The subjective thinker as artist

Abstract

In both the pseudonymous and nonpseudonymous writings of Sraren Kierkegaard a number of passages give the impression that the author opposes poetic or artistic forms of expression in human life. Romantic poetry and the romantic mode of ‘living poetically’ in particular are subjected to severe criticism in The Concept ofIrony and Either/Or, but in many instances the charges brought against the poetic in the authorship range beyond romantic forms to include poetry in general.’ A negative attitude toward the poetic is especially prominent in writings from the middle period of Kierkegaard’s authorship, e.g. Stages On Life’s Way, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Works of Love, and The Point of View For My Work as an Author. These works declare, for example, that a union between the aesthetic and the ethical is a misalliance (SLW, 400), that a poetic relation to actuality is a misunderstanding and a backward step (CUP, 347), that religious pathos does not consist in singing, hymning, and composing verse but in existing (CUP, 348), that the poet cannot help us to understand life (WL, 63), and that we must move away from the poetical to a religious, more specifically a Christian, mode of life (PV, 74). Even in the later religious literature, where Kierkegaard views his own role as a ‘poet of the religious’ (JP, 6: 6511) and his writings as a form of ‘poet-communication’ (JP 6: 6528, 6574), imagination is likened to ‘an actor clad in rags’ (TC, 186), and the poet (next to the priest, who is regarded as no more than a poet) is declared to be the most dangerous of men (KAUC, 201-202). Although this decidedly negative posture toward the poetic is present throughout the authorship, it should be seen as constituting only one side, not the total viewpoint, of Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms on this subject. Running counter to it is another perspective in the literature which regards the poetic as an essential ingredient in ethical and religious forms of life.* Sometimes these forms of existence themselves are understood and characterised in aesthetic terms, making it possible to discern what may be called an existential or ethical-religious aesthetics in Kierkegaard’s thought.3 In the Concept of Irony, for example, the religious is described as an inward infinity that constitutes the truly poetic, and the ethical task incumbent upon every individual is understood as a demand to ‘live poetically’ in a religious sense (CI, 305, 3 13,3 14). Similarly, Judge William in Either/Or claims that the highest in aesthetics is reached when the ethical ideal is given concrete expression in daily life, and the ethical individual is described as feeling himself both ‘creating and created’, having become like ‘the experienced actor who has lived into his character and his lines’ (EO, 2: 137). We cannot consider here all the places in Kierkegaard’s writings where aesthetic categories are employed in portraying ethical and religious existence.