of indirect communication by direct communication enables diff erent levels of awareness of the work and is closely connected to Schlegel’s concept of irony, which he defi ned at one point as ‘permanent parabasis’ (Firchow 1971 : 29) . Th is dual perception, which for Schlegel allows simultaneous proximity and distance from reality, recalls Kierkegaard’s fi gure of the glasses, which simultaneously magnify and diminish their objects (SKS2: 33/EO1: 24). Irony also enables human beings, according to Schlegel, to commit to fi nite reality and simultaneously to keep the eternal in view (Firchow 1971 : 30) .

Th is dual perception is also at work in Kierkegaard’s practice of indirect communica-tion, whose aim is to communicate an ethical-religious capacity rather than objective

13 Note that in the English translation this important dash has been omitted from the very end of the chapter before the conclusion, thereby erasing the point of Kierkegaard’s self-erasure.

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information. Th is can only be done through art, not through science: ‘Th e ethical must be communicated as an art, simply because everyone knows it’ (Pap. VIII 2 B 81). In so far as this is ‘second ethics’ informed by religion, rather than the morality of mores tele-ologically suspended by faith, it has an eye on the eternal. Since it is known by everyone, it entails a commitment to fi nite reality. Double refl ection ‘is already implicit in the idea of communication itself ’ because the subjective individual wants to remain in inwardness—a process which is never fi nished—while at the same time wanting to com-municate this inwardness directly, which requires a fi nished result. ‘So it is also in the God-relationship. Just because he himself is continually in the process of becoming in an inward direction, that is, in inwardness, he can never communicate himself directly, since the movement here is the very opposite. Direct communication requires certainty, but certainty is impossible for a person in the process of becoming, and it is indeed a deception’ (SKS7: 74–5/CUP: 73–4). In their aspiration to fi nd a new bible as the founda-tion of a religion adequate to modernity, Schlegel and Novalis sought a structure like the Roman , with the capacity to change and grow in accordance with the living spirit of reli-gion (Stoljar 1973 : 86) . Kierkegaard’s method of indirect communication requires simi-lar fl exibility, but it aims to engage its receiver with existence through action rather than merely through refl ection. 14

One crucial diff erence, however, is that Schlegel regarded the poet as the priest of the new religion. He thought genius an adequate basis for religious authority. Kierkegaard attacks just this assumption in his ethical-religious essay of 1847, ‘Th e Diff erence between a Genius and an Apostle’. Th e principal diff erence for Kierkegaard is that genius and apostle belong to the qualitatively diff erent spheres of immanence and transcendence respectively. Although the genius can bring something new, it ultimately disappears into ‘the human race’s general assimilation’, while what the apostle brings is ‘something para-doxically new’, which cannot be assimilated (SKS11: 98/WA: 94).

Novalis has a view somewhere between Kierkegaard and Schlegel’s. He regards sacred texts as only partly the product of artistic imagination, and partly of inexplicable origin. Novalis thinks of sacred books as independent forms of life, like human beings or human communities (Stoljar 1973 : 87) . Nevertheless, he shares the Romantic metaphysics of immanence, which seeks to synthesize ‘Fichte’s idealism, indeterminism, and dual-ism . . . with Spinoza’s realism, determinism, and monism’ (Beiser 2003 : 131) . Th e crucial move in the synthesis is to apply the metaphor of organism to nature as a whole. Everything in nature is then construed as a diff erent level of organization of the pervad-ing life force. Self-consciousness, whether felt or articulated in art or science, becomes a matter of nature redoubling by folding itself.

While Kierkegaard’s method of indirect communication seems to constitute an attempt to represent the unrepresentable, using the structure of Romantic irony (Schwab 2008 : 40) , his assertion of the qualitative diff erence between immanence and transcend-ence prevents his own art, or anyone else’s, from achieving the task. Moreover, though

14 Kierkegaard shares with Fichte the idea that engagement with existence must be an act rather than a refl ection ( Kangas 2007 : 70 ).

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he retraces many of the steps of enculturation [ Bildung ] and Romantic self-creation in his authorship, Kierkegaard ultimately ascribes his creative output to ‘upbringing’ by Governance (SKS16/PV: 77). Despite the claim that his writing is not the work ‘of the poet passion or of the thinker passion, but of devotion to God’ (SKS16/PV: 73), he writes without (divine) authority. He does not aim to write a new bible, but only ‘once again to read through solo, if possible in a more inward way, the original text of individual human existence-relationships, the old familiar text handed down from the fathers’ (SKS7: 573/CUP: 629–30). His critical misprisions, double refl ections, pseudonymous and fi ctional self-diremptions, parodies, satires, and ironies lead him to the edge of a faith which must be given as an act of grace by a transcendent God.

But it seems the striving for simplicity, like Schlegel’s striving for perfectibility, is never done. One waits in patience and humility for grace, having prepared for its recep-tion through resignation, sin-consciousness, and repentance. Despair then reappears as a necessary condition for the reception of faith. Despair arises from an intensifi cation of sin-consciousness—the feeling of distance from the absolute—until, at breaking point, the ‘inverse dialectic’ of Christianity converts adversity to prosperity, hopelessness to hope, suff ering to joy, and sin to atonement. Yet the mark of each positive attribute is its negation, and even faith is maintained in a double vision—of off ense and blessedness (Walsh 2005 : 34–5, 123–9) .

Kierkegaard claims that as a poet he can express more than he is capable of achieving as a man. He says of his use of the pseudonym Anti-Climacus that it indicates ‘that it is a poet-communication’, yet adds that ‘what I am saying is the very truth, but the fact that I am saying it constitutes the poetic aspect’ (SKS22/KJN6: NB14: 19/PC: 293–4). Although Kierkegaard insists that he speaks without authority and distinguishes Christianity by means of transcendence, his role as poet veers almost indiscernibly close to the Romantic vision of the poet as the mediator of religious truth. Art overfl ows the boundaries of rep-resentation, revokes the very notion of representation, and keeps fl owing. Kant, how-ever, made an important distinction between a border [ Grenze ] and a limit [ Schranke ]. While either side of a border is continuous with the other, the other side of a limit is lim-itless (Llewelyn 2004 : 90–3) . Kierkegaard’s indirect communication diff ers from the Romantic poet’s by pointing to the sign of the God-man. Whereas the Romantic merely overfl ows a border, this paradoxical sign is taken by faith to be a radical incursion of the transcendent, a tear in the fabric of sense, through which the individual reader may glimpse the unlimited possibility of atonement in the twinkling of an eye [ Øieblikket ].

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Stewart, Jon (2008). ‘Solger: An Apostle of Irony Sacrifi ced to Hegel’s System’, in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries. Tome III: Literature and Aesthetics (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate).

Stokes, Patrick (2010). Kierkegaard’s Mirrors: Interest, Self and Moral Vision (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).

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Th ielst, Peter (2003). ‘Poul Martin Møller: Scattered Th oughts, Analysis of Aff ectation, Struggle with Nihilism’, in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard and His Contemporaries: Th e Culture of Golden Age Denmark (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter), 45–61.

Walsh, Sylvia (2005). Living Christianly: Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Christian Existence , (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press).

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Suggested Reading Beiser (2003). Cappelørn, Niels Jørgen , Deuser, Hermann , and K. Brian Söderquist (eds.) (2008). Kierkegaard

Studies Yearbook 2008 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter). Frank, Manfred (2004). Th e Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism , trans.

Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert (New York: State University of New York Press). Kosch (2006). Pattison (1999). Schelegel, Friedrich (1958–1991). Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe , 35 vols., eds. Ernst

Behler et al. (Munich: Schöningh). Jon Stewart (2003). Kierkegaard and His Contemporaries: Th e Culture of Golden Age Denmark

(Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter). —–— (ed.) (2008). Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries. Tome III: Literature and

Aesthetics (Aldershotand Burlington: Ashgate).

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