The Potential Role of Art in Kierkegaard's Description of the Individual by Scott Koterbay (Studies in the History of Philosophy: Edwin Mellen Press)Excerpt: The complications and convoluted textual trackways of the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1813 - 1855) are nothing if not multiple and dense. A writer of immense intelligence, irony and wit, "SK" (as Walter Lowrie his biographer and one of his principal English translators refers to him) wrote many books in his short life, leaving to posterity a vast, fecund seam of critical insights and tools for further thought. In this he laid the foundations for several highly significant critical philosophies, notably the Existentialism of writers such as Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers and Jean-Paul Sartre, but also, by what is indeed a very circuitous twist, the perplexing, recursive complexities of what is loosely known as Postmodern or Poststructuralist thought.
With respect to Existentialism the legacy is securely and vigorously affirmed. Much of Kierkegaard's reputation rests upon this connection and there is nothing to be gained by denying (should one wish to emphasise other aspects of his contribution) the phenomenal importance of this writer's influence upon the history of western thought. But Kierkegaard's practice as a radically innovative writer, an inventor of dialogic, interrogative forms has also left its startling, pensive trace upon a generation of thinkers whose philosophical positions are very far from that occupied by Kierkegaard himself and in conflict with the implicit and now somewhat laboured tenets of Existentialism. Kierkegaard's adoption of a diversity of pseudonyms, masks through which to disseminate a wide range of conflicting points of view are what is pertinent here, paralleling as these devices do the questioning of single subject positions that is - this refutation of a presumed singularity of position - a common feature of Postmodernist
writing, as well as of its equivalent within the visual arts. To write a passionately argued tract in which a clearly defined line of thought is developed, following this with one ostensibly produced by another author but which is in fact by the person it appears to attack, as Kierkegaard had occasion to do, is a rhetorical device more readily associated with the self-consciousness of post-1960s European thought than with Denmark in the first half of the nineteenth century. Kierkegaard's writing markedly transcends the body of works it so vividly helped to spawn, taking on a new relevance for readers encountering it in the present age.
Considering this long-term relevance of this philosophy and its pertinence in new and unpredictable cultures and contexts should help the reader of Scott Koterbay's book on Kierkegaard's elusive yet highly provocative "aesthetic theories" understand why the former's study is of such importance today. In examining in detail Kierkegaard's comprehensive, if elusive philosophy this book not only provides the reader with a subtle account of the major components of this great thinker's work, but moves forward to look at important aspects of the Dane's understanding of art and the aesthetic which have not previously been attended to with such, perspicacious, involved attention.
Kierkegaard's writings are usually seen as having three distinct stages or areas of import: the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. The former two are first put forward in the seminal work Either/Or of 1843. As Ronald Grimsley succinctly puts it: "Whereas the aesthetic personality remains disastrously turned in upon itself, refusing to acknowledge any higher possibility to its existence than an absorption in its own feelings and emotions, the ethical individual identifies himself with the existence of his fellow
men, actively sharing in their moral needs and aspirations."
Extending out from, but well beyond the ethical stage is that of the religious or Christian, which involves humankind's relation with the absolute. Koterbay has much to say on this facet of Kierkegaard's stance as a religious thinker and about how art, in a somewhat inverted manner, engages with it.
Beginning with an outline and critique of Kierkegaard's highly idiosyncratic theory of the individual, of the self as he defines it as the kernel of a philosophical "system" whose central beliefs involve the mapping out of theological world view of which the self is but one - although a very necessary - component, Koterbay goes on to unpick the intricacies of Kierkegaard's notion of art. To focus upon art in this way is to take a most unorthodox position vis-a-vis conventional approaches to Kierkegaard, which by and large may be divided into two distinct branches or schools. For one group of scholars, Kierkegaard is important as the founder of Existentialism and this philosophical position in relation to his life and writings is ceaselessly researched, examined and turned over, as though it were the only seam of his work that might be productively perused or which opened up issues that would seriously be taken up in future studies. As for the second "school" or approach, the attention here is upon Kierkegaard's position as a Christian philosopher. What is important about Koterbay's essay is that it breaks this mould, shifting the terms of the discussion to a different field of operation. In this, Koterbay somewhat resembles Kierkegaard himself, an outsider figure when placed in relation to the prominent intellectual debates of his day. Koterbay is working to extend the frame of specialist research on his chosen subject, an activity which, in the first instance "merely" expands the body of information about and the lines of approach to Kierkegaard, and in the second, revitalises and realigns the broader understanding of the subject at hand. One is reminded of the so-called "affair of the Corsair" of 1846, a tempestuous exchange between Kierkegaard and several of his contemporaries in and around the aforementioned satirical publication, though exactly how Koterbay's work on Kierkegaard's relation to art will be received by other scholars remains to be seen. Koterbay's tract is nonetheless a polemical one and will surely provoke much discussion among interested parties.
Furthermore, this zooming in upon the place of art in Kierkegaard's oeuvre is more than a merely pedantic or personal concern of its author, for the state of art and of the aesthetic is, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, by no means untroubled or securely located. In fact quite the opposite might be claimed for this scurrilous branch of philosophy and practice. Postmodernism is at one level a dissolution of the certainties we once thought we held, and art, at least since Hegel, has been subjected to a still continuing series of doubts and attacks, which, having reached a new intensity in our own day, remain to plague us. At a time when the practice of art seems stronger and more prominent within western culture than perhaps at any other time the value of art, its validity - even the possibility of it being a meaningful and effective force at all - remains in question. In Kierkegaard's philosophy art is already subjected to an act of productive disregard, an account, rather, of its flaccid promise in relation to the critical task at hand. In spite of Kierkegaard castigating art for its failings, for its apparent uselessness, his work ultimately, as Koterbay notes in Chapter 6, fails to fully attend to it: "...the authentic artist is a communicator of the ideal, but in what sense? Therein lies the question of the actual nature of the authentic artist in Kierkegaard's thought, one which he himself did not explicate."
Koterbay picks up and examines at length what he calls in Chapter 8 "the ambiguous and difficult position that the art object occupies within Kierkegaard's writings". He gives us the critical case against art as a necessary prerequisite to outlining how art and the aesthetic are perceived by later thinkers whose work has been important for contemporary discussions of the subject. In doing this, Koterbay has looked in great depth at a much disregarded factor in Kierkegaard's
world view, one which, as this volume makes vividly clear, is well worth the attention which up until the present work it has all too sorely lacked. Koterbay's book is thus not only a major contribution to an important but maligned and misunderstood element of Kierkegaardian philosophy but is also an attempt to show its relevance to the situation today. Contemporary art and its related discussion parties cannot but benefit from such a work. One thing surely absent from many of today's debates around art, both at the theoretical and practical levels, is some means of realigning notions of authorship and selfhood with the work of art itself. Kierkegaard's approach offers one such proposition, and even if we may feel that times have radically changed and not all the pieces of Kierkegaard's philosophical model are to our taste or understanding, his provocative picture of the impossible possibility of the aesthetic as expounded by Scott Koterbay, gives us a much needed theoretical, critical, and ultimately pragmatic insight into problems that require, in our own time, to be urgently and most assiduously addressed.
Peter Suchin
Peter Suchin is an art critic and artist. He has published in a wide range of journals and books, including Art Monthly, Art Press, Frieze, Contemporary, Variant, Mute and D McCorquodale et al (Eds), Occupational Hazard: Critical Writing on Recent British Art (Black Dog, London, 1998). He has exhibited his art internationally, most recently with the exhibition Museum of the Vexed Text at Redux, London in 2004.