I somehow convinced one of my professors to let me do an IS on Kierkegaard this quarter. I’m ecstatic. My work for the quarter includes weekly posts about what I’m reading. Amazon Affiliate links to the books I’m using if you want to read along: The Essential Kierkegaard and Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography. So here we go.
This week I read about the three things considered most critical to understanding Kierkegaard: his relationship to his father; his engagement to (and breakup with) Regine, and “the Corsair affair.” I followed these by reading Either/Or, which he wrote during the time after he ended his engagement to Regine.
The most interesting thing to me was learning that not only did Kierkegaard write pseudonymously, but he insisted that the pseudonymous works should be read as the works of the character that wrote them, not of Kierkegaard. This makes me think of modern entertainers like Taylor Swift or (less modern) Peter Murphy whose work moves fluidly between autobiography and first-person fiction.
This realization stayed with me as I read Either/Or this week. According to this Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry, Either/Or presents multiple voices or perspectives. This feels like a presage of Fear and Trembling, the only book of Kierkegaard’s I’d already read. How many ways are there to tell a story? How many truths? How many realities?
I haven’t finished Either/Or yet; to be honest, I’m struggling to stay focused when there are so many witty one-liners. I keep thinking, “Ooo, I need to write about that,” but I only get to write a few hundred words each week. I’m sure Dr. V won’t complain about more words, but I do have a brand new job and another class to balance with this one. Anyway, the one-liner that sent me scrambling to this post before I finish the reading is this one:
“People with experience maintain that proceeding from a basic principle is supposed to be very reasonable; I yield to them and proceed from the basic principle that all people are boring.” I, 257.1
Look I hollered out loud in the IHOP. Big Jane Austen vibes (“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a great fortune must be in want of a wife”2).
Funny as he seems to be, I see something more important arising in this work. Early on in Either/Or, Kierkegaard says, “I feel as a chessman must feel when the opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved.”3 My first thought was, “Okay but how does that chessman feel?”
That is, the sentence doesn’t really tell us anything. Can a chess piece feel things? I assume Kierkegaard4 means the chess piece because the referring pronoun used is “it” not “him.” So assuming the chess piece is personified here and has feelings,5 what are those feelings when its movement is challenged? Is the piece upset that its plans were interrupted? Is it relieved that it doesn’t have to carry out an appointed task? Does it resent the opponent’s interference? How can I begin to guess how a chess piece feels when its opponent says it can’t be moved? And proceeding from there, what in the world does that tell us about how Kierkegaard feels in that moment?
In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard tells the story of Isaac from the perspective of every character in the Bible story. This feels like the same exercise in one sentence. Is the chess piece resentful and rebellious because Kierkegaard’s father was overbearing and strict? Is the chess piece trapped by its own guilt and shame at having entered an engagement it can’t fulfill? Is it simply bored with the tedium of its opponent’s never-ending cache of rules?
Reality starts to feel like “streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent;”6 how the hell do we even start to “spit out all the butt ends of [our] days and ways?”7 Which is to say, concrete reality begins to crumble as soon as I consider the implications of a dozen possible realities contained in 18 words.
Howard V. Hong and Hong, Edna H., eds. The Essential Kierkegaard. Princeton: Princeton University Press (2023), 50.
Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice.
ibid. I, 6; p. 38.
Well, Victor Eremita, but actually A., because Eremita is supposed to be editing A’s diaries, so Kierkegaard has placed two degrees of Kevin Bacon between himself and the writing.
Assuming that A. is referring here to the chess player and not the piece generates a ‘nother whole essay.
T. S. Eliot. “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock. Lines 8-9.
ibid. Line 60.