Soren Kierkegaard - Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

REPETITION AND PHILOSOPHICAL CRUMBS

S REN A ABYE K IERKEGAARD (1813-1855) was born in Copenhagen, Denmarks main trading port. He was a defining figure in Denmarks Golden Age, when its art and literature rivalled the best from Paris or Berlin. He earned the equivalent of a doctorate in 1841 with a dissertation on The Concept of Irony, with Constant Reference to Socrates. A substantial inheritance freed him to write full time and sidestep the compromises of an academic career. Though he went through an abortive engagement, he never married and was freed from the distractions of family life. He published Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, Repetition, and Philosophical Crumbs in 1843-4, and several other works in a variety of innovative genres thereafter. His writing career was to end with the massive Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), intended to be, indeed, his concluding statement, after which he would lead the simple life of a pastor. But by nature incurably polemical, a bitter dispute with a popular Copenhagen weekly kept him in the public eye. His critiques of the popular press, mass politics, and social club religion were to have a profound influence on twentieth-century existentialist, Marxist, and religious commentary on bourgeois society. As philosophers and social critics Heidegger, Arendt, Camus, and Sartre relied heavily on him, while his dazzling insights and literary skills were to influence the writers Ibsen, Rilke, and Kafka, Auden and Dinesen, as well as such theologians as Tillich, Barth, Buber, Bonhoeffer, and Levinas.

M. G. P IETY is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Drexel University. She was a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Sren Kierkegaard Research at the University of Copenhagen from 1990 to 1998, and has published articles on Kierkegaard and on the philosophy of religion.

E DWARD F. M OONEY is Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Syracuse University. He is the author of On Sren Kierkegaard: Dialogue, Polemics, Lost Intimacy and Time (2007), as well as two other books on Kierkegaard and articles on Kierkegaard and moral philosophy.

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

SREN KIERKEGAARD

Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs

Translated by
M. G. PIETY

With an Introduction by
EDWARD F. MOONEY

and Notes by
EDWARD F. MOONEY and M. G. PIETY

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Translation and Notes M. G. Piety 2009
Introduction, Select Bibliography, and Notes Edward F. Mooney 2009

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

I N 1843, a few months before the publication of Repetition and about a year before that of Philosophical Crumbs, Kierkegaard published Either/Or in two volumes; the first (Either) evokes a fragment of life from the angle of an aesthetic existence, the second (Or), from an ethical standpoint. The compilation of papers evoking an aesthetic way of life includes poetic musings, music criticism, and reflections on tragedy. A mood of somewhat sinister dissipation and manipulation permeates the psychological intrigues of The Seducers Diary, a small novelette that has often been published separately. The second volume, also a compilation, includes letters addressed to the aesthete of Volume 1. They come from the pen of one Judge Wilhelm, a worthy citizen who gives a rather long-winded defence of an ethical way of life. There is a tension, then, between the Either and the Or that invites readers to weigh the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of their own orientations in life. Just to complicate matters, a short religious tract is inserted in the final pages. Beyond the life of a poet or a judge is the life of a pastor or priest. The pastors contribution to this fragment of life is a severe, accusatory sermon on our being always in the wrong as against God. Thus, in Volume 2 we have a critique not only of the self-indulgent aesthete but also of the self-satisfied Judge.

Either/Or, like Crumbs and Repetition, seeks to map the subtle ways that suffering is imposed and self-imposed, and to suggest paths of relief. We are aware that the book holds up a troubling mirror to our lives, and we see that as readers we have a role to play in negotiating the tensions between the ethical and the aesthetic, for instance. The books use of pseudonyms, and complex dramatic stagings, are characteristic. While Either/Or is but a small fraction of Kierkegaards total literary, philosophical output, Repetition and Crumbs represent an even smaller fraction, but their small size and lavish detail make them marvellous doors into Kierkegaards worlds.

Repetition marks the end of Kierkegaards initial, and in many ways richest, year of publication, 1843. Philosophical Crumbs comes a few months later. The Concluding Unscientific Postscript, a 500-page sequel appearing in 1846, is a tragi-comic treatise that stages Kierkegaardian subjectivity and objectivity, the roles of knowledge and passion in orienting a self, and the face-off between Reason and Faith. Front and centre is a self radically distinct from any social mass or group membership. Singular individuals struggle to make sense of things, to find a basis for life-shaping decisions, to find insight to ease the ubiquity of affliction, not least ones own. Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs open these themes, and display the artistry and wit of Kierkegaards infinitely restless moral and religious imagination.