de te narratur fabula: Stages on Life's Way

Stages on Life's Way and Concluding Unscientific Postscript are the two big books of Kierkegaard I've been most looking forward to, after Either/Or, and they don't disappoint. Not that I have understood a tenth of what he's saying here. These are the sort of thing I used to read through twice in a row before going into class equipped with maybe one or two basic insights and questions to lay on the table for my fellows in seminar. But they are full of their own insights and questions, arcane connections and everyday illuminations, that much I can tell. There are passages of total obscurity, structural and stylistic choices which boggle, but even these bespeak the spiritual wrestling of their author as clearly as any direct statement.

When I got to around the midpoint of the Postscript, where the narrator passes over in review of Kierkegaard's works to comment upon them and assess the project as a whole, I stopped and went back to Stages, which I hadn't read yet since I had hoped to better see the connection between Philosophical Fragments and its sequel by reading them back to back. Thus, what is surely the longest postscript ever attained what must be the longest block quote or footnote, so to speak, when I interrupted one 600 page book to read a 700-pager (though a lot of that is editorial apparatus). Again, I use the term 'read' here in the loosest sense. Toss in a habit of reading this material while falling asleep, and is it any wonder I have no idea what I've been reading for the past few months?

I don't remember most of my dreams, but I imagine they involve my magically comprehending Kierkegaard, befriending him and conversing in that peculiar dreamlike logic which makes so much sense within the dream.

It always happens that way--so charitable, so rich is life: the less one has, the more one sees. Take a book, the poorest one written, but read it with the passion that it is the only book you will read--ultimately you will read everything out of it, that is, as much as there was in yourself, and you could never get more out of reading, even if you read the best of books. (364)

I don't know for sure, because he so rarely says anything explicit about it, but I take it when he says 'the best of books,' he means the Bible. Certainly, in Kierkegaard's terms, the category of the religious seems tuned to the Christianity of his particular place and time, if mainly as a revolt against it. Rather than rewriting the Bible--though in some Platonic fashion ever other book would necessarily participate in this ideal--Kierkegaard in Stages on Life's Way seems to be rewriting Either/Or and Plato, starting from a Symposium-like banquet in place of the aesthetic essays which open that work, a sheaf of Reflections on Marriage from the same Judge William who responded to the Seducer's Diary before, and then a long diary of another sort of seducer, even more closely resembling Kierkegaard himself, one who would seduce us into the religious.

If, in accord with one of Plato's views, one quite ingeniously takes Socrates to be the unity of the comic and the tragic, this is entirely right...the unity is in the earnestness (365-6)

And again:

Religious earnestness, like the religious, is the higher passion proceeding from the unity of the comic and the tragic. (440)

In this, Kierkegaard resembles the Scholastic masters, embracing pagan wisdom within a Christian framework, and reminding us that what may look like a dry and bookish program is actually the height of passion, a trinity of Shakespearean drama, Socratic wonder, and Christian love.

Saint, sage, and satirist, SK is also a delicate psychologist, illustrating not so much a cure for depression as the manner in which it expresses the honest attempt to understand 'as much as there was in yourself,' as Montaigne, Pascal, Beauvoir showed in their times, too. For all that the religious has fallen into worse repute than ever with the passage of time, the genius-level thinkers all tend to concur: health, education, economic reforms all collapse into the same fundamental human mystery. They must be approached with scientific evidence, poetic imagination, democratic interpretation. No matter the technocratic measures we employ and material comforts we enjoy, rollicking along on the West's waves of prosperity, they recall to us in a still small voice--or call up our own thundering condemnation--of the deeper meaning of our story.