More Upbuilding

We looked a bit before at the prefaces to the series of Kierkegaard's Upbuilding Discourses. Here's the closing paragraph in the last of them, One Who Prays Aright:

We have spoken about struggle. Struggle is usually not joyful; when one person is victorious, the other is crushed--alas, it sometimes happens that both the victor and the one overcome have lost. But this struggle is marvelous, well worth being tested in, eternally worth praising, since here they both are more blessedly victorious than when the lover's argument is transfigured into increased love. Are you saying, my listener, that this discourse is not easy (one who is being tested may find it poor and bland compared with the sufferings)--the struggle itself is not easy either. If someone wants to beguile himself by anticipating the quiet outcome of the struggle, its happy understanding, then this is no the fault of the discourse. The victory is still a victory only in a certain high and noble and therefore metaphorical sense, but the pain is literal. When the hour of victory is coming, we do not know, but this we do know--the struggle is a life-and-death struggle.

What has happened here? Questions without question marks, long convoluted periods and parenthetical asides, direct address and self-reference--much of what we find throughout the Discourses, we find also in the pseudonymous works. This voice which is Kierkegaard's own is no less earnest about his direct endorsement of the Christian worldview, and elaborating what he takes that to mean, than his other voices are in their philosophical treatments of the search for such a "happy understanding". Yet after hundreds of pages, this is where he winds up: lover's arguments as a likeness, nobility as a metaphor, and pain as literal, taking his stand on the inscrutability and the certainty of the life-and-death struggle to be a Christian.

At places in this one he sounds like Nietzsche: "The strong man is warned not to misuse his power against the weak, but the weak man is also warned not to misuse the power o prayer against the strong. It may well be that a tyrant who misused his power, a deceiver who misused his shrewdness, never perpetrated as atrocious a wrong as the one who cowardly and slyly prayed in the wrong place, prayed in order to advance his will, flung himself into the weakness of prayer, into imploring misery, in order to shatter another person" (384). What if Kierkegaard was the more prescient of the two, and better saw the path the religious perspective would be bound to take in the wake of modernity? Not the death of God and revaluation of all values, but the hollowing out of the church and every social institution as human potential became freed to be concentrated in this acute inwardness, not unlike these philosophers', only much less educated, connected, instead of to tradition, to social media, but among the resources there encountering, perhaps, a blog or podcast or app that makes us aware of just such heartfelt prayer underlying the once-oppressive and hypocritical churches, just such nobility as the highest aim of even democratically-conceived states which have since succumbed to empire and slipped thence into corporate control.

We eagerly await the next series from Peterson, for instance, whether on Exodus or on the Tao te Ching, once he's had enough of the celebrity-atheist debates and book tours. We agree with his acolytes on much, but stop short of the Pelagianism they seem to endorse. All for the importance of consciousness, of metaphysics, and of the innateness of certain values and the kind of mythological storytelling with which we share them, we would point out something about the way the Christian story introduces charitable interpretation as a ground rule, independent of artful captatio benevolentiae. And thus it not only instructs us to love others, but shows us how: by loving their stories.