THE MIDWIFE
LESSONS IN SACRED OBSTETRICS
By Anti-Kierkegaard
A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it’s a joke.
– “A,” Either/Or
The soul is sick. She moans, trembles and sweats. Look! she is stumbling, white as death. She can no longer stay on her feet but falls to her back and cries out in agony.
Those who care scramble about. They seek help—but who can help her? What is it she needs? “A doctor!” calls one. “A therapist!” another. “A real job! A real job!” cry her parents and her desperate, respectable friends. “More!” cries a Salesman, assured she needs saving. “Repent!” thin men agree, “and be saved!” “Our healthcare system has failed her!” picket the zealous. “She’s fading! She’s fading!”
“She’s pregnant.” (But none of the frantic hear.) An old woman, old as leaves, has recognized of what she truly stands in need: a midwife.
But, could it be? All this—the crowd-conformity, the crass consumerism, the spoiling of the seas, the felling of the woods, the brutalism of our tastes, our bleakest nihilism—all these have been but…birth pangs? A greater world gestates! Something Most Wonderful is being knit inside…
The soul is pregnant with God.
But who is it can deliver Him? Where is the midwife? Without one, both will die. Who has experience in such vital exploits? A rare set of skills is called for, to be sure. Audacity, obviously, but also precision, poise. Fingers sensitive to the pulse of the times. For many imminent dangers face this Nativity. Look! There, flanking the soul in labor, ready to devour the Child as soon as It is born: the beast of superficiality, and the dragon, irony.
Fortunately, our midwife has been gestating too—developing through the dialectical labor of Centuries. Indeed, in the nineteenth century “the child leaped in her womb,” and the voice was heard of one crying out in the wilderness, “Either/Or!” What pseudonym shall we give this incarnation of the midwife? Not “Yahweh-Is-My-God” (‘Elijah’), for he is no Jewish prophet; nor “Yahweh-Is-Gracious” (‘John’ [fittingly, from Latin from Greek from Hebrew]), for he is not Christ’s preface either. No, he is, most appropriately, the repetition of that repetition, whose bold project “amounts to neither more nor less than wanting to introduce Christianity again.”[1] In that endeavor, he would fail; but he would indeed pave a Way as he stood at the crossroads of epochs. He, with another prophet of the century, would stand before the altar of God. “God is dead!” cried the Witness beside him; “Long live God!” he cries. And so his name shall be “Kierkegaard,” for he is both “Graveyard” and “Church-Farm,” simultaneously cemetery of old idols and fallow soil for new cults. “That which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die,” and the God of the past must perish for the soul to give birth to God. Kierkegaard—dialectic even in name.
So, call in that midwife! There’s much he will need to teach us if we are to bring God safely into the world, today, in our town time…
LESSON 1
OBSTETRICAL HAZARDS:
SUPERFICIAL IMMEDIACY AND IRONIC REFLECTION
A man sits on a couch, watching an episode of his favorite television show. He isn’t creating something beautiful, considering the sacredness of growing things, imagining the sublime possibilities of God. No, he is completely enraptured by his screen. For as long as it has his attention, it has it utterly and completely.
Oh…but the show has ended.
No worry! He presses a button and another comes on right after!
Now, he isn’t thinking about creating something beautiful, considering the sacredness of growing things, imagining the sublime possibilities of God. No, he is completely enraptured by his screen…
This is superficial immediacy.
“Quiet please.”
Wait…who said that? You turn, and see a security guard with his finger to his lips. “Not so close, please,” he warns a couple who have leaned against the man’s couch. You look at the wall and read the plaque: “MAN WATCHING TV.” The artist’s statement is full of words like “disjuncture,” “recontexting,” and “problematize.”
But this “piece” isn’t creating something beautiful, considering the sacredness of growing things, imagining the sublime possibilities of God. No, it is critiquing the superficial immediacy of that man.
This is ironic reflection.
“Quiet please.”
(Not again!?) You turn, and see a different security guard. “Not so close,” he warns a couple taking a picture of the first security guard. You look at the other wall and read the plaque: “AT THE ART GALLERY: EXHIBIT: MAN WATCHING TV.”
But the artist’s statement is essentially unchanged, full of words like “disjuncture,” “recontexting,” and “problematize.” This “piece” isn’t creating something beautiful, considering… —No, it is critiquing the superficial immediacy of the art gallery!
This is still ironic reflection.
Ironic reflection, you then realize, has no end.
It is infinite…
Churchfarm, too, faced these demons, faced them in their inchoate phases. What we today know as “the shopper,” the middle-class “consumer” (our dear friend on his couch), was, in Churchfarm’s time, not fully realized. He still had the tinsel of religion dangling off him (even if Christmasses were over). Still, there he is: the bourgeois Philistine! (embodiment of unreflective immediacy). “[Kierkegaard] called them ‘Philistines’ [spidsborgers],” writes scholar of philosophy M. Holmes Hartshorne talking about those embodiments of superficial immediacy, whose “essential character…is an unconscious reflection of society’s values and prejudices, i.e., of everything which his contemporaries take for granted, without his giving a single thought to the basis of these beliefs.”[2] The Philistine thus lives in a state of immediacy, not reflective enough to consider his existence to the point of seeking some spiritual depth or self-actualization, not skeptical enough to see and so correct the wrongs of his society.
However, simply waking him from this superficial stupor does not solve his problem—rather, it generates a new one: ironic reflection. Hartshorne again:
When the Philistine discovers that his values and decisions and his life’s purpose are determined not by his choice but by the relative and accidental character of prevailing patterns of society, he becomes disillusioned. Everything tends to become for him a matter of indifference, because no choice, no decision is finally his; it only appears to be and so is empty of self and of meaning. Because his values and duties have no absolute status in reality, not even in the reality of his own nature, they are threatened with meaninglessness. Nothing any longer is taken seriously.[3]
With the disillusionment of existential thought, the Philistine will probably transform into the reflective “aesthete,”[4] that is, the shrugging hipster, the po-mo nihilist, our dear artist of the above “conceptual art piece.” “For the aesthete,” says Hartshorne, “values have no relevance, because they have no objective status, no ontological reality. …The aesthete perceives the folly of being constrained by any values whatever.”[5] Thus, woken to the harsh truth that the superficially-immediate world (in which so much of contemporary society lives and breathes and has its being) is shallow, empty, and destructive, yet unable to posit anything more valid in its place, the reflective aesthete can only show Caliban the mirror, ironically reflecting the monster he cannot cure of ugliness.
This approach is as old as irony itself—which is to say, as old as Socrates: the “midwife” of philosophy. Socrates, by assuming an ironic ignorance, prompted his interlocutors to reflect on the established order and thereby expose the fundamental arbitrariness and absurdity of its unquestioned values. And yet, after demolishing the order, what was to be reconstructed with any sense of confidence? “Irony has here a dismantling or destructive function,” writes Nassim Bravo Jordán on Kierkegaard’s ironic inheritance from that old gadfly:
Socrates destroys the validity of the prevailing culture and system of beliefs, but does not provide anything else in place of the lost actuality. In this sense, Socrates was ‘purely negative.’ …As Socrates revealed the inadequacy of the established order and gave no other solution to cover for the loss, he brought the individual subject to a state of isolation where he was left alone to himself. …Now the subject had to turn his gaze into his own inner self and look for an answer that the given actuality could no longer provide.[6]
For Graveyard—attempting to kill the illusory God of ‘Christendom’ in order to deliver his own Christian God—reflective irony is key precisely to isolate the “single individual” in this way. Only once we’ve gotten him alone with his subjectivity can he leave the superficial immediacy of crowd-Philistinism and begin his spiritual ascent. “[J]ust as philosophy begins with doubt,” K writes, “so also a life that may be called human begins with irony.”[7] Thus, in his cartography of the spiritual ascent, the ironist occupies a necessary liminal space between sensual immediacy and the ethical realm that begins with reflection.
But what if, after the established order is undermined, one becomes stuck in this liminal realm of irony? Destruction and dismantling complete, what if the individual has nowhere then to turn? Worse, what if ‘the crowd’ itself becomes thus despairingly ironic? Could such a thing even occur?
Indeed, it has—in both Kierkegaard’s time, and our own. Writing in The Point of View for My Work as An Author (a kind of retrospective key to his entire authorship composed towards the end of his life), the author marvels at the Copenhagen of his day, noting how
en masse the entire population of a city, guilds, fraternities, tradespeople, people of station…they, with their families become—those thousands and thousands become (the one and only thing I would venture unconditionally to insist is impossible for them to become, especially en masse or in families)—they become ‘ironic’ with the help of a newspaper, which in turn, ironically enough, by means of an editorial staff of street-corner loafers, usurpingly dominates the fashion, and the fashion that is stipulated is—the ironic.[8]
In such an irony-saturated scene, where all the old values are excoriated through reflection, the only real sin becomes naïveté. The punishment for this transgression: condescension—destruction of the person not through denouncement or overt rejection, no, but through a means far more insidious: by being made irrelevant.
For our dear midwife, this was precisely the strange turn of events he witnessed. “It was a demoralization that was all too terribly reminiscent of the punishment with which one of the ancient prophets in the name of the Lord threatens the Jews as the most dreadful of punishments: Boys shall judge you.”[9] In this ironized environment, says K,
[N]o attack is so feared as that of laughter, how even the person who courageously risked his life for a stranger would not be far from betraying his father and mother if the danger was laughter, because more than any other this attack isolates the one attacked and at no point does it offer the support of pathos…[10]
O, for the pathos of naïveté! Whether this situation represents the incipient genesis of our time’s own condition or simply an uncanny doppelganger (an experimental Petri-dish for practicing test-tube midwives in preparation for the Great Re-Birth), I don’t know. Either way, this ironized population—ironized, note, under the influence of mass media—bears a striking resemblance to our own postmodern moment, when, under the pervasive trance of television-induced irony, “the most frightening prospect, for the well-conditioned viewer, becomes leaving oneself open to others’ ridicule by betraying passé expressions of value, emotion, or vulnerability. Other people become judges; the crime is naïveté.”[11] Such is the analysis, anyway, of David Foster Wallace in his own prophetic essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” Wallace (himself an alien of sincerity in a land of ironists), fostered, like any good midwife (or, for that matter, the [god]father to the Son of David), a Child not to be his own. He himself would not see the Promised Land of earnestness, but in a lucid and cogent argument developed over some forty pages he reveals just how saturated postmodern American culture had become with reflective irony and critical ridicule—even to the point of calling them “agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture.”[12]
The problem, it would seem, turns out to be precisely what in Socrates’ “purely negative” maieutic approach proved beneficial: the critical effect of cultural dismantling. “[I]rony,” says Wallace,
entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.[13]
In short, the hyper-reflection of postmodernism’s deconstruction of value becomes, in lieu of some subsequent reconstruction, a culture of despairing nihilism. Though we lampoon him in our installation pieces, might we not as well become the Man on the Couch? Whereas Socratic irony led the individual to reflection and thus realization of self, a critical irony propagated by mass media and consumed by the crowd turns the crowd, ironically, reflectively ironic.
And yet…not quite—not truly reflective at all, since the critique does not isolate one with his or her own subjectivity but occurs at the level of the crowd, which, virtually by definition, cannot rise above some over-simplified, superficial “reflection” (every “deep” needs popular’s “shallow”). Still, the irony is total and implacable. For in a post-modern culture distinctly reacting against the “Modern Project,” which was essentially the second act of irony’s play—the reflection-driven construction of a better world—in such a post-modern culture, there is simply nowhere to go after irony. There can be no resolution to this cynicism, since the target of the irony is resolution itself, fulfilment, an Answer.
The result of irony so directed can only be a general malaise—a population of cynics who, because a crowd, lack the necessary reflection to recognize those social means by which they have become so cynical to rise beyond it. Meanwhile the wits recognize, but can offer no remedy.
Most strangely, then, ironic “reflection” has become immediate to the Philistine (for whom “values and decisions and his life’s purpose are determined not by his choice but by the relative and accidental character of prevailing patterns of society”), ironically through being “mediated” by a Media of true reflectors, who themselves can only ever be ironic.
In Immediacy and Reflection in Kierkegaard’s Thought, Harvey Ferguson says something similar at the beginning of his essay, “Modulation: A Typology of the Present Age.” Extrapolating further on notions of “reflection,” Ferguson notes: “Modern life is sheer immediacy, it is nothing beyond the continuous transition from one activity and event to another; and, at the same time, it is endlessly reflective, its content is made up of images.” He thus continues that, while such ironized crowd-folk seem
far removed from the type, more generally representative of modernity, that Kierkegaard apostrophised as ‘bourgeois-philistinism’…[,] they, too, undemanding, unimaginative and timid, live immediately; sunk in the inertia of institutionalized forms of life that, however recent in origin, have the appearance for them of a wholly natural, and therefore incontestable, reality. And, in a different way, they are so ideally reflective; not through any special gift for, or training in, the intellectual mechanisms of abstraction, but through these conventionalized forms themselves. Their immediate experience, their experience of themselves, is given entirely through the social conventions that fill and regulate their every moment… …[M]odern society and modern culture might be described as an unprecedented identity of immediacy and reflection, and…this identity is realised in two such seemingly disparate types as the aesthete and the bourgeois-philistine.[14]
So, just as MAN WATCHING TELEVISION is the ironic work of an artist, so is the artist just another man on the couch—and, let us give it to him, the couch-man himself a (kind of) ironic aesthete.
What, then, is to be done? The bind we’ve created for ourselves in this conflation seems nearly insoluble. This social disease is killing the pregnant soul, and yet the critical medicine we might use against it has lost all efficacy by our having become so immune to it. For, to be sure, “avant-garde irony and rebellion have become dilute and malign. They have been absorbed, emptied, and redeployed by the very [mass-culture] establishment they had originally set themselves athwart.”[15] Indeed, it is worse than that: the “medicine” itself, we now see, is what is making her sick.
Our resident alien preached a parable from his own wilderness, and it is for all those with ears to hear: “Think, for a moment,” he says,
of Third World rebels and coups. Third World rebels are great at exposing and overthrowing corrupt hypocritical regimes, but they seem noticeably less great at the mundane, non-negative task of then establishing a superior governing alternative. Victorious rebels, in fact, seem best at using their tough, cynical rebel-skills to avoid being rebelled against themselves – in other words, they just become better tyrants. And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us.[16]
How ironic! Was it not God who for so long played our Tyrant? We, in our earnestness, in our silly naïveté, had once held to that old Myth, to that silly order of certainties and unquestioned absolutes. And then—the revolution! our awakening from premodern immediacy into reflective modernity,[17] from dogmatic slumbers to an Enlightenment of sapere aude! when, reflecting, we realized that all the ancien régime could be questioned, doubted, undermined. Nothing was fixed; all was contingent. “For, according to Kierkegaard,” writes Heiko Schulz, “the secret of all reflection is: ‘There is nothing unconditional’ (Pap. X4 A 525). On the contrary, everything becomes dialectical or ambivalent by being reflected upon.”[18] But now look at us: so tyrannized by ironic reflection! so lorded over by, what? the conditional.
Blurring his existential project with a reflection on the political upheavals of his day (who would do such a thing?), Graveyard observes:
The fault from below was to want to do away with all government. The punishment, since the mode of the sin is always the mode of the punishment, the punishment is: that which comes to be most bitterly missed is precisely—government. Never as in our century have any generation and the individuals within it…been so emancipated as now from all the inconvenience, if you will, of something standing and necessarily standing unconditionally firm. …[N]ever will a generation so deeply come to sense that what it and every individual in it needs is that something stands and must stand unconditionally firm, needs what the deity, divine love in love, invented—the unconditional.[19]
In this, as with much else, Kierkegaard was wrong—another generation has come to sense just that, a sense expressed in our own recent chafing beneath the junta of superficial reflective irony which deposed that old tyrant God and now keeps its boot on our throats. God is dead; reflection killed him (curiosity and the King of Cats), and we are grown too old, too cool for Queen Mab’s tales. The issue of the hyper-reflected present age, then, Ferguson is right to compare with Weber’s “disenchantment of the world.” The awe of the Sacred is gone; only shiny surface remains.[20]
The soul is sick. She moans, trembles and sweats. Her holy land is occupied by a harsh new government of overlords. Look! in their ceaseless accounting and census-taking, the soul is forced to go further, even at the height of her pregnancy! (Conditions are always bad, it seems, for Savior-birthing.) But we are running out of time. We must make her due with the conditions we have—be they as superficial as a formulaic fantasy novel, as reflectively ironic as an endlessly-layered metafiction. Surely God has worked with less before.
Indeed, Churchfarm himself faced equally daunting prospects for his grand idea, his huge religious undertaking. Of that idea, “[t]here surely [were] this one and that one who understand what I mean,” he recalls,
but who then with a certain good-naturedness would pat me on the shoulder and say, ‘My dear friend, you are still rather young—and then to want to begin such a project, a project that, if it is to have any success at all, would require at least a dozen well-trained missionaries, a project that amounts to neither more nor less than wanting to introduce Christianity again—into Christendom. No, dear friend, let us be human beings; such a project is beyond both your power and mine. This project is just as insanely grandiose as wanting to reform ‘the crowd,’ which no sensible person gets involved with but lets it be what it is. To begin on such a thing is sure disaster.’
How cynical, no? How passive, how hopeless these “good-natured” ones—just the way our junta wants us. And though we seek no second Christianity (bold, even as that might be) but rather would go further, to a new God altogether, a higher God; a dialectical mediation of old and new, transcendent and immanent, pagan and Christian as it were (the Mother Goddess and Father God themselves conceiving, and the soul giving birth to that offspring! [Oh yes, grandiose indeed!])—though we today would go further than Kierkegaard, beyond him, looking forward not back, there is still so much thus doula can teach us. For one: indefatigable commitment to the idea. For K concedes to his good-natured kill-Gods: “Perhaps”—then adds:
[B]ut even if it is or would be a sure disaster, it is also certain that the objection has not been learned from Christianity, because when Christianity entered into the world it was even more decidedly sure disaster to begin on it—yet it was begun; and it is also certain that this objection was not learned from Socrates, because he involved himself with ‘the crowd’ and wanted to reform it.[21]
If nothing else, this dogged determination and commitment to his idea shows that there is something beyond the paralysis of reflection. With this will and passion alone, Churchfarm gestures to the way out of the abyss.
LESSON 2
PARADISE REGAINED: SECOND IMMEDIACY
AND RE-ENCHANTMENT
Reflection, we have observed, is endless. It can continue ad infinitum, ad nauseam, ad absurdum. As it does, it puts all action on hold indefinitely. We thereby become paralyzed—until we finally become apathetic. In short, reflection kills action (a great problem for modern Danes it seems). Left unchecked, in the flow from modernity to modernism, “to be or not to be?” devolves into the “do I dare to eat a peach?” And, ultimately, we come to postmodernism’s palest either/or: “Coke or Pepsi?” And all the while, we never become human beings. And all the while, the Earth gets uglier, growing things die, God remains dead…
Clearly, then, modern reflection must be stopped. The infinite regression of ironic critique must come to an end—but how?
To simply turn one’s back on thought, question, critique, seems too much “head-in-the-sand.” Our Dear Foster-Foreigner recognized this possibility for the ironic artist too, saying, “One obvious option is for the fiction writer to become reactionary, fundamentalist. Declare…contemporary culture evil and turn one’s back on the whole spandexed mess and invoke instead good old…literal readings of the Testaments and be pro-Life, anti-Fluoride, antediluvian.”[22] Of course, respected literary figure that he is, he quickly rejects this proposal, not just because a throwback-paradise remains equally susceptible to “manipulation in the interests of corporate commercialism and PR image,” but because “[m]ost of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.”[23]
I reject reactionaryism too. Though, it should be stated that Wallace’s specific reasoning behind doing so seems based on relatively weak arguments. For instance: How does a culture that has turned its back on commercialism for the simple life of Good Ol’ Fashioned Religion even give corporate commercialism a foothold? I must say, I do not see the Amish, for instance, with these problems. One does not observe flashy television pitches for horse-drawn carriages or a neon barrage advertising homemade clothing. Homemade clothing by its very nature does not demand advertising, and those who abjure television make poor targets for television ads. Fundamentalism of that sort, then, seems indeed to offer some veritable defense against the commercial decadence of pomo culture. As for the quality of life for the Neanderthal versus our contemporary nihilist, I won’t venture to compare. Though, some very hackneyed and clichéd expressions do come to mind, like those phrases about living on bread alone or the best things in life not being “things,” etc. (In fact, I think Henry David Thoreau wrote a whole pamphlet about this kind of tripe, and something similar is said by many of—[but oh, how old-hat]—the world’s sacred traditions.) In any event, the nihilist-Neanderthal debate seems more like an open question these days, and opening ever more with every new OPEN sign. As Ferguson notes, “the issue remains fiercely contested; reflection can be enlightenment, calculability, progress, justice as well as coldness, abstraction and authority. Immediacy can be nostalgia, sentimentality, superstition as well as warmth, community and spontaneity.”[24]
Still, Wallace is right. The reactionary solution is no solution at all. For one thing, how could it ever actually occur? Our time is simply too captivated by “corporate commercialism and PR image,” and we’ve got Stockholm syndrome bad (indeed, the relationship seems so consensual at this point one even wonders if we consumers didn’t initiate it ourselves…). So enraptured, what mass reactionary movement could have any luck? No, it seems it would take some catastrophic undermining of the system, some withering shock to the unsustainable fundamentals, even to give reactionaries a fighting chance. In short, to go backward we would have to be thrown backward. To get back to our roots from these skyscrapers we would need to collapse…
So, in lieu of apocalypse then—indeed, to avoid apocalypse—we’ll need to go forward still, to transition through superficial irony to some point beyond it, where reflection stops. To stop reflection we will need to go through reflection and reach what Kierkegaard called a “second immediacy.” Only there, on the other side, can we hope to establish a new unconditional—that ever-fixed point upon which we can base our lives, our culture, our selves, our souls.
This “new” or “second immediacy” was a crucial concept for Churchfarm. He was not interested simply to deconstruct society’s unquestioned values; he had an aim in mind. Taking the role of midwife from Socrates, he sought to engage his audience ironically to isolate thereby the “single individual” with him/herself in reflection—but only so he might guide them towards the second immediacy of a religious existence. Once in reflection, the individual is eventually faced with a choice: either to keep reflecting themselves into paralysis and superficiality, or to break this endless cycle and leap into faith. The latter takes an act of will born out of passion—inward states that alone possess the power to break objective critique and found, subjectively, a new unconditional. Professor Paul Cruysberghs puts it succinctly enough, stating, “In the will reflection comes to its limits. And even though the will is reflective as well, by resolution and action a new order is established, a post-reflective order, which in some way repeats or resumes, or assumes the pre-reflective order of immediacy.”[25]
Reflection ceases when the individual affirms a new unconditional, even as he or she knows that to do so is dangerous, for more reflection could easily prove this a bad decision: surely a different unconditional would have been better… And yet, because more reflection can always appear to disprove an unconditional, one will have to override doubt with volitional affirmation, acting, with all passion, as if it were true. Indeed, only by acting as if the unconditional is true can it ever be true for the individual.
In his essay “Second Immediacy: A Kierkegaardian Account of Faith,” Heiko Schulz captures some of the essence of this move (ironically, a kind of paradoxical both/and perspective). He writes:
According to Kierkegaard, believing in God is apparently something like being reflectively aware in every moment that it is up to yourself to decide what to do or what to strive for as unconditionally good, while at the same time being aware that every option has a counterbalance that could just as well be the right option here and now; and yet, on the other hand, to act as if there were no doubt as to whether this belief and this intention is the right one instead of their respective alternatives (including a complete withdrawal from action), since a loving god has promised, directly to reveal to and always already decide for you, which way to go.[26]
In short, he goes on, one has the immediate sense that one has been taken by the hand even while, reflectively, one knows no hand is there. If immediacy is like dreaming, sound asleep, and reflection is akin to being woken up from the dream, then second immediacy is “dreaming wide awake.”[27]
Such is Churchfarm’s answer to the problem of modernity’s paralyzing and ultimately nihilistic over-reflection. If his Copenhagen, “with the help of a newspaper,” and our post-war America, exponentially more influenced by mass media, achieved a superficial “immediate reflection” of popular irony, then might this not present us with its salvific inverse: reflective immediacy? For we have not forfeited reflection, we have transfigured it, come to an immediacy beyond it. For us today, could this not offer the mechanism by which we once again achieve earnestness? Could this be the holy scheme Wallace sought, to undermine commercialized irony? A knowing naïveté, a willed earnestness, a second sincerity?
He ends his essay with a prophecy, a voice calling in the wilderness seeking poets to come,
who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. …The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal.’ To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law.[28]
An ironist can brush off the reactionary all too easily. But what ammunition of ridicule is left against one who knowingly risks ridicule? What can be said of one who has gone so far through irony that she can authoritatively appropriate the pejorative “pastiche” in order to speak, when no one else will, of those “old untrendy human troubles and emotions”? To undermine, at the outset, the critics of such “kitsch” by an affirmative return to such “kitsch,” that she might transfigure it into “art”?
Could it work? if only long enough to clear the air of such toxic irony that something so absurd, so childlike and naïve as “God” might be born into a world of ironists? “To be ignorant is no art,” says Kierkegaard, “but to become ignorant and to be ignorant by having become ignorant – that is the art.”[29]
If modern reflection occasioned our “disenchantment of the world,” what might a second immediacy do? If reflection kills immediacy and causes us to lose the unconditional—that divine point upon which self, soul, and culture rest—might we not will ourselves some “God” again, and passionately reconstruct a world ironic critique has left undone?
The soul is sick, pregnant with possibility. Where is the midwife? the preparer of the Way? Who can communicate to the world this leap, this second immediacy, this passionate willing of the unconditional? Wherever he or she is, more must first be learned—and in the most subjective way. For, our master midwife tells us, this leap cannot be directly communicated at all. It is too inward, too subjective an experience to be taught like some system. No, if the sense of it is to be elicited in another at all, it must be as the midwife elicits a child from the womb of her mother.
And so our lessons in this ancient craft continue.
LESSON 3
INDIRECT COMMUNICATION:
MAKING MYTH “INTERESTING”
Churchform, too, faced the problem of raising the religious out of the mundane. For him, this is precisely where modern “Christendom” had left it—making the great truths socially-acceptable platitudes and bland clichés, making them precisely those “old untrendy human troubles and emotions.” Again, reflection is to blame. Reflection is the marker of modernity (compared to the immediacy of the pre-modern), meaning that any aesthetics of modernity will also be characterized by reflection. This essentially modern aesthetic paradigm has a name: “the interesting”—which Professor Brian Söderquist defines as “the particular and unique constellations of reflective subjective consciousness that are portrayed in the figures of modern literature and other forms of fine art that were absent in the aesthetics of antiquity, which was less subjectively attuned.”[30] As such, “[d]efinitive of the concept of the interesting is reflection” and, indeed,
[r]egardless of where Kierkegaard uses it, ‘the interesting’ has to do with a reflective self-awareness that gives rise to a tension between the inner life and outward appearances. …The category of the interesting is thus closely tied to his concept of irony. …In fact, ‘the interesting’ is perhaps best described as the most nuanced self-reflective modern form of irony.[31]
The challenge, then, is how to make the “old truths” interesting for the modern audience, precisely when the “old truths” are earnest, not ironic; immediate, not reflective. As we saw above, the trajectory traced will need to pass through reflection to a second immediacy. Will this not, then, require casting the old truths into reflection? That is, creating ironic distance between what is said and what is meant, a tension between truth and appearance? In short, “What was needed, among other things, was a godly satire.”[32]
Kierkegaard himself called this approach ‘indirect communication’: a whole bag of rhetorical tricks and strategies aimed at cornering the reader into a true subjective relationship with the material. “The problem,” writes C. Stephen Evans,
is that people already know a lot of moral and religious truths, but have not really thought them through in relation to their own lives. In such a situation, communication of such truths can easily amount to ‘patter’ … [Kierkegaard] therefore sets himself the task of communicating indirectly, of assisting others to engage in the ‘double reflection’ that is essential for genuine subjective understanding. He wants to encourage not merely intellectual understanding, but the ‘second reflection’ that requires understanding of what these concepts would mean for a person’s own life.[33]
Because simply stating the great truths was no longer viable in an age of reflection, K turned to “double reflection.” But what exactly is meant by this?
“Genuine subjective understanding,” writes Evans, “requires that a person first grasp the relevant concepts (first reflection), but then go on and think through what it would mean to apply those concepts to the person’s own life (second reflection).”[34] In this way, a life commitment is arrived at not through pale objective thought but instead through the inward realization that occurs via subjective experience. Indeed, this is the only means by which commitments can actually matter—if they are arrived at through individual will and genuine passion—and this can only happen if the ideas are, as it were, experienced firsthand.
To get his audience to such a position, Churchfarm presents for our own reflection various sorts of “first reflections”: entire life-views presented as pseudonymous “authors,” each with their own perspectives and philosophical commitments. In reading these reflections played out, sometimes to the point of absurdity or self-destruction, we ask ourselves, “Do I want to be like that?” These lifeviews thus serve as archetypes of human experience. They are representatives, avatars of specific worldviews, embodied examples of life at different phases of the existential journey. Thus, of the “poetized authors,” Kierkegaard says
their importance…unconditionally does not consist in making any new proposal, some unheard-of discovery, or in founding a new party and wanting to go further, but precisely in the opposite, in wanting to have no importance, in wanting, at a remove that is the distance of double-reflection, once again to read through solo, if possible in a more inward way, the original text of individual human existence-relationships, the old familiar text handed down from the fathers.[35]
In this sense, the different voices are nearly mythic in their significance. And yet, despite simply performing “the old familiar text,” these dramatis personae retain a vitality by being made “interesting”—that is, by being cast into reflection with the introduction of ironic distance. Kierkegaard, in a stroke of obstetric genius, has found one way of making “plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions” something interesting. Yes, he employs irony—but irony in service of earnestness, and so not “purely negative” but actually reconstructive, as failed life-views offer landmarks on the individual’s path to truth. (Again, it would seem, a Dane who would “by indirections find directions out”!)
In his late retrospective, On My Work as an Author, he makes such things explicit, writing: “‘[d]irect communication’ is: to communicate the truth directly; ‘communication in reflection’ is: to deceive into the truth.”[36] Thus, indirect communication functions for K just as ironic ignorance did for Socrates: it is a maieutic technique, ironically dismantling certain perspectives in order to isolate the single individual with their subjectivity (for, as we saw, only from subjective reflection can the subjective affirmation of a new unconditional be made and second immediacy attained). Thus, as Socrates, in ironic ignorance, allowed his interlocutors to follow dead-ends on their way to the truth, so Kierkegaard offers his readers some dead-end perspectives to subjectively digest and ultimately reject on their way to faith. This is what he means when he says that “all the pseudonymous writings are maieutic in nature.”[37]
The soul is sick. She is trembling, crying out in agony. And all her birth-pangs—the crowd conformity, the crass consumerism, the spoiling of the seas, the felling of the woods, the brutalism of our tastes, our bleakest nihilism—all these cry out for remedy. And yes, if spirituality can do it, if spirituality can return us to the Earth we are now devastating; if myth and a recrudescence of those “old untrendy human troubles and emotions” could bring our eyes back from our gadgets to our brothers and sisters, our children and fellow creatures; if it were just a matter of tearing our attention away from work and stuff and screens back to “the original text of individual human existence-relationships, the old familiar text handed down” from Mothers and Fathers; if it were truly just a matter of creating something beautiful, considering the sacredness of growing things, imagining the sublime possibilities of mystical union, before it is too late—then yes, yes, yes, perhaps “all is permissible.” Here is a truth worth deceiving into. But where is the midwife?
All that is needed now is another godly satire.
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NOTES
[1] Søren Kierkegaard, The Point of View for My Work as An Author [Hong translation] (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ), 42. [2] M. Holmes Hartshorne, Kierkegaard, Godly Deceiver: The Nature and Meaning of His Pseudonymous Writings (Columbia University Press, NY), 14. [3] Ibid., 16; emphasis added. [4] Ibid., 18. [5] Ibid., 17. [6] Nassim Bravo Jordán, “Irony,” in Kierkegaard’s Concepts, Tome IV: Individual to Novel (Routledge, Abingdon, UK), 41. [7] Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony [Hong translation] (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ), 6. [8] Kierkegaard, The Point of View for My Work as An Author, 64. [9] Ibid., 64-5. [10] Ibid., 65. [11] David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (Hachette, NY), 63. [12] Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram,” 49. [13] Ibid., 67. [14] Harvey Ferguson, “Modulation: A Typology of the Present Age,” Immediacy and Reflection in Kierkegaard’s Thought (Leuven University Press, Leuven, Belgium), 125. [15] Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” 68. [16] Ibid., 67. [17] Hartshorne, Kierkegaard, Godly Deceiver, 122. [18] Heiko Schulz, “Second Immediacy: A Kierkegaardian Account of Faith,” in Immediacy and Reflection in Kierkegaard’s Thought, 80. [19] Kierkegaard, On My Work as an Author [Hong translation] (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ), 19. [20] Ferguson, “Modulation: A Typology of the Present Age,” 127. [21] Kierkegaard, The Point of View for My Work as An Author, 41-2. [22] Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” 69. [23] Ibid., 69-70. [24] Ferguson, “Modulation: A Typology of the Present Age,” 123. [25] Paul Cruysberghs, “Must Reflection Be Stopped? Can It Be Stopped?” in Immediacy and Reflection in Kierkegaard’s Thought, 14-15. [26] Schulz, “Second Immediacy: A Kierkegaardian Account of Faith,” 85. [27] Ibid., 71. [28] Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” 81-82. [29] Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses [Hong translation] (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ), 25. [30] K. Brian Söderquist, “The Interesting,” in Kierkegaard’s Concepts, Tome IV: Individual to Novel, 26. [31] Ibid. [32] Kierkegaard, On My Work as an Author, 17. [33] C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK), 36-7. [34] Ibid., 30. [35] Johannes Climacus, Concluding Unscientific Postscript [Hong translation] (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ), 629-30. [36] Kierkegaard, On My Work as an Author, 7. [37] Ibid. [38] Ibid., 17 [39] Ibid., footnote on 18. [40] Kierkegaard, The Point of View for My Work as An Author, 53. [41] Ibid., 58. [42] Benjamin Daise, Kierkegaard’s Socratic Art (Mercer University Press, Macon, Georgia), 117.