Soren Kierkegaard

Themes and Resonances in the writings of Kierkegaard
'Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage'[1]
by Peter Coates

May I thank you for inviting me to revisit the work of Soren Kierkegaard. It has been edifying. According to a recent commentator[2] there are generally three ways in which the work of Kierkegaard has been approached in the literature. Initially, he was regarded as 'romantic memoirist' – an anguished soul who took to the spiritual after an 'unconsummated passion' for Regine Olsen: an engagement which he himself broke off in favour of a higher spiritual-poetic life-commitment. Secondly, he is generally regarded as the father of existentialism – fathering, as it were, his own radical and revolutionary (and for him the only) universal form of true Christianity. And thirdly, and most recently (from about the 1990's) there developed a literary-deconstructionist perspective crucially interested in Kierkegaard's account of 'indirect communication' and 'literary experimentation'. For me (and I'm sure for Kierkegaard) it is his inaugural existentialist understanding of the true individual and spiritual grounds of Christianity which is his greatest and most lasting contribution to a universal and totalising perspective on human potential. At least one great philosopher of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was certainly not known much for commenting on the work of other philosophers or perhaps not even reading them, said exceptionally of Kierkegaard: "Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint".[3]
Soren Kierkegaard

Revisiting the works of Soren Kierkegaard and after many years' familiarity with the works of Ibn 'Arabi, it is difficult, though not impossible, for me to read Kierkegaard except through the lens of the Andalusian master. But I have come to think of this as rather a bonus as there are many more-than-merely-coincidental thematic resonances between the two writers. Particularly noticeable when one adheres to the principle of the Unity of Existence.

Therefore, in keeping with the personal and biographical roots of much existentialism, particularly the writings of Kierkegaard, I can usefully begin on an anecdotal note. After having initially been interested in literature and drawn towards such works as Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground and Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author (titles which themselves have an existentialist philosophical ring) and drawn equally to the nature mysticism present in such authors as Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence I developed an increasing interest towards philosophy itself, which I imagined would throw some light on the basis of the whole matter. Imagine my surprise as a first year philosophy undergraduate when Existentialism was simply dismissed, even vilified, and regarded as being based on an elementary philosophical mistake. Such a rich source of human insight (which I personally knew it to be) dismissed as not warranting any serious philosophical acquaintance. Even the titles of the major works of some of the more recent twentieth-century existentialist thinkers such as Martin Heidegger's Being and Time and Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness were seen to notably exemplify the alleged error and ought to have been carrying a serious philosophical health warning.

The error of which existentialism was accused, so the story goes, is that of the systematic mis-use of the verb 'to be'. It is suggested that the concept of 'being' or 'existence' is not the kind of concept that can be legitimately investigated or even written about. Being or Existence cannot be consider as possessing certain properties or qualities which we can further investigate. When we say 'atoms exist' the word 'exist' simply confirms that something possessing certain properties actually exists rather than does not exist: to say that 'atoms' or 'molecules' exist adds nothing whatever to the properties of what an atom is. So, according to this, existentialists have simply got the logic of the concept of 'existence' wrong.

Interestingly, it is precisely this form of argument which is levelled against Ibn 'Arabi by Affifi, whose study of Ibn 'Arabi's metaphysics of unity we know as the Twenty-nine Pages. However, I can never pass the opportunity by, when referring to Affifi's exposition and critique of Ibn 'Arabi's metaphysics, of pointing out that if you read carefully all of Affifi's original text one begins to observe that when Affifi forgets what he has set out to criticise and simply immerses himself in the exposition of Ibn 'Arabi's metaphysics he noticeably becomes enchanted by what he finds. And we note with interest that Affifi 'later conceded he had not fully understood the thought of Islam's doctor maximus'.[4]

However, this general philosophical critique of existentialism (and also of Ibn 'Arabi's wahdat al wujud) neither fully understands the nature of existentialism or even understands it at all, or at worst wilfully misunderstands it. Like Ibn 'Arabi's central metaphysical themes, Kierkegaard's treatment of his key concepts cannot so easily be dismissed. As a preliminary introduction let us simply list Kierkegaard's central themes : freedom, subjectivity, inwardness, passion, decision, authenticity, teleological suspension of the ethical, the moment, absolute paradox and his critique of metaphysical system-building and of contemporary forms of Christianity. The reason why such engaging themes cannot be dismissed is because his whole existentialist corpus is about human possibility and 'ways of being in the world' and about relating to oneself and to God. In short, the entire logic of Kierkegaard's writings are about what it means and is to be fully human and to live an authentic human existence.

This involved, for Kierkegaard, a powerful and radical revolutionary understanding of Christianity itself. In this context, Kierkegaard, like all existentialists, uses the word 'existence' in a special sense: to denote human potential.
Later existentialists utilised their own terms for that which distinguishes human existence from other forms of existence – like Heidegger's Dasein, Jasper's Existenz, Sartre's pour soi and Nietzsche's Ubermensh. For the sake of summarising this point we can say that the fundamental axiom of all forms of existentialism (atheistic and theistic) entails that the human subject is more accurately described as an existence rather than an existent – a fact whose discovery Heidegger attributes to himself, describing its importance as on a par with the Copernican revolution in astronomy.

To put this in the terms of another German existentialist Karl Jaspers human Existenz is not a type or category of being (like animal, vegetable or mineral), but potential being. And it follows that only human beings, unlike other animals and unlike natural objects, can fail to realise their radical human potential. A tree is a tree is a tree but a human being is not born complete in this sense: we have to find out who and what we are. Existentially it is quite possible to live inauthentic lives based on what, for example, Sartre called 'mauvaise foi' – bad faith or by 'hiding behind excuses' or as Jasper's puts it, equally emphatically, we can 'flee from our freedom' as well as embrace it.

The fundamental tense of existentialism is the future: we are what we become. Human identity is a continual act of self-creation and self-projection into an open future – we are not locked in to what we are now. Choice and decision are major existential categories which determine what we will become. Neither are we locked into the mental packages of our times. The import of our existential decisions is intensive rather than extensive: it is not like choosing cornflakes, but, rather choosing our life-orientation or choosing 'a way of being' with ourselves and others. It is possible to drift through life on the horizontal plane of habit: to drift into higher education, co-habitation, religion, politics and so on in a habitual manner - almost automatically. But, occasionally there can be vertical intersection – a seismic dislocation which wakes us up and shatters our habitual everydayness. These are very significant wake-up moments and usually involve a personal and urgent re-evaluation of our decisions and choices and our view of things and ourselves.

Of course, existentialists of all persuasions recognise that there are always some givens referred to sometimes as facticities – that is, those circumstances not of our own choosing – like parents, biology, culture, language, etc. This means that human freedom is necessarily located in the concrete details of our everyday lives. Human freedom is not free-floating – but what we can choose is our attitude towards or perspective on, or reaction to, these givens. These very choices, decisions and responses determine the kind of person we are or become. Even the refusal to choose is a choice.

Equally of existential importance is the recognition that each individual is a unique, irreplaceable centre of consciousness. We cannot be cloned or manufactured or treated as an ideological subject to be fitted into some ideological system – religious, political, economic, social or whatever. Human-beingness is, by its very nature, always capable of transcending its own artefacts of reification: that is its attempts to reduce itself to some kind of thing or object. Existentialism's lasting contribution is likely to be its radical analysis of human consciousness and its profound, dynamic possibilities. This is the idea that we are existence (as it were thrown at birth into existence) and we cannot ever step outside it but can only encounter it: all existentialists emphasise the sheer givenness, variety and primordiality of existence. Human beings could never have thought it up. For Kierkegaard, this freshness of vision is paradoxical and bewildering for it testifies to the truth that 'the eternal has come into being in time' and he astutely remarks 'the only thing-in-itself which cannot be thought is existence'.

'The single individual, which everyone can and should be' constitutes for Kierkegaard the fundamental existentialist category. We have, (as also Nietzsche said enigmatically later in the same century) to become what we already are. For Kierkegaard the emphasis is clearly on the fact that we are in the making at every moment. And here we encounter an initial difficulty. For Kierkegaard, we are for most of the time not in a position to know who or what we are �for it is a feature of contemporary life that we often lose contact with ourselves, that is, lose contact with that self which has been with us all along, but we have ignored or failed to recognise. Consider the following:
"The greatest hazard of all, losing one's self, can occur very quietly, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss – an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife etc – is sure to be noticed"

The Sickness unto Death (Trans. Hong and Hong, Princeton University Press, 1980) p32.
There is often an irony and humour in Kierkegaard's writings which serves to heighten the essential point being made. His university thesis was entitled The Concept of Irony, with continual reference to Socrates and he had to ask special permission of the king to write in Danish instead of the prescribed Latin for he felt that not only would Danish do the topic more justice but also perhaps this love of his living native language was more truly an expression of his authentic self and inheritance. But universities being universities the University of Copenhagen insisted that the subsequent oral examination be conducted in Latin. It's small biographical details like these which indicate the strength of his heart-felt and emerging convictions.

He sums up his architecture of the self and his treatment of 'the single individual' in the following manner:
Spiritual superiority only sees the individual. But alas, ordinarily we human beings are sensual and, therefore, as soon as it is a gathering, the impression changes- we see something abstract, the crowd, and we become different. But in the eyes of God, the infinite spirit, all the millions that have lived and now live do not make a crowd, He only sees each individual.[5]

What he goes onto say contains his greatest insights and some of his most difficult-to-grasp material for it is his account (in the context of his radical Christianity) of the ultimate theophanic foundations of the human self. He starts off fairly straightforwardly by stating the first synthesis from which all other syntheses are derived:
'...man is a synthesis of psyche and body sustained by the spirit'.[6]
And in an analogous context we learn:
A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two. A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation's relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation's relating itself to itself. [7]

The self is that which comprehensively relates the relation of the complementary opposites (e.g. the Finite/the Infinite, the Temporal and the Eternal etc) to itself and thereby relates always and only to itself. The self is, therefore, for Kierkegaard, not simply the relation of itself to itself but is the self-involving, all-inclusive relatedness of itself to all its own myriad and many-faceted relations. Perhaps, even the totality of the self is always present in the particularities and infinities of its owns relationships.

And further Kierkegaard concludes:
in relating itself to itself and in willing to be oneself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it. (That is, God)[8]

Let us try and unravel some points here. For Kierkegaard, this transparent self is the self freed from the impediments of fear, despair and dread, elements which figure much in the Kierkegaardian lexicon. The human spirit is an ongoing relational process to itself. It is a 'verb' rather than a 'noun'.
In general existentialist literature considers this self-relating reflexivity as the defining nature of human consciousness and awareness. It clearly allows for the possibility of radical self-change: a situation in which consciousness consciously reconfigures itself. At its most spiritually potent it is a consciousness becoming 'more' transparent to itself – freed from its obfuscating impediments. This is analogously connected with what Izutsu points to when he observes that the meaning that we perceive the self to have 'is inseparably connected with the subjective state of man, so that the self-same reality is said to be perceived differently in accordance with different degrees of consciousness'.

And it also implies that the human self can live inauthentically – that is, out of proper relationship with itself – a state of losing conscious contact (within in the vicissitudes of space, time, language, culture, history, biology and gender) with our essential reality as spirit. We can live our lives and relate to ourselves in denial of our dependence on that which established and ongoingly establishes us. On the other hand, a conscious recognition of our absolute dependence (which is servanthood) realigns our relationship to our core nature. Such a conscious recognition demands acting in accordance, moment by moment, with the demands of such a recognition. And this is 'the willing to be oneself' at every moment so that the self, as Kierkegaard puts it, 'rests transparently in the power that established it'.

The implications of this Kierkegaardian view of the relationship of the individual's theophanic awareness of God is radical because the single individual's relationship with the grounds which established it is direct and unmediated. It is an awareness which transcends the State, the priest or any secular or religious collectivity and all the relative conditions of the phenomenal world. Neither, insists Kierkegaard, does this elevated view of the unmediated single individual's relationship to God have anything at all in common with the prevailing mediocrity with which the Lutheran Protestantism of his day was 'blest above measure'.[9] Kierkegaard is uncompromising concerning the directness of the single individual's unmediated facing with God.

The undivided emphasis on living completely in the intersection of time and eternity (or in 'the moment', as Kierkegaard so often puts it) is best expressed in Kierkegaard's captivating descriptions of the phenomenology of the truly spiritual life. Consider his early treatment of the his central concepts of 'passion' and 'subjectivity':

What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain understanding must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do; the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live or die. What would be the use of discovering so-called objective truth, of working through all the systems of philosophy and be able, if required, to review them all and show up the inconsistencies within each system; – what good would it do me to be able to develop a theory of the state and combine all the details into a simple whole, and so construct a world in which I did not live, but only held up to the view of others; – what good would it do me to be able to explain Christianity if it had no deeper significance for me and for my life; – what good would it do me if truth stood before me cold and naked, not caring whether I recognised her or not, and producing in me a shudder of fear rather an a trusting devotion? I certainly do not deny that I still recognise an imperative of the understanding and that through that one can work upon men, but it must be taken up into my life, and that is what I now recognize as the most important thing. That is what my soul longs after, as the African desert thirsts for water. That is what I lack, and that is why I am left standing like a man who has rented a house and has gathered all the furniture and household things together but has not yet found the beloved..[10]

These heart-felt longings are not essentially a matter of intellectual understanding or a result of any Hegelian system-building. All conceptual attempts by philosophers 'to explain existence and history' must, suggests Kierkegaard, elicit a smile from Providence 'He has perhaps not exactly laughed at them, for they had a certain human and honest seriousness about them.but Hegel – oh let me think in a Greek manner – how the Gods must have guffawed!'[11]

These heart-felt longings and passions are, for Kierkegaard, a defining index of primordial spirituality. He famously asserts that 'spirituality is inwardness, inwardness is subjectivity; subjectivity is essentially passion'[12] Inwardness is the realisation and appropriation of spirituality in its fullness: that is, we need to be it. It is not sufficient to just talk about it (however, cleverly and convincingly) if in our talking about it we continue, in unawareness, to inhabit quite a different subjective universe. It is partly in order that we may understand this point well that Kierkegaard writes about stages on life's way. He refers to these existential modalities as the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious.

Consider two concentric circles (one outer and one inner) around the same centre point. The outer circle is the aesthetic form of existence, the inner smaller circle is the ethical form of existence and the centre point is 'the single individual'. For those who live on the outer circle their essential motivation is ego-centric in that all that they do is for their own pleasure and self-satisfaction (however culturally and imaginatively sophisticated) and such undivided self-centred motivation can make them very successful in the world, even admired. What they fear most is boredom and they soon become bored. In music it is typified by Mozart's Don Juan: the romantic libertine. But, as Kierkegaard points, out once they have got all the t-shirts a certain realisation of the fact that this kind of life is not really working out – a kind of despair at the underlying emptiness of this way of life appears behind the scenes. This despair can work in two ways – a desire to fling oneself back into one's former ways even more determined to make them work this time. In this case the despair is seen as a temporary hiccup. But the same despair can also be a positive corrective. It may engender a desire to live differently – engender what Kierkegaard called a 'leap of faith' into the unknown – into the ethical stage. But, nevertheless, insists Kierkegaard, the aesthetic life does rest on a taste of the infinite and imaginative possibilities open to man but in an entirely egocentric and self-deceiving manner.

Marriage and vocation are seen as exemplars of the ethical stage: the gravity here is commitment beyond one's self. Here responsibility and commitment are central and also a sense of one's indebtedness to collective social life. One might call it the 'good householder stage' and certainly Kant's famous moral 'categorical imperative' encapsulates its spirit. It is qualitatively different to the aesthetic life – it has a completely different centre of gravity. Entering into a long-term committed relationship exemplifies, for Kierkegaard, just such a leap of faith into the unknown. Kierkegaard was deeply attracted to the ethical life in his deep love for (and infatuation with) Olsen. He broke off his engagement because he thought that 'God had lodged a veto' against the marriage. When he broke off the engagement he records: 'my thoughts were these: either you throw yourself into the wildest kind of life – or else become absolutely religious'.

As one commentator summarises: the ethical life is a kind of 'official existence �that of a good head of family, that of the faithful husband, that of the conscientious workman or employee' but its limitation is that it fails to 'recognize one's own infinite self and does not engage in an absolute striving to attain one's own highest infinite salvation, outside and above that which is official and the most finite duties of this life'.[13] Kierkegaard clearly chose the religious stage: his eroticism, according to some, being sublimated in his poetry. But certainly, his breaking off the engagement with Regine freed him from any further love affairs of this kind. Of the general ontological significance of woman he says the following:

Woman clarifies finiteness, man chases after infinity. So it should be, and each has his or her pain; for the woman bears children in pain, but man conceives ideas in pain..woman is man's deepest life. Let man give up his claim to be lord and master of Nature, let him yield his place to woman; she is its mistress, it understands her and she understands it. That is why she is everything for man, for she bestows finiteness upon him...I have often rejoiced to see woman's significance in this light: for me she then becomes a symbol of the congregation in general, and the spirit is greatly embarrassed when it has no congregation in which to dwell, and when it dwells in the congregation it becomes the spirit of the congregation. That is why....it does not say in the Scriptures that a maiden shall leave the father and mother and cleave unto her husband, as one might expect...(as) she seeks protection in the man; no it says, 'A man shall leave his father and mother and shall cleave unto his wife', for inasmuch as she gives him finiteness she is stronger than he.[14]

Here we see the feminine principle ontologically portrayed as the necessary and perfect symbol of creative receptivity to the spirit.

The next stage is the religious stage. And this involves a leap of faith into a radically different spiritual order of existence, an order which doesn't entirely negate the previous stages but subjects their appraisal to a deeper telos. This is where Kierkegaard introduces the idea of 'the teleological suspension of the ethical'. To develop his point he cites extensively the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. And we soon learn that the religious stage involves a transformation of the self. We may say that such an individual is 'not limited to what appear to others to be the facts of experience – for the very landscape and architecture of [the single individual's self-experience] is recast in the very process of grappling with it'.[15]

As we know, the story of Abraham and Isaac is recounted in the Bible, in the Koran and in the Fusus al-Hikam of Ibn 'Arabi. Each account has its particularities. Kierkegaard had recourse only to the biblical account. But these differences do not substantially alter the point Kierkegaard is making for all the versions agree that Abraham thought he was required to sacrifice his own son and was willing to do so. Whether Abraham was actually instructed to sacrifice his son Isaac or Abraham misinterpreted the meaning of his own dream or, even, whether or not Abraham told his wife Sarah or Isaac about it the basic points remains: Abraham perceived that he was required to sacrifice his son. We know, of course, that the matter turned out differently and that Abraham was not required to sacrifice Isaac (but rather a ram in his place). And we know the great Divine recompense that was bestowed later on Abraham and his descendants. But, for Kierkegaard, this whole extraordinary episode illustrates that the truly religious life is a profound paradox that takes the individual beyond the domain of the ethical. Kierkegaard is unremitting in his clarity that the sacrificing of one's son cannot be justified by any universal ethical principle.

There may be circumstances, suggests Kierkegaard, where the taking of one's son's life, however painful, may be justifiable ethically: 'where the State entrusts the father with the sword of judgement, when the law demands punishment at the father's hand' or, perhaps there has been a gross violation by the son of his duty. But in the case of Abraham it is a qualitatively different situation: for 'he overstepped the ethical altogether. And had a higher telos outside of it, in relation to which he suspended it'[16] Even Shakespeare, notes Kierkegaard, with his kaleidoscopic insight into the vagaries of humanity and human passion never gave voice to this unique dramatic topic. For the reality of the perceived demand of Abraham to sacrifice Isaac is fundamentally a paradox whose ontological domain resides beyond the ethical universe. According to Kierkegaard, Abraham remained silent and told neither his wife Sarah nor Isaac what he had been asked to do for it is such that he could not have explained to or justified it to anyone within the relative discursive parameters of moral discourse: for how could such a radical 'teleological suspension of the ethical' be shown to be compatible with human ethics. At the very least, the adoption of such a teleological suspension relativises the findings of all moral discourse. Would it even be sufficient to answer that what Kierkegaard is asserting is that our judgement of good and evil is 'relative to our knowledge'?[17] Not straightforwardly so for Kierkegaard because of its fundamentally different ontological basis: the ground of the teleological suspension of the ethical belongs to what he calls the category of the absurd. We are not dealing here primarily with an ethical universe but with a dimension of reality beyond the grasp of human reflection or ethical conceptualisation: this is the unmediated divine landscape which 'the single individual' (say a Abraham or a Socrates) inhabits and constitutes 'an absolute relationship with the absolute' which cannot be linguistically mediated – it is essentially an unmediated private matter.[18] He says:

The absurd, or to act by virtue of the absurd, is to act upon faith, trusting in God...I must act but reflection has closed the road..I am brought to a standstill by my powers of reflection...
This action, in relation to humanly-constructed rational principles of ethics, results in a cognitive immobility, but Kierkegaard continues:
...and yet here is where I have to act... really decisively ...because I am then caught up in an infinite passion [19]

What by some would be considered an offense to the human intellect is for Kierkegaard a paradox which does not imply contradiction, but, rather a truth which can only be embraced in faith and realised through inwardness, until we become that single individual 'which everyone can and should be': a truth only realisable through heroic self-realisation.

I use the term heroic advisedly because Kierkegaard uses an analogous sense of 'heroism' to that documented in Ibn 'Arabi's Kernel of the Kernel. We are very fortunate here at Chisholme to be able to read such material with what Kierkegaard would undoubtedly call 'inwardness'. And as we shall see, in what follows, Kierkegaard concurs that only he who does an heroic act knows its taste and demands. This was the situation with Abraham and, for Kierkegaard, with Socrates and potentially of us all. In Fear and Trembling and in his discussion of the suspension of the ethical he also strategically mentions Socrates. He regards Socrates as a hero – a tragic hero because of his trial and manner of death. And an intellectual tragic hero because of the way he accomplished his divine mission through systematic questioning: Socrates own analogy of himself as a midwife of the spirit helping others to give birth to themselves through the process of recollection is relevant here. Let us see what Kierkegaard makes of Socrates in that remarkable passage in Fear and Trembling:

One may take Socrates as an example. He was an intellectual tragic hero. His death sentence was announced to him. That instant he dies – for one who does not understand that the whole power of the spirit is required for dying, and that the hero always dies before he dies, that man will not get very far with his conception of life. So as a hero it is required of Socrates that he repose tranquilly within himself, but as an intellectual tragic hero it is required of him that he have spiritual strength to carry himself through. So he cannot like the ordinary tragic hero concentrate upon keeping himself face to face with death, but he must make this movement so quickly that at the same instant he is consciously well over and beyond this strife and asserts himself. So if Socrates in the crisis of death had remained mute, he would have weakened the impression of his life and awakened a suspicion that the elastic irony within him was not a cosmic force but a lifebelt which by its buoyancy might serve to hold him up pathetically at the decisive moment.[20]

Socrates said in response to the narrow margin of the vote that condemned him to death: 'I should never have believed it would be such a close thing'. [21]

There is much more that could be said about his life that is widely commented upon by others scholars one of which perhaps ought to be mentioned and that is the significant invisibility of any mention of his mother throughout his entire writings. And, perhaps, most prominently of all, the suffering and spiritual stress that dominated his short forty-two years of life, which was indissolubly tied to the theology of the suffering Christ and intensified by his own predisposition to despair and melancholy. This cannot have been helped by the prediction which was primarily rooted in his father's inconsolable guilt at '...(having cursed God?...and impregnated Kierkegaard's mother out of wedlock?') that God would punish him by taking the lives of all seven of his children before they reached the age of 34 (the age of Jesus Christ at his crucifixion)'. [22]

Finally, let us turn to an aspect of what might be called the developing maturity of his spiritual intention which seems to have governed his entire programme of authorship. We see something of the importance of this in Kierkegaard's decision to published much of his work pseudonymously. For him these were 'indirect communications' whose characters often articulated opposite points of view. Kierkegaard did not want either himself or his authorship to be taken as an authority. This would run counter to the necessary inner work that each individual has to do for themselves and presuppose a knowledge on the part of the author which only God could know. There is no teacher except God in the Kierkegaardian spiritual arena. Each of us has to do our own sums as he says: 'There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys: they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked out the sum for themselves'.

But additionally, as Kierkegaard is at pains to make clear:
It must above all be pointed out that I [am not one] who... originally envisioned everything and now, self-confident on all points, uses indirect communication, but that I myself have developed during the writing. This explains why my indirect communication is on a lower level than the direct, for the indirectness was due also to my not being clear myself at the beginning. Therefore I myself am the one who has been formed and developed by and through the indirect communication[23]
But other works (eg his Edifying Discourses and Works of Love) he considered to be direct forms of communication in which he was 'to take clearly and directly everything which up till now has been indirect, and come forward personally, definitely, and directly as one who wished to serve the cause of Christianity'.[24]

This change in the orientation of his spiritual intention is isomorphic with his later rejection of 'hidden inwardness' in favour of what I would call expressive inwardness. 'Inwardness' is still, of course, fundamental to the Kierkegaardian project and he acknowledges that it is because of his earlier commitment to 'hidden inwardness' that he has come to realise its dangers and inappropriateness.

Consider:
...nothing is more dangerous than to cut men loose and give up all control, and allow each man to give assurance about all that his hidden inwardness conceals. And nothing is more contrary to Christianity, Christianity which, above all, wishes everything to be made manifest[25]

We have covered a great deal of ground and you have all been very patient. As well as their major differences there are all kinds of resonances between the ambience of Ibn 'Arabi's invitation to self-knowledge and Kierkegaard's radical call to inwardness: both are monumental invitations to discover who and what we really are – to what it means to be truly human – in other words, mutatis mutandis, invitations to our essential nature. That the whole programme of Kierkegaard's authorship is essentially to be considered as an invitation is probably related to him becoming an influential figure beyond his time and culture, just as Socrates himself (who himself never left any writings and who was, according to Kierkegaard, best regarded as a very private individual) himself became a world-historical figure. In fact, Kierkegaard has a word for this posthumous process: he calls it Governance, divine governance perhaps? Governance, in this context, indicating that which controls the influence of something. This is why he says and I shall conclude on this note: an envelope 'being a means of transmitting a message to its proper recipient and a means of concealing it from everyone else: the enclosure of a disclosure. It could of course be addressed to you; and the only question is whether you will care to open it'. [26]

Peter Coates, Beshara School At the Chisholme Institute, March 7th, 2009

Notes

[1] A line from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night quoted by Kierkegaard prior to the Preface of Philosophical Fragments.
[2] The Kierkegaard Reader eds. Chamberlain and Ree (Blackwell, Oxford, 2001) p3-4.
[3] Remark cited in a discussion at the Moral Sciences Club in Cambridge by Maurice O`Connor Drury.
[4] Khalil, Atif Journal of Religion and Society Review of Peter Coates' Ibn 'Arabi and Modern Thought
[5] The Diary of Soren Kierkegaard, part 5, sect. 3, no. 127, entry for 1850. (Ed. by Peter Rohde, 1960)
[6] The Concept of Anxiety . The Kierkegaard Reader ed Chamberlain and Ree (Blackwell, 2001) p199.
[7] The Sickness unto Death Ed. & trans. Hong and Hong, ( Princeton Paperbacks, 1983) pp13-14.
[8] The Sickness unto Death Ed. & trans. Hong and Hong, ( Princeton Paperbacks, 1983) pp13-14.
[9] The Journals of Kierkegaard Trans. And Ed. Alexander Dru (Oxford University Press, 1959) p498.
[10] The Journals of Kierkegaard Trans. And Ed. Alexander Dru (Oxford University Press, 1959) p15.
[11] The Kierkegaard Reader Eds. Chamberlain and Ree (Blackwell Readers, 2001) p24.
[12] Kierkegaard Modern Thinkers Zuidema trs. Freeman (Philadelphia Penna, 1969) p17.
[13] Kierkegaard – Modern Thinkers Zuidema trs. Freeman (Philadelphia, Penna, 1969) p31.
[14] Either/Or trans. Alastair Hannay (Penguin Classics, London, 1992) p577.
[15] Ibn 'Arabi and Modern Thought Peter Coates (Anqa Publishing, Oxford, 2008) p 168.
[16] The Kierkegaard Reader Eds. Chamberlain and Ree (Blackwell Readers, 2001) p87.
[17] The Twenty-Nine Pages Extracts from A.E. Affifi's work (Beshara Publications, Roxburgh) p68.
[18] The Kierkegaard Reader Eds. Chamberlain and Ree (Blackwell Readers, 2001) p89.
[19] The Journals of Kierkegaard trans. and ed. Alexander Dru (Oxford University Press, 1959) p291.
[20] Fear and Trembling Soren Kierkegaard trs. Lowrie (Princeton University Press, 1952) p182.
[21] The Last Days of Socrates trs. Hugh Tredennick (Penguin Books, London, 1969) p69.
[22] Soren Kierkegaard William McDonald (Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy 2006 online)pp3-4.
[23] Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard: Religion, Individuality and Philosophical Method
�Charles L. Creegan (Routledge, 1997) Chap 2 n.65.
[24] The Journals of Kierkegaard trans. and ed. Alexander Dru (Oxford University Press, 1959) p259.
[25] The Journals of Kierkegaard trans. and ed. Alexander Dru (Oxford University Press, 1959) p447.
[26] The Kierkegaard Reader Eds. Chamberlain and Ree (Blackwell Readers, 2001) p114.