Piecing together Philosophical Fragments, or a Fragment of Philosophy

I'm always fond of titles that give an or after, ever since I read The Hobbit as a kid, or There and Back Again. At first this one seems simply tautological, which seems to be the joke. As you read along, Kierkegaard's pseudonym Johannes Climacus, edited by S Kierkegaard, ventriloquizes through quotation marks to give your protestations, or the protestations of some critical reader like you. The speaker protests that his fragment or fragments are all thinly veiled or outright quotations from elsewhere, that the philosophy or philosophical poem he is laying out is the Biblical story in erudite dress.

The theme of repetition, of echoing, of saying the same old things, comes forward at the end of each section, just to highlight how little claim to originality the ideas may have, despite their elegant arrangement. Climacus seems eager to concede that he is recapitulating the Christian narrative in another guise. He continually recurs to his difference from Socrates and the theory of recollection, wherein we are supposed to have the truth already within ourselves, invoking instead the moment of the paradoxical entry of truth into history, a moment with a historical point of departure provided by the god. Whereas Socratic teaching is maieutic, one human being helping another though doubt and wonder to recognize the eternal truth within and bring it forth in articulate speech, he asserts, Christian teaching is generative, giving the occasion, the capacity for understanding one is in untruth, as well as the eternal truth, the new wine skin and the new wine, which we may encounter in the happy paradox of faith, or else stumble over and take offense.

I think that about gathers his key words to sum up. Of course, the bare summary gives only the slightest sense of what it is like to experience this text, to take its invitation to think through such a sweeping dialectical poetic thought experiment, which turns out to be nothing less than the call to wonder at the incarnation of logos.

But more than Socratic method, Climacus' polemical target here seems to be Hegelian method. It is interesting that the latter has morphed through Marxian and Freudian and critical-theoretical approaches to continue to dominate the universities, whereas the former has enjoyed something of a resurgence in popularity at the grammar school level, albeit a poorly understood and mostly-buzzwordy rather than a substantial one, just as the professors seem largely unaware of their history, much less their world-historical lateness to the scene. Part of why I am not a professor, after all, nor even a full-time teacher anymore, is that I don't pretend to understand either Socrates or Hegel, teaching or history, much as I am enjoying working my way through the reading. Still, whether we attempt to go beyond Socrates in the Hegelian manner or just try to get back to Socrates through classroom discussion, Climacus' main point seems to be that we need to keep our sense for paradox about us, not to try to cover it over with words when it strikes us in the midst of our methods, but to be open to its calling us beyond ourselves.

Something of this is what I would like to say in the Tedx talks this year, now that their agreement page is loading. I don't know if anyone has applied yet, or how they could have honestly checked the box saying they'd read it when it wasn't working before.

And I still like the line of thinking about these topics I undertook back in the desert, but I have the feeling I will still be thinking over the same things in these and other ways for a long time yet.