Kierkegaard and Comedy-
pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/i7746.html
“This prompts a more serious question: Who might reasonably be nominated as the funniest philosopher of all time? I want to throw down this gauntlet: Bundle together any other ten philosophers who have made a major impact in the history of philosophy. I challenge any reader to assemble a selection of humor from all of them put together that is funnier than what you find in this volume of Kierkegaard.”- Thomas C. Oden
Imagine that. There you are, ready to throw yourself off a cliff, and three steps away he lands on your nose. You stop, staring cross-eyed at the insect, and the ten years it took for you to become this miserable and decide to kill yourself is absolved by a bug sitting on your nose at once.
I love that!
Voltaire is funny in an ironic sort of way, as well.
Yes, I was just thinking about Voltaire myself. Some discussions between Zadig and professor Pangloss I found absolutely hilarious, although I had not read the Candide entirely.
“With Voltaire, the pen runs and laughs”- Nietzsche
I found no greater master of irony than Kierkegaard in the world of literature. It should be a comforting thought that such a dismal man had this great capacity for humor. I have talked to many who portray Kierkegaard as the saddest of spirits, but this is because they have not yet found him. The road to great laughter is paved with crooks and crannies and blackened stones.
He also tells the story of a man who was walking down the street contemplating suicide, and just as he turns the corner a dislodged brick falls from above and kills him. His last words are “Praise the Lord!”
Oden gives an excellent analysis:
“The incongruity of this situation is that suicide is a violent act of freedom against oneself, whereas the entirely coincidental falling of the stone, which kills him without involving his intention, is briefly glimpsed by the dying man as an unexpected gift or blessing, hence a reason for praise. He no longer has the burden of ending his own life, since it is happily ended by an absurd, unexpected falling stone. This is an example of contradiction, and it appears within the sphere of the aesthetic because it is focused on pain avoidance.”
“With Voltaire, the pen runs and laughs”- Nietzsche
I never saw that quote. I liked it.
Meanwhile, Kierkegaard is someone that I have not read much of. My understanding of him is that he tries to justify the existence of god. Is that correct? That’s why I have always tried to avoid him.
What’s his main focus?
I can’t remember the specifics, been too long, but in an essay called “The Present Age” Kierkegaard tells of a minister who exhorts his flock to be right with God. To give up the world and follow God’s path. One of the congregation visits with the minister and declares that he has decided to give up his business and all his worldly posessions to be in God’s grace. The minister in alarm says, what are you thinking? Go on holliday, take a laxative,…
Oh yes, Voltaire and Candide. After all, “We must be living in the best of all possible worlds…”
JT
I’m sure you could google him to find a lengthy introduction somewhere.
His historical significance lies in his rebellious and unorthodox treatment of Christianity. That is what he is most know for academically. Like Spinoza and Voltaire, his beliefs got him into a lot of trouble and he remains an enigmatic character in history.
However there is much “philosophy” in his writing, if not the thick technical ideas proposed by popular metaphysicians of his day, which handles most accurately the real existential conditions of the ethical life. Once he said of Hegel “he constructs great castles of ivory yet lives in the woodshed beside them,” expressing the unpractical application of the technical, metaphysical systems to every day life.
You might consider him to be an anti-philosopher, but remember that the historical setting which he was in created the atmosphere for his polemical attack on everything academic. With this he customized his style of writing to deliver extremely philosophical points, but in a unique and somewhat unphilosophical way. There has never been a philosopher even remotely comparable to Kierkegaard.
As a young boy, his father ordered him to place second in a test given to those children in his class. Now, you see that it would be much easier to place first or last, but to do just enough to be better than the third, but worse than the first, requires greate precision, intellect, and an understanding of the other children’s capacities. The young Soren had no idea that he would soon become a master at “sizing-up” the human being.
Kierkegaards strength is in his use of the subliminal device. Irony, parody, sarcasm, contradiction, paradox, dilemma, quagmire, all forms of “indirect” communication (inspired by the Socratic method) through which Kierkegaard stripped naked his reader and pulled the rug out from under him. He is the most ‘personal’ philosopher I have ever read. It is as if he is there winking at you when you discover the hidden meaning in his brilliant puzzles, and you say, with goose-bumps rising on your neck, “Aha!”
I have come to the decision that the three greatest philosopher of all time are Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Sartre. With K and N, I see two sides of a single coin…with S I see the currency of it put into action and spent.
An excellent book to get is “Kierkegaards Parables.”
I’ll look for his Parables.
I also offer a candidate for his competition: Chuang Tsu (in a good translation)
“There was a man whose chatter certain circumstances made it neccessary for me to listen to. At every opportunity he was ready with a little philosophical lecture, a very tiresome harangue. Almost in despair, I suddenly discovered that he perspired copiously when talking. I saw the pearls of sweat gather on his brow, unite to form a stream, glide down his nose, and hang at the extreme point of his nose in a drop-shaped body. From the moment of making this discovery, all was changed. I even took pleasure in inciting him to begin his philosophical instruction, merely to observe the perspiration on his brow and at the end of his nose.”
“The Postponed Answer- What is religion? When a Greek philosopher was asked to define religion, he asked for a time to prepare an answer; when the agreed period had elapsed, he asked for another postponement, and so on. In this way he wishes to express symbolically that he regarded the question as unanswerable. This was genuinely in the Greek spirit, beautiful and ingenious. But if he had argued with himself, that since it was so long that he had left the question unanswered, he must now have come nearer to the answer, this would have been a misunderstanding; just as when a debtor remains in debt so long that the debt is finally paid- through having remained so long unpaid.”
"The Amusement of the Gods- Of all wishes, which is the best? Something wonderful has happened to me. I was caught up into the seventh heaven. There sat all the gods in assembly. By special grace I was granted the privilege of making a wish. “Wilt thou,” said Mercury, “Have youth or beauty or power or a long life or the most beautiful maiden or any other glories we have in the chest? Choose, but only one thing.” For a moment I was at a loss. Then I addressed myself to the gods as follows: “Most honorable contemporaries, I choose this one thing, that I may always have the laugh on my side.” Not one of the gods said a word; on the contrary, they all began to laugh. From that I concluded that my wish was granted, and found that the gods knew how to express themselves with taste; for it would hardly have been suitable for them to have answered gravely: “Thy wish is granted.”
One thing I specifically like about that last one is the manner in which Kierkegaard deals with the Gods. The response was purposely ironic, which caused a temporary confoundment in the Gods’ thinking…that pause when the wish he requested was not only the last thing expected, but also something the Gods could never allow in the seriousness of human existence.
In the interaction Kierkegaard is in a sense confidently bargaining with the Gods rather than some timid submission to an overwhelmingly glorious thing. He has a kind of upper hand in the situation. It is almost as if the interaction is entirely mocked by the emphasis of ease in which the response to the wish is passed off…like “sure, why not, I’ll make a wish” spoken with as much disinterest and boredom as with apathy, and then a compliment to the Gods as being tasteful, as an excellent addition to an already eternal wayward and competative comedy between man and Gods in one quick, sharp sarcastic quip; Kierkegaard asking for the impossible just to indirectly object to it while confirming he is more clever than the Gods for requesting a wish they could not grant, and then patting them on the head with a “that’s tasteful, Mercury, real tasteful.”
That is one interpretation I get from the parable.
Brilliant.
The Gods are embarrased, thanks to Kierkegaard.
Excellent. And funny.
Oscar Wilde is by far the funniest philosopher who ever lived. Closely followed by Plato.
Yes yes. I just got my Parables of Kierkegaard and have been in a reading frenzy. I wish I could find the material on the net so I wouldn’t have to type each one if I wanted to share it.
Here is another good one-
“A Permit for Prostitution- What is comedy? When a woman seeks permission to establish herself as a public prostitute, this is comical. We properly feel that it is difficult to become something respectable (so that when a man is refused permission to become master of the hounds, for example, this is not comical), but to be refused permission to become something despicable, is a contradiction. To be sure, if she recieves permission, it is also comical, but the contradiction is different, namely, that the legal authority shows its impotence precisely when it shows its power: its power by giving permission, its impotence by not being able to make is permissible.”
“The Author Who Could Not Write Fast Enough- Excessive self-confidence- how is it challenged? A man…several years ago honored me with his literary confidence. He came to me lamenting that he was to such a degree overwhelmed by fullness of ideas that it was impossible for him to put down anything on paper, because he could not write fast enough. He begged me to be so kind as to be his secretary and write at his dictation. I at once smelled a rat and promptly consoled him with the assurance that I could write as fast as a runaway horse, since I wrote only a letter of each word and yet guaranteed that I could read everything I had written. My willingness to be of service knew no bounds. I had a big table brought out, numbered many sheets of paper, in order that I might not even waste time in turning a page, laid out a dozen steel pens with their holders, dipped my pen- and the man began his address as follows: “Well, yes, you see, my dear Sir, what I really wanted to say was…” When he was through with the address I read it aloud to him, and from that time he has never asked me to be his secretary.”
This would make an excellent sketch…
“The Freeze of the Mime- What is the relation of eternity and the moment? Paul says that the world will pass away “in an instant in the twinkling of an eye.” By that he also expresses the thought that the instant is commensurable with eternity, because the instant of destruction expresses at the same instant eternity. Allow me to illustrate what I mean, and forgive me if there is found anything offensive in the parable I employ. Here in Copenhagen there once upon a time were two actors, who perhaps hardly reflected that a deeper significance might be found in their performance. They came on the stage, placed themselves opposite one another, and then began a pantomime representation of some passionate conflict. When the pantomimic play was in full swing, and the spectators were following the play with keen expectancy of what was to come after, the actors suddenly came to a stop and remained motionless, as though they were petrified in the pantomimic expression of the instant. This may produce a most comical effect, because the instant becomes accidentally commensurable with the eternal. The effect of sculpture is due to the fact that the eternal expression is expressed eternally; the comic effect, on the other hand, by the fact that the accidental expression was eternalized.”
Adlerian:
Let’s put it this way. For every one complaint you have toward God and religion…Kierkegaard would have three. The moment you thought you had an understanding of religion and God, he would turn you on your head.
I don’t think you should be so quick to avoid Kierkegaard. Special care must be taken here in the treatement of “theism” when regarding Kierkegaards ideas about “God.” They are, to say the least, unique and unorthodoxy, bearing a peculiar anthropological and ethical significance as opposed to a metaphysical one, where most serious religions found their doctrines if they can succeed in doing so. You would most likely run through the various “logical” proofs and disproofs for the existence of God and query Kiekegaard within that setting. When it fact Kierkegaard’s basis for the ideation of God is in the rejection of those methods and the inevitable absurdity of intellectual paradox where one eventually ends up. This ‘problem,’ if you want to call it that, is where the meat and potatos are, and Kierkegaard proposes that if a “God(s)” existed it would be in the process of such dilemma, such ethical excursion, that evidences for such would become obvious.
“It is by way of objective repulsion that the absurd is the dynamometer of faith in inwardness.”- Kierkegaard
Yes, God is an existentialist.
Most likely you are comparing Kierkegaard’s “Christianity” with popular Christianity, biblical Christianity with conventional interpretation. A better comparison would be to Hegel’s Christianity.
Kierkegaards rejection as espoused in Concluding Unscientific Postscript- “Possible and Actual Thesis by Lessing,” is that there was no objectively “logical” route to explanation for existence. There could be “logic,” and there could be experience, but there could never be objective experience proved logically and universalized as an explanation for existence. His opposition to Hegelian metaphysics was a form of existential deconstruction, but it was not a nihilism, as it is so often mistaken as. Religion, to par, in Kierkegaard’s time was predominately Platonic, popular, and public and was at a climax with Hegel. Kierkegaard sought to maintain the ethical importance of ‘spiritual practice’ in existence but did so by turning logic on its head, acting as the antagonist to conventional theology.
I call him a soft Nietzsche. Nietzsche the hard Kierkegaard. Their ideas meet in metaphors almost archytipical for the psyche. Between the Will to Power and the Infinite Inwardness there lies the perfect balance of human being. Only after this alchemy is achieved can Spinoza be understood and God found.
…and on the eighth day God created the Kierkegaard-Nietzsche-Spinoza plan for planet earth. (and you thought it would be easy. Ha!)
But that’s another story.
I tend to take your word for things and you make him sounds interesting. I am currently swamped in the reading and learning department, but will place him high on the list.
So, do you have suggestions regarding an order to read him in, or best for me, an especially amusing or pithy read?
Thanks.
Heraclitus!!
the rodney dangerfield of philosophy