I’ve read and studied Kierkegaard for decades, but pretty much always from a secular point of view. Hampson’s book serves as a good antidote. Hampson is an Oxford theologian with strong credentials in Lutheranism as well as continental philosophy, squarely on target for an insightful reading of Kierkegaard.
Hampson’s own positions on Christianity and religion are complex — let’s just get that out of the way because many readers may know something of her. She is “post-Christian,” feminist, and generally a critic of what she refers to as “Christian mythology.” But what she does in this book, by my reading, is present Kierkegaard in his own terms as a compelling opponent of the secularization of Christianity.
Kierkegaard is writing for a post-Kantian, post-Enlightenment world. What that means is that religion has been relegated to something that reason needs to approve. The title of Kant’s book Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone says it pretty plainly. And Hegel takes things even farther in Kant’s wake, subsuming religion as a stage, and not the final stage, in the historical path to Absolute Knowledge.
Kierkegaard asserts religious faith as something that resists reason, even defeats it. Although his works vary widely in style, format, and even in pseudonymous authorship, one core, consistent theme is that religious faith requires a break with reason. Faith is a paradox, or even “the Paradox,” that separates the “knight of faith” from the life of reason, as embodied (in Hegelian terms) in the institutions and public life of civil society. We’ll see that that separation also separates the person of faith from the church as one of those institutions.
Hampson presents Kierkegaard’s thought by following the course of his published writings. For each published work, she gives a short introduction setting it into the context of Kierkegaard’s thought and life. That’s followed by an exposition of the main points and arguments, and a critical reflection of her own. She says that she chose the particular works she covers as “those central to the theological and philosophical themes of the authorship [Kierkegaard’s cast of pseudonymous authors].”
Interestingly, Either/Or, arguably Kierkegaard’s best known work, isn’t among them. Nevertheless, it figures heavily in Hampson’s account. In Either/Or, Kierkegaard had set out two stages or realms of life without religious faith — the aesthetic life of “immediacy” and the ethical life of commitment to and immersion in the rational life of a person’s time and place, as embodied in public institutions and practices.
Kierkegaard later, in The Sickness Unto Death, which Hampson does include in her accounts, describes the aesthetic life as one in which a person fails even to have a self, in the sense of actively reflecting on and intentionally choosing the kind of self or person to be — it’s a life of impressions, feelings, and moment-to-moment choices.
The ethical life, by contrast, he describes in The Sickness Unto Death, as a self that attempts to become a self through that immersion in and commitment to reason and the public life of one’s place and time. This picture of the person committing to the public world and finding their place in it is something that Kierkegaard takes from Hegel. The public institutions and practices of a time (and place) embody the historical evolution of reason. Finding your place in that public world is what the person of ethics ("Sittlichkeit" in German, connoting less individual moral conscience than concrete, social customs, institutions, and practices) does.
But the ethical is found wanting by Kierkegaard. In The Concept of Dread (The Concept Angst in Hampson’s own translation of the title), Kierkegaard claims to a universal condition of anxiety (angst) which prevents the reflective individual from achieving that kind of rational immersion into and commitment to the institutions and practices of public life. Something isn’t fulfilled, and the individual becomes an “exception.”
Faith then comes onto the scene for Kierkegaard as a potential response to that anxiety. But public life, even the church itself (and for Kierkegaard, this was the official Church of Denmark) doesn’t truly demand faith, only more immersion and conformity.
Hampson, from the beginning of her book, calls our attention to the influence of Lessing (18th century German philosopher Gotthold Lessing) on Kierkegaard’s understanding of faith. Lessing had, like Kierkegaard, faced the confrontation between the objectivity and rationality of the Enlightenment on one hand and the demands of Christian faith on the other. And he concluded that no historical facts about the life of Jesus (or for that matter, first person witnessing) will convince you, rationally, to believe that that historical man, Jesus, was the Son of God.
In a metaphor that seemed to cement itself at the core of Kierkegaard’s thinking, Lessing wrote, “That, then, is the ugly great ditch which I cannot cross, however often and however earnestly I have tried to make that leap."
What is required of faith is exactly a “leap” away from reason, to believe something that, on the face of it seems paradoxical, that a man should also be a god (or God), that that man should perform miracles, that through him, the infinite should enter into the very finite life of human beings at a particular time and bring eternal significance with him.
Lessing himself was unable to make that leap, because he couldn’t justify it. But that, for Kierkegaard, is precisely why an individual must make the leap, because it is a leap away from the life that doesn’t work, the life of embodied reason. This is exactly what the person of faith does, by committing to belief in Christ as this paradox of faith.
Again in the terms of The Sickness Unto Death, what the person of faith does in order to become itself is to do so through a non-rational relationship to something outside itself — the paradoxical Christ — rather than through its own means, as in the ethical to attempt to do so through its own rational nature.
As inconsistent with the rational, faith is also inconsistent with any kind of exhaustion of a meaningful life in the public sphere. This is what ultimately puts Kierkegaard at odds with both the Enlightenment and his own Church of Denmark. The public life is the life of rationality and understanding (or strains to be so), while faith goes in a completely different, even opposed, direction.
If faith is possible then, it is only possible outside the public and the social. It must be wholly individual.
As Hampson traces Kierkegaard’s thought, and his later activism, his philosophical defense of faith against the Enlightenment and the forces of rationalism is continuous with his attacks on the church of his time. He saw the church, and “Christendom” in general, as the engulfing of the church by public life, such that the state, civil society, and faith should now go hand-in-hand, with the proper citizen finding his place in all spheres of public life alike. Such a watered down, secularized version of faith was distasteful to him, even growingly so in his last years as he became an active protester against the Church of Denmark.
Hampson’s approach does credit to both Kierkegaard’s core claims and to how they developed over the course of his writings.
She also brings a critical perspective from Lutheranism itself. She understands Kierkegaard’s separation between the ethical and faith, and his insistence on the paradoxical nature of faith, as continuous with Lutheranism, often citing Luther’s own writings and commentators to back up her claim. This was something I was missing almost entirely in my own reading.
That’s not to say that Kierkegaard’s arguments are completely inseparable from his religious affiliation. Hampson emphasizes that Kierkegaard’s rebellion against the Hegelian intellectual tide of his time is rooted in the “perspective of existence.” Hegel’s world-historical system provides the world sub specie aeternitatis, a view from nowhere and no-when in particular. But the actual, existing individual always finds himself/herself in an actual situation and an actual time and place, with specific choices to be made. Hegel, in Kierkegaard’s view, has nothing to say to such a person. What that person needs to decide is particular and specific to a life and a future, and what Hegel offers is exactly the opposite — the viewpoint from which each life is subsumed in a picture so large and seamless that that person doesn’t even appear in it.
Kierkegaard’s insistence on this “perspective of existence” inspires not only his own account of faith and its requirements, but also many of the themes of existentialists to come after him — the centrality of choice, the failure of reason and public life to provide the criteria for choice, the challenge of despair, and the possibility of authenticity.
I have to say I’m indebted to Hampson for supplying a perspective that makes so much of Kierkegaard more understandable to me — the place of the story of Abraham and Isaac, his rebellion agains the established church, even the significance of his own failed engagement to Regine Olsen.
I’d be curious to know if readers not all that familiar with Kierkegaard’s writing find her book valuable and understandable. I suspect they might, given that she takes the pains to take the reader through his thought from beginning to end, with an emphasis on exposition.
I do have to say that the exposition was what was most valuable to me. In the final chapter of the book, and in the “critique” sections of each chapter on one of Kierkegaard’s works, Hampson steps back into her own thoughts about Kierkegaard, and those thoughts are certainly valuable and interesting. But, really, with somebody like Kierkegaard, understanding him is such a challenge that critique fades, at least for me.
Still, this ranks with the most valuable commentaries I’ve found on Kierkegaard. I think it’s a must-read for anybody with a serious interest in understanding him.
Loading your book clubs
There was a problem loading your book clubs. Please try again.
Not in a club? Learn more
Join or create book clubs
Choose books together
Track your books
Bring your club to Amazon Book Clubs, start a new book club and invite your friends to join, or find a club that’s right for you for free.
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Follow the authors
Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.
Customers who viewed this item also viewed
Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1
Top reviews from other countries
John Rowan
A bit onesided
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 26, 2013
Zipster Zeus
Broaden your philospohical horizons...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 7, 2013
Neutral
The Kirk on Guard
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 14, 2013
Rosey Lea
High-level academic opinion, not a recreational read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 23, 2013
K. Petersen
A Hard, But Ultimately Rewarding Critique of a Gloomy Lutheran
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 9, 2013