The Passion of Infinity: Kierkegaard, Aristotle and The Rebirth of Tragedy

The Passion of Infinity:
Kierkegaard, Aristotle and

the Rebirth of Tragedy
Daniel Greenspan
Walter de Gruyter
Kierkegaard Studies
Monograph Series
19
Kierkegaard
Studies
Edited on behalf of the
Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre
by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Hermann Deuser
Monograph Series
19
Edited by
Niels Jørgen Cappelørn
Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

Daniel Greenspan
The Passion of Infinity

Kierkegaard, Aristotle and the Rebirth of Tragedy
Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

Kierkegaard Studies
Edited on behalf of the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre
by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Hermann Deuser
Monograph Series
Volume 19
Edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn
앪
앝 Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI
to ensure permanence and durability.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Greenspan, Daniel.
The passion of infinity : Kierkegaard, Aristotle, and the rebirth of trag-
edy / Daniel Greenspan.
p. cm. ⫺ (Kierkegaard studies. Monograph series, ISSN 1434-2952 ;
19)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-3-11-020396-7 (clothbound : alk. paper)
1. Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813⫺1855. 2. Aristotle. 3. Tragedy.
I. Title.
B4377.G7195 2008
1281.3⫺dc22
2008026010
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Acknowledgments
Without the support of the Howard and Edna Hong Library at St. Olaf
College, which made a substantial amount of advanced research pos-
sible, and the generous spirit of Gordon Marino and Cynthia Lund, I
would have been nowhere near as prepared to begin this project. For
support both material and spiritual during the actual writing I need
to thank the Kierkegaard Research Center, along with the Fulbright
foundation, who together made my Copenhagen residency possible.
There were many faculty members there from whom this project ben-
efited, but certainly its most warm and welcoming director, Niels Jør-
gen Cappelørn, whose editorial advice was essential, and whose en-
couraging presence across the hall often brought a lift. Joakim Garff,
a kind of Socratic-comic guide while at the Center, must also accept
my warm appreciation for his reading and sympathetic support, as
must Jonas Roos, for a passing remark that provided far more than he
realized. Although most of the work was completed abroad, both be-
fore and during this process there were two readers in the U.S. whose
contributions were essential. Walter Brogan has been a source of valu-
able insight, particularly on the Greece sections. I especially need to
thank Jack Caputo for his concernful mentoring of this project. His
keen eye and sense for where to pull back from the edge were vital.
Finally, Irene Ring and James Sikkema were both an indispensable
part of the preparation of the manuscript, the latter sent at a critical
moment apparently by the gods, volunteering without any obligation
or hope of recompense.
And of course, I need to thank Dana, for standing so close by me

every step of the way.
Table of Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Part I
Ancient Greece
1. Reason and the Irrational: Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus . 10

2. Literature and Moral Psychology: From Homer to
Sophocles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
3. Aristotle’s Poetics: Oedipus and the Problem of Tragedy . 70
4. Psuchê Redux: Philosophy and the New Psychology . . . . . . 95
5. Psychologizing Oedipus: Reason and Unreason in
Aristotle’s Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Part II
Golden Age Denmark
A. Kierkegaard’s Retrieval of Greek Tragedy
6. Tragedy as Historical Idea: Either/Or’s “Ancient Drama

Reflected in the Modern”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
7. Stages on Life’s Way: Hamartia after Modernity . . . . . . . . . 158
8. Fear and Trembling: Tragedy, Comedy and the Heroism
of Abraham . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
9. The Concept of Anxiety: Fate and the Tragic Logos of
Second Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
x Table of Contents
B. Beyond Eudaimonism:
Tragic Virtue and the Practice of Eternity
10. Moral Psychology in the Pseudonyms, Search for a Method 237

11. Ethics Contra Ethics: Climacus on Eternal Happiness and
Tragic Virtue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265
12. Kierkegaard and the Tragedy of Authorship . . . . . . . . . . . . 293
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317
Index of Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327
Index of Subjects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 330
Introduction
In his essay on Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, a work in which

tragic emotion carries titular weight, Jacques Derrida gestured briefly
at a new conception of emotions and the body which would do the
lived reality of emotion better justice, one at which Kierkegaard, I
believe, was hard at work:
Why does terror make us tremble, since one can also tremble with cold, and such
analogous physical manifestations translate experiences and sentiments that appear,
at least, not to have anything in common? This symptomatology is as enigmatic as
tears. Even if one knows why one weeps, in what situation, and what it signifies (I weep
because I have lost one of my nearest and dearest, the child cries because he has been
beaten or because she is not loved […]), but that still doesn’t explain why the lachrymal
glands come to secrete these drops of water which are brought to the eyes rather than
elsewhere, the mouth or the ears.1
To better interpret the phenomena of emotion, “We would need to

make new inroads into thinking concerning the body” – “What is it a
metaphor or figure for? What does the body mean to say by trembling or
crying[.]”2 Through his careful phenomenology of emotional life, par-
ticularly these tragic emotions of grief and terror, Kierkegaard, we’ll
find, attempts to restore both the archaic mystery of emotion and its
cognitive significance (literally, that emotion signifies, intends a mean-
ing) that Greek philosophy recognized intuitively. 3 It was this coinci-
1
Jacques Derrida The Gift of Death, p. 55.
2
Jacques Derrida The Gift of Death, p. 55.
3
Rick Furtak Wisdom in Love, pp. 46 f. “[I]t is only because he understands emo-
tions as cognitive phenomena that he can be accurately described as an advocate
of ‘passionate thought,’ or ‘passionate reason.’” Furtak cites the following authors
as presenting a similar view, though without acknowledging its implicit Hellenism:
Walter Lowrie Kierkegaard, p. 99; Jean Wahl Kierkegaard, p. 229; David J. Gou-
wens Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker, p. 52; C. Stephen Evans Passionate Reason,
generally.
Cf. Abrahim Kahn Salighed as Happiness? pp. 98-109. Khan also gives an impres-
sive argument for the non-modernness of Kierkegaard’s passionate thought, though,
again, without mentioning the Greeks.
2 Introduction
dence between reason and the body (that the body had reasons, and
could be trained in its desires and action to express argued ideas about
what was best, and that, on the other hand, reason might also be forced
to express the ‘irrational’ reasons of the body) that constituted for the
Greeks the interest and domain of what we now call moral psychology.
Derrida’s essay poses this question of the emotive body within the
broader context of investigations into the modern, European relevance
of ‘daimonic’ madness (in the mystery religion primarily of Chris-
tians, but also ancient Greeks) as a repressed condition of possibility
for rational culture and the ùthos of responsibility. His essay invites
a return to Kierkegaard as the first philosophical thinker to interro-
gate the disenchanted rationality of enlightenment culture in terms of
this challenge that the violence of divine madness once raised in the
schoolhouse of philosophy. The irruption of the mystery and unstable
emotion surrounding daimķn returns in Kierkegaard as an essential
component of his critique of both philosophies of immanence and de-
pressed cultures of reflection in need of a tragic blow and healing.
Reading Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and Aristotle’s aesthetics and
moral psychology, under the heading of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous
writings, this book charts the conception of this irrationality as a prac-
tical problem for tragic poetry to explore and philosophy to conquer.
Each of these thinkers represents an essential historical turn in think-
ing the problem of the irrational, both in terms of guilt (hamartia) and
sickness and the purification (katharsis) and potential happiness (eu-
daimonia) that knowledge can bring. In reclaiming the structures and
concepts of ancient Greek tragedy, Kierkegaard, we’ll find, undoes
the undoing of tragedy Aristotle had accomplished in eliminating the
possibility of daimonic experience from the table of tragic equations.
Before Aristotle, the collapse of human reason was bound generally,
and even with Plato, in part, to a transcendent religous domain, power-
fully independent of man’s logos – the “sign of a beyond.”4 Aristotle’s
4
Michel Foucault Madness and Civilization, p. 74. Foucault distinguishes the pow-
erfully independent irrationality of madness per se from “unreason,” the genus in
which modernity envelops it, an opponent defined by the reason which, in it, fails,
in which reason enjoys “a triumph arranged in advance” (p. 64). While Foucault lo-
cates the transition from the irrational to unreason in the classical age of modernity,
the movement can be traced to Aristotle’s anthropologizing of the irrational as a
form of animality. See, for instance, pp. 77-78 on the inherited meaning of Aristo-
tle’s “rational animal.” “From the moment philosophy became anthropology, and
man sought to recognize himself in a natural plenitude, the animal lost its power of
negativity, in order to become, between the determinism of nature and the reason of
man, the positive form of an evolution.”
Introduction 3
scientific psychology for the first time reduces man’s irrationality to

the ‘unreason’ of an exclusively natural cause, that the reason implicit
in a purposive and intelligent nature defines. 5 The psychologizing of
dangerous emotion as pathù in the soul and the effect of unreason-
ing desires introduces an entirely new conception of the irrational as a
blind, animal failure. While the overwhelming of our intelligence once
signified the transcendence and divinity of other logoi, more powerful
and complete, it lapses now into a simple stuttering or gap, a vacancy
within our self-same reason, without meaning or use, which the philos-
opher’s care of the soul defends against. Without a radical intervention
in Greek culture’s traditional concept of the soul (a creature largely of
its poets, Homer chief among them), the philosopher’s moral science
(epistùmù) or craft (technù) would have been unthinkable.6 And so in
addition to the work, in Part I, on Sophocles and Aristotle, I also of-
fer a pair of chapters briefly sketching the genealogy of the soul as a
historical idea, from its conventional, literary conception to that world-
conquering notion of a personal element in us akin to the divine – iden-
tified principally with thought – which philosophy would shape as the
object of its moral care and psychological study.
Reading Kierkegaard alongside the Greeks confirms a hypothesis
whose invention was no luxury of mine, but rather Kierkegaard’s own,
echoed by his first biographer, Georg Brandes, who described him as
“essentially educated” not only “by Socrates” but also “the Greeks”
more generally.7 In 1848, Kierkegaard drafted an invitation to an im-
aginary lecture series in which he would unlock the hermeneutical
principle of his authorship as a modern writer. The relation to ancient
Greece would be the key:
5
Martha Nussbaum The Fragility of Goodness, p. 307. A key strategy of the philoso-
pher’s art of life and its goal of rational independence, common to both Plato and
Aristotle, was to make “our lives safe […] from these internal sources of uncon-
trolled danger.”
6
In Nicomachean Ethics i.2, for instance, Aristotle uses both languages, that of art
and science, to characterize his ethical-political thought and identifies the practical
sphere of “the Good” as a domain of “science,” though not, of course, in the strict
sense he gives it later in vi.3. Cf. Martha Nussbaum The Fragility of Goodness, p. 94.
In “the consensus of philologists, there is, at least through Plato’s time, no systematic
or general distinction between epistùmù and technù. Even in some of Aristotle’s most
important writings on this topic [of a technù governing practical choice], the two
terms are used interchangeable.”
7
As cited in Joakim Garff Søren Kierkegaard, p. 317.
4 Introduction
The undersigned intends to offer a short course of lectures on the organizing principle
of the entirety of my work as an author in relation to the modern age, illuminated with
reference to classical antiquity.8
The lectures were never given and until recently this Greek horizon of
Kierkegaard’s thought, Socrates notwithstanding, had been left rela-
tively unpursued. About twenty years ago, Alisdair Macintyre includ-
ed a few pages on Kierkegaard in After Virtue, which he later admits,
pleasantly enough, represented an amputated and somewhat mistak-
en view of Kierkegaard.9 This encounter with Kierkegaard, however
abortive and mutated, was the first stroke on a new page, suggesting
that Kierkegaard’s relevance as a moral thinker, historically, ought to
be understood in terms of his relation to Ancient Greek virtue eth-
ics, particularly Aristotle. For Macintyre, the “radical choice” theory
which he ascribes to Kierkegaard marked the first recognition by our
modern, rational culture that moral choice could no longer be ration-
ally justified. Kierkegaard, for Macintyre, has been caught celebrating
at Aristotle’s funeral, raising the flag of individual will amidst the use-
less fragments of reason’s moral claims.
In the space of a few years, a number of essays were published, as
well as a book, Kierkegaard After Macintyre, in which Macintyre’s
criticisms were not-so-coolly rebuffed by Kierkegaard scholars, whom,
loyal to the spirit of their man, took this attack somewhat personally.
More importantly, though, than the accuracy of Macintyre’s reading
of Kierkegaard (an insignificance Macintyre himself admits), was the
surge of interest in Kierkegaard as a moralist along Aristotelian lines.
Not only was Kierkegaard NOT Aristotle’s nemesis, historically, we
began to hear, but there were important ways in which Kierkegaard’s
philosophy of action labored in a workshop outfitted with Aristote-
lian tools.10 One critic “shall read Kierkegaard more as a successor of
Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas than as a predecessor of Sartre and
8
Pap. VIII 2 B 186, 292-293 (no SKS). Cf. JP 5:6094.
9
See Alasdaire Macintyre “Once More on Kierkegaard” in Kierkegaard After Mac-
intyre, ed. by Davenport and Rudd.
10
Anthony Rudd “Reason in Ethics, Macintyre and Kierkegaard” in Kierkegaard
After Macintyre, ed. by Davenport and Rudd, p. 136. Kierkegaard “was concerned
with the long term development of character traits – virtues and vices. […] Why,
then, is Macintyre’s account of Kierkegaard in After Virtue, (he has hardly men-
tion him in his subsequent work) so negative?” Cf. Norman Lillegard “Thinking
with Kierkegaard and Macintyre about Virture, the Aesthetic, and Narrative” in
Kierkegaard After Macintyre, ed. by Davenport and Rudd, pp. 211 f. Lillegard uses
Macintyres’s framing of the question of ethics as “what sort of person am I to be-
come” to place Kierkegaard in the classical tradition as moral psychologist.
Introduction 5
Foucault.”11 Most recently, in Wisdom in Love, Rick Furtak enlists

Kierkegaardian moral psychology in a debate about Hellenistic eth-
ics, offering a very reasonable justification of loving engagement with
others, against the detached wisdom of the Stoics. Through Kierke-
gaard’s work Furtak offers a “guide for the emotionally perplexed,”
“a conception of what it would mean to trust oneself to be rational in
being passionate.”12
Still, rosy passages such as this ought to come as something of a
shock to even those with only a glancing knowledge of Kierkegaard’s
titles. They tempt us to draw Kierkegaard dangerously close to the
therapeutic individualism of a certain brand of self-help, whose ideals
of well-adjusted comfort he would have ridiculed expertly.13 Kierke-
gaard, of course, does hold the passion of love dear. In Works of Love,
he has left us a lengthy and passionate meditation on its elemental,
religious force. But is it so easy to forget that other passion at work in
the Gospel of Luke’s frightful dictum (14:26), which his pseudonym
de Silentio recalls in his poetizing of Abraham: “If anyone comes to
me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children
and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my
disciple.”14 As he raised the knife over his son, his wife’s child and the
promise of generations, could Abraham trust that he was “being ra-
tional in being passionate?” Of course he could not. Explanation and
justification were scarce on the awful peak of Moriah.
Though, when the pseudonymous ‘A’ posed the question epigraph-
ically – “Is reason then alone baptized, are the passions pagans?”
– he did situate Either/Or as well as the authorship it inaugurates
within the classically Greek frame of something like virtue ethics.
Yet, as we’ll discover, the passions which interest Kierkegaard are
not the tempered passions of the Greek philosopher, but instead the
ecstatically conflicted emotions specific to the poet’s tragic plots, and
typical, we’ll find, of Greek lyric generally. While it is not without
cause that scholars of late have drawn Kierkegaard into the measured
11
Robert C. Roberts “Existence, emotion, and virtue: Classical themes in Kierke-
gaard” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, p. 177. Cf. Robert C. Rob-
erts “Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and a Method of Virtue Ethics” in Kierkegaard in
Post/Modernity, ed. by Matustik and Westphal.
12
Rick Furtak Wisdom in Love, p. xii.
13
Phillip Rieff The Triumph of the Therapeutic. Rieff’s book is a classic treatment of
this historical trend.
14
As translated from Kierkegaard’s Danish in the Hong edition of Fear and Trem-
bling, p. 72.
6 Introduction
company of Greek philosophers, the tensions that ought to result are

always either downplayed to a fault or missed entirely.15 John Daven-
port, for instance, discovers a Kierkegaardian virtue ethics, but “in
place of the classical notion of eudaimonia as the human telos” at-
taches the goal of “narrative shape and enduring meaning” in “a hu-
man life.”16 He focuses, typical of the frontiersmen of Kierkegaardian
virtue ethics, on the moderating, civic-minded example of the Judge,
decontextualized and without reference to the religious. “That,” he
writes, “is a further story, which we would have to trace to get Kier-
kegaard’s complete conception of existential virtue fully in view.”17
Yet, I would argue, without a discussion of the religious, we spoil
the insight that Kierkegaard may have something like a virtue ethics
to explore with a fraudulently amiable picture of how emotional life
ought to be understood and developed. The tendency to define hu-
man beings by social standards, for Kierkegaard, leading naturally
to the regimes of affluence and station, was responsible for the loss
of the human itself. Man can only truly be man individually, in the
awful, destabilizing encounter with god, an experience of the eter-
nity whose incomparable measure brings personal mortality brutally
and instantly to light. Investigating Kierkegaard’s debt to the ancient
Greek ethics of virtue, to Aristotle in particular, in whom the tech-
nique of this ethics matures into a full-fledged psychology, requires
the exploration of darker territory and more unstable passions, a re-
turn to the domain of tragic lyric in which the West first deliberated
15
See Robert C. Roberts “Existence, Emotion and Virtue: Classical Themes in Kier-
kegaard” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, p. 203. Roberts, another
frontiersman of Kierkegaardian moral psychology, rightly distinguishes Kierke-
gaard’s thinking from Aristotle’s in its heightened suspicion of reflection, and the
endorsement “against Aristotle” of dissociating “oneself from aspects of one’s
character.” Yet, surprisingly, he never qualifies Kierkegaard’s work with regard to
temperance, an Aristotelianism Kierkegaard utterly inverts. By default, Kierke-
gaard’s moral psychology appears to be a minor tune-up of Aristotle’s, subordinat-
ing passion to thought and establishing reason’s authority and harmony in the soul.
Other commentators, such as Norman Lillegard, promote an identically sanguine
view of Kierkegaard the Aristotelian, based on the isolated character of Judge Wil-
liam, exemplar, for Kierkegaard, of a very prudent, civic-minded rationality. Cf.
Norman Lillegard “Thinking with Kierkegaard and Macintyre about Virtue, the
Aesthetic, and Narrative” in Kierkegaard After Macintyre, ed. by Davenport and
Rudd, pp. 221-226.
16
John Davenport “Towards an Existential Virtue Ethics: Kierkegaard and Macin-
tyre” in Kierkegaard After Macintyre, ed. by Davenport and Rudd, p. 265.
17
John Davenport “Towards an Existential Virtue Ethics: Kierkegaard and Macin-
tyre” in Kierkegaard After Macintyre, ed. by Davenport and Rudd, p. 308.
Introduction 7
on the problem of the irrational. It is Kierkegaard’s philosophical le-

gitimation of not just some emotion (i. e., Greek wonder) but all of
the soul’s modulations, no matter how distorted or painful, as crucial
to our studies and exercises in humanity that makes him so worthy
of attention. Through a poet’s sensibility and skill he ennobles even
the most destructive and uncontained of the passions with a digniity
and purpose.
It is not until Kierkegaard’s philosophical drama, which I take up in
Part II, composed of the pseudonymous lyrics of his various dramatis
personae, that this ancient, tragic problem of the irrational assumes
its latest shape.18 In each of his pseudonymous students of the soul
we can observe psychological study return, once again, to the moral
art of character-building, rather than the disinterested observations of
natural science which at the time of his authorship were just beginning
to find their pace. The authorship’s appropriation of tragic concepts
and structures, not without tension, bears the influence of the philoso-
pher’s concern for moral education and his definition of humanity in
intellectual terms. Like Aristotle, Kierkegaard develops a theory of
human action and a practice in virtue based on the authority of ideas
and the absolute telos of ‘happiness’ – though one with explicit rather
than implicit religious significations19 – grounding his ethics in rea-
son’s passionately tragic experience of a god. This leads him to a radi-
cally different understanding and valuation of the passions, though
oriented still by a version of the Greek ideal of passionate intelligence.
The philosopher’s reason-centered craft of human life, armed now
with a tragic-religious insight into reason’s failure to satisfy or even
understand its desires, cedes its authority to the wonder and terror of
religious experience as authoritative intelligence of a different order.
Kierkegaard’s tragic moral psychology frees the psychologically re-
duced notion of the irrational from its dependent position (as a kind of
18
See CUP1, 625 f. / SKS 7, 569 ff. I take Kierkegaard seriously when he instructs us
to regard his pseudonyms as dramatic characters, who nevertheless are the product
of their own creation, whom he has merely ”prompted,” each with an independent
psychology corresponding to their own ”life-view,” the philosophical perspective
they embody.
19
This is the difference between the Greek eudaimonia and the Danish salighed. For
an analysis of Salighed, see Khan Salighed as Happiness? Kierkegaard on the Con-
cept of Happiness. The concept, across the authorship, implies man’s impotence
and the reliance on either his love of god, or god’s grace. It implies the shaping of
individual personality, through “the exercise of one’s passional capacity” (pp. 72 f.).
Like eudaimonia, it demands the activity of the self (p. 91).
8 Introduction
“manifestation of non-being” 20) beneath reason in the soul, enlarging

the field of possible experience beyond the limits which rational man
defines.
This study of the pseudonyms would undoubtedly profit from an
account of tragedy’s significance for the explicitly religious and pre-
dominantly signed writings, as well as Kierkegaard’s own biography.
The biographical parallels with tragedy range from the obvious, such
as god’s alleged curse upon the Kierkegaard family, killing five of
Søren’s six siblings by his thirty-first year (1834, nine years before
the authorship begins), to the more subtle hints, such as the journal’s
sketch of “a novella titled ‘the Mysterious family.’” Here Kierkegaard
considers reproducing “the tragedy of my childhood: the terrifying,
secret explanation of the religious” which with the suddenness of a
word would provide “a terrifying explanation of everything.” 21 Were
we to look to the later writings and their almost insane fervor for re-
ligious offense, we would discover rich figures like St. Peter, exem-
plary figure of a tragic pollution and exile: “In love of Christ or in
hatred of the world he left everything, his station in life, his livelihood,
family, friends, human language, love of mother and father, love of
fatherland,” 22 a thought from Christian Discourses once again com-
pleted by the journals. “The despised person, rejected by the human
race, a poor, single, solitary wretch, an outcast – this, according to
Christianity, this is what god chooses and what is closest to Him.” 23
But the subjects of dramatic literature and philosophical psychology,
especially of the pagan ilk, are not properly Christian subjects, and
space will not allow a responsible treatment of these themes as they do
enter into the content of the signed works. In the context of the final
chapter, though, placing Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous use of tragedy
structurally in relation to the authorship as a whole, I do mark several
points where this work could begin.
20
Michel Foucault Madness and Civilization, p. 115. For a general discussion of this
development in the modern age see Chapters 3 and 4.
21
Pap. IV A 144 / SKS JJ:147. Cf. JP 5:5690. See Joakim Garff Søren Kierkegaard,
p. 352. On Garff’s analysis, the entries fleshing out this novella are later included in
Stages on Life’s Way.
22
SV1 10, 186. Translated by Bruce Kirmmse, in Garff’s Søren Kierkegaard, as with
all references to the Papirer references in this introduction.
23
Pap. VIII 1 A 598 / SKS NB4:113. Cf. JP 4:4131.
Part I
Ancient Greece
Tragedy, Happiness and the Problem

of the Irrational:
Aristotle’s Moral Psychology and the
Challenge of Sophocles’ Oedipus
Dionysus has still his votaries or victims, though

we call them by other names; and Pentheus was
confronted by a problem which other civil authori-
ties have had to face in real life.
– E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational
The gods have become diseases.

– C. G. Jung, Commentary on the Golden Flower
Chapter 1
Reason and the Irrational:
Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus
Introduction
Oedipus was the quintessential tragic hero for Aristotle, and prob-
ably also for Sophocles. And so Sophocles returns to Oedipus, “most
splendid symbol of humanity,” 1 a quarter century after the Tyrannus,
having reached such an extremity of age it would excuse a poet of
even his powers from more work. Kierkegaard, we will see, like Hegel,
preferred Antigone to Oedipus. But this still places his most elaborate
thinking on tragedy within the Oedipus narrative. As Kierkegaard
himself will explain, the tragic nature of ancient dramas was not to
be found in a conceptual dilemma which Antigone better represents,
such as Hegel’s dialectic between divine and human law or logos. The
‘tragedy’ of Greek tragedies is rather internal to them, located some-
where in the actual dramatic time through which a family catastrophe
unfolds.2 It is for this reason impossible to separate his (or our) medi-
tations on Antigone from the tale of her father. A single guilt binds
them as one. 3 And so the story of Kierkegaard’s Antigone begins with
the father, Oedipus. “[I]t is not an individual who goes under, but a
little world; it is the objective grief, unloosed, that now strides ahead,
1
H. D.F Kitto Greek Tragedy, p. 393 f.
2
The sorrow, writes Kierkegaard, is “in the tragedy” itself. EO1, 148 / SKS 2, 147.
“What provides the tragic interest in the Greek sense is that Oedipus’s sad fate reso-
nates in the brother’s unfortunate death, in the sister’s conflict with a specific human
injunction; it is, as it were, the afterpains, Oedipus’s tragic fate, spreading out into
each branch of the family. This totality makes the spectator’s sorrow so very pro-
found.” EO1, 156 / SKS 2, 155.
3
Cf. J. M. Bremer Hamartia, p. 158. Kierkegaard anticipates Bremer’s understanding
of hamartia as an entity extending itself through the action of the plays. Oedipus’ life
“may thus be seen as a single long drawn out hamartia. Not a moral quality.”
Reason and the Irrational: Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus 11
like a force of nature, in its own terrible consistency, and Antigone’s

sad fate is like the echo of her father’s, an intensified sorrow.”4
In Fitts’ and Fitzgerald’s translation of the Tyrannus, they add an or-
nament which is not in Sophocles’ text. They call Oedipus the “heroic
mind.” Although technically imaginary, it is an illuminating fraud. If
the mind has a story, 5 as does the evolution of the Oedipus myth, from
Homer through Sophocles, down to the modern versions of Corneille,
Dryden, and Voltaire, then the tragic myth of Oedipus as “heroic
mind” represents a second episode. In this story, the birth of ‘reason’
at the start of the 6th century develops unforeseen complications in
the sphere of praxis,6 or, reasoned action. Oedipus comes to embody
these complications as the paradigmatic figure of tragic knowledge, a
transplant of the intelligence and accessibility of the Ionian postulate
– logos – to the dissecting table of Athenian drama. Man rather than
nature now becomes this object of rational investigation. This trans-
plantation is completely natural to the Milesian germ of reason:7
The advent of the polis, the birth of philosophy – the two sequences of phenomena
are so closely linked that the origin of rational thought must be seen as bound up with
the social and mental structures peculiar to the Greek city. […] Reason itself was in
essence political. […] When philosophy arose at Miletus, it was rooted in the political
4
EO1, 156 / SKS 2, 155.
5
That thinking has a history is of course what Hegel will claim. Kierkegaard, still
very much under the impression of Hegel’s historicizing of philosophy in his early
phase of authorship, at which point Either/Or was composed, echoes this thought
throughout the essay on the tragic in ancient and modern drama. For the Hegel in-
fluence on Either/Or, see Jon Stewart The Relation between Kierkegaard and Hegel
Reconsidered, pp. 182-237.
6
J. P. Vernant The Origins of Greek Thought, p. 102. “In the history of humankind,
beginnings ordinarily elude us. But if the advent of philosophy in Greece marked
the decline of mythological thought and the beginning of rational understanding,
we can fix the date and place of birth of Greek reason – establish its civil status. It
was the beginning of the sixth century, in Ionian Miletus, that such men as Thales,
Anaximander, and Anaximenes ushered in a new way of thinking about nature.”
7
J. P. Vernant The Origins of Greek Throught, p. 131. “In fact, it was at the political
level that reason was first expressed, established, and shaped itself in Greece. […]
For the Greeks, the individual could not be separated from the citizen; phronùsis,
reflection, was the privilege of free men, who exercised their reason and their civic
rights at one and the same time.” Cf. Werner Jaeger Paideia vol. 1, pp. 139, 142.
At the start of the 6th century B. C., the time of Solon and the world’s first strides
in Athens towards rational politics and democracy, “[T]he culture of the Athenian
nobility was Ionian through and through.” Solon used “Ionian scientific ideas as a
pattern” for his political poetry and legislation.
12 Part I: Ancient Greece
thought whose fundamental preoccupations it expressed and from which it borrowed

a great part of its vocabulary.8
In hatching reason, the polis gave birth to the Siamese twins of phi-
losophy and tragic poetry. Their inevitable division would necessarily
kill one of the conjoined. And so the Greeks tear down the stage of
serious tragedy a century after its construction.
Oedipus is a model (paradeigmi, 1193) and it is his heroic mind
which defines him. The heroic mind Sophocles bestows upon Oedi-
pus of old would have been a pattern of thinking typical of all men
of a new rational culture, which by the 5th c. had already begun to
contest the traditional pieties and vision of Greek life, especially in
the fields of medicine, the legal-political sphere, and more fundamen-
tally in the science of nature. Thucydides has left us a record of this
impulse, in the midst of the plague Athens suffered perhaps not long
before Sophocles wrote this play (430-429 B. C.).9 And so Sophocles
makes the themes of law, sickness and, implicit in sickness, nature, an
essential part of his production.10 Oedipus was no incidental figure for
Sophocles. There are no less than nine Oedipus tragedies of which
we have no more than the title.11 Both Aeschylus and Euripides had
written an Oedipus, like Sophocles, as part of larger cycles. These of
course have been lost, save Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes. Oedi-
pus appears in both the Iliad and the Odyssey and both Hesiod and
Pindar touch on his story.12 His is a very old story for the Greeks.
In adopting Oedipus as its first child, Athenian tragedy adapted his
character, deeply embedded in the collective mythos, to the shape of
its own specific vision. It placed itself within a tradition of poetic re-
flection from out of which Oedipus emerges into full tragic bloom,
8
J. P. Vernant The Origins of Greek Thought, p. 131.
9
C. F. Bowra Sophoclean Tragedy, p. 171.
10
Cf. B. Knox Oedipus at Thebes, ch. III.3 and G. E. R. Lloyd In the Grip of Disease,
pp. 88, 97. Knox devotes all of Chapter III.3 to the deep significance of medicine in
the Tyrannus. Lloyd echoes that “[o]f course the play is not about medicine, about
medical diagnosis and treatment. But human misfortune is depicted, repeatedly, in
terms of diseases.” “[T]heir efforts so often come to nothing (as was the fate […] of
Greek doctors of every description in their attempts to understand and to cure). To
seem pious, or wise, or even good, offered no immunity to calamity, indeed no im-
munity was to be had, any more than there was for disease. Its sudden onset, often
unexplained, maybe irremediable, captures, in so many respects, the very essence
of the human predicament, serving as not merely analogous to, but itself a key ex-
ample of human vulnerability” and the impotence of reason.
11
Richard C. Jebb The Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, p. xxxiii.
12
Richard C. Jebb The Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, pp. xii-xv.
embodying the troubled heart of reason in the city’s breast, isolated

like a sickness for treatment within the ambit of the theatre.
Before moral philosophy or the tragic lyric with which philosophy
briefly shared the city, man’s gnomic lot fell to the poets: Hesiod, The-
ognis, Solon, and Pindar. They projected a new cultural possibility
through which the logos or account of the good human life could be
discovered.13 For these poets, it was the divine order of Homeric $IKù
given a new moralising interpretation that determined the path of hu-
man lives. In the context of tragedy, this archaic attempt to deliber-
ately align human choice with a god’s Justice becomes terribly ironic.
As the gods express themselves through human language, its capacity
to plan or give an account is ironically reversed.14 Divine language
intrudes upon mortal speaking. In the Tyrannus especially, language
becomes a network of blockages rather than a snare for insight. Words
indicate barriers, points of conflict between the past and what is to
come,15 positioning Oedipus impossibly within the contrary logoi of
men and gods.
The Greeks, Sophocles included, believed “as if by instinct”16 that
the universe was based on a logos, obeyed law, and “[e]very detail
13
J. M. Bremer Hamartia, p. 115. Bremer makes Pindar the lynch pin between Hom-
er and the tragedians. Hesiod, Theognis, and Solon are supplemental sources for
our understanding of the development of the moral equation through which tragic
¿Ê¿ÏÒÇ¿ can finally be interpreted. Pindar’s representation is ðÉÀÍÐ u ©ÍÏÍÐ u
DÀÏÇÐ u ÊÎÉ¿ÈÃÊ¿ u ÒÅ: happiness, leads to complacency, leads to arrogance,
leads to offence, leads to god-sent ruin. Cf. Werner Jaeger Paideia vol. 1, p. 252.
Jaeger points out that this has roots in the poetry of Solon.
14
J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Ambiguity and Reversal” in Myth and Trag-
edy in Ancient Greece, p. 120. Human language is reversed when the gods express
themselves through it.
15
See J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Tensions and Ambiguities in Greek
Tragedy” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 42. Cf. Charles Segal “Time
and Knowledge in the Tragedy of Oedipus” in Sophocles’ Tragic World, pp. 146-
48. Segal observes that “The present is both a recapitulation of the past and a re-
enactment of the past in symbolic form,” or, in Sophocles’ own language, “inferring
the new by means of the old” (916). “Sophocles devotes most of the action to the
problem of logical deduction in the present.”
16
C. M. Bowra Sophoclean Tragedy, p. 143. Cf. J. P. Vernant The Origins of Greek
Thought, pp. 107 f. Vernant argues that what Bowra calls this “instinct” toward
logos is organic to the social-political order arising with the polis. This helps clarify
the natural community of reason between Ionian and Athenian thought, across
fields as diverse as the study of nature, politics, and lyric poetry. It was not sim-
ply that Ionian natural philosophy exported the invention of reason to Athens, but
rather that “the form and content of natural philosophy depended heavily on the
secular-rational institution of the polis” underlying them both.
in the Tyrannus is contrived in order to enforce Sophocles’ faith in

this underlying logos.”17 But while the universal order to which philo-
sophical reason aspires naturally draws the mind into its harmonies,
the tragic logos seduces the intellect into a kind of suicide. Tragic
guilt expressed a live political dilemma specific to Greece at this time
between human reason and the force of the irrational, represented
dramatically by the logos of divinity. Knowledge within the sphere of
tragic thinking included “at its center a core of ignorance, the shad-
owy conjunction at our origins whose mystery we can never fully
penetrate.”18 It had something of the Socratic, a knowledge whose
only advantage was an awareness of its own ignorance, whose only ac-
complishment was the imposition of paradox and which could aspire
to expression only through excessively ambiguous language. Oedipus’
vision of truth coincides with a blinding, as the eternal order of the
gods intervenes violently in the contingent human time of the play.
Once the catastrophe has unfolded and Oedipus the wise king has
been destroyed, overtaken by a kind of divine madness, the traces of
this intervening violence remain as a kind of screen through which a
divine logos presents itself. This after-image of the divine anticipates
another literary impression which, as we’ll see in Part II, the modern
tragedy of Kierkegaard’s authorship evokes.
Cf. Werner Jaeger Paideia, vol. 1. Jaeger takes the explicaton of this unargued
premise of Bowra’s as one of its essential missions. Philosophical logos can be
traced back through the lyric poets to the epics of Homer and Hesiod; the order
(dikù) at work in natural reality was originally a moral force, proper to the domain
of poetry. Already Hesiod’s “mythical system is formed and governed by reason”
(p. 65). “Like the rationalistic ideals which created the system of the Theogony,
[Works and Days] presupposes city-state civilization and the advanced thinking
of Ionia” (p. 68). The “justice” in Anaximander’s “nature” was a moral and not a
physical law (p. 160). It was the life of the city-state and the the problem of the ways
of god to man that was first read into the cosmos (p. 161), though, after the Ionian
investigations of the 6th c. into physis, this nature would once again be read back
into the inner life of the individual man. If there was a law of the cosmos, there must
be a law for the souls living within it. Heraclitus takes this step (p. 180), connecting
the “knowledge of Being with insight into human values and conduct, and made the
former include the latter.” This is an original source for Greek thinking on phrone-
sis, knowledge-related action. Cf. fragments 2, 112, 113, 114, 116.
17
C. M. Bowra Sophoclean Tragedy, p. 144.
18
Charles Segal “Time and Knowledge In the Tragedy of Oedipus” in Sophocles’
Tragic World, pp. 147 f.
Sickness and Purgation
Already in the prologue of the first of the Theban plays, we have an

ambivalence between the human and divine realms which rings true
until the last, when Oedipus is translated like an epic hero, or those of
Pindar’s lyrics, into immortality in the groves of Colonnus. We begin
with a crowd of people huddled before the altars in front of Oedipus’
palace. He emerges before these suppliants, their “boughs of supplica-
tion wreathed with chaplets” (327), as a figuration of the divine.19 One
of these suppliants is himself a priest, who has come to Oedipus like
the others to supplicate in time of plague. The confusion of Oedipus
with a god is almost immediately disclaimed. “It is not because we
rank you with the gods that I and these children are seated at your
hearth, but because we judge you to be the first of men …” (329). But
that the confusion must be clarified only confirms what the audience
must have felt. Oedipus emerges at the opening of the play like a god
before his altar.
What gives Oedipus this divine status, though, is more important. He
is proton andrķn (33), “first of men.” This first of men has his universal
aspect in an exceptional power to reason practically. Human wisdom
is Oedipus’ native element and he establishes its measure both in the
“incidents of life and in dealing with higher powers” (329). Though,
the priest continues, “it is by the extra strength given by a god that
you are said and believed to have set right our life” (329). The heroic
mind is a gift from the gods that has made Oedipus the prototypical
man. Sophocles drives the point home once more in the same piece of
dialogue. Oedipus, says the priest, we do not know if your knowledge
comes from men or from the gods. The exchange between mortals and
gods is a dialectic which Sophocles will continue to exploit, slowly turn-
ing Oedipus’ divine status and authoritative intelligence on its head. 20
High will be made low, as in the ancient ritual of ostracization, and
low made high, as with the pharmakos of the Athenian festival of the
Thargelia. The relevance of both is worth explaining.
The ritual of the pharmakos originates in the Athenians impious
murder of Androgaeus the Cretan, re-enacted on the first day of the
Thargelia. The pharmakoi were selected in terms of ugliness. They
represent all that is dead and defiled in the city, what needs to be
19
edy in Ancient Greece, p. 125.
20
sloughed off or purified for the city to “be refertilized,” to bring it-
self back to life. Hence its connection with the fertility ritual of the
eiresiķne.21 The pollution (agos) which the katharmos-pharmakos em-
bodies gave him a sense of religious awe, 22 in addition to defilement
– the pharmakos was treated royally before the expulsion. When a di-
vine scourge afflicts a city, the normal solution is to sacrifice the king 23
and this so-called scapegoat is a member of the community who as-
sumes the role of this king “turned inside out,” sacrificed in his place,
carrying with him all the disorder he embodies.
But the city set its limits from both below and above. Like the phar-
makos, the ritual of ostracization, introduced by Cleisthenes and used
between 487 and 416, expelled what was too high as opposed to too
low. It seems to be a politicized version of the pharmakos, also protec-
tion against divine retribution, plague, and later tyranny. 24 Our picture
of Oedipus resolves under the influence of both of these political and
religious institutions with which tragedy co-existed in Athens.25
The action of the Tyrannus truly begins with an incident transpiring
long before the prologue opens, to which the play as aetiology returns.
Oedipus has freed the city from the tribute of that “cruel singer,” the
Sphinx. Her song was doubly cruel. Not only did it surround the many
deaths of her victims, but it also distracted Thebes from Laius’ mur-
der. This distraction is the cause of the unholy sickness whose symp-
toms now emerge in full bloom, as will Oedipus, their cause, from be-
hind the palace doors, once Jocaste has perished and the tragedy run
21
edy in Ancient Greece, pp. 129 f.
22
ÁÍÐ also denoted matters of religious awe, as indicated by the verb ¿ÄÍÊ¿Ç.
23
24
J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Oedipus in Athens” in Myth and Tragedy in
Ancient Greece, p. 326.
25
edy in Ancient Greece, p. 128. Vernant emphasizes Oedipus’ identity with the phar-
makos, following the link Louis Gernet established between tragedy and the ritual
of the pharmakos, as well as J. P. Guepin. Cf. p. 131: The paean of the opening scene
was also part of the Thargelia, and would have reminded the Athenian audience of
the kathartic ritual, connecting Oedipus with its agos. Cf. G. E. R. Lloyd In the Grip
of Disease, p. 88. Lloyd confirms that Knox, Burkert, Sabatucci, Vegetti, Girard,
Segal all agree on the association between Oedipus and the pharmakos: the source
of pollution through expulsion is likewise the source of salvation. Cf. J. P. Vern-
ant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet Oedipus in Athens in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient
Greece, p. 326. As tragedy was both a political and religious institution, it should be
compared with other political and religious institutions.
its course. In ridding Thebes of its affliction by the winged maiden,

he “set right” or “straightened out” their “life” (hùmin orthosai bion),
and so the priest also asks him now to “raise up the city so that it does
not fall (anorthoson polin, 39). 26 Now as before Oedipus will be called
upon to correct what has become crooked, but Sophocles translates
this “crookedness” likewise into “sickness.”
Addressing the Thebans as a father would his children, Oedipus sees
all of them sick (noseite pantes, 60). Though “None of you,” he contin-
ues, with an irony only available to the audience, “is as sick as I.” The
political disease from which Thebes suffers infects the king most of
all. Presented first in dialogue flush with the language of Hippocratic
authors, as a physician at the bedside of the ailing Thebes, Oedipus in
the end stands “revealed not as the physician but as the sick man –” 27
the source of the city’s plague. As king of Thebes, Oedipus IS the
city. The law of substitution is a special feature of both traditional
Dionysiac sacrifice and those reserved for the altar of the tragic god’s
stage. One sacrificial victim takes the penitential place of the group to
which he belongs. That which affects the landscape and the populace
naturally concentrates itself in its king. Oedipus himself explains the
equation for us. “My soul [emù psuchù] mourns equally for the city
and for myself and for you” (63-64). This “mourning [stenei]” was also
a “groaning,” or “moaning,” the sound of the victim. 28
26
Sophocles uses another form of the verb ÍÏÆÍÑÆ¿Ç: to straighten.
27
B. Knox Oedipus at Thebes, p. 147. Knox catalogues the many Hippocratisms in the
play on pages 139-147. See also page 147n31 for additional instance of words with
medical connotations.
28
There is a homology between dominant forms of Dionysiac sacrifice in such ritu-
als as the Agrionia and the Bouphonia, where the animal is symbolically killed
as both god-victim and man-criminal, and the killing of tragic heroes in a drama.
The homology also applies to the ritual of the pharmakos, as we’ve seen, as well as
ostracization. In each case the victim is meant to be a redemptive substitution for
another person or more typically for a group of people.
There have so far been four ways of approaching the obscure relation between
Attic Tragedy’s performance at the Spring festival of the Greater Dionysia and the
myth and cult of the masked god for whom this festival was instituted. The first
wave of scholars, such as Rohde, thought they had discovered in the myths of the
tragic god the echo of historic events. And so when we find a people re-enacting
the arrival by water of Dionysus to Greek shores, we then presume that at some
point in the dusk of Greek pre-history Dionysus did arrive as a foreigner from the
eastern shores of Thrace. Now of course we know this not to be the case. The linear
B tablets at Pylos disproved Rohde’s thesis that Dionysus was a deity alien to the
Greeks, and likewise called his thesis into question that his immigration infused the
vital Greek bloodline with an alien strain, with a yearning to deny mortal life for a
disembodied, immortal alternative.
Diagnosis is the first part of any cure – knowledge of the causes (tas
aitias) – and so Oedipus sends Creon to the Oracle at Delphi for just
this reason, calling it a remedy (iasin, 68). The search for a remedy in
the case of this particular ailment is also an inquiry into non-human
realms. Oedipus presumes that the plague is not the fruit of chance, but
rather of a divine order which the inspirations of the Pythian priestess
will reveal. Upon returning from the oracle, Creon’s first words already
imply the reversals towards which Thebes is prone, the tragic consti-
Jane Harrison and Gilbert Murray, in the early part of the 20th century, applied
this historical method of interpretation in their groundbreaking studies of the un-
derlying ritual structure of Attic tragedy. They were the first to follow Nietzsche in
his attempt to envision the transition from full blown Dionysian rite to the allegori-
cal lyrics represented on the tragic stage. While Nietzsche’s approach, the first on
record, was one of inspired imagination, Harrison and Murray apply their philo-
logical science to the same problem in the same historical spirit as Rohde.
J. P. Guepin replies to the unscientific inspiration of Nietzsche and the somewhat
naive historicism of Harrison and Murray with a third method of interpretation.
The myths and cult legends of Dionysus as they have been passed down to us ought
not to be read literally as history, and neither should we abandon a scholarly pur-
suit of the actual course of events, as he believed Nietzsche had done for his own
personal form of literary philosophical revel. Rather, these stories and practices,
he believed, ought to be read in terms of their collective, symbolic, psychological
meaning. In the matrix of cult, myth, and the literary production of the tragedies,
Guepin discerns a systematic pattern of meaning bound up with killing, guilt, and
penitential sacrifice. On this reading the nature of the myths surrounding the cult is
not bound up in history, but rather in a tragic sense of paradox definitive of both ac-
tual sacrifice as well as the representations of it in the “gloomy” plays of the Greek
stage. What constitutes this paradox will have to wait for the moment.
The last word on the connection between tragic theatre and Dionysian cult is the
shortest. There is nothing much to say. Pickard-Cambridge establishes this position
in his Dithyramb: Tragedy and Comedy, a response to B. Frazer’s Golden Bough as
well as Jane Harrison’s Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion: Themis and
also Gilbert Murray’s appendix to Harrison’s book. Though in a revised edition
(1962) of Pickard-Cambridge’s 1927 publication, T. L. Webster revives the possibil-
ity that Guepin pursues. More recently, see B. Knox Word and Action, p. 6. Knox
confirms both the likeliness of some connection and the perhaps impossible dif-
ficulty of specifying what exactly that connection entails.
On the other hand, a tacit representative of Pickard-Cambridge’s view, J. P. Vern-
ant maintains that there is no proof of any material connection between Dionysiac
cult and the dramatic contests. We can say nothing about the link between ritual
and theatre, especially concerning sacrifice. Vernant does leave room enough to
establish at least one semantic link. It is in the capacity to subvert reality for illusion
that Dionysus claims his authoritative in tragic theatre. The power to convey illu-
sion, the play of representations, “as if” it were real, to the audience assembled in
the theatre at the Greater Dionysia is the special province of this god.
tution of this troubled city.29 Though here Creon speaks of a reversal

from bad fortune to good: “I say that even trouble hard to bear, if they
chance to turn out well, can bring good fortune” (87-88). We can read
the inclusion of chance here as an ironic charge timed to detonate cata-
strophically with a few words from the shepherd who finally confirms
Oedipus’ true identity. Similar, we’ll find, to Aristotle, nothing in the
vision which Sophocles constructs, ultimately, leaves room for chance.
Tuchù appears only as a foil for the revelation of its antipode, Dikù. 30
Justice is the unflinching order governing the cosmos, but it can only
be seen directly from a god’s perspective, and related to man ambigu-
ously, indirectly, through the signifying wings of the prophet’s bird,
or the obscure speech of an oracle. And so as the prologue ends, just
before the first choral Ode, the priest calls Apollo down from the skies
to save them and put a stop to the sickness. Sophocles connects Justice
and healing in the figure of Apollo, “the healer.”31
Thebes’ sickness is both moral-religious and physiological and the
moral defilement, unexpiated, is now expressing itself in the brute-
ly physical terms of plague. The misfortune of sickness can only be
translated into a greater health once the city has been purified of its
blood guilt. Like the black bile of pre-modern melancholy, the sub-
stance didn’t cause evils the way that brain chemistry now ‘causes’
the ‘effect’ of depression as a kind of representation. It was evil – had
value. Laius’ murderer would have to be physically expelled from the
city. It is at this point that we first read of katharsis, or purification.
“Poiķ Katharmķ,” Oedipus asks Creon, “With what means of puri-
fying” (95) can we drive out the pollution (miasma). The purifying
of Oedipus and the city’s unidentified guilt, what a more enlightened
Aristotle calls hamartia, begins with an inquiry into another proto-
Aristotelian concept in which Ionian science and moral-religious lan-
guage intersect: ‘the cause [hù aitia],’ that which is ‘owed.’32
Where shall the track of an ancient guilt, hard to make out, be found?
ÎÍÓ ÒÍÂq ÃÓÏÃÆÅÑÃÒ¿Ç ÇÕËÍÐ Î¿É¿Ç¿Ð ÂÓÑÒÃÈÊ¿ÏÒÍË ¿ÇÒÇ¿Ð (108−109).
29
J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Oedipus Between Two Cities” in Myth and
Tragedy in Ancient Greece, pp. 334 f. Attic Tragedy expatriates political conflict
(ÑÒ¿ÑÇÐ), like comedy derides it, and funeral speech denied it. Athens is repre-
sented as Plato would have wanted it, while Thebes is a model “anti-city,” a magnet
for terror and strife.
30
Cf. H. D. F. Kitto Greek Tragedy. Kitto develops this insight extensively.
31
Apollo’s epithet is initially Paian, the physician of the gods, healer, and also saviour
or deliverer.
32
See Werner Jaeger Paideia, vol. 1, p. 161.
The cause of the city’s grief will be determined when we know who is
responsible for the murder. The cause will be to whom this sickness
is owed.33
But before the nature of this guilt or debt can be exposed, before
the murderer can be driven out or killed, as the Oracle advises, and
the sickness purged, Oedipus must begin the investigation of his crime
a second time by returning to the beginning (archù), again. The “rid-
dling song” of the sphinx “forced us to let go what was obscure and at-
tend to what lay before our feet” (339), Creon tells Oedipus before the
chorus’ first stasimon. And so Oedipus must “light up the obscurity
[aut’ egķ phanķ]” (339). He will now once again defend the city, but
also Apollo (339), in search of the guilt or aitios which is likewise the
‘cause’ of the religious pollution dawning on the city.34 This “first of
men” acts on behalf of Phoibos (133), Apollo the bright, the radiant,
the pure – illuminating the obscure under the god’s aegis of light, and
purifying the city and all who dwell there of its pollution. Oedipus in-
vestigates the moral-religious archù of this crime against the city and
the gods through an investigation (historia), recalling the investigation
of the Ionians into the rational principle (archù) of an essentially intel-
ligible nature, composing a “history,” developing the “comprehensive
account” which the Ionians dubbed theory (theoria). Sophocles’ rep-
resentation of Oedipus as investigator poses the implicit question of
the possibility of extending this Ionian science to the human sphere,
to questions of ethics and religion, to man, his cities, and eventually,
his soul – a question revolutionized by Aristotle’s philosophical psy-
chology and, 2300 years later, Kierkegaard’s dialectical-lyric.
Terrible Knowledge, Tragic Speech, Third Wisdom
The chorus first invokes Zeus as both speaker and healer: “Sweet-
speaking message of Zeus […] Delian healer invoked with cries” (151-
154). This Delian cure comes in the form of language, and, particu-
larly, speech. Since this first lament of the chorus is an absence of the
right kind of mental attention, the kind of language which would re-
33
Aitia can mean an accusation of a crime, and also the guilt implied in the accusa-
tion, but also cause, in the sense of “for the sake of.” Oedipus’ “guilt” is the “for
the sake of which” the plague is now on Thebes. This “for the sake of which,” or
“cause,” returns as a principle of both ethical choice in Aristotle, and also kinùsis
in the natural world.
34
Agos from the verb Azomai: to stand in awe of, also to dread.
direct this attention and the healing of the city’s grief coincide. “Sick-
ness lies on all our company, and thought [phrontidos] can find no
weapon to repel it.” (170) The images in the parodos of dark turning
to light, night turning to day, are, as we’ll see, unmistakable. They
seem to correspond naturally to the chorus’ appeal for this illumina-
tion of practical thought. But at this point the thinking would have to
be divine, rather than human. The entire ode is a beseeching of the
most luminous of the Gods to aid and defend Thebes, shining Phoi-
bos, “bright-faced” Athena, “golden daughter,” and “Zeus, you who
wield the power of the lightning flashes” (344-345).
Yet, paradoxically, the illuminating vision which Oedipus seeks
in Apollo’s name comes as if from the bright blackness of Phoibos’
sun turned inside out – the vision of an eclipse. To look directly into
this anomaly carries the risk of blindness. This obverted sun which
shines in a kind of night ironically requires special protection against
the enhanced power of its light. There is a wonderful strangeness to
events such as these, when nature seems to veer off course, just as
there is something awesome and terrible in Oedipus, and the way he
must learn. The Chorus’ parodos develops a powerful vision of this
strangeness through the image of the embattled city. There the The-
bans sing for a kind of fire. Just as customarily it is blood which washes
away the taint of blood, both the plague and the cure are imagined as
flames. The death which spreads “swifter than destroying fire” and
“the flames of ruin” (343) which illuminate the Night of Ares’ on-
slaught invite the fire of Zeus’ lightning, paralleled by Sophocles with
the Day which always follows this Night. Day and Night are continu-
ous with one another. Their fires collaborate in the same work. Invited
as well are the “fiery torches of Artemis.” The final god to be invoked
is also familiar with the flame. It is “ruddy-faced Bacchus, to whom
they cry Euhoe, companion of the Maenads,” whom they wish “to
draw near with brightly blazing torch of pinewood against the god
who lacks honor among the gods” (203-215). This dishonourable god
is of course Ares. Thebes is caught between the flames of life and
light, divine intelligence, and those of ruination, between Day and
Night. 35
35
J. P. Guepin The Tragic Paradox. Guepin discusses the conflict in tragedy between
the gods Dionysus and Ares as typical of the tragic paradox (pp. 43, 46). The de-
struction of the tragic hero, his criminality and guilt, is the other side of a divine
innocence which he also embodies (pp. 108, 116). The problem of tragedy was pre-
viously the problem of sacrifice, the unity of joy in death and suffering, the unity
For all of its luminosity the imagery of the parodos turns essentially
on the ambiguity and paradox through which it evokes nature’s inver-
sion, the inversion of light and dark, Day and Night. “The fruits of
the glorious earth do not increase, and no births come to let women
surmount the pains in which they cry out” (172-174). Nature is failing,
but not of its own. Ares’ Divine fire has “scorched” (192) the womb
of Thebes. It cannot grow, or nurture itself. Life has turned to death.
The fires of plague brought on by pollution illuminate the Theban
night. Yet it is the magnification of fire (so far an image of sickness) in
the hands of the gods which brings healing.
The sun of the Tyrannus is charged with a number of meanings, all
of which refer back to the mingling of vision and blindness: illumina-
tion and darkness, wisdom and foolishness, sanity and mania. Oedi-
pus returns to this familiar image of the sun as his initial confrontation
with Teiresias concludes. “You are sustained by darkness only, so that
you could never harm me or any other man that sees the light” (374-
375). But Oedipus suffers, finally, at the hands of Apollo, the most lu-
minous of the gods, the god from whom the light of divine intelligence
ushers forth at Delphi from the split rock. Oracular knowledge is akin
to the knowledge of the prophet, which is unspeakably ambiguous,
and in its unspeakability as well as its mechanism, unteachable. 36 It is
the light of these benighted truths which will blind him.
And I say, since you have reproached me with my blindness, that you have sight, but
cannot see what trouble you are in, nor where you are living, nor with whom you share
your home. Do you know from what stock you come? First you are unaware of being
an enemy to your own above and beneath the earth, and, next, the two-pronged curse
that comes from your mother and your father with deadly step shall one day drive you
from this land; now that you have sight, then shall you look on darkness. (412-420)
Oedipus’ expiation is accomplished through sunlight, the pure god.37

It will drive him from the day and into darkness, a terror (deinon)
neither to be seen nor heard (1312). Both Oedipus and the landscape
of victim and god, innocence and guilt, the value of violence, suffering and death
(pp. xiii, 31, 62, 74-79, 84).
36
Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus 395-396. Teiresias possesses two potentially distinct
types of mantikù, according to Oedipus, who says the prophet has neither. On the
one hand, divination, which was a skill that could be taught, and on the other hand
a kind of inspired prophecy which cannot. The second kind of knowledge would be
identified with the god, while the first would not. Cf. Cornford Principium Princip-
ium Sapientiae, pp. 73 f. Cornford distinguishes between the possession/divination
of mantic wisdom, such as we read of in the Phaedo, or Republic 571d, and the
augury by signs which is an “art of the reasoning faculty.”
37
take on the aspect of darkness and terror which Teiresias ascribes to

the doomed king’s knowledge (316). The “fire of the sun,” along with
the rest of nature, “the earth and the sacred rain” which Oedipus had
inverted, can no longer receive him (1425-1428). The sun of Phoibos
as it shines through oracle and prophet does not illuminate. Oedipus’
tragic vision will be forced to range through mountainous night, be-
neath a sun which burns all the brighter against this night’s black foil.
It is an unnatural image – Oedipus is an unnatural creature. The sun
that burns at night is the recoil of Oedipus’ speech upon him, which
Teiresias has promised: “It is sad that you utter these reproaches,
which all men shall soon utter against you” (oneidizķn, oneidiei, 372-
373). 38
The truth of Oedipus’ native birth will place him correctly in the
royal line, straightening it out, while this straightening is likewise the
recognition of perversion, of the ignorance in tragic speech within
which tragic knowledge hides. He associates himself inadvertently
with this foregone knowledge, with the Pythian oracle, its radiant God
Apollo, and also Laius, the murdered king. In fact, Oedipus will act
“as though he had been my father” (349). Oedipus’s pledge is ironic
proof of the depth of his ignorance. He cannot act “as though” Laius is
his father – Laius is his father. The speech made most clearly and with
the most dramatic force by Oedipus, that of the curse, is also ironi-
cally a kind of speech without knowledge, even less than he realises.
And I pray that the doer of the deed, whether a single man has gone undetected or
he has acted with others, may wear away a miserable life in misery, miserable as he is.
(246-248)
“It was not to leave the guilt unpurified [akarthaton]” (256), Oedipus
says a few lines later to the chorus of Thebans.
The only possible cause for the extent of Oedipus’ disaster is the
curse upon the criminal which he voluntarily commends to the city
and the gods. The killing, were it done without knowledge, or in
self-defense, as it had been, would have required a mere ritual pu-
rification. 39 As for the parricide and incest which reveal themselves,
even they would have been excused once the pollution were ritually
cleansed. To a Greek audience this curse would have been completely
38
Sophocles’ language recoils in the doubling of the participle and the active indica-
tive. This is a pattern that continues throughout the play.
39
C. M. Bowra Sophoclean Tragedy, pp. 165, 172. The law of Dracon would have ac-
quitted Oedipus of deliberate homicide. Oedipus’ crimes would have demanded
purification, not punishment. SIG, 111.
real.40 Patriarchs as well as the priests of Apollo were thought to have

the power to curse with great effect. The revenging spirit of Laius as
well as Oedipus’ devotion to the God in his invoking the curse would
have been enough to insure its force. But as king Oedipus is given still
a third established authority by which to command the fates.41 These
words of his become a crucial part of the action of the play. As he
himself explains, once the tragedy unfolds, “myself I spoke that word”
(1381).
But the power of ‘who’ speaks and ‘when’ draws its strength of lan-
guage from the ordering power of a divine Dikù. It is the ritual power
of language which demands Oedipus’ destruction, a wretchedness
he unwittingly calls upon himself in Justice’s name. “But beside you
other Cadmeans, all who approve these words, may Justice fight and
may all the gods ever graciously remain” (275). The connection be-
tween the enforcing of this justice and both the power and obscurity
of human language asserts itself consistently throughout the play. As
Oedipus’ true nature gradually reveals itself, the curse he has uttered
against the criminal repeatedly terrorizes him,42 from Teiresias’ initial
demand that he “abide by the proclamation,” and “from this day on
address neither these men nor me” (350-351), to Oedipus’ late rec-
ognition that he has “in my misery cut myself off, commanding with
my own lips that all should drive from their houses the impious one,
the one whom the gods had shown to be impure and of the race of
Laius” (1379-1382). It is a “fixed point”43 of reference about which the
story unfolds. Just before Teiresias enters the second scene, Oedipus,
responding to a chorus confident in the power of his public declara-
tions to draw a confession, explains that “He who is not afraid to do
the deed is not frightened by a word” (296). But what if the word is
a deed, part of the action, like a marriage vow or an insult? There is
good reason to see Sophocles not only using language to forward the
plot (which is what Aristotle meant, identifying language in the Poet-
ics as part of the action) but also thematizing the ability certain kinds
of language have to be deed-full.44 Oedipus was not afraid for his life
40
C. M. Bowra Sophoclean Tragedy, pp. 172 f.
41
C. M. Bowra Sophoclean Tragedy, p. 173. Bowra provides a lengthy list of other
textual authorities on the special ability to curse allotted certain figures.
42
Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, 350 f., 744 f., 767, 813-820, 1290-1291, 1379-1382.
43
John Jones On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy, p. 208.
44
Aristotle Po., 1456a36-b4. On Aristotle’s claim, see John Jones On Aristotle and
Greek Tragedy. Cf. Charles Segal in “Freud, Language, and the Unconscious” in
Sophocles’ Tragic World, p. 162. Sophocles’ Tyrannus makes “language itself the
at the crossroads where he met his father, but it will be the word that
strikes fear into him. It is the word which finally destroys him, spoken
with a delayed knowledge, which, in dawning, reveals the terribly self-
destructive nature of this act of speech.
The distinction between word and deed was well established for the
Greeks. 45 By using the destroyed figure of Oedipus to present early on
the sort of heroic distinction between word and action we are accus-
tomed to finding in Homer and Pindar, Sophocles ironically calls this
distinction into question and prepares us for the terrible action the
word will soon have on this hero, whose deeds and catastrophes are
intellectual – about speech and knowledge – rather than warrior-ath-
letic. In the universe of Oedipus we “speak disaster,” we “accomplish
words.” But this is only possible given the intertwining of the mental
and the physical which was also conventionally Greek: he “accom-
plished the word given aforetime [palaiphaton] at Pytho,”46 Pindar
writes of the famous king’s twist of fate. This is no isolated quirk of
the poet. Xenophanes, for example, describes language similarly as
something which, if true, completes itself in action. When a man says
something “completely true” it has “completed itself,” “and yet he has
no exact knowledge, in contrast to the god.”47 These usages all draw
from the single well of Homer, in which the word often does just this
(epos telein).48 Sophocles returns to the same source: “You shall not
get away with speaking disaster twice [pùmonas ereis]” (363), Oedipus
warns Teiresias. Disaster is wreaked with the lips and not the hands.
But these words cannot be just any mortal words. And so it will not
field that fully enacts the play between the hidden and the obvious.” Cf. J. L. Austin
How to do Things with Words, for a discussion of performativity. Cf. Jacques Der-
rida “Signature, Event, Context” in Margins of Philosophy. Derrida offers a critical
discussion of Austin’s notion of performativity.
45
Bruno Snell, Poetry and Society, pp. 78 f., 82. There was a customary opposition
between word and deed, or word and fact, in Homer and Solon. Snell cites Solon
E. I. fr. 10: “for ye look to a man’s tongue and shifty speech, and never to the deed
he doeth.” Pindar’s opposition between the hero and the poet who praises him,
for Snell, reflects the same opposition. Tragedy, a development in the internalising
of man, he argues, naturally transforms the passivity and language and reflection
into something active. This will culminate in the pure activity of the philosopher’s
contemplation, such as Aristotle’s ÆÃÍÏÇ¿. See also Iliad, xvi. 718-723, xx. 232-234,
497-498, xxii. 333-334.
46
Pindar, Olympian Odes, 2.42 ff., as cited in Richard C. Jebb The Oedipus Tyrannus
of Sophocles, pp. xiv-xv.
47
Fr. 34. As translated by Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 142.
48
Homer Iliad i.108. See Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 142n18.
be the speakable element of Teiresias’ knowledge that we ought to be

interested in, not the teachable, but rather the unspeakable.49
The “truth” is implanted in Teiresias, whom we hear is a “godlike
prophet” (298-299). Teiresias has a wisdom (phronùsis) in commun-
ion with “all things, those that can be explained and those unspeak-
able, things in heaven and things that move on earth” (353). Although,
as Aristotle explains, the action of tragic speech expresses thoughts,
there are some thoughts, like the prophet’s, which cannot be expressed
directly, some knowledge which cannot be transmitted from one per-
son to the next. Teiresias and Oedipus represent a distinction between
two kinds of truth which language can express, divine and terrestrial,
between two languages, prophetic and profane, and finally between
two types of wisdom or knowledge. The prophet is said to “dispose
[nķmķn] (300) all things, to distribute them (nemein), reminding us
of the ordering function of law (nomos) in both nature and the state. 50
Behind this distinction in languages, truths, and wisdoms is the en-
forcing of this law, a quantity like Oedipus (though infinitely stable,
rather than infinitely unstable) crossing the threshold between the
human and divine, a principle of order for both nature and politics
through which human wisdom and language are subverted by the
gods from within.
The first choral ode’s inversion of nature is mirrored by the inversion
of wisdom and foolishness. “I did not know that your words would be
foolish,” (433) Oedipus tells the prophet. Teiresias is foolish to Oedi-
pus, but, we hear from the prophet, wise (emphrones) to Oedipus’ par-
ents (435-436). Teiresias, whom Oedipus has called blind in thought
(nous, 371), irrational, betrays the first glimpse of a vision which will
change Oedipus’ wisdom into folly, and, likewise, the folly of the
prophet’s riddling words into wisdom. The power of his intelligence
has also been the cause of his ruin (442). True wisdom (phronùsis)
belongs to Teiresias, the profundity of the religious, though Oedipus
may have a talent for solving riddles (441). And so when Teiresias tells
49
The word for unspeakable things follows and is contrasted with didakta, things
taught. The implication is probably that the unspeakable things are unspeakable in
that it is impossible to explain how they work.
50
J. P. Vernant The Origins of Greek Throught, p. 86. Force (Bia) in Athenian politics
was a servant of “nomos, which reigned in place of the king at the center of the city.
Because of its relation to dikù, nomos still had a certain religious connotation.” It
was through logos that dikù was established. The element of force was an irration-
ality necessary to ensure the rational politics of the state. Cf. Arendt Hannah The
Human Condition, p. 63 f. Arendt provides a relevant discussion of the verb nemein
and its relation to the institution of Greek law, in its spatial aspects especially.
him flatly who he is and what he has done, it is as if the prophet has
merely stopped to clear his throat.
Not two but three kinds of wisdom touch in this play, as three roads
had met where Oedipus clashed with his father. “A man may surpass
one kind of sophia by means of another,” but both are distinct from
the wisdom of Zeus and Apollo, who “know the affairs of mortals”
(498-505). Prophetic wisdom stands (like Oedipus will in the Colon-
nus, once transfigured) on a middle ground between human wisdom
and the wisdom of the gods.51 The second chorus pits Oedipus’ in-
tellectual weight against this inspired knowledge of the prophet. The
“decision” (krisis) will be resolved once the “saying” is “made un-
mistakeable” (501). This unmistakable saying, the kathartic truth of
the prophet’s divine logos, will express itself in a form that has been
straightened out, a clarification of the prophet’s “obscure” and “rid-
dling words” (439). And so the chorus refers to this language as orthon
epos, the word that is straight.52
But what force is it that might pound this crookedness in Oedipus
straight, releasing nature, the city, language and thought itself from
the sickness with which it has been contorted? It will be the interven-
tion of this third wisdom in the first, though without the mediations
of the prophet: the coming of a dreadful knowledge. “How dreadful it
is to know when the knowledge does not befit the knower!” (316-318)
– Teiresias’ first response to Oedipus. He speaks of terrible knowl-
edge, a “being-wise” which does not pay a profit, to paraphrase So-
phocles’ expression: ÔÃÓ ÔÃÓ ÔÏÍËÃÇË oÐ ÂÃÇËÍË ÃËÆ¿ ÊÅ ÒÃÉÅ ÉÓÅ
ÔÏÍËÍÓËÒÇ. But taken more literally, we can hear in the language of
this expression the sense of goals (telù) reached through a knowledge
which does not free the one who knows. Rather, it binds him, in con-
trast to the loosening, slackening, or freeing motion of luein. Even
Teiresias is bound by this knowledge. “I shall never reveal my sor-
rows, not to mention yours” (328-329). But whether he speaks or not,
51
See note 97, ch. 1.
52
See J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “The Lame Tyrant” in Myth and Tragedy
in Ancient Greece, pp. 226 f. The theme of literal lameness and straightness, apart
from a metaphorical correction of language, thought, or justice, as Sophocles clearly
applies the idea, is essential to the play. Oedipus, as the chorus suggests in the first
ode with the image of the wounded bull, due to the crooked lineage he originates, as
Vernant has shown, is a “lame tyrant.” The tyrant is a god and a beast among men.
He is isolated, rejects the rules at the basis of social life, placing himself apolis. In
Oedipus we have the perversion of generations. He is originally other than he is, a
bent figure. Mythologically, the tryant, such as Periander, is lame, like Oedipus, and
possesses a “different, dancing gait.”
“things will come of themselves, even if I veil it in silence” (341). If

language is really so ineffective, as Oedipus, too, has claimed, and if
there is such a gap between religious truth and human thinking, why
did Sophocles, a fundamentally religious poet, compose his song? The
human situation can be glimpsed from a point outside of it, its truth
revealed, if and when this point places itself, however catastrophically,
within man’s domain. It is an event no less essential to tragedy than
it was to the Dionysian rite from out of which it grew. While Pindar’s
mortals and gods intersected in the translation of the hero into im-
mortal splendour, echoing Homer’s Elysium, in Sophocles’ lyric they
meet in tragic conflict. Oedipus is this place where the time of the
gods and that of humanity intersects. Tragic poetry is the misdirected
language of its exposition. 53
Tragic Vision and Moral Education
Sophocles illustrates through Oedipus man’s learning of an inhuman

truth. 54 The development of tragic speech bestows a tragic knowledge
upon the king, like that of Teiresias, a second wisdom through which
a third communicates indirectly. Although the purpose of the play is
not fundamentally moral, Oedipus does acquire what the philosopher
might call the virtue of wisdom, though not as the result of sustained
practice, such as the askùsis of philosophy, but rather in the spontane-
ous acquisition of vision, via the accidental pursuit of a veiled guilt.
The Creon of the Antigone – twin tragedy of the intellect to the Tyran-
nus – learns in a similar way, as he explains to a chorus describing the
typical circumstances of moral education, a situation which does not
apply to his exception. He will not know what is happening to him until
the education is over:55
Ah! Seeing justice seems to be like knowing it.
Chorus: ÍÇÊq oÐ ÃÍÇÈ¿Ð ÍÖÃ ÒÅË ÂÇÈÅË ÇÂÃÇË.
But ah me … I will have a wretched learning. (1270)
Creon: ÍÇÊÍÇ ÃÌ× Ê¿Æ×Ë ÂÃÇÉ¿ÇÍÐ.
53
Charles Segal “Freud, Language, and the Unconscious” in Sophocles’ Tragic World,
p. 163. “Poetic language ‘means’ by indirect suggestion and paradox as well as by (or
in deliberate contradiction with) one-to-one correspondence.”
54
See B. Knox Oedipus at Thebes. Knox is once again a great resource. On the con-
temporary significance of teaching and learning in the Tyrannus, he directs us to
lines 31, 388, 357, 554, 545, 574, 576, 698, 839, 708, 1009, 1193, 1193-1195.
55
R. D. Dawe “Some Reflections on Ate and Hamartia” in Harvard Studies in Clas-
sical Philology 72, p. 113. The citation of this exchange belongs to Dawe.
Creon’s learning is not the normal kind. It is not enough for him nor
will it be for Oedipus to absorb this knowledge in the usual ways, prac-
tically, gradually acclimating his moral vision. Teiresias is of course
right when he says that Oedipus “cannot learn from me” (333). 56 But
then how can he learn? What kind of regimen does an education like
his require?
Since the resistance to tragic knowledge and the destructions it car-
ries are naturally tremendous, recognition must be forced against eve-
ry mechanism of defense that Oedipus and Jocaste can enlist. Divine
knowledge appears here as a kind of truth which consciousness resists,
unknowingly. 57 That the gods are in some sense Oedipus’ unconscious
does not mean that they are merely a projection existing only in the
mind. The resistance he mounts in his investigations does not oppose
some fantastic primal scene, for instance, but rather something very
much real and independent of him. The revelation of what the gods
have in store, that speech which breaks “the veil of silence (341),” will
be the recognition of this reality as a conscious fact. The true meaning
of language, its knowledges, which shudder and break, do not begin
in the mind of man. They have their beginning outside of him, only
winding down to him finally. The recognition, we will see, begins with
mania, and concludes in the reversal of a life and its essential life-view.
It is a tragic rejoinder to the philosopher’s adequation of the knower
with the divine object of knowledge. 58 In the case of Oedipus, to be-
56
He anticipates the problem of learning as Plato defines it in the Meno, and Ar-
istotle at EN, ii.4, in terms of habituation. Cf. Jaeger Paideia, vol. 1, p. 218. This
was an essential Greek problem even before Sophocles, in the poetry of Pindar, for
instance, and can be traced back to Achilles and his teacher Phoenix in Iliad ix,
though Pindar was the first to formulate it, as in Nemean Odes, iii, in The Odes of
Pindar, “for it was thrust on him by the conflict of the aristocratic traditional educa-
tion with the new rational spirit.” If virtue can be learned and taught universally,
then aristocratic blood becomes politically devalued. Kierkegaard will return to
individual learning and generation as an essential problem in the Fragments and
their Postscript, where the possibility of learning, and especially of learning to be
virtuous, takes center stage. Cf. Paideia, vol. 1, p. 28, on the force of the irrational
and the limitations of education in Iliad, ix.
57
Charles Segal “Freud, Language, and the Unconscious” in Sophocles’ Tragic World,
p. 161. Segal says something similar: like the unconscious in Freud, the truth about
Oedipus and Thebes is a radical alterity which seeps through the cracks in the rea-
sonable structures of language, and lives. “Where Sophocles implies divine powers,
Freud implies the processes of the unconscious.”
58
See Frances Cornford Principium Sapientiae. Cornford provides a general dis-
cussion of the history of the belief in the adequation of knower and known. This
would
come more like the gods through divine intelligence does not make a
king. It expels one. Wisdom means self-destruction.59
Tragic experience transforms Oedipus’ vision through the eruption
of tragic knowledge, in him, and with it the vision of the city he com-
mands, as well as the Athenians who wrought the tragic stage. Tragic
vision coincides with a social structure. Its lyric was part of a crea-
tive upsurge of “strictly political institutions, modes of behaviour, and
thought” implicit in “the regime of the polis.”60 It is a consciousness
divided between the old wisdom, which was unteachable, and the new
didakta of a democratic reason and democratic virtue in which any
citizen could train. In the Tyrannus, it is Teiresias who first announc-
es the potential tragedy of knowledge – to know fully, beyond one’s
measure, as a man, was to suffer. The divine truth with which Teir-
esias sorrowfully aligns himself from the opening scene has been set
upon Oedipus. It is a contest between the king’s crafty truth and the
uncrafted intelligence of the gods. And the speaking of truth, though
Teiresias says otherwise, does matter. This tragedy is one of knowl-
edge. The question of knowing, at the time, was no mere theoretical
diversion, but rather an essential political matter. Oedipus embodies
both the great teachers of the 5th century, Socrates included, and the
student whose ignorance becomes the object lesson of the play, the
instrument of its tragic purpose.61 Through this instrument the poet
reveals the uncanny reality immanent in the things themselves of the
city, its people and landscape, through which the divine logos shows
itself. Teiresias had already tried to communicate this reality directly.
apply to both the Ionian and Attic philosophers, ranging from the 6th to 4th centu-
ries, where the mind and its object are formed of the same substance: Anaximenes’
air, for instance, Heraclitus’ fire, Anaximander’s apeiron, or, in the case of Anax-
agoras, mind itself. And so the cosmos was by nature intelligible. Cf. Plato Republic
490b, 508de. Plato traces both the power to know and the truth which this power
grasps to the single source of the Good. But the literal expression is Aristotle’s, who
spells out this theory of knowledge in De Anima, iii.4. Cf. EN, 1139a8-11.
As is typical, the late philosophical expression merely expresses a latency at work
in the culture long before. For even more on Aristotle and the Greek background
of this idea, see J. A. Stewart Notes to the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, vol. 2,
pp. 11-15, as well as H. H. Joachim The Nicomachean Ethics, pp. 169-172, both
commenting on EN, vi.1. For early accounts of ‘homoiotic’ knowing by the senses,
Joachim directs us to Empedocles, fr. B109; Democritus, frs. A77, A121 and A135.
59
Bruno Snell Poetry and Society, p. 77. “All his searching and investigation destroys
Oedipus himself. This is ultimate wisdom.”
60
J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Tensions and Ambiguities in Greek Trag-
edy” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 31.
61
B. Knox Oedipus at Thebes, pp. 136 f.
Oedipus responded to the danger inherent in the more instructive

kinds of speech with a warning: “You shall not get away with speaking
disaster twice!” (363). But Teiresias spoke twice because he had not
been understood (359, 361). The king cannot “see the plight” (367) in
which he lies because he has not understood the prophet’s speech. He
cannot see, or understand, because the knowledge Teiresias possesses
cannot be taught. It must be undergone. Only in this way can there be
the katharsis Oedipus seeks, can his soul and city be healed.
We might get some sense of what this katharsis of intelligence in-
volves with these, perhaps the most terrifying, of Teiresias words:
This day creates you and destroys you.
kÂq kÊÃÏ¿ ÔÓÑÃÇ ÑÃ È¿Ç ÂÇ¿ÔÆÃÏÃÇ.62 (438, my trans.)
We hear an echo of the physical inversion of nature which struck the

city’s fields and women: “The fruits of the glorious earth do not in-
crease, and no births come to let women surmount the pains in which
they cry out.” This inversion of generation concentrates itself in Oedi-
pus’ fate, in generations crossed: brother-father, son-husband.63 The
natural production which issued in death instead of life returns in
Oedipus with absolute energy and again turns life on its head. The day
of growth is the day of decay – the day of decay is the day of growth.
This is the totally destructive depth which learning must achieve.
We seem to hear the voice of Heraclitus sound here as the first scene
draws to a close, and once again, when Teiresias identifies the “first of
men,” now, as the last, “most cruelly rooted out.”64 Behind the veil of
harmony is the unflinching truth of human strife weaving itself per-
petually into divine patterns.65 Once the investigation into the identity
of the criminal succeeds, Oedipus, blinded by his own hand, will no
62
It is true that we hear of Oedipus’ birth, his creation, in the context here of the
question of his literal parentage, “those that gave you birth” (Íl Ñq ÃÔÓÑ¿Ë). But hu-
man procreation soon slips into something else when Oedipus asks Teiresias what
mortals gave him birth. Teiresias’ response, that it will be the day, casts Oedipus out
beyond the limits of the human, where he rightly belongs by dint of his tragic fate.
63
“And he shall be revealed as being to his children whom he lives with both a brother
and a father, and to his mother both a son and a husband, and to his father a sharer
in his wife and a killer” (457-460).
64
“For there is none among mortals that shall be more cruelly rooted out than you,”
(427-428) the prophet tells him.
65
C. M. Bowra Sophoclean Tragedy, p. 201. There is a kinship between Sophocles and
Heraclitus. Both impose the absoluteness of a logos upon man and both consign
human knowledge to obscurity and contradiction. In addition to Jaeger’s Paideia,
Bowra also points to the influence of Ionian ideas on Sophocles’ distinction be-
tween perceived appearance and reality, opinion (ÂÍÌ¿) and knowledge or truth.
longer see what there is to be seen. He will have discovered nothing on

his own. Tragic knowledge sharpens the contradictions in Oedipus to
their finest point, between the intellect and this active something that
“is never fully explicable in rational terms.”66
The play moves in the manner of a revelation. In this sense Jocaste
will be right, when, dismissing the oracles, she councils Oedipus in the
impenetrable uncertainty of fortune. Pronoia, the foreknowledge im-
plicit in reasoned choice and moral responsibility, is impossible (978).
Oedipus’ mutilation, however, enacts the renunciation of this reason-
able human vision in which “the event” (977, 1080) of Luck rules, an-
ticipating a god-like vision akin to the prophet’s:
For he broke off the golden pins from her raiment, with which she was adorned, and
lifting up his eyes struck them, uttering such words as these: that they should not see
his dread sufferings or his dread actions, but in the future they should see in darkness
those they never should have seen, and fail to recognise those he wished to know.
(1271-1274)
What has come to light is Oedipus’ own terrible nature, which Teir-
esias has known since the start. The investigation into his birth reveals
that Oedipus in marriage returned to the source of his being (1499),
as through his criminal investigation he has returned to another be-
ginning, the time of the murder, before his arrival.67 This was a ter-
ror which could not be learned through examination, or looked upon
directly, but rather revealed against the mass of his intellectual will.
Even Oedipus’ genius was unable to provide the conditions for receiv-
ing this kind of knowledge, nor could an intellect as desireful as his
interest itself in pursuing it. It breaks in upon human thought from
beyond the horizon, an unsought for numen which destroys as it en-
lightens.
Tragic Crime and the Onset of Mania
What is it that forces this terrible knowledge upon Oedipus? Where

does it draw its strength? In the first ode, the criminal is pictured by
Sophocles’ view is “a product of religious and philosophical thought,” he writes,

directing us to Heraclitus, frs. B78 & B79; Parmenides, fr. B1; Alcmaeon, fr. B1.
66
Charles Segal “Time and Knowledge in the Tragedy of Oedipus” in Sophocles’
Tragic World, p. 149.
67
Cf. 1496-1499. The parricide can be seen as a necessary complement to the incest,
their father killing his own, (ÒÍË Î¿ÒÃÏ¿ Î¿ÒÅÏ nÊ×Ë ÃÎÃíËÃ), to “have issue with
the mother, from whom he himself had sprung.”
the Theban choristers as a “bull, limping sadly with sore-wounded

foot.” He “travels through the wild jungle and through caves and
over rocks” because Zeus “armed with fire” pursues him (462-482).
Oedipus’ name announces to us the “swollen foot” of this bull (oi-
dein – pous: to swell – foot), as it betrays the intellectual rather than
physical source of its injury (oida: I know).68 While Oedipus the bull
flees this terrible knowledge which the prophet forecasts, “the dread
spirits of death,” Erinyes of father and mother “that never miss their
mark,” as well as the prophecies themselves, take on a physical reality.
Emerging from the earth’s centre the prophecies “hover about him,
ever alive” (481-482). The language of the prophecy is real, the stuff
of heat, earth, and vapour. Like the life which this earth nurtures, a
living which extends to human generation,69 oracular language is also
alive (zķnta), akin to the vital flames of Zeus and his son Dionysus,
but also Ares the destroyer. The life of earth nurtures that of lan-
guage and, as allies of the divine order in which Oedipus and his city
are thrown off balance, both have become distorted beyond human
thought and control.70
Oedipus will be forced to adopt a difficult vision, like the philoso-
pher in Plato’s cave. Learning to see man as he truly is draws the initi-
ate of tragic knowledge into the hands of a daimķn deploying mad-
ness as an instrument of this renewed perception. Because human
language is not built to house such a vision, the god communicates
through language that is riddled, or bent, though the broader vantage
of the play’s end reveals this derangement as the sudden eruption of
intelligence. Oedipus unearths his true identity, an episode in the se-
ries of interpretations of the Delphic maxim (gnķthi seauton), making
Oedipus an unlikely companion for Socrates and a precursor to his
great Danish admirer.
When Creon and Oedipus collide in the second scene, precisely this
question of mental health and the integrity of knowledge dominates
the exchange. It is a straight mind (orthos phrenos, 528) which judges
straightly (orthķs phroneis, 550), says Creon, to which the chorus adds:
68
For a gloss on the linguistics of the name, see J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet
“Oedipus in Athens” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 322. Cf. B. Knox
Oedipus at Thebes, pp. 127 f., 149, 183 f., 189, 264.
69
An individual’s life is always referred to by Sophocles as ÀÇÍÐ, while the life which
extends across generations is expressed in terms of ÄÍÅ.
70
Charles Segal “Earth in Oedipus Tyrannus” in Sophocles Tragic World, p. 212. Seg-
al gives his analysis of this element (ÁÅ, ÕÆÍË) as divine, as opposed to the political
ÕÍÏ¿, or land, over which the king rules.
speaks “the word that is straight” (505). But in what ways can this
straight-thinking become vulnerable to a crookedness? Distinguish-
ing himself from Oedipus, Creon attempts to correct the debauched
king with these words:
When I do not know I like to say nothing.
ÃÔq ÍlÐ Á¿Ï ÊÅ ÔÏÍË× ÑÇÁ¿Ë ÔÇÉ×. (569)
A more literal translation is helpful: “For with regards to that which

I do not know, I love silence.” Oedipus is living proof of the conse-
quences for not cultivating this appropriate love of silence. While “a
mind that thinks sensibly cannot become evil” (600), judging poorly
will contort a straight mind into a crooked one. The juxtaposition in
the line by the poet makes it clear: ÍÓÈ ¿Ë ÁÃËÍÇÒÍ ËÍÓÐ È¿ÈÍÐ (−)
È¿É×Ð ÔÏÍË×Ë (600). There is one hinge upon which “thinking well
– evil mind” turns. In the case of Oedipus one is in the process of
spinning into the other, and as Creon advises, “time alone reveals the
just man” (613). He has already beseeched the king to pause and “re-
flect upon the matter” in order that he “might give himself the logon”
(583, my trans.). But Oedipus cannot think straight. He suffers from
divine inspiration, a mania brought on by the gods that since Homer,
through “mental blindness,” has brought great men to ruin.71
The chorus will soon sing of the shafts of passion which the gods
send down upon those, like Oedipus, who disturb the order of Justice.
The shape of his life has been redrawn to include the vague hands of
a daimķn – possessing both mind and spirit – which only now make
themselves known. Once Jocaste reveals a few more details of Laius’
murder at “the place where three roads meet,” Oedipus himself rec-
ognizes a kind of mania overtaking him, a “wandering” of the soul
(psuchù) and a “stirring” of the mind (phrenķn) (727). This stirring
(anakinùsis) is literally a motion upwards, a rising we might associate
with waking up. Along with the ever-present images of the sun, Helios,
“foremost of the gods” (660), this hint of Oedipus’ madness strikes us
as the initial ascent of a kind of divine light, one which ignites an alter-
71
See J. M. Bremer Hamartia, pp. 104, 112. Cf. R. D. Dawe “Some Reflections on Ate
and Hamartia” in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 72, pp. 116-9. Oedipus’
madness is a development in the Greek concept of atù. As Bremer explains, both
atù and hamartia link some kind of error to mental derangement brought by a god.
But this happens in different ways for different poets, depending on the degree of
culpability assigned to the error, the moralizing of the atù. Homer and Sophocles
are free of this moralizing, while Hesiod, Theognis, Solon, Pindar, and Aeschylus
develop the moral significance of atù as divine punishment. Aristotle’s error will be
of the Homeric-Sophoclean ilk.
native form of knowing in the ‘middle place’ between gods and men
which Oedipus occupies. The development of these “torments [atais]”
(1205) – a mania bespeaking the influence of a daimķn – climbs to-
ward its highest pitch as the act of self-mutilation draws near. 72
Oedipus is an artistic-political experiment in the limits of law, the
extreme situations by which the shape of law and the city it defines is
established from the outlands of what is prohibited or excluded. The
law that tragedy expressed was still in the making and these extremi-
ties of legal circumstance test the limits of what law can contain, of
what legal speech can comprehend.73 Oedipus’ mania is a consequence
of violating the divine nomos which first greeted us in the figure of the
prophet. A divine pattern has revealed itself in the stormswept waters
of Thebes, though the full extent of it is not yet clear. With the con-
ventions of human law consumed by revolt, the disease and chaos of
Thebes that Oedipus concentrates in his individuality open a choric
space, a place without place,74 removed from both the land (chora) of
the city and the humane earth (gù) that gods provide, through which
the chorus of Thebans glimpse divine law: “The mortal nature of men
did not beget them, neither shall they ever be lulled to sleep by for-
getfulness. Great in these laws is the god, nor does he ever grow old”
(868-872). This is a law grounded in the fear of Dikù. Its violation
calls “shafts of passion [thumou] against defenseless souls [psuchas
amunķn]” (893-895).
By the third scene, Oedipus’ mania rises to the surface language of
the drama. This passion he suffers, in which his logos fails, which only
intensifies as the play continues, was typically daimonic in Sophocles’
time.75 An invisible power has been at work in his life, diverting him
internally from his chosen course. “Would one not be right who judged
that this came upon me by the action of a cruel deity [daimonos]”
72
J. M. Bremer Hamartia, pp. 118, 163 f. Bremer spends time developing the centrality
of atù, a god-sent mania, to Sophocles, and Oedipus in particular. His blindness is
ÆÃÍÆÃË, indissociable from the act of the gods. The doom which he had to work out
himself is simultaneously the accomplishment of the god Apollo (164). Cf. R. D.
Dawe “Some Reflections on Ate and Hamartia” in Harvard Studies in Classical
Philology, pp. 95-98. Dawe also goes through great philological lengths to show the
genealogical connection between atù and hamartia in Sophocles and determines
that the idea of ruin or damage which generally defines atù is based on a more fun-
damental cause of “mental blindness.”
73
Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 339.
74
Cf. Jacques Derrida “Khora” in On The Name.
75
E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 41.
(828-829), he asks. Oedipus also invokes the interference of the gods

in the figure of Zeus,76 defining himself soon after as hated by the
gods (echthrodaimķn) should his fate work itself out in the disaster
which looms.77 The chorus later confirms the background influence
of the daimķn. “With your daimona as my example, yours, unhappy
Oedipus, I say that nothing of mortal life is happy” (1193-1196, my
trans.). Of course no god has intervened directly, at this point. All the
action has arisen naturally from within the relation Oedipus bears to
his world. But this is just how the irrationality of the daimķn worked
for 5th c. Greeks, and that of Homeric atù before it. It is an exteriority
which operates from within.78 Through its infection by this unstable
difference the immanence of human reason and design is obverted,
forced, ultimately, to recognize the authority of a divine Other. This
alterity communicates itself only indirectly, through the reversed
course of human affairs.
Anxiety, an “exciting” of “his mind with every kind of grief,” is the
first signal of the work of this unseen daimonic power upon Oedipus
(914-917).79 As Jocaste supplicates before Apollo, bearing garlands and
incense, she laments to the god that Oedipus is no longer a “rational
man [ennous]” (915-916), but has been possessed by some irrational
force. Presenting herself here before the god of light, so that Oedi-
pus might be restored to “mind” through a “cleansing solution” (921),
she goes on to describe his manic state more specifically. The king is
“at the mercy of the speaker,” she says, “struck powerless” if anyone
“speaks of terrors” (915-917). The cleansing which Jocaste speaks of
is also a loosening or freeing from the grip of this fear. 80 Speech, like
Oedipus’ curse in the first scene, possesses great occult power in this
play. The magic of the word takes effect in physical reality. The word
and the world – ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ – coalesce in a way that is alien to
modern distinctions between subject and object. Language is of the
earth, the skies, and inside Oedipus is a terrible world about to spill.
76
Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, 738.
77
Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, 816.
78
Cf. E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, pp. 38-42. Atù, unruly passions,
pollution, and moira, and Erinye, are each typical forms of daimķn as linked to
misfortune.
79
It returns at lines 1190-1196. For references to the “active” intervention of a daimķn,
where the passive, undetected influence translates into actual madness, despair,
and self-destruction, see lines 1258, 1260-1261, 1300-1302, 1311, 1327-1328, 1478-
1479. There is also the reference to atù at line 1205.
80
The word ÉÓÑÇË refers us to both the ”lustral baths” through which the polluted are
cleansed, and also the related freeing or loosening of ÉÓÃÇË.
Though language also functions in a way to which the methods of

psychoanalysis can testify today. It takes only a word to dredge the
unholy monsters of the unconscious to the daylight of consciousness.
Still, as we’ve seen, the unconscious here is not within Oedipus. It is a
divine transcendence latent in the world of men, about to dawn upon
him awfully.
A key feature of the mania mounting in Oedipus will be its capac-
ity for doubled or even tripled language, accommodating contradic-
tory truths. The word in general in the Tyrannus has a “double power
[dunamin diplùn]” (938), like the words of the messenger who visits
Jocaste once her supplications are through, whose message will bring
pleasure, but also sorrow (936-937). That language is always more or
less obscurely doing two things at once is no accident, since there are
two orders of thought and language intersecting, human and divine, in
the ambiguous third wisdom which both Teiresias and Oedipus abide. 81
It is impossible to contain a tragic character like Oedipus within a
single “network of meaning.”82 The characters themselves testify to it
as the story unfolds behind them, and they gain the kind of narrative
perspective afforded the reader. They become readers themselves, for
whom the autonomous force of language is always playing tricks, even
when it is language they themselves have spoken. The loosening of the
signifying web within which Oedipus’ identity hangs is both a symp-
tom and cause of this mania.
In Jocaste, a precursor of this doubling or reversibility in language
enjoins a scepticism concerning the oracles, and the limits of human
knowledge more generally. The play is written at the height of the
sophistic enlightenment, and Sophocles gives Jocaste the role of the
skeptic for whom all truths can be argued both ways. 83 To be reasona-
81
W. B. Stanford Ambiguity in Greek Literature, pp. 163-173; J. P. Vernant and Pierre
Vidal-Naquet “Ambiguity and Reversal” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece,
p. 117; Charles Segal “Time and Knowledge in the Tragedy of Oedipus” in So-
phocles’ Tragic World, p. 140.
82
Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 349.
83
See Charles Segal “Freud, Language, and the Unconscious” in Sophocles’ Tragic
World, pp. 176 f. The Tyrannus was written at “the height of the sophistic enlighten-
ment” in Greece. It is clearly about “conscious knowledge.” It “may certainly be
read as a critique of man’s confidence in understanding and controlling his world
through his ever-increasing power in the physical, biological, and medical sciences,
and in the human sciences of language, politics, history, and so on.” Segal echoes
hear a reading made earlier by Knox, in Oedipus at Thebes, a debt which he ac-
knowledges, only to go on, more to my taste, to stress the significant resistances
and blindness of Oedipus to “the radical otherness of the kind of ‘knowledge’ that
ble, as she prays that Oedipus would be, though the terror of the word
is fast upon him, requires submission to chance. Foreknowledge is im-
possible – that is the discovery of reason, the return to nous which it
seems Oedipus may now make. “It is the event that rules, and there is
no certain knowledge of anything” (977). Oedipus will soon declare
himself enthusiastically to be this “child of Tuchùn (1080) – “Event” –
the mother of a human time which streams freely, without significant
purpose or measure. But this apparent return to reason is only the
heightening of his madness. The elevation of reason is equivalent to a
kind of madness. Jocaste’s faith in rhetoric and chance, which we see
in her attempt to use language to persuade and bend chance to her
will, along with her rejection of certain knowledge, dead ends in the
unholy madness which peaks in her suicide, just before Oedipus, mu-
tilating himself, mounts the crest of his own disturbed heights.
This is the telos of the play, whose arrow, the chorus has told us
and will tell us again, inevitably hits its mark (481, 1197-1201). The
sickness of the city must concentrate itself in Oedipus, to be expelled
with him. It is his service to them as sacrificial victim, an offering to
the divine order of Dikù in which Oedipus plays a part that has come
offensively loose.84 No priest is required to raise the knife, no maenad
to tear at his flesh. Oedipus accomplishes this sacrifice under his own
power, through the simple act of bringing the truth of his origin (sper-
ma) to the light of knowledge (idein) (1077). He will bring his birth to
light, make it appear (phanķ, 1059)85 through dialogue, as he prom-
ised earlier to “light up the obscurity” of Laius’ killer (phanķ, 339).
But to uncover the mystery of his birth, the source of his life (sautou
he does not have.” This is “a knowledge to which the organs of consciousness – the
‘ears, eyes, and mind’ of line 371 – are indeed ‘blind’.”
84
See J. P. Guepin The Tragic Paradox. There is good reason to interpret the tragic
hero, at least partially, in terms of the “resistance model” of Dionysiac myth and
sacrifice. He is both criminal and victim, guilty and innocent, human and divine.
The offense is somehow necessary, if not to the gods, then to us. This is Guepin’s
conclusion. To live means to kill, and to take life means to incur guilt. This guilt
must be expiated. Charles Burkert reaches similar conclusions in Homo Necans
about the nature of Dionysiac Religion, where the community incurs a murderous
guilt in order to establish its own moral-religious limits, and then re-establish its
innocence and the bounds of an ordered, human life once again through sacrificial
violence. See ch. 4, especially p. 226.
85
B. Knox Oedipus at Thebes. Knox gives a complete discussion of the significance
of Ô¿ÇË× and similarly derived words, at pp. 131-133, connects it with inquiry at
pp. 120 f., mind at p. 125, knowing at p. 128, reason at p. 133, truth at p. 134, and
teaching and learning at pp. 135-137, invoking the “atmosphere of the intellectual
ferment” of the time.
biou) in a line of generation (genos), he must sacrifice this individual

being (1060).86 His self-sacrifice will ironically be the effect of this in-
telligent self-assertion, through which he accidentally tears the fabric
of society within which the tune of nature, time, the gods, and human
identity is harmonized. The ambivalence between the human and di-
vine in Oedipus, a place where society ruptures, the excluded source
of its health, the source of pollution, is also a source of salvation. But
the fever must rise before it breaks.
The excessively inspired language of the third stasimon points to-
ward the mad presence of the divine in both Oedipus and the choris-
ters themselves, who sing now of Oedipus’ divine parentage.
Who, who among those who live long bore you, with Pan who roves the mountains as
your father? Or was it some bedfellow of Loxias? For the mountain pastures are all
dear to him. Or was it the lord Cyllene, or the Bacchic god dwelling on the mountain
tops that received you as a lucky find from one of the black-eyed Nymphs, with whom
he often plays. (1098-1109)
This has been a puzzle of its own to many interpreters. What to make
of Oedipus’ hypothetical fostering or adoption by a number of gods?
The choruses of Sophocles, we should recognize, do not stand out-
side the time of the play. Their perspective is neither that of the gods
nor that of the author.87 Their beliefs change, they make exchanges
and undergo the play as do the individual characters. In this ode, we
witness the passing of Oedipus’ inspired mania like contagion to the
choristers themselves.88 As Oedipus loses his right mind, swooning
with the terrible knowledge of his birth, the chorus now swoons with
him, as the intoxicating appearance of the gods in the figure of Oedi-
pus’ fate similarly inspires the Thebans. The sickness which Thebes
had contracted in adopting Oedipus as its king, while first literally
bearing black fruit, expresses itself ultimately in the symptom of holy
madness which they share with their debauched king, likening him to
a god, while singing, inspired like the poets, of his fellow immortals.89
86
The play consistently opposes the distinctly separate lives of individuals (ÀÇÍÇ) from
the generations and destructions within the processes of “Life” itself (Ä×Å), of “liv-
ing.” An example of this is the cluster in which one’s “life,” at line 983, is distin-
guished from a “being alive” or “living” at lines 979, 985, 986.
87
H. D. F. Kitto Greek Tragedy, pp. 159-161.
88
89
The four kinds of holy madness as Plato describes in the Phaedrus are that of
prophecy, poetry, philosophy (as love), and initiation. While the madness of atê
is clearly at work here, the situation is as always ambiguous. Both Oedipus and
now his chorus could also be said to suffer from the madness of initiation, through
which a mystical union is forged between man and gods. That Oedipus returns in
His madness and theirs coincides with his removal from the human
line of generations, choked by the knot his probing has tied in it. He
is placed in the incestuous family of the deathless gods, in which time
and generations are always crossed, going nowhere, where frivolity
and luxury are the rule.
But this chorus, after all, is mad.
Madness, Katharsis and Language
The mounting enthusiasm and anxiety of Oedipus and his chorus, as

well as the queen, anticipate the violent release of this energy in a con-
cluding katharsis. What the effect of katharsis was is a question im-
posed on us by Aristotle. While he was interested in a katharsis in the
audience, we are still at work inside the play. The language of kathar-
sis is part of the drama. What it entails in Aristotle is a complicated
and difficult question, one that will have to wait for chapter three.
Here within the context of the drama we can claim a little more au-
thority. The theme of purification sends us back to the king’s question
at the beginning of the play. By what means will Thebes be purified?
After begging for the rights of an old man to keep quiet, the elderly
shepherd finally completes the story Oedipus has been assembling.
Oedipus demands the shepherd “speak justice” (toun dikon, 1158),
reveal the truth that can ease this crease in nature that has starved
and infertilized the city of Thebes. This day will destroy him, Teir-
esias augured, and this katharsis comes at the hand of this unwilling
shepherd, a few words from whom make a grand sacrifice of his king.
The sacrificial blow which a few turns of phrase deal Oedipus is best
described by this shepherd himself. While in the opening scene of
the Tyrannus Oedipus stands like a god before his altar, he now lies
prostrate upon it. Just before the blood spills, the shepherd warns his
victim:
Ah, I have arrived at the danger in speaking.90
ÍÇÊÍÇ ÎÏÍÐ ¿ÓÒ× Áq ÃÇÊÇ Ò× ÂÃÇË× ÉÃÁÃÇË.
the Colonus as a prophet figure, like Teiresias, who is finally translated into immor-
tality, supports the thesis that here too his unholy madness, like the pollution more
generally of which it is a symptom, also has a holy aspect.
90
Lloyd Jones, in the Loeb edition, translates: “Ah, I have come to the danger point in
telling my story.” It is a matter of emphasis. While he puts it on the point of arrival, I
put the emphasis on the speaking. It is in speaking that I have arrived at the danger,
rather than being at a certain point in speaking.
And I in listening. But nevertheless, one must listen.
È¿Á×Áq ¿ÈÍÓÃÇË ¿ÉÉq mÊ×Ð ¿ÈÍÓÑÒÃÍË. (1169-1170, my trans.)
And so the shepherd and the king face one another, overcome togeth-
er by their fear of what speaking will reveal. The revelation demands
they cooperate in a speech which claims them both, unwilling instru-
ments of its own momentum. Neither wants to continue, but they must.
The shepherd because he is forced by his king, and the king because
he also has been forced. Despite his resilience to the truth of his crime
(he has set himself against it from the start), the irresistible desire
to know in combination with the facts (to pragma) has overpowered
his ability to evade it. “Ah, famous Oedipus, whom the same wide
harbour served as child and as father on your bridal bed! How, how
could the field your father sowed put up with you so long in silence?”
(1207-1213). This is the pollution of which the house must be purified
(katharmķ, 1228).
The ambiguous doubling we have seen throughout the language of
the play, between day and night, straight and crooked, true and false,
life and death, sickness and healing, justice and chance, wisdom and
foolishness, sanity and madness, etc., all seem to be rooted finally in
a doubling of the flesh. Before taking her life, Jocaste “weeps over the
bed where in double misery [dustùnos diplù] she had brought forth
a husband by her husband [andros andra], and children by her child
[tekn’ ek teknķn tekoi]” (1249-1251). But the “double power” of the
poet’s word is co-present with the power of bodies to wreak a “dou-
ble misery,” a power which is physical, expressed by other bodies, the
husband who is also a son, the father who is also a brother, the wife
who is also a mother. Oedipus is the “self-same seed [tauton sperma],”
a seed that was sown twice in the same maternal soil, the father that
grew up to kill his own (ton patera patùr humķn epephne, 1496), yet
the wretchedness of Oedipus’ fortune is likewise a wretchedness of
mind (tou nou), as it is for those, like the chorus, who must look on
him (1348).91 This becomes unequivocal as the passive influence of the
daimķn to which Oedipus and the chorus attest translates itself into a
more direct and violent intervention in life and mind, which, in Oedi-
pus, are so closely joined.92 The passage at 1258-1262 is “surely a locus
for the way the 5th century Greeks thought about the irrational.” 93
91
Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, 1348. “How I wish I had never come to know you!”
92
Cf. lines 1258-62, 1300-2, 1311, 1327-1328, 1478-1479.
93
J. M. Bremer Hamartia, p. 164. Bremer points out that both ÃËÅÉ¿ÒÍ and ÃÊÎÇÎÒÃÇ
“are used in tragedy to indicate the sudden and destructive approach of, or mental
invasion by, divinity.”
And in his fury some god showed her to him; it was none of us
men who stood nearby. And with a dreadful cry, as though
someone were guiding him he rushed at the double doors, forced
the bolts inwards from their sockets and fell into the room.
ÉÓÑÑ×ËÒÇ Âq ¿ÓÒ× Â¿ÇÊÍË×Ë ÂÃÇÈËÓÑÇ ÒÇÐ ÍÓÂÃÇÐ Á¿Ï
¿ËÂÏ×Ë Íl Î¿ÏÏÅÊÃË ÃÁÁÓÆÃË ÂÃÇËÍË Âq ¿ÓÑ¿Ð oÐ níq
kÁÅÒÍÓ ÒÇËÍÐ ÎÓÉ¿ÇÐ ÂÇÎÉ¿ÇÐ ÃËÅÉ¿Òq ÃÈ ÂÃ ÎÓÆÊÃË×Ë
ÃÈÉÇËÃ ÈÍÇÉ¿ ÈÉÅÆÏ¿ È¿ÊÎÇÎÒÃÇ ÑÒÃÁÅ.
This wretchedness and mania, the ambivalences he embodies, cannot

come to light outside of the ambiguous logos of the play’s tragic speech.
In blinding himself, Oedipus avenges his daughters Antigone and Is-
mene, as a brother, against the father who begat the three of them. He
has split in two, punishing the father, as son, with a physical metaphor
for the blindness with which the father’s mind has seen and probed.
Come to these hands that are your brother’s, which have done
their duty on the eyes of the father who begat you, once so
bright; he who unseeing, unknowing (ÍÓÆq lÑÒÍÏ×Ë)94 became
(ÃÔ¿ËÆÅË) your father by her from whom he himself was got. (1480-5)
The ‘showing [ephanthùn]’ of Oedipus’ ‘becoming’ depends essen-

tially on the grammar of kinship, as all the disseminations of mean-
ing in the play have depended upon the potential play of the signifier,
have had the structures of Greek grammar as a necessary condition.95
His madness is both the collapsed crossing of generations and of the
symbolic ordering power which distributes them, the conventional-
ized space and time within which identity is established. The crushing
vacuum that the gods leave in their wake absorbs them both.
In the end, this katharsis accomplishes the straightening which
Oedipus, his wife and the chorus have each in their own way sought.
Once the truth is made clear, the dark figure of Oedipus has no more
need of the light (1182). The inversions have been righted. It is no
94
In Oedipus declamation to his daughters, as one who neither sees nor “knows,”
Sophocles significantly chooses the participle of historia, the proto-philosophical
investigations of the 6th c. Ionians into an essentially rational ‘nature.’
95
Charles Segal “Time and Knowledge in the Tragedy of Oedipus” in Sophocles’
Tragic World, p. 141. “Sophocles makes the ambiguity of language impinge ines-
capably on the ambiguity of personal identity. In the play language and kinship
function as parallel modes of situating oneself in the world and so of knowing who
one is. To know the truth of what we are, we need to understand the discourse
through which we create ourselves.” Cf. Charles Segal “Freud, Language, and the
Unconscious” in Sophocles Tragic World, p. 179. Segal, however, does not want to
deny that reality exists outside of textuality, to make “the post-structural fallacy,
reducing what can appear only through language to a solely linguistic existence.”
longer the darkness which illuminates. It is no longer the sun which

blinds. The paradoxes of nature along with his identity have been sim-
plified.96 Once the truth is revealed, speech becomes plain. The only
thing the sun can do for Oedipus is shine upon the world which he
has defiled. But Hades too is prohibited. To die would be to return
to the heart of his defilement, the shades of the mother and father he
violated. Because Oedipus can neither look upon this world nor the
one below, he chooses the middle place of blindness, no longer of this
world but living still within it.97 Though even this habitation will be
beyond the city, in the wild regions of Kithaeron (1452).98 The moun-
tain where he was first left to die as an infant once again becomes his
home, the same mountain where the maenads, inspired by their tragic
god, perform their savage winter dance, suckling the young at their
breasts, before tearing them apart and eating them raw.99
96
See Charles Segal “Earth in Oedipus Tyrannus” in Sophocles’ Tragic World, p. 212.
Segal analyses the relation of men as mortals to the divine element of earth, and
with it sky, as opposed to the “land (ÕÍÏ¿)” over which man has dominion.
97
Tragedy in Ancient Greece, pp. 356-358. As Vernant points out, in the Colonus,
Oedipus occupies part of the ÊÃÑÍÁ¿Ç¿, or middle place, between the gods of the
underworld and the gods above, chthonos and Olympos. The space in the play is
divided between the sacred wood and the profane space through which access is
given freely. Oedipus is always carried to and fro between them. The bùma, the ex-
act frontier between the sacred and the profane, also acts as the boundary between
silence and speech, between the wood where quiet must be observed, and the place
where it is proper to speak.
My interpretation of the blinding follows Bowra. C. M. Bowra Sophoclean Trag-
edy, pp. 179-183. The implication is that Oedipus was not mad, but “chose” to blind
himself. Though this is the inference Bowra draws, I do not. Dwelling neither in
this world or another strikes me as a fairly mad choice, governed by a paradoxi-
cal logic. Oedipus is left with no ‘place’ to go on living. Yet ultimately Bowra dis-
solves the difference between this self-possessed choice and the work of a Â¿ÇÊ×Ë.
Bremer, too, does the same. “Daemon and man are viewed as one awful entity bent
upon destruction.” The subtle difference may be that the former insists on Oedipus’
self-presence in the act, though it was destined to pass, while the latter empha-
sizes Oedipus’ raving. The ample textual evidence Bremer gives for his view out-
weighs Bowra’s interpretation, based only on dramatic logic. For the influence of
the Â¿ÇÊ×Ë on Oedipus, especially his blinding, see lines 738, 816, 828 f., 1193-1196,
1258, 1260 f., 1300 ff., 1311, 1327 f., and 1478 f.
98
See Euripides Bacchae 752, where Kithaeron is mentioned.
99
J. P. Guepin The Tragic Paradox, pp. 252-256. The suckling which precedes the
maenads’ homophagy is said to be a symbolic mothering. Usually animals were
used, such as fawns. The rending of the beasts and eating raw of their flesh signified
a devouring of their own child. This “symbolizing” was sometimes accomplished
more precisely by the devouring of actual children, stolen from the arms of other
mothers. It is possible that more rarely some women did massacre their own children
Happiness and Moral Wisdom
Once the terrible knowledge of the third scene is secured, Sophocles

interposes a few concluding words on happiness in the chorus’ final
stasimon. He distinguishes between two kinds:100 the first, olbos, im-
plies wealth and prosperity, the benefit of talents, such as a fine intel-
lect or good birth, successfully put to use – what we might simply call
good luck.101 There is another concept of happiness, though, that car-
ries with it a number of religious nuances which the first lacks. In the
fourth ode, now that Oedipus’ endowments and good luck have been
unmasked as conspirators in his annihilation, the chorus sings of this
other kind of happiness, of eudaimonia. The generations of mortals
are always “close to nothingness” (1186), they chant.
What man, what man wins more of happiness than enough to
seem, and after seeming to decline.
²½Ð Á¿Ï Ò½Ð ¿ËÅÏ ÎÉÃÍË Ò¿Ð ÃÓÂ¿ÇÊÍËÇ¿Ð ÔÃÏÃÇ Å ÒÍÑÍÓÒÍË

mÑÍË ÂÍÈÃÇË È¿Ç ÂÍÌ¿ËÒ ¿ÎÍÈÉÇË¿Ç. (1189−1192)
In the same lyrical breath, the chorus explains the connection be-
tween this universal pronouncement and Oedipus’ fate in particular.
The first of men has been revealed as the last. The Thebans use his
fate (daimona) as an exemplar (paradeigmi) for all mortal men (1193):
“Nothing of mortal life is happy” (1196, my trans.).
Through his representation of eudaimonia, Sophocles reveals the
last great paradox of the fall of Oedipus and the purification of Thebes.
Oedipus’ arrow had found its mark, travelling correctly and with great
strength when he destroyed “the prophesying maiden” and “stood like
a wall keeping off death” (1197-1201). But this success (olbou) was
not eudaimonos, “sactioned by the gods” (1198). Oedipus’ happiness
was not a happiness, his eudaimonia, from a wider perspective, that
of the gods, was dusdaimoni, a terrible fate (1302). Now relaxed, the
in this Dionysiac rite. The entire ritual is traced back by Guepin to the Egyptian
threshing of wheat, a mythological metaphor for Seth’s murder of Osiris, and his
rebirth and reassembling at the hands of his sister, Isis. Seth, the criminal, then
becomes the sacrificial victim in expiation of his crime.
100
Sophocles’ distinction, we’ll see in Chapter 4, mirrors Kierkegaard’s own between
lykke and salighed.
101
Cf. Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, 1530, 1285. “So that one should wait to see the fi-
nal day and should call none among mortals fortunate (ÍÉÀÇÄÃÇË), till he has crossed
the bourne of life without suffering grief.” “Their earlier happiness (ÍÉÀÍÐ) was
truly happiness.”
web of time102 that had twisted into the knot of Oedipus reveals the
paradoxical collision of happiness and unhappiness in the same man,
a crookedness and a being-straight, a bending which destroys life, and
a divine correctness of course which sustains it. In being destroyed
Oedipus’ faulty human knowledge is converted into a more truly he-
roic mind. But this hero is also an outcast, without human abode, liv-
ing as an animal or a god. Like the translation of heroes in Homer and
Pindar, Apollo, straightening him out, translates Oedipus as knower
into a kind of god. This divine correctness, foreordained, frames the
contingent successes (olboi) of human life within the wider lens of a
destiny they allot. Luck is a mere apparition, it only “seems [dokein]”
(1189-1191), while the true fate in store is no more likely a eudaimonia
as it is dusdaimoni, the worst of miseries.
For a moment the awful irrationality which seeps into the human
scene through Oedipus disturbs this veil of appearances long enough
for us mortals to steal a look. But it cannot be squared with human cat-
egories, eliciting contradiction from the chorus. “To speak straight, you
breathed life into me and lulled my eyes in death” (1220-1222),103 they
sing paradoxically to their fallen king. Who Oedipus is and what he has
accomplished for the city of Thebes cannot be communicated directly.
He is too many things at once to be identified. To “tell the truth” or
“speak straight” in a world where Oedipus is the paradigmatic man, we
admit it, the chorus sings, sense cannot be made of any of this. We are
left only with the horrible image of an Oedipus which the mind resists.
Once the blinding has taken place and things have been “straight-
ened out,” Oedipus is once again remarkably sane. The god-sent atù
he has suffered, temporary by nature, exhausts itself.104 Now, along-
side his daughters, Oedipus laments that he cannot give much advice
(phrenas, 1511), not because reason fails him, but because they do
not yet have understanding. We wonder what kind of advice Oedipus
would have been able to provide his daughters, had they reached the
age of reason by the time his horror had come to light. Everything
in the play militates against the relevance of human reason, its wis-
doms and prospects for moral education. The intelligent desire that
102
Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, 1213. “Time the all seeing has found you out against
your will.”
103
This is a minor adjustment of the Lloyd Jones translation.
104
Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, 1299-1302. “What madness (Ê¿ËÇ¿) has come
upon you,” the chorus asks Oedipus, first seen after his blinding. “Who is the god
(Â¿ÇÊ×Ë) that with a leap longer than the longest has sprung upon your miserable
fate?”
drives Oedipus so ambitiously towards his mark, the investigations it

pursues and the choice in which it concludes, none of these operate
under human authority.105 Sophocles perverts Heraclitus’ enlightened
formulation, subjecting ùthos ambiguously to daimķn.106 Happiness
is a matter for the gods to decide, whose self-same time invades the
contingency of life onstage and determines every outcome, manifest-
ing itself through the zones of opacity and incommunicability in the
words men exchange.107 Returning in his idea of justice and guilt to
a Homeric understanding, Sophocles contests the poetry intervening
between he and the blind bard – the logic of man enforced by the gods
is neither just in any moral sense nor is it discernable.108 Like Oedipus,
we are seeds furrowed within a divine fabric, which, upon relaxing
itself into its full display, extinguishes each protective fold for the sake
of a brighter pattern.
105
See R. D. Dawe “Some Reflections on Ate and Hamartia” in Harvard Studies in
Classical Philology 72, p. 119. Oedipus embodies phronùsis, to which euboulia
is related, as well as “that quality of deinotes to which Aristotle alludes at EN,
1144a25.” Cf. pp. 111-112. For a parallel in the Antigone, the only other tragedy,
writes Dawe, composed in terms remotely as intellectual as the Tyrannus, see
the chorus’ stress on the need for euboulia (1098), the messenger’s summation of
events in terms of aboulia (1242), Creon’s description of his own dusbouliai (1269),
Antigone’s description of her possible error as dusboulia (95), and especially the
closing lines of the play, a “homily on phronein.”
106
edy” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 37. Vernant emphasizes the am-
biguity of Heraclitus’ formulation within the context of tragedy: ùthos anthropķ
daimķn. The fragment can read, “it is character in man that one calls daimķn,”
or, “that in man which one calls character, is daimķn.” This ambiguity for him is
the essence of tragedy. Kitto, Bowra, and Bremer also subordinate character to
daimķn, though Kitto and Bowra also cite Oedipus’ hubris as an essential com-
ponent of his tragedy. Indirectly this points to the ambiguous identity between
character and daimķn which Vernant claims. For Bremer, there is no ambiguity.
Oedipus’ fate is through and through the work of a daimķn. Knox, on the other
hand, insists unambiguously on the flaw of hubris.
107
edy” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 48. Cf. p. 43.
108
The word hamartia actually occurs at lines 621 and 1149 in the Tyrannus. The
sense is that of missing the mark. It also shows up in the same sense in both Antig-
one and Oedipus at Colonus.
Chapter 2
Literature and Moral Psychology:
From Homer to Sophocles
Introduction
Aristotle, we’ll discover, pursues the same problem as Sophocles, the

conflicted nature of reason and its relation to the irrational, though in
a purely conceptual register, and transposed fully into the language of
theoretical psychology. At no point before Aristotle do we find a the-
ory of psychic conflict in exclusively conceptual language, apart from
images or dialogue, in the absent third person voice of science.1 This
leap in methodology is what makes him such an essential case, histori-
cally. His attention to lived experience, especially the concreteness
of emotion and desires, as well as the many dues he pays to common
sense, make his work as practically relevant as it is interesting from
the standpoint of historical psychology. The story of how this became
possible is in part a revolution in how the Greeks thought about the
soul or psuchù.
What had been anything but personal and immortal, two centuries
before Aristotle’s time, was transformed into an immortal and fully
personal thing with which the individual identified completely.2 The
idea and therefore experience of one’s ‘soul’ was remarkably new, and
1
See W. K. C. Guthrie “Plato’s Views on the Nature of the Soul” in Plato II, ed. by
Vlastos, pp. 241 f. “To ask: ‘what then is the nature of the ‘motion’ of God, and of
souls absorbed into his being?’ would be, for a man like Plato, to exceed the bounds
of logos. Here mysticism steps in. […] Nevertheless this is just the sort of question
that the irrepressible Aristotle did ask. […] [F]or Plato, however far dialectic might
go, the veil between it and mythos must always remain, since it existed in the nature
of things. For Aristotle, to take refuge in mythos at all was nothing but a confession
of weakness.”
2
Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 73. On Orphism and
the soul: “We may think of this Greek conception of the soul as beginning to de-
velop in the sixth century. Its roots may well reach deep into the pre-historic strata
of human existence; but during the sixth century the belief that the soul was divine
ultimately a hybrid of Greek thinking and the ingress of foreign reli-

gious ideas from the east, across the trade routes of the Black Sea. Be-
fore Socrates (and the sophists and medical writers from which Plato
drew in illustrating him, who also distinguished importantly between
soul and body), we hadn’t had souls the way we do now. 3 And without
that Orphic watchword: “I, too, am of godly race,” the Socratic care of
the soul, with the infinite value it placed on the individual personality,
would have been inconceivable, as would the science of the soul and
human action Aristotle proposes a century later.4
For Aristotle, desire combined with thought is the cause of human
action, and all human action ought to be guided by an idea of the
good life, or what it is to flourish (eudaimonia). In order to obtain this
blessed form of happiness, then, we need a science of the soul to lay
out the structures of reason and desire, so that they can be ordered in
the way that best disposes us towards this flourishing. This is an echo
of the problem of logos as Sophocles imagined it in the figure of Oedi-
pus, but the terms of the problem have taken on new meanings, been
transcribed into the substance and language of psychology as opposed
to religious poetry. Just as Aristotle’s thinking, we’ll find, in its early
phases retains a trace of this divine transcendence in the irrational
element of the human soul, Euripides gives us two shining examples
of this psychologizing of the irrational within the tragedy of the pre-
ceding century, both in the characters of Medea and the Phaedra of
and had a metaphysical destination took on the intellectual form that enabled it to
conquer the world, and this will always remain a decisive historical event.”
3
Charles Burnet “The Socratic Doctrine of the Soul” in Essays and Addresses,
p. 160. Burnet, in the landmark essay of 1916, argues that Socrates’ genius lay in
this re-invention of psuchù as the site of a moral self care, or therapeia. “Socrates, so
far as we could see, was the first to say that the normal consciousness was the true
self, and that it deserved all the care bestowed on the body’s mysterious tenant by
the religious.” And so the philosopher’s care of the self, in Socrates, was originally
modelled on the Orphic-Pythagorean concern for katharsis of a divine, immortal
self.
Cf. David Claus Toward the Soul, pp. 6, 108, 181-183, and, more generally, Part iii,
ch. 4, pp. 141-155 & ch. 5. Claus gives a more nuanced and painstakingly etymological
argument for a general shift in popular 5th c. usages of the word among sophists such
as Antiphon (v.) and Gorgias (Encomium of Helen); the pre-Socratic philosopher,
Democritus (fr. B191, et al.); and the pairing of psuchù-sķma in the medical texts,
Airs, Waters, Places and Regimen I, which theorize a technù of the soul. Cf. pp. 182 f.
Plato developed this psycho-physical pairing (The psuchù was “the psychosomatic
physis of a man, amenable to therapy and doctrines like those furnished by scientific
medicine for the body.”) into the opposition with which we are now familiar.
4
See Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 89. Orpheus, fr.
B19.
Literature and Moral Psychology: From Homer to Sophocles 49
the Hippolytus: “I know what crimes I am about to commit, but my

anger is stronger than my reason, anger which causes the greatest af-
flictions among men” (1078), 5 says Medea, or, in Phaedra’s companion
monologue, “We know and recognize what is right, but we do not act
on it, for we are in the grip of passion” (380).
This overlap between the problem of the irrational as both the poets
and the philosophers conceived it begs the question of their common,
intellectual inheritance, especially concerning the soul in which phi-
losophy located the problem.6 While Sophocles’ concern for human
action and choice opened the space for Aristotle’s theory of the hu-
man, like all poets, he perceived reality in terms of “living shapes, not
as concepts.”7 This chapter’s task will be to trace the lineage and tra-
jectory of this transformation of ‘soul’ which allowed something like a
full-fledged moral psychology, such as Aristotle’s, to emerge from the
popular inheritance from which tragedy eclectically draws.
Practical science, the science of man and human action, full-fledged
in Aristotle for the first time in history, concentrates itself on the na-
ture and care of the soul. By closely following this shift in the soul’s
conception, from that of religious poetry to the philosophically scien-
tific register of investigation and conceptualization, we can stage the
background for the shift, more specifically, in the troubled relation
between reason and the irrational. Following Aristotle’s own advice,
as students of ethics we “must learn the facts about the soul” (EN,
1102a18-20). So before turning to the state of tragedy in Aristotle and
its implications for his ethics and psychology, I want to distinguish his
view of the soul from that of Sophocles, by churning the literary-cul-
tural soil in which philosophy went digging for the roots of its ‘psuchù’
as custom and the poets had traditionally conceived it. We’ll find that
the altogether mortal soul of Homer and the lyric poets, before taking
on its personal, immortal character somewhere between Socrates and
Plato, and then, in a compromised form in Aristotle, was forced into
conversation with a belief in the divinity and immortality of certain
individuals foreign to Greece at this time: the image of the Thracian
theologos.
5
See Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, pp. 126, 128. His translation.
6
See Werner Jaeger Paideia, vol. 1, p. 353, for more on tragedy – Euripidean in particu-
lar – as character psychology, containing a theory of psychic conflict: “Euripides was
the first psychologist. It was he who discovered the soul, in a new sense – who revealed
the troubled world of man’s emotions and passions. He never tires of showing how they
are expressed and how they conflict with the intellectual forces of the soul.”
7
Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 112.
Homer: Opening the Path for Psychology
As odd as it may seem to apply the term psychology to Homer, the sto-
ry of Greek psychology begins with the father of poetry, whose proud
achievement it was to distinguish the soul (psuchù) from the corpse it
survives.8 Aristotle identifies Homer as the seed bed of tragic lyric, and
Sophocles’ conception of the soul, we’ll see, also draws from this Ur-
poet. In fact, the Iliad and Odyssey provide us with the first model for a
general psychology which the West has to offer.9 Socrates taught that the
soul was “‘the intellectual and moral personality,’ and in consequence a
thing of unique and priceless value,” wrote Guthrie. All Europe “has a
reason to be grateful for his teaching.”10 This soul as Socrates redefined
it was a literary conjuring, as far as Greece was concerned, and by no
means a popular inheritance. Nor was it popularly received. Homer,
we’ll find, understands by soul almost the exact opposite of the indi-
vidual character that Socrates describes and Plato confirms as immor-
tal and god-like. In the very first lines of the Iliad, Homer identifies the
individual man with the body which the breath or shade of soul leaves
behind, the husk on which the birds and dogs feed.11
Homer became a hero for a chthonic thinker like Nietzsche, not so
much because of what is there, but because of what isn’t. In Homer’s
two epics the reader discovers the significant absence of any interest
whatsoever in a life other than this one. Homeric man hated nothing
more than death, where the divine order, beauty, and strength of life,
in dying, really did become carrion for birds and dogs. There was no
apologizing for the ugly certainty of man’s future. “‘Do not try and ex-
plain away death to me,’ says Achilles to Odysseus in Hades;” Death
is beyond interest, “for when death comes it is certain that life – this
sweet life of ours in the sunlight – is done with, whatever else there
may be to follow.”12 The idea that earthly existence was somehow
false, a training ground or a shadow of some other realm, is foreign to
Homer. Death is merely the shuttling away of the thin psuchù-image
of the embodied man to the house of Hades.
8
9
Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 1. Beyond the esthetic, and the intellectual-
historical, “there is a third side to the Homeric phenomenon which we might call
the ‘philosophical.’”
10
Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. xi.
11
Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 74. Cf. Iliad i. 3-5;
xxiii. 105.
12
Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 4.
But what then are the qualities of this soul?

Rohde, the first to till this field, qualifies the soul initially by what
it lacked. We can work our way back towards Homer’s concept by
stripping away the alien layers of our own thinking, until we get to the
hollow center that is Homer’s psuchù. “It [the psuchù] is described as
being without feeling, deserted by mind and the organs of mind.”13 All
of the capacities we typically ascribe to ‘soul,’ such as spirit (thumos),
mind (noos), and desire (boulù), for Homer appear to be functions of
“the empire of the body.”14 There is no one term which contains them.15
These powers we customarily ascribe to the unitary soul are referred
to through physiological metaphors of the heart, the diaphragm, or
other bodily organs associated with affection and drive.16 Will, feeling
and intelligence are expressions of the midriff (phrùn).17 ðtor, a seat of
feeling, seems to have designated the throat, and kardia, functioning
similarly, the heart.18 The closest Homeric analogue for something as
abstract as our ‘soul’ appears to be thumos, an agent variously of pas-
sion, will and knowledge – though tied, like phrùn, to the midriff.19
But Homer’s use of thumos implies that treating ‘psychic’ phenom-
ena more generally as manifestations of the literal body was already
somewhat a thing of the past. Thumos, though still closely tied to the
midriff, was an immaterial function. The terms of psychology had be-
gun to slip from the body into a symbolic register, the germ of an
13
14
Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 51 (58n).
15
Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 8. “Homer has no one word to characterize
the mind or the soul. Psuchù, the word for soul in later Greek, has no original con-
nexion with the thinking and feeling soul.” Cf. David Claus Toward the Soul, p. 7,
and chapter 1 generally. The soul functions are divided by Claus into ÆÓÊÍÐ ÊÃËÍÐ
ÅÒÍÏ ÈÅÏ ÈÏ¿ÂÇÅ ÔÏÅËÔÏÃËÃÐ ËÍÍÐ, all of which can “denote human psycho-
logical agents.”
16
Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 74.
17
18
J. de Romilly Patience Mon Coeur, p. 43.
19
See David Claus Toward the Soul, pp. 16-26. Claus makes clear that all of the ele-
ments of the soul could exhibit agency, for Homer. But on my reading of him, and
others already referenced, especially Rohde, thumos distinguishes itself in combin-
ing a relative abstraction from the body with a passionate, existential situatedness,
compared to these other forces. In this sense it anticipates the ‘soul’ developed and
studied centuries later by Greek moral psychologists. Although, as one of a number
of forces and agencies that overlap in a person, it does this only barely. On the im-
material nature of thumos and its similarity to phrên, both in function and location,
Cf. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 29 f.
inner life somehow separate from the world of bodies and force. 20
Powers such as noos, boulù, menos (courage), and mùtis (cunning) are
thought of as “independent, free-working, and incorporeal.” 21 They
are of, but not precisely in, the body. Homer conceals this primitive
intellectualizing of man and world in the dust and blood of battle,
retaining its root in the body, while, at the same time, providing an
abstract psychology that reflects the meaningful order he brings to
man’s world, mirroring the orderly realm of Olympus. 22 He is the first
stage of psychology and of European thinking. 23
Even those scholars who question to what extent the Homeric soul-
words essentially designated disparate parts of the body admit that
insisting on the distinction between the mental and the physical is to
impose an anachronism on not only the poet, but the age. There are,
of course, tensions that exist within the Greek words for soul.24 And
we can elaborate on these tensions, using the language and concepts
we have spent ages developing. But to fully succeed at this task would
be to destroy the essential value of archaic psychology for us now. It
offers an alternative model from the ground up of what it means to
think and feel, the relation between an individual’s thought and feel-
ing and the common world. To the archaic Greek speaker our mod-
ern distinctions between ‘inner’ and ‘outer,’ subject and object, were
simply not possible. 25 We’ve already found this ambiguity, original to
20
David Claus Toward the Soul, pp. 25 f. Claus, for example, contests this traditional
understanding of soul-functions in Homer, taking Snell as an example. Rohde, he
argues, misses the influence of the development of secular disciplines, alongside
Orphic-Pythagorean ones, on the 4th c. philosopher’s conception of the soul. Even
in Homer, he believes, these soul-functions are somewhat free of the body, and
together express a “life-force” which carries through the pre-philosophical litera-
ture, and enables, along with the Orphics, the 4th c. philosopher’s conception of
the immortally rational, personal soul. His study is extremely systematic, covering
every single instance of psuchù’s usage from Homer to Plato, and cannot possibly
be glossed here.
21
22
We might see the mighty Cyclops whom Zeus enlisted in his struggle to establish
this order as a precursor to the spirit element of the soul, in Plato and Aristotle,
which serves reason, a kind of divinity, in its rule over the appetites (the violence of
the chthonic Titans subdued by Zeus in the realm of Tartarus). For a discussion of
the institution of order in the Greek cosmos by Zeus, against the Titans, see Nor-
man Brown’s introduction to his edition of Hesiod’s Theogony, p. 20.
23
Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 22: The lawfulness of Olympus will be in-
fused into the human mind, which, in Homer, is constructed as a part of the order
they govern.
24
David Claus Toward the Soul, p. 7.
25
David Claus Toward the Soul, p. 7.
Homer, reflected in the world of Sophocles’ Oedipus, which the lit-

erature intervening between Homer and tragedy will confirm, as will
Aristotle’s psychology as late as the 4th century.
The nature of Homeric psuchù, essentially embodied and alive, re-
sists the kind of analysis I am skirting here as I try to align his innova-
tions with those static analyses of philosophy to come. Not only was
there no one soul to contain the personal life we now identify with the
entity, but perception, thought, feeling, these things we now think of
as somehow ‘inside’ the person were for Homeric man implicit in the
world each man shared with the rest. Seeing, for example, in the verb
derkesthai, denoted a “visual attitude” towards the world, an image
of the eye itself, as gleaming, or menacing, etc., and not the function
of the eye or the mind as such.26 It is an objective look someone has
which is seen in the eyes of another, or, other times, when the verb is
used with an object, a kind of visual beam which falls upon it, or cuts
through to it: what we might call a gaze or a stare. There is no first-
person seeing in the modern sense of a purely psychological function.
Like the other verbs for seeing, it expresses outward qualities of an
action, dependent on gesture and feeling, not an immaterial, passive
function of the mind or soul, or the seeing or knowing related to it. 27
Mind (Noos) was still too closely connected to the eye and this eye
to the world (as one body among others) to be itself a source of any-
thing.28 Seeing (idein) and knowing (eidenai) were determined by their
object. The same would be true for the passionate intellect of thumos
with which noos is often mingling. The difference for both of them
from other physical organs is so slight that they become merely other
elements of the person, an aggregate of bodily and quasi-psychological
parts which respond to the touch of the world upon them, the many
forces which penetrate him, each of which are connected with specific
actions, parts of the body, and types of experience (fiery menos in
ambitious limbs, for example, or defensive alkù in battle, sthenos in
the force of muscle, the kratos of the ruler, etc.). 29 Homeric man is a
26
Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, pp. 2 f.
27
28
29
Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 20. Cf. pp. 5-8. Like the disunity of the self or
soul, the body, too, which opposes it as an organic whole, has not yet been thought
of in Homer. “[T]he Homeric Greeks did not yet have a body in the modern sense of
the word; body, sķma, is a later interpretation of what was originally comprehended
as melù or guia, i. e., as limbs. Again and again Homer speaks of fleet legs, of knees
in speedy motion, of sinewy arms; it is in these limbs immediately evident as they
are to his eyes that he locates the secret of life.”
loose connection of living parts infused with bodily forces, drawn or

compelled by the shine or menace of the face of things, behind which
lay the surge and power of the gods, or by the gods themselves. He is
not yet the source of his own actions.30
There is an added irony in looking for Homer’s psuchù since the
soul in Homer only becomes active in death. It has no function in
the living man “except to leave him.”31 So long as the body breathes,
the psuchù lies within, imperceptibly dormant. Likewise, sķma, for
Homer, is only the corpse.32 The life of the body is divided between
the many forces and objects compelling the limbs, muscle, heart, eyes,
and other living organs, which are neither our body nor our soul. As
the body (sķma) is a corpse in which the formerly active limbs come to
rest as a generic whole, the soul is a “feeble double of the self.”33 Not
only is this soul not immortal, it “can hardly be said to live even, any
more than the image that is reflected in the mirror[.]”34 Both psuchù
and sķma, the separate entities of soul and body, as we conceive them,
Homer considered dead.
In addition to the departed shade, Homer sometimes uses the word
psuchù when “unmistakably we should say life.”35 This vague breath
unites the independent powers of the body in a generic “living.”36 It is
through the more original sense of breath that the shade and this life-
force were bound together. 37 The verb apopsuchķ, in Homer, meant to
breathe out. When we die, we breathe out the soul, a principal of animal
30
Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 31. In other words, he has no spontaneity of
the mind, will, or any purely spontaneous impulse of emotion.
31
32
33
34
Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 9. Cf. Charles Burnet Socratic Doctrine of the Soul, p. 142.
Rohde alludes here to Apollodorus, who described the soul as an eidolon or image
with “no more substance than the reflection of the body in a mirror.”
35
Cf. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 31 (59n).
36
Homer Iliad xxii. 161. Cf. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 51 (58n). Cf. Werner Jaeger The-
ology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 74. Homer often uses the word psuchù in
the sense of life. Rohde recognizes this usage, but projecting the famous passage
from Pindar back into Homer, discovers an indwelling soul in the person, freed in
dreams and in sleep. Jaeger, following Walter Otto’s landmark critique, reduces this
sense of psuchù to merely generic life. See Walter Otto Die Manen oder Von den
Urformen des Totenglaubens. Claus takes this to the extreme, reducing all the soul-
words in Homer to a mortal “life-force” which is nevertheless not identically a part
of the body.
37
Ernst Bickel Homerischer Seelenglaube, p. 259. As Jaeger explains, this connection,
now natural to any discussion of Homeric psuchù, was first made by Ernst Bickel.
Jaeger brings Rohde, Otto, and Bickel together in his discussion of the priority of
life shared by both man and all the lower species. 38 The flight of the soul
to Hades and the loss of this force of animal life easily coalesce in the
physical metaphor of the breath, and exhalation.39
Homer’s world is a kosmos, “a perfect organization such as men try
to establish in their earthly states.”40 But in certain isolated passages
of Homer, such as the funeral games, and the nourishment of the dead
with wine and flesh, as well as the cremation of the body along with a
man’s possessions, weapons, etc., the belief in a life for the soul after
death still peeks back at the reader, despite the poet’s veils, from a more
primitive past.41 These, Rohde believed, were the relics of an ancient
soul-worship, a more primitive, chthonic-daimonic cult.42 In Homer
these rituals occur only on “special and isolated occasions” and appear
to be only “half-understood.”43 Time has removed from us exactly what
led to the abandoning of this animistic cult of ancestor worship, the
“breath” over “life” and “shade” in the ordinary usage of soul-words in archaic
Greece.
38
Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 77. Homer uses thumos, how-
ever, almost exclusively for this principle of life in the lower animals, preserving the
language of psychù for man. The exceptions to this only reinforce the rule.
39
It is retained by the Orphic poets of the sixth century who represent the soul enter-
ing the child on the wings of the wind. Here, the Homeric conception takes its turn
towards the Socratic, and eventually the scientific psychology of Aristotle. This is
an important point, presupposing the connection between Homer and the Ionians,
especially Anaximenes, who had identified both intelligence and life with the air,
and, as we’ll see in part five of this chapter, made the Orphic adoption of the tradi-
tionally Greek philosophical impulse possible, preparing Greek soil conceptually
for the cultivation of a profoundly new and strange sense of psuchù whose coinage
we attribute typically to Socrates: our ‘true self,’ a personal divinity and immortal-
ity attributable to the rational element in us which is in some sense independent of
the body.
Whether the soul is immortal for Socrates is an imposing question, and not one
I pretend to answer here. But it was divine, rational, and apparently set against
the normal desires of the body. Though Rohde’s study excludes Socrates for just
this reason: a “doctrine” of immortality was not part of his teaching. Burnet’s, in-
fers a doctrine of immortality from the Apology, but not one essential to Socra-
tes’ project. Charles Burnet Socratic Doctine of the Soul, pp. 158 f. More recently,
Claus’s exhaustive philological study concludes that the Socratic “invention” of the
soul as the cognitive and moral identity of the individual does not until the Gorgias
become “the fully realized psychological version of the Pythagorean soul.” David
Claus Toward the Soul, p. 183.
40
41
Erwin Rohde Psyche, pp. 12-19.
42
By soul, Rohde apparently means any non-material double which survives the death
of the body, but not necessarily anything denoted by the word ‘psuchù’ itself.
43
belief in an animation of the souls of the dead after the body’s expira-
tion.44 But when the primitive past seeps through the cracks in this new
foundation, it does so as daimķn. Yet, for Homer, the arbitrary power
of individual daimones is limited both by the notion of an ordered fate
(moira) and by “the will of the highest of the gods.”45 There is a notori-
ous suppression in Homer of these aberrant powers, part of no larger or-
der, which disturb the authority of Zeus’ Dikù. The epic, then, provides
the germ of the Greek dialectic between reason and a more primordial
irrationality, which, in asserting itself, reason is forced to suppress:
The irrational and the unaccountable is the natural element of the belief in ghosts and
spirits; this is the source of the peculiar disquiet inspired by the province of belief or
superstition. It owes most of its effect to the instability of its figures.
The Homeric world, on the contrary, lives by reason; its gods are fully intelligible to
Greek minds and their forms and behaviour are clearly and easily comprehensible to
Greek imagination. And the more distinctly were the gods represented, the more did
the spirit-phantoms fade away into the shadows.46
The epic poet was of the same stock which “in a later age ‘invented’
(if one may be allowed to put it so) science and philosophy.”47 With
the chthonic opacity of the daimones removed, a near perfect order
was composed in which the soul-functions and their burgeoning meta-
physics could become clearly ordered, and orderable. Aristotle’s De
Anima, from this angle, is an amendment to Homer. In both Homer
and Aristotle the soul distinguishes itself from inanimate matter, first
as life, breath, and shade, as well as the spiritualized yet mortal body
of thought and feeling, and, later, as “the form of the living body.”
This “mental attitude was a distant threat to the whole system of that
plastic representation of things spiritual which the older antiquity had
laboriously constructed.”48
Tragedy, the art of terror before the unknown, would be the return
of reason’s primeval opponent in Greece for the last time.49 Luther
44
45
Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 29. See also E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational,
pp. 23 (65n), 42, 58 (79n). Dodds echoes Rohde, while rejecting the notion that
the Homeric Erinyes represent what was once an ancestor spirit. It is, though, an
element of the ancient notion of daimķn. When daimonic madness ensues, it is an
effect of some violation of cosmic order, a dispensation of moira.
46
47
48
49
Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 33-38. Now and then, as during the early stag-
es of Attic tragedy, the dark forces regain their power, and the terror of the mysteri-
ous asserts itself once more. The wonder in one’s eyes, before the Olympians, does
will reintroduce this enemy of reason to modernity, again, just as rea-

son itself is getting a foothold. Kierkegaard, in his spirit, charged with
both the light of Greek reason, the ecstatic daimķn and suffering of
the mysteries, and the imagination of the poet, will stage the tragic
contest on the invisible, inner stage of the infinite dwelling within
him. The construction of this inner stage, however, requires that the
self acquire a depth which, we’ve just seen, it never had in Homer. 50
Homer and the Lyric Poets: A “Psychology” of Conflict
In what sense were Homer and the lyricists to follow doing psychology,
addressing the same problem of the irrational that the philosophical
prose of ethics and politics would later take up as moral science? As
a rule, when a person is emotionally distressed, Homer neither names
nor analyzes the nature of the emotion. The Iliad’s Agamemnon is a
perfect example, overcome by distress, his army on the brink of ruin,
and unsure of which direction to turn:51
Agamemnon lay beyond sweet sleep, and cast about in tumult of the mind. As when
the lord of fair-haired Hera flashes, bringing on giant storms of rain or hail, or wintry
blizzard, sifting on grey fields –, or the wide jaws of dread and bitter war –, so thick
and fast the groans of Agamemnon came from his heart’s core, and his very entrails
shook with groaning. (X, 5-10)
This is one of two examples of the strife of anxiety in the Iliad. The
other involves the Achaeans as a group:
So Trojans kept watch that night.
To seaward
Panic that attends blood-chilling Rout
now ruled the Akhaians. All their finest men
were shaken by this fear, in bitter throes, as when a shifting gale
not affect the whole man as does terror before the daimonic. The eye distances the
gods of Olympus, making them objects of admiration, peers, almost, more remote,
but also familiar. This wonder and admiration for the Olympian order, which the
disordering terror of the daimonic necessarily interrupts, issued in philosophy.
50
Cf. Heraclitus, fr. B45, as trans. by Kathleen Freeman Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic
philosophers, p. 27: “You could not in your going find the ends of the soul (psuchùs),
though you travelled the whole way: so deep is its Law (logon).” The first discussion
of the psuchù per se as something with inner depth shows up in Heraclitus. As we’ll
see, the lyric poetry of Ionia and Aeolia will be an important precursor to this in-
vention of an infinitely deep, inner territory in man.
51
J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, pp. 38 f. This is one of two examples of anxiety
(l’angoisse) in the Iliad given by Romilly. The other involves the Achaeans as a
group, at ix. 4-8.
blows up over the cold fish-breeding sea,

north wind and west wind wailing out of Thrace
in squall on squall, and dark waves crest, and shoreward
masses of weed are cast up by the surf:
so were Akhaian hearts torn in their breasts. (IX, 1-10)
Emotion is presented forcefully, but this force is matched by the sim-

plicity, evidence, and externality of its cause. Homer divides a man
from himself neither in thought nor feeling. 52 When characters reflect,
Homer, in place of showing them in the train of thought, presents
them in conversation with themselves, as if they were two. 53 Charac-
ters dialogue with their thumos, or their kardia. Where we should find
a struggle against oneself, just as hesitation is broken by outside influ-
ence, either of the gods or companions, these errant forces come simi-
larly from the outside, as Athena calms Achilles in Song I, restraining
him from attack on his general, staying his sword through a psychic
intervention. 54 A true division in the self is so rare in early Greek lit-
erature generally that a single episode in Homer remained, as late
as the fourth century, the classic example of psychological torment.
Rapping himself on the chest to stay the murders for which his heart
literally cries out, Odysseus cries in reply, “patience, my heart!”55 The
scene returns three times in Plato (twice in the Republic [390d, 441bc]
and once in the Phaedrus [94d]) as a vision of the soul’s struggle with
itself. More so than the lover’s torments of the lyrics, it is this moment
in Homer which remained paradigmatic of psychic strife. But even
this example depicts the heart as a contestant which comes upon man
from without, not from within.
The lyric poet, like Homer, “inscribes the life of men in their actions
and reactions.” But the lyricists do introduce a few changes. They slow
things down, concerning themselves less with history and more with
perception and feeling, the aesthetic absolute of attunement to a mo-
ment, to an episode such as the close of Sappho’s wedding hymn:
… like the gods
… this thronged crowd
drove speedily … to Ilium.
The sweet piping flute mixed with the lyre
and the rattling of castagnets; brightly the
52
Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, pp. 19, 31.
53
J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 31.
54
J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, pp. 34 f. Romilly refers us here to Iliad i. 193-
200. “The Gods direct the game. And this fact rids the poet of the need to search
for psychological explanations.” Romilly, Patience Mon Couer, 37.
55
maidens sang a sacred song, the divine sound
reached the aether …
along all roads …
mixing bowls and platters …
myrrh and cassia and frankincense rose in the air.
The women raised a cry, those who were older,
and all the men raised a delightful song, triumphant,
calling upon the far-shooting lord of the Lyre, and they
sang of Hector and Andromache, like to the gods (GL, fr. 44). 56
Despite their unmatched sensitivity to impressions, the immensity of

their feeling, Greek lyric rarely expresses the life of the soul. It was
pithy, and less analytical than Homer. 57 With the exception of three
minor developments, the tendency to avoid psychologizing character
and action “shows clearly that no major difference has intervened
since the epic.”58 There is not much mention of psuchù in the popular
lyrics (elegiac and iambic poetry), and when there is, it is Homeric. 59
Homeric psuchù remains the touchstone, despite the growing depth
of mind and feeling in the lyric and the eternities of sensibility and
sensation they explored.
There were three developments in the lyric beyond Homer which pre-
pare the ground for the tragic problematizing of the relation between
the autonomy of human thought and feeling and the force of the world
and its gods driving man from without. First, some of these poets talk
about themselves in terms of “I,” exposing their feelings. “Wretched I
lie, dead with desire, pierced through my bones with the bitter pains
the Gods have given me” (EI, fr. 84), sings Archilocus in one epode.60
Second, while Homer had occasionally presented hesitation, and even
more rarely a conflict with externalized desires or feelings, lyricism in-
56
As cited and translated by Bruno Snell. Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind,
pp. 62 f.
57
58
59
Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 411. Jaeger also confirms Rohde. “It is only natural that the
poets imitating Homer should have retained his terms with their old significations.”
Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 79. Claus gives an
exhaustive list and analysis of its post-Homeric usage, and comes to the same con-
clusion. With relatively rare exception, the use is essentially Homeric. David Claus
Toward The Soul, ch. 2. Cf. p. 193, his index to citations of psuchù, for references to
fragments.
60
Cf. Archilocus EI, frs. 2 & 68: “In the Spear is my kneaded bread, in the spear my
Ismarian win, when I drink, I recline on the Spear”; “I long to fight with thee even
as when I am thirsty I long to drink.”
sisted on the fact that people often act in spite of themselves.61 Perhaps
it is in this experience of paradoxical feeling that the tincture of the
self first impresses itself on literature and thought: “Lo! I both love and
love not, and am mad yet not mad” (LG, fr. 104), sings Anacreon. The
lyrical self is a source of delayed or obstructed action, a place where
the memory or hope of action thrives poetically, as a kind of frustrated
longing. It is a place where tensions thrive between contrary desires,
such as Sappho’s “bitter-sweet Eros” (GL, fr. 130), part of the unstable
world in which the back and forth of Anacreon’s conflict flourishes.
Sappho, for example, writes of herself that she is divided between the
desire to speak and a shame that holds back her tongue (GL, fr. 137).
Finally, even in the evocation of an overwhelming love, the place
where lyric takes the most remarkable step forward, they have “re-
prised the Homeric principle which consists in describing the proper
emotion by evoking physical symptoms.” Instead of sentiments, Sap-
pho describes sensations, as the following fragment demonstrates
perfectly:62
For when I look at you for a moment,
then it is no longer possible for me to speak;
my tongue has snapped,
at once a subtle fire has stolen beneath my flesh,
I see nothing with my eyes, my ears hum,
sweat pours from me, a trembling seizes me all over,
I am greener than the grass,
and it seems to me that I am little short of dying (GL, fr. 31).63
The psychological in lyric is still the physical. It happens on the sur-

face of things. The source of these physical assaults is still the action
of the gods64 – a savage exteriority, as were the psychic interventions
in Homer. Eros and Aphrodite are capitalized, unable to fit within
the psychological miniature of the human breast or skull. The force of
love which the lyric expresses, having, yes, introduced the “I” in order
to evoke it even more tensely, is still centrifugal, directs the versifier
out towards the lover or the god, not inside towards a ‘self.’ They are
61
Sappho GL, fr. 1, 24: “she will love even against her want (ÈÍ×È ÃÆÃÉÍÇÑ¿)” adj.
trans.; fr. 94, 5: “truly I leave you against my will (¿ÃÈÍÇÑ’)”; cf. Theognis EI, 388:
“and, acting forcibly against his want, to carry much shame” (adjusted trans., ÒÍÉÊ¿
Âq ÍÓÈ ÃÆÃÉ×Ë ¿ÇÑÕÃ¿ ÎÍÉÉ¿ ÔÃÏÃÇË). Cited by Romilly in addition to other frag-
ments. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 47.
62
63
As cited in J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 50 (my trans. from the french).
64
Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, pp. 52 f. According to Snell, all of the violent
emotions, for the lyricists, were the result of the action of the gods.
always uncovering through their individual, lyrical person a greater

source of value, such as Justice in Solon, whose “price” should the
guilty escape “the pursuing destiny of Heaven,” is paid by their inno-
cent children or else by their seed after them.”65 It is Solonian Justice
which “paves the way for Attic tragedy,”66 generating “the very core
of the religious doctrine” which it dramatized a century later.67 The
lyrically ambivalent subject, divided in thought and feeling, anticipates
the ambiguous innocence of tragic guilt which Aristotle, we’ll find, re-
thinks in the purely cognitive terms of hamartia.
Sophocles and the 5th century
The tragic poet, Rohde writes, is “committed to the search for an ad-
justment between the mental attitudes of an older and a newer age.”
He must “assimilate and make his own the spirit that actually called
forth the dark and cruel legend of the past” to his own time.68 As we’ve
seen, these ‘ages’ can be classed in terms of the proto-philosophical
Homeric religion, well-ordered and perspicuous to the human mind,
and an older, daimonic religion which threatened and disturbed the
burgeoning rational order. No tragedian is as focused by this task of
reconciling them as Sophocles, with Aeschylus still rooted so liter-
ally in archaic religion, and Euripides overtaken by the philosophi-
cal spirit which ultimately triumphed over the age. Though Rohde
may have been too much a creature of his own time when he claimed
that ancient drama was “an artistic product based on psychological
interest,”69 he does have his reasons. In posing the modern question of
rational autonomy, the tragic poets must problematize human agency,
and, by implication, venture into the realm of psychology. Individual
psychology springs first from the moral quandary tragedy presented.
The Homeric soul remains an essential element in the popular con-
ception of the soul in the classical age with which both academic phi-
losophy and tragic poetry would have to contend. Along with Homer-
ic ‘life’ the idea of the soul in the fifth century confused several other
notions. The influence of a new form of religious belief contradicting
65
Solon EI, fr. 13, 28-32. Cf. fr. 4, 14-16. “Justice, who is so well aware in her silence of
what is and what hath been, and soon or late cometh to avenge.”
66
67
Werner Jaeger Paideia, vol. 1, pp. 144 f.
68
69
Homer’s already shows itself in the poetic and philosophic belief that
the unconscious activity of dreams and visions manifests a divinity
within man.70 The Homeric shade also mingled with the notion of the
living corpse which Homer had done his best to erase. Pindar can
speak of Hades conducting the mortal bodies of the dead to his un-
derworld estate and early Greek vases and later Euripides speak to us
of the psuchù dying.71 Add to this medley the idea of the soul as the
living self which appears to have cropped up first in 6th c. Ionia on
the graves of sailors, for example, and the writings of Anacreon, and
Semonides,72 and you have a mess of conceptual indistinction.
The concept of ‘soul’ in Sophocles, however, is much narrower in
scope and more easily managed. There is no mention of the living
corpse, and no immortal, divine substance repressed within the body.
The influences bearing on Socratic thinking about the soul’s personal-
ity and divinity had not penetrated the popular, earth-bound quarter
of tragedy.73 It is most similar to the initially Ionian and later Attic
conception of the living self, a trope for what in Homer went by the
name thumos.74 Sophocles’ psuchù can be the seat of many capacities,
like courage, passion, pity, anxiety, and appetite, but before Socrates,
and while he perambulated Athens, the soul was seldom, if ever, the
seat of reason.75 When the soul did constitute a self, it was a bodily self
whose imagination was strictly emotional. It did not experiment in or
identify with a purely rational reality independent of the body. The
70
E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 135 (3n). This belief shows up in
a fragment of Pindar’s, as emphasized by Rohde. Pindar The Odes of Pindar, fr.
131. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 415. Rohde also directs us to Xenophon Cyropaedia,
8.7.21, Plato Republic, 571d, and Aristotle Fragmenta, ed. by Rose, fr. 10.
71
E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 138 (18n). Dodds cites IG, I2.920;
Euripides Helen, 52; Euripides Daughters of Troy, 1214; Pindar Olympian Odes,
9.33 in The Odes of Pindar.
72
E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 138. This notion repeats in Sophocles.
Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, 64. It is used interchangeably with body (sķma) at
line 643 to refer to the person of Oedipus.
73
David Claus provides a close analysis of psuchù in the tragic poets. David Claus
Toward the Soul, pp. 69-85. He concludes that barring some exceptional instances
in Euripides, the soul has not yet, in the tragic lyric of the 5th c., taken on the quali-
ties of personal character which become essential to its development in Socratic and
post-Socratic thought.
74
See discussion on pp. 97 f.
75
E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 139. Dodds follows Burnet’s lecture,
“The Socratic Doctrine of the Soul.” This language would have been extremely
unusual to the ear of the 5th century Athenian, as Aristophanes satire in the Birds
and Clouds attests.
soul in Sophocles is no reluctant prisoner of the body; it is the “life or

spirit of the body, and perfectly at home there.”76 And so Sophocles
can speak of the soul as dwelling in the blood.77
It may be possible, however, to extract even a little more detail,
approaching something like technique, from Sophocles’ notion of
psuchù. In almost proto-Platonic fashion Sophocles’ Antigone con-
trasts the emotive self (psuchù) with two other elements of character:
intellectual judgement (gnomù) and moral judgement (phronema).78
Phronema seems to act as a middle term involving both, a kind of
gate passing between them, as Plato’s thumos will act as a mediator
between the purely reasoned activity of the logistikon and an unrea-
soning epithumia. Of course in Plato, and then Aristotle, all three
elements are inscribed within a single psuchù. Here the psuchù is part
of loose talk about the self which aligns it with two other elements in
a suggestively philosophical way. This only further demonstrates the
contrast, since the psuchù itself is one of the elements, as was thumos
in Homer, which also had a sort of umbrella function psychologically.
A single psuchù comprising the whole of a man is clearly absent.
Sophocles, more than any other poet, maps the interstices between
the germ of an inner life of freedom and rational responsibility, on the
one hand, developed by philosophy, and an opposing religious neces-
sity, a divine dikù contesting this autonomy of reason. He does this,
however, without any official training in either theology or philoso-
phy.79 The reasoned element for Sophocles would not have been the
philosopher’s psuchù, but, like Homer, most often the thumos, and
in some cases nous.80 The multifaceted entity of thumos along with
the other abilities typical of human life could not by any account be
interpreted as the single substance of individual character that the
soul becomes in the human-scientific imaginations and moral psycho-
logical techniques of 4th century philosophy. The moral substance of
a man which the educations of reason sculpt, imposing the shape of
it’s harmonies from without through a reason within, was not part of
Sophocles intellectual repertoire. Neither Homer nor the lyric poets
showed any sign of its psuchù, and it was they who conceptually set
the tragic stage.
76
E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 139
77
E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 159 (27n.). ÒÍÓÊÍË ÃÈÎÇËÍÓÐ ¿ÃÇ
ÖÓÕÅÐ ¿ÈÏ¿ÒÍË ¿ÇÊ¿ Sophocles Elektra, 785.
78
ÖÓÕÅË ÒÃ È¿Ç íÏÍËÃÊ¿ È¿Ç ÁË×ÊÅË. Sophocles Antigone, 176.
79
Rohde Psyche, p. 431.
80
See Romilly’s discussion of Sophocles, generally. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer.
Character Psychology and Strife in the Soul
How then can we speak of a tragic psychology without a psuchù to

identify the thinking person?81 As we observed in chapter one, the in-
ner life of thought and feeling and the outer realm of nature and the
gods intertwined in Oedipus’ world. The answer to this question lies
outside of the notion of soul, then, in the strict sense. It is found in-
stead in the literary evolution of the idea of personality, or character,
with which Socrates aligned the psuchù. It was the personal nature
of Socrates’ soul that revolutionized the concept, and not the immor-
tality assigned it by his student, Plato.82 As we’ll see with Sophocles,
we need not have a soul to explore character and disposition, though
the technique of the self which philosophy introduces will require it.
While Homeric man “is not yet thought of as the source of his act,”83
the tragic poet rethinks action in order to extend as far as his abilities
and inclination allow the degree to which individual responsibility can
be thought.
A new interest arose in the 5th century in what drives man from
within, and tragedy was the literary genre most committed to this
reflection on the sense of human acts.84 It examined through figures
like Sophocles’ Oedipus and Ajax, Euripides’ Hecuba, and Aeschy-
lus’ Clythemenstra the potentially disastrous conflict between the old
mysteries and violence on the periphery of the city (ritually explored
by adolescent boys as ephebes of Artemis the huntress, or the bac-
chant women on the mountain of Kithaeron) and the new reason, de-
marcating this outland of violence from the sanctioned order of the
polis. Tragedy’s manner of expression was the first attempt to animate
the individual agent artistically. This manner – the mask – forced the
inner regions of this persona into the open air. The art form empha-
81
J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 45. Romilly asks this question of Homer,
which given her work, would extend just as well to the lyric poets. It is in tragedy
that something which we might legitimately begin to call psychology first shows up.
But even here the nature of the soul is not at issue, as it will be for philosophy.
82
This is why Jaeger’s Paideia objects to Rohde’s study, which excludes Socrates for
this reason: a doctrine of immortality was not part of his teaching. See Guthrie’s
introduction to Psyche for the reply to Jaeger’s objection (and also Burnet’s, in “the
Socratic Doctrine of the Soul,” which is the same – though Guthrie doesn’t mention
it). Cf. Charles Burnet “Socratic Doctine of the Soul,” pp. 158 f. Burnet infers a doc-
trine of immortality from the Apology, but not one essential to Socrates’ project. In
addition, see note 39, ch. 2.
83
J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, pp. 45 ff.
84
sized the collective significance for the city gathered in the theatre.
It instinctively turned away from the intimacy of personal sentiment
explored earlier by the lyric toward the objective potency of action.85
Sophocles was especially well placed for the literary development
of ‘character’ which could only proceed once religious explanations
of human action were on the wane. This psychological interest and
the literary developments that accompany it are grounded in an un-
precedented interest in disposition as a source of human action. 86 This
finally is the sense in which psychology begins first with the moral de-
liberations of tragic lyric, and ethics, the science of human action first
opens the doors to interiority.87 It doesn’t matter that Oedipus never
chooses, that his character doesn’t affect the action, that the serious
psychological conflicts are always objective ones between opposing
characters, character and situation, character and the gods, never a
matter of characters at odds with themselves. The way that he un-
dergoes the action is a powerful comment on both his character and
the others with which he collides, such as Teiresias, and Creon. As
we saw in the first chapter it is not as a source of action – and so, in a
way, we are still with Homer – but rather as a reverberation of it that
an innovative psychological nuance first takes the stage of Greek life
in Sophocles. Suffering follows character. Though he doesn’t choose
his path, or have an interesting inner life, Oedipus the king is irre-
placeable, caught in the web of his past and future, and, as a literary
figure, the complex of tradition. Because of who he is, he suffers in an
exemplary way.
This occupation with ethical categories such as character, disposi-
tion, action, and the moral debates between characters, the language
of which tragedy borrowed from the legal and political discourse of
rhetoricians and sophists occupying the city, introduced a level of psy-
chological conflict unheard of in any previous genre, even more radical
than that of the lyricists.88 But Sophocles never analyzes the ‘nature’
of this conflict. He does not inquire into its mechanism. Feeling (more
often than not, suffering and despair) is presented concretely, actively,
as living in a way that still recalls Homer.89 Sophocles doesn’t explore
85
86
See Winnington-Ingram Sophocles: an Interpretation. Romilly, additionally, ar-
gues that the invention of the third actor was necessary in order to stage the debate
between characters qua characters. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, pp. 74 f.
87
J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, pp. 76 f.
88
89
‘who’ the character IS, his substance, or soul, but rather the moral
compass they carry, how they act, what kind of person they want to
be.90 Though the individual pain is real, resolution comes when one
yields to another, to a god, not, as with the philosophers to some, as
Aristotle, we’ll find, codifies for the first time into theory, when one
conquers oneself.
No one educates Oedipus and he never struggles with himself inter-
nally. This could be said of Sophocles’ characters in general. They are
never uncertain, or wavering in their actions.91 They are unified and
steadfast as characters. Aristotle was right: through their action, they
represent types of thinking. There are occasionally conflicting emo-
tions, but Sophocles consistently refuses to give his protagonists divi-
sions in the soul or self.92 They don’t have the formal nature93 which
a soul provides, which the philosophical mind will impute, and which
90
91
J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 82. See Sophocles Ajax, 457: “And now what
to do,” Ajax asks, return home, or go to Troy. But this is a false problem. The de-
cision, like all decisions in Sophocles, has been made ahead of time. It is oratory.
Both choices are unsatisfactory. He has already decided to die.
92
J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 83. See Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, 673-
675 (re: fluctuations of anger), 1303-1305 (re: the mix of fear and curiosity). In The
Trojan Women, Romilly observes, Hyllus acts despite himself. See the final scene,
where he burns his father, Heracles, on the pyre, and resolves to marry Iole, the
woman responsible for his mothers’ death and his father’s stricken condition – es-
pecially lines 1202-1208, 1230-1231.
As Dodds observes, line 176 of Antigone suggests otherwise, a hint perhaps of
the philosophical conception to come. Romilly also cites this line as evidence for a
possible counter-claim, in order to point out that these are not divisions in the soul,
but rather in the person, which includes the soul. Still, it pushes the boundary of her
claim that no such division exists, without necessarily contradicting it.
93
See C.E Hadjistephanou The Use of Physis and its Cognate in Greek Tragedy with
a Special Reference to Character Drawing. Hadjistephanou, in a systematic study of
Sophocles’ plays, concludes that physis is used consciously to “to describe character
either on the basis of duties and rights, or by virtue of general characteristics, or by
ascribing to them individual traits, his main concern being to portray characters of
noble birth and nature, and characters who display hubristic behaviour and are led
to destruction” (Abstract). Only class characteristics are relevant to our question,
and all of these are closely associated with the idea of birth, especially in cases of
nobility. “Nobility of nature always presupposes nobility of birth” (pp. 30 f.). The
original meaning from out of which the physis of individuals, in terms of character
traits, develops, likewise, is birth (p. 9). The usage breaks down into six clear-cut
categories relevant to character drawing: “birth,” “suggesting social rank and sta-
tus” which is tied to birth, “growth,” suggesting stages of it, as in the growth of
wisdom, “the ‘growth’ of man” as a species of life, “the differentiation of the sexes,”
“‘character’ or ‘nature’” which is either noble or of another specific trait. There
are no instances of “nature” used to describe something like the soul or essence of
any moral psychology in the full sense requires (as a moral substance
to mold).94 Aristophanes’ satirizing of Socrates’ language is our best
witness to how odd the language of the soul applied to the ‘true self’ of
normal consciousness would have seemed not only on stage, but in the
mouth of the ordinary Athenian.95 If we look at the plays themselves,
we see that thumos, an element of the Platonic soul, in the Tyrannus
strikes the soul like an arrow from without.96 Emotion, even speech
and thought, like the words of prophecy emanating from the earth or
the appeal of “the land (47-48)” which calls Oedipus its saviour, like
tragic knowledge, issues from a divine exteriority latent in all things.
Emotion such as thumos is there to justify or explain character and
action, never as a point of independent interest. The thumotic, for ex-
ample, for Oedipus’ chorus, are the unjust. It is with arrows of thumos
that the Gods punish these people. Emotion has an essentially dra-
matic significance.
man, as found in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle (see Hadjistephanou’s appendix of

extraneous usages of physis).
94
See Michel Foucault History of Sexuality, vol. 2, pp. 37, 88. Foucault breaks the
art of the self down to ontology, deontology, ascetics, and teleology. It is ontology
which gives us the ‘what’ that we are to shape. Also, in Oedipus Rex, for example,
the soul (psuchù) shows up three times, at lines 64, 727, 894. In none of these places
does it have a ‘psychological’ significance. It merely refers, as was common, to liv-
ing people, with an emphasis on emotional life. There are two noted exceptions in
the rest of the corpus, both in the Philoctetes, one of his latest plays. At line 55, a
psuchù is said to be capable of being entrapped by words, suggesting it is the seat
of knowledge. At line 1013, “the mean soul of Odysseus peering through crannies”
suggests it is the seat of character. Burnet cites both as exceptions to the rule, in the
5th century, where in “no other place is it even suggested that the ‘soul’ has any-
thing to do with knowledge or ignorance, goodness or badness, and to Socrates that
was the most important things about it. Charles Burnet “The Socratic Doctrine of
the Soul” in Essays and Addresses, pp. 156 f.
95
Aristophanes Birds, 1555; Clouds, 94. Aristophanes plays on the ambiguities be-
tween the traditional Homeric meaning of “ghost” and the Socratic identification of
the soul with the individual personality. Cf. Burnet, “The Socratic Doctrine of the
Soul” in Essays and Addresses, pp. 157, 160 f. To care for the soul would typically
have meant to be physically careful, to “mind one’s ghost.”
96
Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, 894: ÆÓÊÍÓ ÀÃÉÅ ÒÃÓÌÃÒ¿Ç ÖÓÕ¿Ð (shafts of passion
hitting souls). Here, the Chorus uses “souls” to mean individual people, who will
suffer passions, if the gods punish injustice; 63-4: ÃÊÅ ÖÓÕÅ. Oedipus uses soul here
to refer to the self which mourns, “equally for the city and for myself and for you.”
In both cases of use the “soul” is generically emotive; 727: ÖÓÕÅÐ ÎÉ¿ËÅÊ¿. Here
Oedipus refers to the loss of balance, emotionally, distinct from the stirring of the
mind also named. This coincides with the mourning and the passions in the first two
examples.
Sophocles does speak of man’s ‘nature’ in one sense. The ‘growth’

of man – his origins in a specific type of birth – which characterizes his
physis as a member of one of life’s species, as animals and plants also
distinguish themselves specifically with respect to life, implies that
man has certain natural limits which he should not transgress.97 Man’s
nature is distinct from the gods. The fortune of a character can stand
or fall on whether or not this limit is respected, namely, on the pursuit
of sophrosynù and the avoidance of hubris.98 Physis in this sense is still
tied closely to natural growth. The word is never used to characterize
a god, as part of a class or in any other way, since, for Sophocles, gods
are perfect and cannot ‘grow’ as men do.99 Physis as growth exempli-
fies the vegetal in man, as much as it is a word which in its Ionian
modifications points to what this nature, in particular, might be.
As with the cult of Dionysus from which tragedy grew, Sophocles
understood human life dialectically as part of a more primordial liv-
ing in which all things that grow and whose lives are eventually spent
are embedded.100 There is no content to man’s physis other than this
imperfection which being physikos represents. We are still a long way
conceptually from Aristotle’s devising the universal essence of man, a
soul defined by the unborn governance of reason over the unreasoned
animal elements with which it has been forced into collaboration.
What then will Aristotle as the first scientist of man make of this
Dionysian art that had insisted so awfully on man’s inevitable part in
the violences of nature, on the destruction of the human categories
ordering sexuality and violence, as well as Homer’s distancing of men
from the gods, especially in matters of reason?101 If tragedy is to be al-
lowed back into the city from which Plato barred it, the tragic view of
reason will have to yield to the universal pretensions of philosophical
97
See Sophocles Ajax, 758-761, and, regarding the use of reason, Antigone, 683-684
with 720-721. As cited by C. E. Hadjistephanou in The Use of Physis and its Cog-
nates in Greek Tragedy with Special Reference to Character Drawing, p. 53.
98
C. E. Hadjiestphanou The Use of Physis and its Cognates in Greek Tragedy with
Special Reference to Character Drawing, p. 54.
99
C. E. Hadjiestphanou The Use of Physis and its Cognates in Greek Tragedy with
Special Reference to Character Drawing, p. 25n1.
100
Karl Kerenyi Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, pp. xxxi-xxxvii.
Kerenyi explains what on page 239 he calls the “dialectic” immanent in the Diony-
sian outlook.
101
For Homer, mortality was something to enjoy while strong, and fortune was with
you, and then lament as life was taken away. In the Dionysian religion, death and life
intertwine in the ‘indestructible living’ of organic nature, capable not only of physi-
cal reproduction, but of ecstasies and visions. It had essentially divine properties.
knowledge.102 As a part of a universally rational nature, even Oedipus,

the most tragically excommunicated of figures, like all men, is gov-
erned by its logos. What he is – ‘human’ – will have to be redescribed
in a way that makes him, as much as any part of nature, and much like
a patient is for a doctor, intelligible.103
Before turning to Aristotle’s ethics and psychology, where he pur-
sues this science of the soul and human action, we first need to exam-
ine the Poetics’ complementary interpretation of tragedy.
102
Aristotle’s sympathy for tragedy ought to be seen within the context of Plato’s
rejection of the art form. See Republic, 606b, specifically on the threat of tragic
emotion. Aristotle claims that rather than exacerbating the emotions of pity and
fear, tragic provocation mollifies them.
103
See G. E. R. Lloyd In the Grip of Disease, pp. 176-179. Lloyd provides a discussion
of the relation of the doctor (iatros) to the natural scientist (physikos) in Aristotle,
and the naturalizing of medicine in terms of the physis of the Ionian philosophers.
For Aristotle, the investigation of first principles and causes of disease, as part of
nature, is the job of the natural philosopher as well as the doctor. The best doctors
must derive their principles from the study of nature. Cf. Aristotle OS, 436a17, and
OB, 480b22-4, as cited by Lloyd.
Chapter 3
Aristotle’s Poetics:
Oedipus and the Problem of Tragedy
Introduction
Aristotle’s Poetics, an incomplete set of lecture notes, is the first literary-

philosophical analysis of tragedy, the origin of aesthetics and the tradi-
tion of literary criticism to come. It gives us an unprecedented picture
of philosophy’s reception of the Dionysian art and the problem of the
irrational it presented in the violent and disordered life it brought to the
Greek stage. But Aristotle’s Poetics was written about 70 years after So-
phocles’ and Euripides’ death, and more than a century after Aeschy-
lus had exited life’s stage.1 Aristotle, then, is an audience member in an
empty theatre, whose stage has been abandoned. As a commentator on a
dramatic art that is no longer being performed, Aristotle’s place at criti-
cism’s hermeneutical beginning is doubly ironic, since it was the rise of a
philosophical (or, maybe more specifically, ‘sophistic’) sensibility in fifth
century Athens that put serious tragic lyric to death. Aristophanes in the
Frogs (406 B. C.) was the first to announce the death of tragedy:
Right it is and befitting
Not, by Socrates sitting,
Idle talk to pursue,
Stripping tragedy-art of
All things noble and true. (1491-1495)2
Aristophanes is writing about Euripides, whose ear for him was too
inclined towards the Socratic. It was through the influence of philoso-
phy upon tragedy and Greek life that the art form was corrupted and
forced into decline. 3 By examining what Aristotle makes of katharsis
1
John Jones On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy, p. 11.
2
Trans. by Snell. Bruno Snell The Discovery of the Mind, p. 113.
3
See Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 113. “The art had in fact been stripped
of its very existence, and it cannot be denied that philosophy was responsible for its
destruction.”
Aristotle’s Poetics: Oedipus and the Problem of Tragedy 71
and hamartia in the Poetics we can better situate his ethics and the
relevant psychology in relation to tragic lyric, and determine tragedy’s
legacy within philosophy’s moral and political science of the human
soul.
Aristotle’s Poetics devise a place for a sane Oedipus whose tragic
blow does not deprive him of self-knowledge – of who he is. In do-
ing this he redefines two crucial components of the tragic scheme:
hamartia and katharsis. Hamartia becomes unambiguously Oedipus’
own, part of a rational, anthropocentric world, something we can
comprehend and potentially control, as katharsis lapses into a pleas-
urable relief of emotion, no longer capable of spontaneously trans-
forming the individual from without as it had before in the ecstasies
of religious rite and the mystery cults of gods like Dionysus, as well
as on Sophocles’ stage. Aristotle, by, contra Plato, finding a place for
tragedy within the city walls, philosophically adopts the problem of
irrationality irrupting through Oedipus and the earth (gù, chthon)
beneath Thebes, ironically preparing a moral psychological inter-
pretation which eliminates the possibility of tragedy as Sophocles
originally conceived it. Something as basic as Aristotle’s tastes in
language, unable as he was to distinguish between the dissos logos of
sophistry and that of tragedy, demonstrates a typically philosophical
rejection of the essential ambiguities of tragedy, without which its
ironies, reversals, and inherent care for conflict fall flat. The Poetics
and Rhetoric completely neglect the deliberate use of ambiguity in
poetry, symptomatic in the poet’s hands of a logos which contests
itself implicitly, and of a figure like Oedipus composed of the differ-
ence or gap within it.4 Aristotle was undoubtedly a member of the
same squad which Aristophanes has Socrates and Euripides found-
ing together, neutering the gods upon which Sophocles’ tragic vision
of man depends. 5 The story of tragedy which we have today begins in
the expert hands of one of its killers.
4
See W. B. Stanford Ambiguity in Greek Literature, pp. 12-14 (on condemnation) &
p. 22 (on neglect). Poetic ambiguity in every case for Aristotle is a “regrettable acci-
dent” of “the reader’s ignorance or the poet’s incompetence,” writes Stanford (p. 69).
Poetry, like philosophy, deals with truth, and to be true is to be clear (saphes), or, put
another way, to be Greek. This excluded lexical ambiguities essential to Sophocles
and the Tyrannus especially, as Stanford shows in Ch. 11. The play contains more
than twice as many amphibolies as any of his other plays (p. 173).
5
John Jones On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy, pp. 13-15, and chapters iii-iv generally.
Jones argues persuasively that the tragic hero is a false imposition on Aristotle’s
text.
The Essence of Tragedy: Katharsis and Hamartia
This makes the Poetics a kind of autopsy. Fittingly, it is the model

of the organism, the living whole, which guides Aristotle’s analysis.
Tragedy ceased to change, he writes, once it acquired its own nature
(1449a14).6 It will have to be understood in terms of function and aim,
as, for Aristotle, do all living things. The link between the art of the
poet and the nature which the art inspects, the shape to which it fits its
craft (which, like all art, it imitates), marks a break in Aristotle’s un-
derstanding of poetry with the irrational influence of divine inspira-
tion in the tradition before him. This “old story” of which Plato speaks
in the Laws (719c) surfaces most clearly in the Phaedrus’ divine bless-
ings of madness, their violent alteration of established social norms
connected with Dionysus’ vintage, one of which is the gift of poetry
(244a-245a).7 But we can trace it back at least as far as Democritus
in the 5th century (frs. 17 & 18) who cites Homer as an instance (fr.
21). Aristotle’s rational nature governing both poetry and the poet
replaces the gods and their madness as the source of what becomes a
poet’s mimetic skill.8
The Katharsis Passage
Aristotle identifies the form of tragedy which the poet imitates in its
“tragic effect [tùs tragķdias ergon]” (1450a30-31), the source of end-
less circling by scholars around a passage which is not likely, barring
the discovery of the hypothetical missing book of the Poetics, to be-
come any clearer:
6
Cf. Aristotle Po., 1449a23: Nature discovers the metre suitable to dialogue, when
dialogue comes into being; Po., 1451a9: The limit of the size of a drama corresponds
with the nature of the material. Po., 1460a4: Nature itself teaches the poet to choose
the proper metre for an epic structure. Cf. Stephen Halliwell Aristotle’s Poetics,
pp. 82-96, on physis and its role in the technù of poiesis.
7
Plato Phaedrus, 265a: Divine madness is produced ÓÎÍ ÆÃÇ¿Ð ÃÌ¿ÉÉ¿ÁÅÐ Ò×Ë
ÃÇ×ÆÍÒ×Ë ËÍÊÇÊ×Ë. Poetic madness is linked to Dionysus’ wine by Cratinus, and its
retrieval by Horace “made it a commonplace of the literary tradition.” According
to Cratinus, writing even before Democritus, the best poets have been inspired by
wine. E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 101.
See Cratinus, fr. 199k. Horace Epistles 1.19.1.
8
See Stephen Halliwell Aristotle’s Poetics, pp. 83-87. Before Aristotle, Plato, in both
the Phaedrus and Ion, writes of the madness of poetic inspiration, and the lack of a
technù. Their lack of knowledge also shows up in Apology 22b-c, and Meno, 99c-d.
A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magni-
tude, complete in itself; in language with pleasurable accessories, each kind brought
in separately in the parts of the work; in a dramatic, not in a narrative form; with in-
cidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions
(tķn toioutķn pathematķn katharsin). (1449b24-8)
Aristotle goes on to explain which plot lines will be most effective in

producing the tragic effect. It is within the context of this discussion
that he hits upon the tragic guilt or error of hamartia. A good man
should not pass from good fortune to bad. A bad man should not tread
the reverse path. Neither will arouse pity (eleon) or fear (phobon) or
inspire “the human feeling [philanthropon].” Extremely bad men fall-
ing into grave misfortune are also to be eschewed, because while this
may arouse the human feeling it likewise fails to produce the tragic
emotions of pity and fear.
There remains, then, the intermediate kind of personage, a man not pre-eminently
virtuous and just, whose misfortune, however, is brought upon him not by vice and
depravity but by some error of judgment, of the number of those in the enjoyment of
great reputation and prosperity; e. g. Oedipus, Thyestes, and the men of note of similar
families. (1453a4-12)
The katharsis of emotions producing the tragic effect, and the hamar-
tia of the play, though logically distinct, are unified in this turn of fate
which Aristotle calls reversal (peripateia).
The degree of pity and fear to which Aristotle continually returns
depends on the way in which the poet accomplishes this reversal. The
“incidents of pity and fear” which the poet imitates “have the very great-
est effect on the mind when they occur unexpectedly and at the same
time in consequence of one another; there is more of the marvelous [to
thaumaston] in them than if they happened of themselves or by mere
chance” (1452a4-6). In an ideal plot such as that of Sophocles’ Tyran-
nus, reversal and discovery (ANAGNķRISIS) on stage and katharsis in the
audience will coincide. The discovery and the reversal “will arouse ei-
ther pity or fear – actions of that nature being what tragedy is assumed
to represent; and it will also serve to bring about the happy or unhappy
ending” (1452a39-b3). If plot is the life and soul of the tragedy, then the
reversal and discovery are the center of its force (1450a33-5). In the Tyr-
annus, Oedipus himself is the site of reversal and discovery, the place
where plot twists in the ideal way. “The marvellous” or “the wondrous”
is maximized in him and has a reciprocal effect on the tragic emotions
(1452a4-6). Though this wonder is a “pleasure,” it alone does not quali-
fy as tragic. “Not every kind of pleasure should be required of a tragedy,
but only its own proper pleasure” (1453b10-12).
Depending upon who is doing the chronicling there have been up to

six interpretations of the katharsis associated with this pleasure.9 The
earliest period (neo-classicism) interpreted the effect in moral terms.
On this view tragic katharsis taught us how to be virtuous, to avoid
misdeeds and the suffering they cause.10 A similar but different view
is that katharsis actually generates “emotional fortitude.” Aristotle
suggests as much in the Rhetoric (1383a4-5). By exposing ourselves to
catastrophe, and surviving, we are less likely to fear it in the future. A
sort of homeopathy for the soul, it is a “loosely stoical view” with ad-
herents dating back to the Italian Renaissance.11 A third group, also,
like those concerned with moral psychology, relates katharsis to the
cultivation of the mean found in Aristotle’s ethics.12 But the last great
9
See Halliwell’s Aristotle’s Poetics. In the following notes, I follow the appendix,
generally.
10
It appears first in Italy, with Segni and Maggi, and later in the Frenchmen Corneille,
Rapin, and Dacier. The same idea emerges in England in the work of Dryden and
Johnson.
11
For example, see the work of Robortello, Minturno, and Castelvetro.
12
Stephen Halliwell “The Poetics and its Interpreters” in Essays on Aristotle’s Poet-
ics, p. 418 f. This theory dates back to the Italians Vettori and Piccolomine, later,
the Dutch Heinsius, and most famously, Lessing, who interprets the term in its re-
ligious sense of purification. Lessing’s view drew on Heinsius’ recognition of the
connection between emotion and virtue. Though Lessing breaks with much of the
moralizing of earlier interpretations, he still connects katharsis with the mean of
the Nicomachean Ethics. For Lessing, this purifying katharsis metamorphoses pas-
sions into virtues. He placed Aristotle’s comments alongside those on pity and fear
in Rhetoric ii.5 & ii.8, and connected these tragic emotions with moral persuasion.
See Lessing Hamburgische Dramaturgie, ed. by Fricke, p. 332, as cited by Bernays
“Aristotle on the Effect of Tragedy” in Articles on Aristotle, vol. 4, ed. by Jonathan
Barnes.
The theory still has live variants, in Halliwell, for example, and Janko, perhaps
its foremost representative. See Richard Janko “From Catharsis to the Aristotelian
Mean” in Articles on Aristotle, vol. 4, ed. by Jonathan Barnes, pp. 346 f., 352. Janko
notes that other critics neglect the intellectual component of phronùsis in feeling
the emotions properly. He combines the intellectual and the emotive in support of
the view that tragedy conduces us to the mean of the Nicomachean Ethics, “giving
us universal patterns of action,” enhancing both phronesis and moral virtue. But if
Lear’s objection stands, that tragedy for Aristotle always preserves the distinction
between mimùsis and reality, then Janko’s view is untenable. It would train us to
feel the wrong things at the wrong time, he argues, since drama is not homologous
to real life. Jonathan Lear “Katharsis” in Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. by A. O.
Rorty, p. 320.
Goethe is the forerunner of the “dramatic or structural” interpretation, the
fourth, in which katharsis is perverted from the audience to the play. While the
theory, of which Else and Kitto are both modern proponents, is, given the evidence
in the Politics, as untenable as the first three, it does eliminate the moral teleologies
coup in the katharsis argument was raised by Bernays, who, first to

emphasize its link with Politics VIII, argued in his famous article of
1857 (“Aristotle on the Effect of Tragedy”) that katharsis ought to
be understood as a physiological metaphor, a medical purging, rather
than one from religious ritual, or lustration.13 Not only did he trans-
form the debate among scholars of Aristotle, but, as Freud’s uncle
in-law, he seems to have influenced Freud and Breuer in the formative
stages of psychoanalysis.14 While earlier interpreters (such as Mint-
urno, Milton, and Dacier) may have applied a kind of medical analogy
to their moral readings, Bernays liberated the therapeutic view from
its moral parent, to which it had been something of an ornament. It
is his view which still dominates the scholarly landscape in one form
or another. Placing the Poetics side by side with the Politics makes it
impossible to locate tragic katharsis in the play, as had Goethe, strug-
gling against the moral reading. Katharsis concerns emotions in the
soul. It also eliminates the purification metaphor which Lessing’s in-
terpretation borrowed from religious cult, replacing it with the medical
one of purgation. But finally how the word functions metaphorically
(medically, morally, religiously, and in the general senses of cleansing
or separation) both within and outside of the corpus leave us stranded
on an island of generality from which there is no hope of escape. That
the preponderant use of the word katharsis in Aristotle, for example,
refers to menstrual discharge, remains a problem for Bernaysians.15
they artificially imposed. This was the motive, after all, for Goethe’s forcing kathar-
sis from the audience to the play. In “Aristotle on the Effect of Tragedy,” Bernays
comments on the clear mistranslation of the passage he was forced into in order
to accomplish this relocation, making of katharsis a “balancing” in the mimùsis
(p. 155). See Goethe Gesaumtausgabe vol. 15, ed. by W. Rehm, pp. 897-900.
A mention should also be given to the doctrine of intellectual katharsis, which re-
duces the process to inference and the intellectual clarification of the plot. L. Golden
is the first and best known advocate of this underdog view. See L. Golden “Mimesis
and Catharsis” in Classical Philology 64. Golden argues that katharsis is merely
intellectual clarification, excluding the emotions. Pleasure becomes cognitive.
13
See I. M. Bywater Aristotle on the Art of Poetry, p. 152 on 1449b27. Bywater makes
this basic distinction in lines of interpretation between the physiological and the
religious metaphors. He favors the first, as do I. Whether or not this purgation has
a moral value or not will have to be settled. Bywater, and later, Lear, reject this no-
tion. Both Janko and Halliwell represent the opposition.
14
Bennet Simon Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece, pp. 140-3.
15
Jonathan Lear “Katharsis” in Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. by A. O. Rorty, p. 315.
In the politics, it is true, medical purgings (iatreias) are used as a

metaphor for katharsis (Pol. 1342a5-17).16 But read closely they ought
to lead us to the view peculiar to Aristotle, which is ultimately non-
pathological.
For any experience that occurs violently in some souls is found in all, though with dif-
ferent degrees of intensity – for example pity and fear, and also religious excitement
(enthousiasmos); for some persons are very liable to this form of emotion, and under
the influence of sacred music we see these people, when they use tunes that violently
arouse the soul, being thrown into a state as if they had received medical treatment
and taken a purge; the same experience then must come also to the compassionate and
to the timid and the other emotional people generally in such degree as befalls each
individual of these classes, and all must undergo a purgation and a pleasant feeling of
relief; and similarly also the purgative melodies afford harmless delight to people (my
italics).
Aristotle likens the healing which tragic poetry supplies to the musical
cure of enthusiasmos in the familiar cults of the time, especially those
of Phrygia, where the flute dominates.17 He repeatedly connects the
flute and the Phrygian mode, as well as the Bacchic orgù and the dithy-
rambic rhythms of its music with this violent enthusiasm of emotion
and the “pleasureable relief [kouphizesthai hùdonùs]” from kathar-
sis.18 The violent emotions of pity and fear occur within the context of
these kathartic songs, referring us back to the pleasurable katharsis
of tragedy and connecting the cathartic ritual of Dionysiac cult (and
other related cults, such as the Corybantic rites, and those of phrygian
Kybele) with tragic theatre.19 Theatrical music in particular provides
16
I. M. Bywater Aristotle on the Art of Poetry, 155-59. The context presents “a whole
series of words which either have or may have a medical meaning.” The pleasure
of healing is connected with EN, vii.13 1152b34; vii.15 1154b17. Bywater’s com-
mentary provides a list of other classical writings, beginning with the physicians, in
which the katharsis of “x” (a similar construction) is found.
17
Walter Burkert Ancient Mystery Cults, p. 19 (32n). Burkert testifies that Pol.,
1342a8 implicitly refers to the Corybants.
18
The Phrygian melodies of the bard, Olympus, are said to excite the soul to enthusi-
asm, and, by implication, to have an effect on character, which is of the soul. Pol.,
1340a6-7. He later writes that the Phrygian mode makes one enthusiastic, as does
the flute. Pol., 1340b5. They are not fit for the purpose of ethics, but for that of
orgiastic katharsis. ÃÒÇ Âq ÍÓÈ ÃÑÒÇË m ¿ÓÉÍÐ ÅÆÇÈÍË ¿ÉÉ¿ Ê¿ÉÉÍË ÍÏÁÇ¿ÑÒÇÈÍË
oÑÒÃ ÎÏÍÐ ÒÍÇÍÓÒÍÓÐ ¿ÓÒ× È¿ÇÏÍÓÐ ÕÏÅÑÒÃÍË ÃË ÍlÐ k ÆÃÍÏÇ¿ È¿Æ¿ÏÑÇË Ê¿ÉÉÍË
ÂÓË¿Ò¿Ç Å Ê¿ÆÅÑÇË. Pol., 1341a21-24. Pol., 1342b4-12 seals the connection between
Bacchic dithyramb, the flute, and the phrygian mode.
19
E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 76. Early Dionysiac ritual, Dodds be-
lieved, was essentially cathartic, in the psychological sense. He refers us to Euripi-
des Bacchae, 77, though the meaning of “purification” remains ambiguous: “Bless-
ed are dancers and those who are purified, who dance on the hill in the holy dance
the pleasurable relief of katharsis, democratically, without prejudice,

for both the healthy and the sick, the virtuous few and the uneducated
masses, to whom Aristotle goes on to extend the added pleasure of re-
laxation, a kind of entertainment in which the pain of work is relieved
(Pol. 1342a17-29, 1339b38-39) – recalling perhaps Pindar’s Dionysus
who “breaks the rope of heavy cares” (fr. 248).
Since the pleasure of katharsis occurs for everyone purgation can-
not be pathological in Bernays’ sense. Not only would pathologizing
katharsis elide the distinction between healthy and sick, it would also
of the god.” Cf. Parker Miasma, p. 288 (36n): Plato’s Euthydemus 277d attests to
the cathartic rite of thronķsis practiced by the Corybantics; Pindar speaks of “the
mother” as kathartria tùs manias, at Pythian Odes 3.139b in The Odes of Pindar,
and Diodorus, at 3.58.2, of a Kybele more generally who “invented purifications for
sick animals and children.”
But there is little evidence for a healing Dionysus in the historical period, writes
Parker. What evidence there is he gathers from The Greeks and the Irrational,
pp. 95, 87n, where Dodds refers us to Plato’s Laws 815cd. Plato rejects as not suit-
able for the life of the polis certain Baachic dances which were performed ÎÃÏÇ
È¿Æ¿ÏÊÍÓÑ ÒÃ È¿Ç ÒÃÉÃÒ¿Ñ ÒÇË¿Ñ. Along with Linforth “Telestic madness in Plato,
Phaedrus 244de” in University of California Publications in Classical Philology 13,
Parker takes Phaedrus 244e as a reference to Baachic/Corybantic rites which re-
lease from madness through homeopathic katharmoi and teletai (though Dionysus
is never mentioned). This, says Dodds, is the usual story since Rohde. See Erwin
Rohde Psyche, p. 287. Rohde found that Plato had the Melampus story in mind,
who “healed the Dionysiac madness of the Argive women ‘with the help of ritual
cries and a sort of possessed dancing.’” See Apollodorus The Library 2.2.2, as cited
by E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 77. Lastly, the cult of Dionysos
iatros was said to have been recommended to the Athenians by Delphi. See Ath-
enaeus, frs. 22e, 36b. Other authors cited by both Dodds and J. Croissant Aristote
et les mysteres, p. 121, such as Aristides Quintilianus de Musica, 3.25 and Servius
ad Georgics, 1.166, 2.389, who connects Dionysus to an emotional-psychological
katharsis, already bear the influence of Aristotle’s famous theory of katharsis, and
so mislead us as clues to its background. Robert Parker Miasma, pp. 288 (38n).
Walter Otto, on the other hand, rejects the therapeutic thesis outright: “The mad-
ness which is called Dionysus is no sickness, no debility in life, but a companion of
life at its healthiest.” Walter Otto Dionysus: Myth and Cult, p. 143. The argument
rests largely on the observation that the god, not just his initiate, is mad. Vernant,
likewise, preserves Dionysus as a celebrant of life, not a doctor. For them, he is the
bearer of an ecstasy which unifies god and man, temporarily destroying the bounds
of the individual and granting him a god-like experience of the world. This may
have more to do with the difference between the more primordial cult of the god
and the mysteries emerging later, at the time of the politicization of Greek life. See
J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “The Masked Dionysus” in Myth and Trage-
dy in Ancient Greece, p. 388, which appeals to Plato’s clear destinction at Phaedrus,
265 between healing ecstasies and those of Dionysus. Cf. Karl Kerenyi Dionysos:
Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life. In its 400+ pages, Kerenyi never discusses
a therapeutic function for Dionysian madness.
imply that the virtuous were pathological. This, for Aristotle, is im-
possible.20 Emotions, as well, for Aristotle imply an “orientation to the
world,” require “belief” as well as “feeling.” 21 And so reading purga-
tion in the medical sense of a physical expulsion again cannot be right.
Since the simple release of emotions for Aristotle is not in itself pleas-
urable, katharsis in the proper sense must explain why a particular
kind of emotional expression evoked musically is pleasurable.22 Just as
musical entertainment and relaxation as well as the musical ordering
of the soul are naturally pleasant (as music is generally), the pleasure
of katharsis is another natural propensity music brings to the table of
Aristotelian psychology. It ought to be understood as a certain kind of
pleasure, connected at least by analogy with emotional violence and
relief (perhaps like relaxing amusement is for the strife of work), one
especially suited to tragedy’s dramatic mechanism (mùchanù) and the
pity and fear it evokes. 23
Admittedly, the picture of katharsis as a psychic pleasure rooted in
specifically tragic music is still somewhat obscure. But our real con-
cern is the relation between katharsis and the moral-psychological
question of character. Fortunately, the Politics’ discussion of katharsis
concerns the moral significance of music. Through it we move one step
closer to mapping the central mechanism of tragedy onto the motions
of ethics. Music in general for Aristotle has four possible uses: educa-
tion (paideian), amusement (paidian), pastime (diagogù) or katharsis
(Pol. 1339b13-15, 1341b32-9).24 The moral question bears on the rela-
tion between katharsis and education. These four musical functions
20
Jonathan Lear “Katharsis” in Articles on Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 317.
21
Jonathan Lear “Katharsis” in Articles on Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 317. See Aristotle
Rhetoric, ii.5 and ii.8, as this pertains to pity and fear. For a discussion of the cogni-
tive role of emotions more generally in Aristotle, see Matha Nussbaum The Fra-
gility of Goodness, pp. 307-309. Regarding the non-medical interpretation, Lear
adds that Aristotle shows no signs of familiarity with homeopathic cures, which is
how tragic katharsis is said to proceed. Rather, his work always explains medical
cures allopathically. Halliwell says the same. Stephen Halliwell Aristotle’s Poetics,
p. 193. EN, 1104b17; EE, 1220a36. Cf. EN, 1154a27-31; 1154b12-15; EE, 1220b30;
Pol. 1337b41; 1339b17. Cf. Croissant’s discussion. J. Croissant Aristote et les Mys-
teres, pp. 49-58.
22
Jonathan Lear “Katharsis” in Articles on Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 328.
23
For a discussion of the natural character of katharsis in the Politics and Poetics,
which comes to generally the same conclusion as I have, see G. E. R. Lloyd In the
Grip of Disease, pp. 187-193.
24
Amusement is later removed, in the second passage of these two passages, and
katharsis added. Although amusements and pastimes could be more or less inter-
changeable.
carried out by both melody and harmony relate, he says, either to

ethics and character (ta ùthika), actions (ta praktika), or enthusiasms
(ta enthousiastika) (Pol. 1341b32-39 [re: melodies], 1342a2-5 [re: har-
monies]). He links katharsis primarily with enthusiasms, and these,
through both Bacchic rite and “theatrical music,” at least indirectly
with tragic theatre and dramatic action. In both cases the religio-moral
and therapeutic purifications pervading Greece in the late archaic and
early classical period are dimmed to the vanishing point (as Homer
himself once suppressed Dionysus and the daimones). The spontane-
ous ecstasies of the mystery cults, the more sober initiations of Eleusis,
as well as the devoted training in god-like ways of life (bioi) among
the Orphics and Pythagoreans have been rinsed away. Tragic katharsis
becomes a kind of aesthetic pleasure with certain emotional features,
a “psychological interpretation” of the phenomenon of ritual with
the aid of a loosely medical analogy.25 Distinguishing the educational
value of Dorian melodies and harmonies (Pol. 1342a28-30) from the
enthusiasmic katharsis inspired by the Phrygian mode (Pol. 1342a11),
Aristotle groups them generally into “ethical ones for education” and
those concerning action and enthusiasm “for listening to when others
are performing (Pol. 1342a1-5).” He rejects the Republic’s bringing
the Dorian and Phrygian together for education, because the Phry-
gian mode “has the same effect among harmonies as the flute among
instruments – both are violently exciting and emotional” (ÍÏÁÇ¿ÑÒÇÈ¿
È¿Ç Î¿ÆÃÒÇÈ¿, Pol. 1342a33-1342b4). Enthusiasmic melodies and har-
monies are clearly set off from ethical melodies and harmonies, as the
musical purpose of katharsis, which, along with amusement, brings a
kind of pleasant relief, was set apart from moral education. 26 Not only
is there no direct link between katharsis and ethics or politics, Aris-
totle tells us directly enough that these enthusiasmic purgations are
dinstinctly unethical (Pol. 1341a21-24). Just as Aristotle’s tuchù is a
condition for eudaimonia but categorically distinct from it, 27 the trag-
ic katharsis triggered by the operations of tuchù is set apart from the
sphere of ethics, whose moral-scientific object will be the soul in which
25
See Stephen Halliwell Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 194.
26
Aristotle Po., 1342a21-25. Aristotle actually recommends that the musician use un-
ethical music to please the vulgar, whose souls, “warped from the natural state,” are
best pleased by “those harmonies and melodies that are highly strung and irregular
in coloration …”
27
See Aristotle Po., 1452b34. Tragic action concerns tuchù. For the distinction be-
tween tuchù, which concerns external goods, and virtue, see EN, 1124a12-31.
eudaimonia thrives, defended with the proper training against the po-
tential miseries of tragic catastrophe.
The Hamartia Passage
Through the secular metaphor of medicine, Aristotle reinterprets the

religious katharseis of the centuries before him in terms of emotional
provocation, psychologizing a religious rite. 28 In connection, hamar-
tia, another term heavy with religious signification in the 5th century,
and moral-legal weight in the century to follow, the centerpiece of the
mechanism of this tragic effect, will be similarly neutered. The recon-
ception of tragic guilt by Aristotle accomplishes the expulsion and
secularizing of the destructively religious element natural both to the
God of tragedy and the Sophoclean art, rethinking hamartia in light
of a secular-rational ethics and psychology.
The interpretation of the hamartia passage has been fraught with as
much controversy as the concept of katharsis, which should come as
no surprise. The two ideas are intimately linked. The moralizing in-
terpretation, again, was the first to prevail, and in the same commen-
tators determining the fate of katharsis.29 The Italian Renaissance set
a moral tone which would take centuries to correct. 30 These are the
tides which carry to France, along with Vettori’s specious introduc-
tion of the “tragic flaw” in his 1560 commentary, where the two mis-
interpretations take complementary and near permanent root. In the
century to follow, in France, the bastard notion of tragedy’s poetic jus-
tice is born from the combined influence of Seneca and the medieval
mystery-plays. The French Academie thought hamartia as the right-
eous punishment of evil, sins, or moral fault, 31 consenting to a new and
28
See David Claus Toward the Soul, p. 154. The medical writers anticipating philoso-
phy’s technù of the soul identify its disturbances with an internal physis which is
“fundamental and single,” excluding any “demonic and external” sources.
29
In tracing the scholarship on hamartia I follow Bremer’s exhaustive account almost
completely.
30
Valla’s 1508 translation was the starting-point of interpretation. He renders hamar-
tia “per flagitium et scelus” (through misdeed and impiety). The word soon takes
the leap directly to “peccatum” (sin) in Pacci’s influential 1536 translation, though
this sin is also coupled with imprudentia, “a lack of information of foresight.”
31
The pillar of this influence was Mesnardierre. Corneille and Racine insist on the
moral fault of the agent, some “fatal weakness” of character, as did Rapin, and, the
decisively influential commentary of Dacier: “Les vices d’Oedipe sont l’orgueil, la
violence & l’emportement, la temerité & l’imprudence.”
unambiguous interpretation of hamartia as “fatal passion or vice.”32

The English schools under heavy French influence followed a similar
trajectory, via the work of Rymer, who actually coined the term “po-
etic justice” in his 1678 essay The Tragedies of the Last Age. 33 Yet, that
hamartia means wrongdoing is made impossible both by what Aristo-
tle actually has to say about tragedy34 and by the relevant sections of
the ethical works, which I will soon examine. 35
What did Aristotle actually write? The context, following the pas-
sage on katharsis, is still Poetics XIII, where plot and the type of trag-
ic figure best represented are under discussion:
There remains, then, the intermediate kind of personage, a man not pre-eminently
virtuous and just, whose misfortune, however, is brought upon him not by vice and
depravity but ÂÇq gÊ¿ÏÒÇ¿Ë ÒÇË¿ [through some hamartia], of the number of those in
the enjoyment of great reputation and prosperity; e. g. Oedipus, Thyestes, and the men
of note of similar families. (1453a6-1453a12)
The plot and the tragic figure at its center, destroyed through an act
of hamartia, should be tailored to the production of pity and fear.
Oedipus is not so much a person as he is a hamartia delivery system, a
moving, empty center within the motions of the play, who through his
vulnerability to hamartia and its disastrous consequences reveals the
pitiable and the fearful to the audience.
Since the tradition after Aristotle is suspect, it is helpful to search
both before and within Aristotle’s work for a proper translation. In
addition, semasiological study of the word group in general can place
Aristotle’s hamartia in relation to that of tragedy. Aristotle must have
32
J. M. Bremer Hamartia, p. 80.
33
Dryden concurs with Rymer, and John Dennis carried the “banner of Rymerian
criticism” into the next century (Though Addison raised objections to “this ridicu-
lous doctrine” his tune did not carry).
34
For a comprehensive discussion of modern scholarship on hamartia, see J. M.
Bremer Hamartia, pp. 91-98. The moralizing interpretation of hamartia was first
challenged, somewhat ambiguously, by Vahlen’s Beiträge (1865). Following Vahl-
en’s reading of the term as “ignorance,” Bywater’s 1909 commentary develops and
further establishes this view. But it was not until O. Hey’s semasiological study of
1927, “Hamartia” in Philologus, 83, writes Dawe, that the moral interpretation of
hamartia was “killed stone dead.” See R. D. Dawe “Some Reflections on Ate and
Hamartia” in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 72, p. 90.
35
It remains to discuss the 19th century tradition of interpretation, German philoso-
phy and “Tragsiche Schulde.” But this will best figure as an introduction to the
siginificance of tragedy in Kierkegaard, as a member of this group. In any case, it is
more germane to philosophical topics than to the philological question of hamartia
in Aristotle and Attic tragedy. I will postpone its significant details to the beginning
of the next chapter.
been aware of one special legal connotation of hamartia, an exculpa-

ble mistake, as opposed to the punishable offense of adikùsai. 36 This
meaning derived from an old one common to all hamart- group words
as well as three others (alitein, amplakein, sphallesthai) that show an
affinity: “to miss, lose an object, lose position.”37 The meanings were
originally morally neutral. There have been five semasiological stud-
ies of the word itself and they all agree (save one) that Poetics 1453a10
refers to an ‘error’, ‘mistake’, ‘blunder’, etc. 38 But by the 4th century
these older meanings had been decisively obscured. The word had
generally come to mean a punishable offense, a crime. The affiliated
words also tended since Homer toward a moralization of what had
originally been a physical, morally neutral description. This makes
Aristotle’s use of it exceptional, and more overtly specialized.
Through Bremer’s exhaustive study the development of the word
from Homer to Aristotle’s time becomes sufficiently clear. What had
meant ‘miss’ slowly took on the meaning of ‘err’ until finally it con-
notes ‘offense.’39 The fifth century retained both meanings of the
word, an ambiguity between innocence and guilt that made it perfect-
ly suited to tragedy. In fact the first use that we have of the substantive
hamartia is in Aeschylus, where offense’ is most frequent, while in
Sophocles it is the sense of ‘err’ which predominates. It is easy to see
how the genre of tragedy popularizes and metaphorically transforms
the word group. Similar trends in this period can be found in the his-
torians, Herodotus and Thucydides, in which the frequencies of use
are balanced (to miss: 32 – to err: 38 – offense: 33). In the latter, the
opposition of hamartanein and adikein, an exculpable mistake and a
36
J. M. Bremer Hamartia, p. 20. Cf. J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Intima-
tions of the Will in Greek Tragedy” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 64.
Dracon (7th c.) had been the one to introduce the distinction between akousios,
hekousios, and dikaios (as it applied to killing) which Aristotle continued to de-
velop three centuries later, though Dracon’s innovation concerned the measure of
an act’s offense, not the psychology of the criminal. It was a matter of what, socially,
was forgivable or not. For more on the nature of Draconian law, see Louis Gernet
Recherches sur le Développement de la Pensée Juridique et Morale en Grece.
37
J. M. Bremer Hamartia, pp. 26-9.
38
J. M. Bremer Hamartia, pp. 24 f., Bremer cites the studies by van Braam, Hey, Phil-
lips, Harsh, and Ostwald. Harsh interprets Aristotle through Plato and Tragedy.
This, argues Bremer, obscures his conclusions significantly.
39
J. M. Bremer Hamartia, pp. 31-56. Homer and the lyric poets together use it in the
first sense 40 times, the second 6 times, and the last six times. By the fifth century,
tragedy invokes this group a total of 127 times, 25 in the first, 41 in the second, and
59 in the third. See tables on p. 31 (Homer), p. 36 (Tragedy), p. 40 (History), p. 44
(Orators), p. 56 (4th c.: Plato, Aristotle, Orators).
punishable injustice, becomes clear. But this was actually a “rhetorical

commonplace” among early orators such as Antiphon, Gorgias, and
Prodicus. Their use of the word group is more disproportionately met-
aphorical than any of those previous, that is, more morally charged.40
In the legal world of the 5th century hamartia took on a special mean-
ing which embraced the contradictory meanings of both mistake and
offense: injurious action, the magnitude of the act and the intention of
the agent notwithstanding.41 Hamartia could refer both to an act that
was hekon ek pronoias, intentional and voluntary, as well as an excus-
able misdeed begotten through ignorance (agnoia).42 Aristotle’s ethics
were in part trying to clear up this muddle of jurisprudence through
the introduction of a more sophisticated psychology of action which
could define intention and choice, and therefore culpability, more
clearly. Defining Oedipus as a figure of hamartia was propadeutic for
the moral and legal categories operating within ethics and the state. A
look at the Nicomachean Ethics will help us interpret the meaning of
tragic hamartia in the more opaque context of the Poetics.
Tragic Action: Oedipus in the Nicomachean Ethics
Reading the Poetics adds color to the moral agent of the Ethics. It
situates and extends him within the broader frame of life and action.43
Likewise, there is an ethical strategy implied in the hamartia of the
Poetics that immediately becomes clear when we look to the Ethics.
Plato, conveniently, has left us a passage which bears striking similar-
ity to Aristotle’s, which situates more definitively the philosopher’s
occupation with this term. Plato reflects in the Republic on what kind
of an actor may enter his State. Being a measured man (metrios anùr,
396c) the actor will be prepared to imitate good men, and, sometimes,
their failure via some error (esphalmenon, 396d). The Platonic inher-
itance, then, is greater than some might suppose. Though Aristotle
defends tragedy against the sedition which Republic III and X allege,
he saves the art by reducing it philosophically to something befitting,
at least potentially, the Platonic legacy at the heart of the theory. As
40
See note above. The meanings ‘err’ and ‘offense’ outnumber the original sense of
‘to miss’ by more than 200 (63-157-117).
41
O. Hey “Hamartia” in Philologus, 83, p. 15.
42
J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Intimations of the Will in Greek Tragedy”
in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 64.
43
This is a basic premise of John Jones’ On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy.
we’ve already seen, his restrictions on music were even more severe
than Plato’s. Hamartia will have to live up to extremely optimistic and
ultimately rational criteria, which become most explicit in the Ethics.
The Nicomachean Ethics provide Aristotle’s mature view of hamar-
tia. Dramas (dramata), he writes, were called “dramas” according to
many because they represented people in action (drķntas, Po., 1448a27-
29). The two spheres of interest, ethics and poetics, therefore, were nat-
urally kin.44 In the beginning of the third book Aristotle gives an ac-
count of voluntary and involuntary actions (hekousiois and akousiois)
that, with several allusions, clearly has tragedy in the background. The
involuntary, he says, due either to compulsion or ignorance, “are con-
doned, and sometimes even pitied” (EN, 1109b31-33). He refers in this
context to Alcmaeon of Euripides’ lost play – “compelled by certain
threats to murder his mother.” Voluntary action begins with the agent,
while the “origin” of compulsory action (to biaion) “is from outside”
(EN, 1110b16-18). Action like Oedipus’ “done through ignorance is in
every case not voluntary” (EN, 1110b18-19). Though effectively Oedi-
pus causes the parricide and incest he suffers, the force of ignorance,
actually, compels the action from without. This is Aristotle’s version
of tragic ambiguity. It is not voluntary (ouk hekousion) in every case,
and involuntary (akousion), as with Oedipus, “only when it causes the
agent pain or regret.”
Aristotle makes a further distinction between acting in ignorance
or through ignorance (en or dia). In the first case ignorance is not the
cause, but a feature of the action, as when the drunken or the enraged
(or, the drunkenly enraged) attacks the innocent streetlamp, for ex-
ample. It may be true that he acts without knowledge of right and
wrong, but the reason that he tarries with the inanimate is not igno-
rance.45 It is because he is angry, and drunk. The agent’s emotions
(pathù) are the cause. Acting in ignorance refers to what Aristotle
will analyse as akrasia in book VII. Although not deliberate, since the
man acts despite himself, he is cognizant of the particular facts; his ac-
tion is “in some sense voluntary”46 and therefore punishable. Oedipus,
44
Stephen Halliwell Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 140. “[I]t implies that the fabric of tragedy,
or indeed of all poetry, is the representation of human purpose striving for realisa-
tion, and therefore falls within the purview of ‘practical’ or ethical philosophy.”
45
The distinction here is between knowledge of the universal or major premise and
the minor premise or particular fact. See pp. 109-113.
46
Wrong action through spirit or appetite shows up at EN, 1111a25, and is deemed
voluntary, because unnatural in kind or force, and though beyond individual con-
trol, is no less natural to humankind than reason, as stated at EN, 1111b-b3.
though, for whom apparently the murder and without question the in-
cest are both chosen, must act through ignorance: an unconsciousness
of the particulars “of the act and of the things affected by it.” In cases
like these, Aristotle writes, the act is pitied and forgiven, because he
who acts in ignorance of any of these circumstances is an involuntary
agent” (EN 1111a-a1).47
Aristotle identifies the circumstances of ignorance surrounding
these involuntary actions of the Oedipal type: 1) the agent, 2) the act,
3) the thing that is affected by or is the sphere of the act; and some-
times also 4) the instrument, for instance, a tool with which the act is
done, 5) the effect, for instance, saving a man’s life, and 6) the manner,
for instance, gently or violently (EN 1111a2-6). Both ignorance of the
agent and of the thing affected or the sphere of the act would apply to
Oedipus. Aristotle, confirming its relevance to the Poetics, cites the
Euripidean figure of Merope as an example of the ignorance of effect,
who mistook her son for an enemy.48 Although Oedipus’ “ignorance
of the sphere of the act” would make his action involuntary for Aris-
totle, stopping there would fail to describe what we have already seen
in chapter one to be the essence of Oedipus’ hamartia: more than
anything else, he is mistaken about his own identity.
Although Aristotle lists ignorance of the agent as one type of igno-
rance, he immediately disqualifies it. “Now no one, unless mad (main-
omenos), could be ignorant of all these circumstances together; nor
yet, obviously, of the agent – for a man must know who he is himself”
(EN 1111a7-9). Aristotle separates the agent from the sphere of the
act and makes him a special kind of object about which, barring mad-
ness, it is impossible to claim ignorance. But Oedipus’ ignorance of
“the sphere of the act” was originally, for Sophocles, grounded in the
ignorance of himself which Aristotle separates and consigns to fiction.
This ignorance, a half-civilized form of religious madness, disappears
from the philosopher’s moral-aesthetic equation. Aristotle cannot
make the action of a tragedy human-centered, subject to the same
logos governing his Ethics and Politics, and also let these religious
overtones ring out. Homer, for instance, had no problem blaming Ag-
amemnon for stealing Briseis from Achilles, which, nevertheless, he
47
The two remaining types of action are deliberate wrong action, the punishable con-
sequence of a vicious character, an “ignorance displayed in moral choice” (EN,
1110b33-4), and deliberately virtuous action.
48
This is an example taken from the lost Cresphontes, which, we’ll find, also figures in
the Eudemian Ethics.
chalked up to the religious madness of atù.49 For both Homer and So-
phocles that the gods ruled the game was no excuse. The offense of
crime was no less real. Aristotle leaves the poet’s Oedipus stranded
in the no man’s land of tragedy, where the center of rational man and
his cities, that which moves and guides him, his identities, can still be
displaced. He replaces him with yet another avatar, a more sanguine
Oedipus, like Homer’s, who “ruled on in beloved Thebes,”50 and ex-
iles Sophocles creation to the hinterlands of gods and beasts, a terri-
tory beyond the human, against which its boundaries and aspirations
are defined (EN, 1145a22).
The Alteration of Hamartia in the Nicomachean Ethics
Aristotle in Book V devises his plan for a sane Oedipus, the source
of an involuntary action – though neither medically or religiously de-
ranged, due not to the compulsions of ta bia, but rather agnoia. That
religious madness is no longer a valid interpretation of tragic action
is enough to confirm the divorce of Aristotle’s hamartia from the
archaic madness of atù. But this alteration of just how it is that rea-
soned choice is tragically reversed by external forces introduces if not
a problem within Aristotle’s theory, then at least a major challenge to
the relevance of the theory as a whole for readers. “[E]ither hamartia
in Aristotle’s discussion has a meaning unknown from any of its other
very frequent occurrences in Greek literature (including Aristotle
himself), and Aristotle has not seen fit to add a word of clarification
to his casual introduction of this novel concept: or else his words have
almost no relevance to Greek tragedy as it was actually practiced[.]”51
Intepreting Aristotle’s hamartia as an “error of judgment,” as scholars
generally do these days, rescues him from this irrelevance, and also
harmonizes the single line in which the word appears with the rest of
his work. “[A]n error of judgment,” however, “is something which can
be either entirely the responsibility of the man who makes it,” as in
49
Iliad, ix. 119. “But since I was blinded by atù and Zeus took away my understanding,
I am willing to make my peace and abundant compensation.”
50
Odyssey, xi. 312.
51
R. D. Dawe “Some Reflections on Ate and Hamartia” in Harvard Studies in Classi-
cal Philology, 72, p. 91. Dawe’s article argues that atù and hamartia, while distinct,
are continuous in the tradition. Aristotle’s usage is perfectly sensible. Adkins, in
“Arisotle and the Best Kind of Tragedy,” emphasises the distance between Aristo-
tle and the world view in tragedies of the 5th century.
Aristotle, or, with Sophocles a century before, it “can be something

induced, normally by the gods putting a man in such a position that
he has little choice but to make a decision that will later recoil on him
with disastrous, and above all disproportionate consequences.”52 So
which is Aristotle’s use of the word? What does it make of Sophocles’
tragic paradox: an externality interior to Oedipus, which as it unfolds
according to divine necessity destroys him?
The beginning of an answer lies in the development of the language
of “psychic interference” in the literature before Aristotle. The origin
of its development, of course, is Homeric, where we read of the atù
sent by the gods. But Homer assigns responsibility to the temporar-
ily insane, which he can do only because reasoned choice is not the
criterion, as with Agamemnon, compelled “to make amends” though
“Zeus had stolen my wits[.]”53 The agent is still too mixed up in the act
for psychological criterion to excuse him. As in the first Greek laws
laid down by Dracon, later, in the seventh century, intention was not
the issue. What mattered was the objective content of the deed, the
offense it caused, what we might call the moral damage.54 Aristotle’s
ethical project, in part, is an attempt to distinguish once and for all
the moral and legal agent from the objective act, to develop a theory
of action sufficiently grounded in the rational principles of the new
Athenian politics, which could do away with the violent tribalism of
the past that Homer represents and Dracon basically retains.
The common conceptual root of atù and hamartia, deeper than
mental blindness, is this damage (blabù) that they explain. Both
words account for damage men accomplish when in some sense not
the source of their action. Homer never once uses the term hamar-
tia. He explains the way in which good men come to harm (blabù)
through atù. But by the time of Euripides and Aristotle the word atù
drops out of use completely. 55 Meanwhile, in the 5th century tragedies
as well as the intervening lyric poetry, both words are used in similar
contexts and “seem to be equated.”56 Antigone herself in a “homily
52
sical Philology, p. 94.
53
Iliad, xix. 155-157. Cf. E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 3.
54
J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Intimations of the Will in Greek Tragedy”
in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 61.
55
sical Philology 72, p. 106.
56
See R. D. Dawe “Some Reflections on Ate and Hamartia” in Harvard Studies in
Classical Philology 72, pp. 101-105, for a list of exemplary contexts. Dawe estab-
lishes the correspondence between both atù and blabù, of which these examples
on phronein”57 implicitly connects deliberation and hamartia with the

atù of the famous ode at 582 and its “Erinyus of the mind” (Erinus
phrenķn):
For those whose house is shaken by the gods, no part of ruin (atas) is wanting, as it
marches against the whole of the family; like the swell of the deep sea, when darkness
runs beneath the water, brought by the dire blast of winds from Thrace, it rolls up from
the bottom the black sand and the wind-vexed shores resound before its impact. 58
Aristotle, in choosing hamartia, had distinguished the “vital strand”

of at least the tragedy of the Labdacids, which, more than any other, in
the Antigone and Tyrannus, was about logos at its destructive limits,
although what Aristotle understood by the word was still only “a part
of what the tragedians had understood by it.”59
When Aristotle discusses hamartia in the Ethics directly he couch-
es the damages of Book III’s discussion of voluntary action in his own
civilized language. Hamartia enters the text explicitly in Book V with-
in a broader discussion of just (dikema) and unjust (adikema) actions,
that is, actions which are either punishable or not. First, an act must be
voluntary, as described earlier in Book III, to qualify as either just or
unjust (EN 1135a15-17). Aristotle now regroups the blabai of the ear-
lier book in terms of justice and injustice. Compulsion (ta bia) drops
out of the equation, leaving a space that he fills with the introduction
of hamartema, acts committed dia agnoia. Both hamartema and the
misfortunes of atuchema are categorized as acts done through igno-
rance, while adikema are the effect of either incontinence (akrasia,
acts done in ignorance) or vice (kakia), both voluntary. Atuchema are
not attributed to the agent at all. Hamartema are their moral and legal
equivalent. In cases of hamartema, as with atuchema, I am the archù
of the act qua damage. But I am ignorant of its ‘purpose’ or ‘end’ – the
possibility that the act would prove harmful. This makes my action
akķn, involuntary. If the poet determines the hamartia correctly, fol-
are types. Aristotle, at EN, 1135b, classifies hamartema along with atuchema and
adikema as types of damage.
57
R. D. Dawe “Some Reflections on Ate and Hamartia” in Harvard Studies in Classi-
cal Philology 72, p. 111. See Sophocles Antigone, 925-928: ¿ÉÉq ÃÇ ÊÃË ÍÓË Ò¿Âq ÃÑÒÇË
ÃË ÆÃÍÇÐ È¿É¿ Î¿ÆÍËÒÃÐ ¿Ë ÑÓÁÁËÍÇÊÃË kÊ¿ÏÒÅÈÍÒÃÐ ÃÇ Âq ÍÇÂq gÊ¿ÏÒ¿ËÍÓÑÇ
ÊÅ ÎÉÃÇ× È¿È Î¿ÆÍÇÃË Å È¿Ç ÂÏ×ÑÇË ÃÈÂÇÈ×Ð ÃÊÃ.
58
Outside of these odes, the language of the play has consistently legal and moral-phi-
lophical resonance. Variations on bouleusis relate the play to phronùsis: Euboulia
(chorus, 1098), aboulia (messenger, 1242), dusbouliai (Creon, 1269), dusboulia
(Antigone, 95), tied to blabù at 1050.
59
sical Philology 72, p. 123.
lowing the doctrine of the Ethics, the tragic figure will cause his own
ruin, but through an involuntary blunder which cannot be blamed,
one legally identical with bad luck. Yet, it was against the senseless-
ness of bad luck that Sophocles’ lyric voiced its tragic appeal.
Katharsis and Wonder (or) What’s Become of Pollution
By severing its ties with atù and forcing divine activity, if necessary,
outside the performed time of the drama, Aristotle secularizes the or-
igin of tragic collision, as his rule for the dramatic mùchanù explains:
There should be nothing improbable among the actual incidents. If it be unavoidable,
however, it should be outside the tragedy, like the improbability in the Oedipus of
Sophocles. (1454b2-8)
This rule forcing the divine outside the frame of the plot extends from
an earlier discussion of how dramatic action should proceed in gen-
eral. It is the thought and character of the agents from which action
flows (1449b36-1450a3) and the playwright should always present this
character-based action as “necessary” or “probable.” Divine inter-
ference would defy this rational necessity or probability. It must be
excluded, along with everything else, including dumb luck, which is
alogos (1454b6-8, 1460a28). Hamartia can be discovered, explained,
and re-interpreted according to the broader rational vision which the
end of the play provides. Wonder and terror before the gods are trans-
lated into the pleasure of katharsis, triggered by the unlikely discov-
ery of reason in a pitiful, terrifying situation which had seemed at first
to defy it.
Aristotle, like Sophocles, connects disaster with wonder, which
for the Greeks came as a pair, and had implicitly religious connota-
tions.60 But for Aristotle it is the logos in disaster that ignites wonder,
while, for Sophocles, it is the disaster pregnant in logos. Katharsis is
enhanced by wonder, we’ve seen, when the poet structures his plot
in such a way that the right figure suffers the right dramatic gram-
mar (1452b34-1453a12). In Aristotle’s hands, his hamartia becomes
something we can in principle understand, which unfolds in the right
60
Religious wonder and terror can be recogznied in the etymology of agos, the dis-
astrous corruption which has its root in azomai, a mood of religious wonder. While
the religious wonder which we find in the agos of Thebes is connected with actual
divinities, in Aristotle, wonder is grounded in logos, which, of course, is also di-
vine.
way. It excites the mind to understanding, another kind of pleasure,

connected by Aristotle both within this work and others with won-
der (to thaumaston) (Metaphysics 982b12, 983a12, Rhetoric 1371a33).
While the Metaphysics famously connects wonder with reason as a
spark for understanding, the Poetics ties wonder to the irrational as
its chief factor (alogon, 1452a4-6, 1460a11-17). The pleasure of won-
derment passes from this tension between reason and the irrational to
relief.61 Through poetic katharsis the unintelligible nightmares which
we refuse to allow as members of a civilly ordered society, or even to
see and to know, are brought into a reasonable, living whole. “There
should be nothing alogon among the actual incidents” (1454b6-7). All
of our Oedipuses are tamed. We wonder at the logos of that which
seemed so violently alogon.
In Sophocles, wonder is the tragic accession of human reason to the
terror and wonder of life amongst the gods. Aristotle reinterprets trag-
ic wonder within the now rational horizon of katharsis and hamartia
as the accession of the irrational to the shape of human reason.62 The
poet, says Aristotle, resembles the philosopher (1451b5), and perhaps
his poet a little too much. The Poetics contests the status of the gods
in Greek myth – and by extension tragedy – as causes of action that
“lie at and beyond the limits of human comprehension” and which
we therefore cannot anticipate, penetrate, or control.63 Their shadow
remains as a mere incidental and exculpable “ignorance in the sphere
61
See Stephen Halliwell Aristotle’s Poetics, pp. 70-74, where Halliwell makes this
connection. Lear objects and attempts to distinguish the desire to understand, in
the Metaphysics, provoked by wonder, from the Poetics, in which he finds won-
der provoked by the desire to understand. Jonathan Lear “Katharsis” in Essays on
Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. by A. O. Rorty. His distinctions, though, are slippery and
ultimately unconvincing. His fundamental point in making them is to point out that
tragic pleasure is not cognitive, and that this wonderment before the unanticipated
and in this sense irrational (bringing both passages together) is distinct from the
“proper pleasure” of tragedy. But Aristotle does say that the marvellous is required
of tragedy. Po., 1460a11-12. Its pleasure and the katharsis of emotions could hardly
be distinct, since Aristotle identifies them at Po., 1452a1-6.
62
Popular Greek belief would have privileged the gods over nature and dumb luck as
a source of eutuchia, to which Aristotle alludes at Phy., 196b5-7 and Rh., 1391b1-3;
Aristotle rejects traditional divine pthonos at Met., 982b32-983a3; Met., 1000a9 and
1074a38 introduce and reject the popular, mythological view. EN, 1178b8 describes
the perfect contemplative happiness of the gods, whose activity is now exclusively
intellectual. Finally, at Pol., 1252b4-7, alluding to Xenophanes, fr. 14, Aristotle sup-
poses we imagine gods as men, ruled by a king, because we are men ruled by kings,
or once were.
63
Stephen Halliwell Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 233.
of the act” as authentically tragic hamartia, ironically, becomes a nec-

essary mistake in the preservation of the intelligibility and integrity of
the whole.64 The Poetics reduce the resistance or paradox of the gods,
pollution in Oedipus and plague in the city, to mundane ignorance,
disabused by the kathartic discovery and reversal which reason dis-
covers in a mechanism of its own design.
Conclusion
The theatregoer, through tragedy, was able to exchange safety and

regularity for the absolute perspective of extreme possibility which
the play evokes. That chaos exists and is possible for us is something
they could explore safely within the quarantine of the theatre, the par-
adigmatic breakdown in Oedipus of primordial social bonds, a catas-
trophe which the drama, ideally, imbues with a meaning and a form.65
By redefining hamartia as an “error in calculation,” and identifying
katharsis with a superficially aesthetic pleasure, connected in the Pol-
itics with a pause in the Athenian work-week, the terrible flower of
tragedy is cut off with the bud. Not only is the destructive power of
the gods evacuated from the stage, but, we find, catastrophe averted
becomes preferable to catastrophe undergone.66 It is better that the
pollution, the plague, be avoided in advance, and if that is impossible,
at least traced back to an error of judgment that could have been. True
phronùsis “would make mistakes like the ignorant mistake of Oedi-
pus impossible.”67
The best way to avoid potential misfortunes, we will find out in
the Ethics, will be moral education. This begins with the soul. While
tragedy was never, for Sophocles or Aristotle, a morality tale, Aristo-
tle does preserve the connection between character and fortune. Ex-
ceptionally rational, good men (epiekeis) should not suffer tragedy.68
64
Stephen Halliwell Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 226. This is an observation of Halliwell’s.
65
Jonathan Lear “Katharsis” in Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. by A. O. Rorty,
pp. 334 f.
66
Po., xiv. 1454a9. Aristotle prefers a tragedy that ends happily, where disaster is
averted at the last minute. This is in tension with Po., xiii. 1453a23, where he says
the opposite.
67
Martha Nussbaum The Fragility of Goodness, p. 387. Nussbaum offers this as a
partial explanation for why Aristotle excludes men of surpassing virtue from tragic
roles.
68
The best candidates for hamartia cannot be unexceptionally reasonable, good men
(not epieikùs, Po., 1452b34) – they must not be “pre-eminently virtuous and just
Tragic guilt must be of a specific kind and its parameters are a matter
of character and action. But underlying this aesthetic criterion is the
conviction that tragedy has a moral hue and its audience an eye to
see it. Plays, like individuals, have a character (ùthos) and a thinking
(dianoia). Though an error like Oedipus’ cannot be blamed, within
Aristotle’s framework it can be avoided, and this is ethically signifi-
cant. Aristotle’s primary ethical interest will not be a theory of blame,
but rather how to cultivate the best possible life. Even if Oedipus is
blameless, the tragic case remains ethically instructive. One ought to
train oneself intellectually in the interest of eudaimonia. In chapter
five we’ll see just what kind of mutation Sophocles’ Oedipus will have
to undergo to enter this ethical calculus and perhaps wonder if tragedy
itself and Oedipus as its best ambassador remain still, despite Aristo-
tle’s invitation, an outsider to philosophy’s secular-rational ethics and
politics.
Fragment 15 (Rose) of Aristotle’s alerts us to his awareness of an al-
ternative form of education – competitive with philosophy – bound still
to the archaic religious power of katharsis: initiates in the mysteries
“educate” and purify themselves through the ritualization of suffer-
ing. Like the Oedipus of tragedy they do not learn (mathein) anything.
They experience or suffer it (pathein). Undergoing this experience
transforms their disposition (diathùsis) spontaneously.69 Kierkegaard,
we’ll find in Part II, calls for a similarly kathartic education. But the
Poetics dismisses the spontaneous regeneration through suffering and
katharsis to a minor corner of the philosophical world-view, dividing
it from any moral considerations of the soul, and minimizing its force
to mere aesthetic play. Rather, it is the Orphic-Pythagorean askùsis
of the shaman, whose influence on philosophy and its reconception
(Po., 1453a7-8)” – despite the fact that the seriousness and nobility of the tragic fig-
ure (Po., 1448a2,27, 1448b10) which Aristotle insists on would seem to recommend
just such a man, as Aristotle himself suggests (Po., 1454b13).
Cf. Bremer Hamartia, pp. 13-15. To be epieikùs for Aristotle meant to be morally
honest and righteous (EN, 1137a31), distinguished by arête, as are the appropriately
tragic characters (ùthù chrùsta, Po., 1454a17). The more unworthy of misfortune is
the tragic figure, the greater a man he is (epieikùs also had social overtones, Cf. EN,
1132a2, 1167b1, Pol., 1274a15), and the greater the pity he solicits (Rh., 1386b31,
1385b33, 1389b10).
69
See Werner Jaeger Aristotle, pp. 160, 162. Diathùsis is a medical term which both
Plato and Aristotle recoup as ‘education’ in their diagnoses on soul. Werner Jaeger
Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 88 (n51). Cf. Aristotle, Fragmenta,
ed. by Rose, fr. 10, and DC 284b3, where Aristotle describes an emotional proof of
God’s existence, as opposed to a rational demonstration: Ê¿ËÒÃÇ¿ ÎÃÏÇ ÒÍË ÆÃÍË.
of the soul we’ll explore in the next chapter, which prefigures the pro-
longed, individual practice in virtue that Aristotle makes a central
feature of his ethics. Pythagorean katharseis, in fact, may be the least
problematic precursor to the tragic katharsis of the Poetics.70
Divorcing tragedy from the ecstatic madness which Herodotus’ tradi-
tion ascribes to the Baachants (ekstasis, existasthai, mainesthai)71 and
the profound sense of pollution and guilt of which the archaic Greeks
were capable, Aristotle’s doctrine of tragic mimùsis also deprives trag-
edy of the special significance of its appointed god, Dionysus, as the
god of illusions.72 This is an especially poignant departure since it was
likely under the auspices of the god for whom reality dissolved into
illusion, and illusion became real, that something like theatre became
possible.73 This break, we’ll see in chapter five, complemented by Ar-
istotle’s ethics and psychology, reduces the tragic guilt and katharsis
associated with Dionysus and his theatre to rational psychology. The
irrational from then on can assert its power only within the human
soul, where reason, naturally superior, can exercise it into a shape to
match its own.
Before getting to this story we need to know under what influence
this leap can take place. The possibility of thinking the problem of the
irrational psychologically relies upon a break in the culture’s narra-
tive about soul, or psuchù. The extent to which human reason could
study and master the irrationality that in cult and theatre (and even
70
See Stephen Halliwell Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 187. Aside from medical purges and
religious purifications, a third possible precedent for Aristotle’s tragic katharsis has
been found in the musical katharsis of the Pythagoreans. The earliest record of Py-
thagorean katharsis comes from one of Aristotle’s pupils, Aristoxenus, fr. 26 in Die
Schule des Aristoteles, ed. by Wehrli, who wrote about the sect’s cathartic use of
music. While also religious, the effect of this spontaneous purification “must have
differed appreciably from the ecstatic or frenzied type of Corybantic katharsis,”
and would have applied to all initiates, not just the pathological. This is a feature, as
we’ve seen, that returns in the Politics.
71
Herodotus, 4.79.3. It is the language of the Scythians in their observations of the
Baachants he records. Cf. E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, pp. 94 f.
(84n). Although Rohde read the soul’s departure from the body into ecstasis, this
language is “commonly used by classical writers” for “any abrupt change of mood.”
It could “mean anything from “taking you out of yourself” to a profound alteration
of personality” (p. 77).
72
Homeric Hymns, 7.34.
73
See E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 94 (82n); J. P. Vernant and Pierre
Vidal-Naquet “The God of Tragic Fiction” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece,
p. 187 f.; Werner Jaeger Paideia, vol. 1, p. 248: the Dionysiac nature of the tragic ac-
tor’s “ecstasy” passed naturally to the spectators.
Homer’s epics, occasionally) disturbed the harmonies of men – their

cities and their souls – in place since Olympus had been raised and
the daimones suppressed – required a radically new conception of the
individual. And so reason conjures both the instrument of psychology
and the object it studies, psuchù, as tools in the subordination of the
irrational qua unreasoning desires in the soul to a governance reason
claims by nature.
In the following chapter, we’ll see how the soul develops into the
kind of medium through which such control can be exercised, as a
kind of science. It is a development in the Greek story surrounding
the god Dionysus, an alternative line of Dionysian flight, one of his
ecstasies.
Chapter 4
Psuchù Redux:
Philosophy and the New Psychology
Introduction
The companion psychology to Aristotle’s revision of tragedy draws

inspiration from two disparate strains in Greek thinking, one native,
the other a trace of foreign blood welling in other-worldly figures like
Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Empedocles, poisoning life and thought
against the mortal body Homeric man had celebrated. It was this infa-
mous “drop of alien blood”1 which Rohde mistakenly traced to the in-
gress of Dionysus’ cult from the Thracian east, across the trade route
of the Black Sea. Though we now know that Dionysus was not the
source of infection, 2 it is no less true that “the idea of an everlasting
soul in man contradicts every single idea of Greek popular religion.”3
There did, however, despite this contradiction in the culture, develop
a belief in the divinity and immortality of the soul.
1
Erwin Rohde “Die Religion der Griechen,” p. 27.
2
See Karl Kerenyi Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life. Appearing on
the linear B tablets discovered at Pylos decades after Psychù was published, Diony-
sus exonerated himself. It was clear that he had been in Greece since Mycenae, a
millennium before Rohde imagined his voyage to Greece from Thrace.
3
Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 254. Moreover, neither the cult of souls which Rohde de-
tects behind the scenes of Homer, nor the Homeric psuchù led to the idea of an “ev-
erlasting, indestructible, immortal life.” The soul never pre-existed the living per-
son, nor did it lie dormant within him, despite Rohde’s mistaken introduction of the
doubled self of Pindar’s, active in dreams or sleep, back into Homer as an inactive
animistic double within the living person. This has since been recognized generally
as an erroneous anachronism. In Homer the soul was but a dead image of the mortal
man. In any case, Rohde himself explains that the animistic cult was focused on the
remembrance of the dead here on earth, through the memory of those surviving
(p. 253). It was earth bound, tied to the family hearth. Its claims to happiness were
mortal claims, for which it depended upon its survivors. To be immortal was to be a
god, for the Greeks (p. 253). The dead ancestor was no god.
This alien strain, we’ll find, contradicts and through this contradic-
tion revolutionizes the primordially Greek story about the soul domi-
nant in Sophocles’ lyric. And while a sort of descriptive psychology of
the individual does begin with tragic lyric, and Sophocles in particu-
lar, it does not mature until Macedonia comes to power, in the time
of Aristotle, when the city has lost some of its hold on the individu-
al.4 More freedom, less hierarchical rule, as with the modern period,
corresponded to an increased demand for self-rule, a broader and
more anonymous, horizontal web of power and its articulation in and
through a dissipated assemblage of individuals. 5 Before the decline
of 4th century Athens psychological interest had aimed at groups:
“crowds, assemblies, of Athenians or Lacedaemonians, of oligarchs
or democrats, of soldiers, youths, the elderly, of barbarians.”6 In the
philosophy of the fourth century a new need arises. The interest shifts
importantly to the character and soul of the individuals making up
these groups, as we find first in Plato, and, even more so, in Aristotle.
Philosophy and the Reconceptualizing of Psuchê
By the time Plato provides the first psychological taxonomy the idea
of a personal, immortal soul may have been in Greek circulation for
at least a couple of hundred years, first recorded for us qua psuchù in
Heraclitus.7 Though it did not rear its head in the poetry we have dis-
4
J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 17: “The psychology of the individual, initi-
ated in tragedy, will not truly mature until the city will have lost some of its power
– which is to say under Macedonian domination.”
5
See Michel Foucault History of Sexuality, vol. 3, pp. 81-84. Foucault applies this in-
sight to the slightly later Hellenistic and Roman periods. Alasdaire Macintyre seems
to imply that the same notion can be applied to modern-philosophical attempts to
provide a rational justification for moral claims, and their dead-end in the irrational
ideals of a bureaucratic culture. This culture accepts on what amounts to faith both
the possibility and value of the efficient management and optimization of human
resources. Alasdaire Macintyre After Virtue, p. 62, and chs. 6 and 7 generally.
6
J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 17: “This trait appeared in all its force with the
work of Thucydides; but one discovers it also in a number of analyses by Euripides,
and in a large part of Platonic thought.”
7
Fr. B 62, B88: m ÂÃ <¦Ï¿ÈÉÃÇÒÍÐ íÅÑÇË mÒÇ È¿Ç ÒÍ ÄÅË È¿Ç ÒÍ ¿ÎÍÆ¿ËÃÇË È¿Ç ÃË Ò×
ÄÅË kÊ¿Ð ÃÑÒÇ È¿Ç ÃË Ò× ÒÃÆË¿Ë¿Ç u mÒÃ ÊÃË Á¿Ï kÊÃÇÐ Ä×ÊÃË Ò¿Ð ÖÓÕ¿Ð kÊ×Ë
ÒÃÆË¿Ë¿Ç È¿Ç ÃË kÊÇË ÒÃÆ¿íÆ¿Ç mÒÃ ÂÃ kÊÃÇÐ ¿ÎÍÆËÅÑÈÍÊÃË Ò¿Ð ÖÓÕ¿Ð ¿Ë¿ÀÇÍÓË
È¿Ç ÄÅË As cited by E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 173n109. Dodds
cautions there against discounting the quotation because of its “pythagorean lan-
guage.”
0SUCHù Redux: Philosophy and the New Psychology 97
cussed, which remained remarkably secular, it existed nevertheless,

and does shine through in places, such as a well known passage in
Pindar (5th c.) about the divine in man released during unconscious-
ness, first in sleep, and ultimately in death.8
It was the Orphic poets who prepared Greece intellectually for the
developments in the domain of soul. The Orphic poets abstract mid-
way from the world of images to that of ideas, offering theogonic ex-
planations of the nature of man and world, why they are corrupted,
and what we can do, as individual bearers of an ancient, reincarnated
pollution and guilt – trace of the murder of Dionysus by the Titans –
to influence their direction positively.9 It tempts the Greek thinker to
distance himself from the empire of the body and pledge himself to
another empire, beyond the sun.
The Orphic theogonies that consolidated this new outlook in the 6th
c. were fueled by philosophical developments in Ionia, such as Anaxi-
menes’ rationally ordered accounts of the universal nature of things.
Even before this alien blood was introduced, the Greek ‘psuchù’ had
a native tendency to expand to include consciousness. This is visible
in both Homeric poems, with their expression, “psuchù kai thumos,”
and in Anaximenes, who writes that the soul (for him, air) rules us
(sunkratei hùmas).10 The real value of this alien strain, exemplified by
shaman figures like Empedocles, was not in the doctrine of transmi-
gration itself, which is obscured for us anyhow, but that it invigorated
the native Greek tendency to think of the soul or breath as the unity
of generic life and the individual spirit or consciousness. Once the
human powers of feeling and thought are identified with a personal
soul, so long as it is embodied it also depends on this life-force.11 Since
psuchù is the broader of the two concepts, what was originally “ani-
8
Pindar The Odes of Pindar, fr. 131. Cf. E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational,
p. 135; Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 415; Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek
Philosophers, p. 75 f. Each attribute central importance to the passage.
9
Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 57. “The truth is that
the theogonic writers cannot be understood except in the light of their close recip-
rocal relationships of their own period who are connected with them by the com-
mon bond of theological speculation, no matter how much they may differ in intel-
lectual type.” “From the spiritualization of nature, theogony draws new strength
(p. 71),” as in the divine first principles of Anaximander and Anaximenes. “Though
philosophy means death to the old gods, it is itself religion; and the seeds it has sown
now thrive in the new theogony” (p. 72).
10
Iliad, xi. 334; Odyssey, xxi. 154, 171; Anaximenes, fr. B2. Cf. Werner Jaeger Theol-
ogy of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 80 (n24, n28).
11
mal life” in the broadest sense, a principle of animation, will absorb

the specifically human life (thumos) of thought and feeling. From here
developed this idea of the soul as something independent of the body
which preserved the individual’s identity from before and then after
his mortal turn on earth. It gave infinite permanence to the “intellec-
tually and morally responsible agent.”12
Many scholars have traced the invention of this Orphic strain
of thinking to what has perhaps erroneously been called “Greek
shamanism.”13 Ever since Rohde’s Psuchù classicists have consistently
looked to the influence of Thracian shamanism on Greece to explain
the invention of such an un-Greek idea within its borders.14 This fig-
ure of the Greek shaman, most vivid (because most recent) of which
for us is Empedocles, was a healer or purifier (katharsios) of both soul
(daimķn) and body, a poet, musician, sage, prophet, and leader of men
all wrapped in one.15 Empedocles was the only one of these personae
to leave first person testimony – “And I am an immortal god for you,
no longer liable to death.”16 He unites in a single figure these fields
12
Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, pp. 84 f.
13
See Pierre Hadot What is Ancient Philosophy? pp. 184, 206. Whether the Greeks
ever had anything like the shamans of Siberia, or the native of North America, has
been called into question by at least a few. Hadot, for example, objects that the
rational, universal perspective of philosophical practice, a non-perspective encom-
passing them all, has nothing to do with the Shaman. The tribal shamans incarnat-
ed in themselves animal spirits. It is a comic juxtaposition, he claims, enlisting other
scholars such as Hamayon. At best, he says, the “symbolic rituals” of shamanism
are too alien to the philosopher not to make things more rather than less obscure.
14
Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 263. Rohde connects shamanism with the belief in “the
power of the soul after separation from the body.” But he mistakenly traces this
belief back to Dionysus, whom he thought was a Thracian god, called there by the
name of Sabos, or Sabazios. Sabos, he thought, passed into Greece through Phry-
gia, where a people “almost identical with the Thracians” shared a cult contradict-
ing all Greek norms of measure, closing the gap between men and the gods when
the worshipper, possessed by him, is himself called Sabos (pp. 256-258). But the
Dionysian element is not a necessary one in the story. There was still a Thracian
influence which both Dodds and Cornford document, though it transformed the
native Greek god, rather than introducing him from abroad.
Meuli documents the Thracian import in his well known article a decade after
Rohde, and scholars such as Jaeger, Cornford, Chadwick, and Dodds pursue these
shamans for some clue to the poison which seems to have entered the Greek vein,
anesthetizing the exceptional individual to worldly life, and invoking a vision for
the soul of a divine promise to come. K. Meuli “On Greek Contact with Thracian
Culture” in Hermes, 1935.
15
Frances Cornford Principium Sapientiae, pp. 121-4.
16
Empedocles, fr. B112. ÃÁ× Âq nÊÇË ÆÃÍÐ ¿ÊÀÏÍÒÍÐ ÍÓÈÃÒÇ ÆËÅÒÍÐ (my trans.). Cf.
frs. B113, B117 & B146, as trans. by Kathleen Freeman Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic
which reason will soon diversify into medicine, poetry, politics, and
natural science (replacing prophecy). Like the philosopher Pythago-
ras, both Heraclitus and Parmenides (student of Pythagoras), as well
as Empedocles, Sophocles’ peer, thought knowledge in terms of a di-
vine recollection which reflected the shaman’s belief in rebirth, the
permanence of something personal in man (psuchù or daimķn).17
The Orphic-Pythagorean story stretches back to Zalmoxis of Thra-
ce, leader of a community of “the best of citizens” who were deemed
immortal.18 Tradition assigns Zalmoxis positions both before and after
philosophy, making him both Pythagoras’ teacher and his student. It
was through Pythagoras and possibly the Orphics (though the relation
between these two sects is unclear, and they both, in any case, represent
a common impulse) that the idea of individual immortality institution-
alized by the shaman in his remote circle of influence was generalized
to include anyone willing to submit to these kathartic practices.19 The
Orphic theogony codifies philosophically-poetically the concept of a
personal divinity and the immortality of the human soul. The join-
ing of consciousness to the ‘life-soul’ (identified by the Ionians with
impersonal elements such as air) in a single psuchù appears first in the
outlook of the 6th c. Orphic-Pythagoreans as a presupposition of their
doctrine of “the so-called transmigration of souls.” 20
Orphic or not, Pindar’s second Olympian Ode is our oldest and
most secure evidence of this invention of an immortal destiny upon
the hitherto mortal soul. It marks a totally new outlook on human life
and the nature and function of man’s psuchù: 21
Philosophers, pp. 64, 67: “But why do I lay stress on these things, as if I were achiev-
ing something great in that I surpass mortal men who are liable to many forms of
destruction.” – “For by now I have been born as boy, girl, plant, bird and dumb sea-
fish.” – “And at the last they become seers, and bards, and physicians, and princes
among earth-dwelling men, from which (state) they blossom forth as gods in highest
honor.”
17
See Frances Cornford Principium Sapientiae, ch. 7.
18
19
Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 149. Their traditions by the 5th c. had become indistinct,
and we have only what this century has preserved for us. On this “generalization,”
see E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 144.
20
21
Pindar Olympian Odes 2.68-73 in The Odes of Pindar. Jaeger confirms in Theology
of the Early Greek Philosophers that the second Olympian is our oldest and most
secure source. In addition and not without significance is the more ambiguous bion
athanaton of Pythian 3.61, as well as frs. 129-133, so important for Erwin Rohde’s
theory of the soul. Fr. 131, for instance, alluding to the mysteries: … “having, by
happy fortune, culled the fruit of the rite that releaseth them from toil. And while
But, whosoever, while dwelling in either world, have thrice been courageous in keep-
ing their souls [psuchan] pure from all deeds of wrong, pass by the highway of Zeus
unto the tower of Cronus, where the ocean breezes blow around the Islands of the
Blest, and flowers of gold are blazing, some on the shore from radiant trees, while oth-
ers the water fostereth;
Describing what was probably the mystery religion of the ode’s re-
cipient, Pindar communicates here a completely new feeling in man.
He no longer feels fully at home in the world and attends to a ritual
regulation of diet and other actions, concerning bloodshed especially,
which will secure his soul a place in Kronos’ hall on the Islands of the
Blest. The Orphic soul-theory which Pindar’s ode expresses directly
influences Plato and Aristotle in their view of the divine and perma-
nent nature of soul or mind, though stripped free by them of the bod-
ied imaginations of the poet. It also infiltrates the medical practice
upon which their care of the soul is based.22
As logos replaced tribalism and the religious authority of the priest-
king (basileus) on the seat of power, the force of the irrational simul-
taneously asserted itself in religious mysteries and therapeutic cult,
as well as the figure of the shaman, and a generalized anxiety about
pollution, especially by blood. It is no coincidence that the cult of
Asclepius’ religious medicine emerged alongside the secularization
of medicine in Alcmaeon and Hippocrates. The existence of Greek
tragedy is proof enough that reason, when it first appeared in Greece,
hung in a precarious balance with the irrational. In instituting a new,
Olympic order, Homer had suppressed the older, more deeply rooted
chthonic religion attached to the hearth of a household. He began a
spiritualization of man’s bonds to the earth and each other. Possession
by a god, by Dionysus or Phrygian Kybele, may have been a return
of the daimķn and a temporary release from the increasing burden
rational culture and organization placed on individuality. 23 As the city
the body of all men is subject to over-mastering death, an image of life remaineth
alive, for it alone cometh from the gods. But it sleepeth while the limbs are active;
yet, to them that sleep, in many a dream it giveth a presage of a decision of things
delightful or doleful.” Claus singles out the same texts as evidence of a transition in
the use of “psuchù,” the conclusion of which he may restrict to the 4th century. Also
important is the Pythagorean Philolaus, B14, the daimķn of Empedocles, B115 and
Xenophanes, B7. David Claus Toward the Soul, pp. 111-120.
22
On the philosophical influence, see Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek
Philosophers, p. 87. On the medical influence, see Hippocrates Regimen, c. 4; cf.
Werner Jaeger Paideia, vol. 3, p. 39.
23
Dionysian katharsis and the Corybantic rites were to some extent identified with
one another by the Ancient Greeks. This is why Plato can use ÑÓÁ ÈÍÏÓÀ¿ËÒÇ¿Ë
and ÑÓÊÀ¿ÈÕÃÓÃÇË as synonyms (Symposium, 228b, 234d), and refer to the same
developed, this spiritualization culminated in the rational individual

of secular politics.24
Along with these orgiastic cults, the theos anùr or theologos (as they
were called by the Greeks) emerges as a kathartic figure similarly pos-
sessed by a god (Empedocles refers to the immortal part of himself as
daimķn, not psuchù).25 In the wake of the new mental universe of this
“guilt culture”26 techniques had been developed to accomplish purity
through purificatory katharseis. These ritual purifications could in-
stantly reverse particular taints, like, for example, the pollutions suf-
fered by Oedipus. Redefined within the context of the theos anùr they
became part of a religious askùsis, an exercise or practice through
which the devotee was kathartically transformed, prepared for his im-
mortality to come, into a kind of god. Homer’s defining limit separat-
ing man from god was breached. Religious pollution (miasma) was no
longer about coming into contact with a particular defilement. Man
was in essence defiled.
Katharsis and Askùsis were linked in the figure of the shaman who
purified himself through extensive retreats and self-denial. 27 On-
healings as both ¿l Ò×Ë ÃÈíÏÍË×Ë À¿ÈÕÃÇ×Ë Ç¿ÑÃÇÐ and Ò¿ Ò×Ë ÈÍÏÓÀ¿ËÒ×Ë
Ç¿Ê¿Ò¿ (Laws, 790de). Cf. I. M. Linforth Corybantic Rites, p. 157. Linforth iden-
tifies the Corybantes as a specialized, healing version of the cult of Kybele, “the
mother.” Cf. Walter Burkert Ancient Mystery Cults, p. 25. The Mater Cult, in other
words, the Corybantic cult of Kybele, and that of Dionysus, Burkert claims, merged
at an early point.
24
E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 142. Dodds’ view can be traced
back to Rohde, who suggested as much more than thirty years earlier. Erwin Ro-
hde Psyche, p. 261. Like the Dionysian religion, which Dodds believes became a
democratic form of ritualized katharsis, expelling psychic tension, the shamanistic
belief, transformed by the Greeks, answered, Dodds writes, to “the needs of the
times.” The rise of individualism coincided with the birth of the city-state. Along
with the ecstatic cults of the 6th century, we find in the Ionian-Aeolic lyric of the
same period, such as Sappho’s, a corresponding desire on the part of the individual
to release that individuality in an ideal community of some kind, of love, memory,
beauty, sympotic poetry, music, and drinking, etc., or, most basically, a community
of those caught in the ebb and flow of time.
25
On the theologos, see Frances Cornford Principium Sapientiae, pp. 102 f. All
madness, and religious intrusion in the human realm is essentially daimķn. See
Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Tensions and Ambiguities in Greek
Tragedy” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, pp. 35 f.: Ê¿ËÇ¿ ÉÓÑÑ¿ ¿ÒÅ
¿Ï¿ ÊÇ¿ÑÊ¿ ÃÏÇËÓÃÐ, all refer to a “sinister numen in different guises” which is
daimķn.
26
E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 28. This is Dodds’ term. The transi-
tion from shame culture to guilt Culture, he writes, from Homer to Aeschylus, “is
gradual and incomplete.”
27
E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, pp. 149 f.
omacritus, a poet like Euripides who tends toward the philosophic, in

the tradition of these theologoi provides a suitable myth in which to
shroud this moral-physical a priori. It circulates widely in Athens by
the 5th century and ties this burgeoning psychological problematic to
the god of tragedy it adopts as its own. The Orphic poem attributed by
Pausanias (2nd c., a. d.) to Onomacritus (6th c., b. c.) mythologized and
canonized an idea which ritual and belief had preserved unconscious-
ly for some time. 28 Plato later alludes to it no less than four times and
his pupil Xenocrates also uses it to explain the soul’s imprisonment in
the body.29 That it bears lasting philosophical relevance is undeniable.
The poem is only loosely myth, one of a number of so-called Orphic
theogonies of the 6th century in which Thracian thought becomes
systematized in the spirit of Greek philosophy. 30 It already deals in
relative abstraction with the themes of guilt and purification, playing
against the more general background of the birth or growth (physis)
of the race. Onomacritus sings of man’s genesis and future salvation,
when the reign of Dionysus begins. Man, he writes, was born of a vio-
lent death, punishment for an earlier and more heinous violence. The
Titans had lured away and captured Dionysus as an infant, torn him to
pieces, cooked these pieces in a cauldron and then eaten them. When
Zeus discovered this abomination he destroyed the Titans with his
lightning bolt and man grew from the remains of their polluted flesh,
but also of the innocent child-god they had digested, born of a divinity
with the need for penance and cleansing.
That these developments had something to do with the problem
of justice in the more primordial sense of moral order seems clear.
The idea that the individual is reborn made it possible to subordinate
apparent injustices to a magical source of justice superceding it. The
discrepancies of this life would work themselves out through a series
28
Pausanias, 7.18.4, 8.37.5. “The stories told of Dionysus by the people of Patrae, that
he was reared in Mesatis and incurred there all sorts of perils through the plots of
the Titan, I will not contradict, but will leave it to the people of Patrae to explain
the name Mesatis as they choose.” “From Homer the name of the Titans was taken
by Onomacritus, who in the orgies he composed for Dionysus made the Titans the
authors of the god’s suffering.”
29
See Plato Meno 81bc, and Laws, 701c, 854b; Cf. Pindar, fr. 127b, and the Xenocra-
tes fragments, as cited by E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, pp. 155-156
(n131, 134).
30
See Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, ch. 4 generally. Other
Orphic theogonies were alleged of Epimenides, fr. B5; Eudemus, fr. 117 (Spengel);
Pherekydes, fr. B1; Acusilaeus, fr. A4; et al., as cited by Jaeger.
of rebirths.31 In this sense it is part of the same literary tradition from

which tragedy emerges, ruminating along with the poets on the nature
of justice, following Solon, and the problem of choice and responsibil-
ity. A strikingly similar inspiration leads Sophocles’ Oedipus to ex-
plain his suffering by hypothesizing an ancient crime of man against
the gods. 32 Two radically divergent lines of flight, both the tragic and
Orphic components of the soul-narrative are part of the Dionysian
legacy, which, like Orphism, concerned man’s freedom (lusis) from
his conventional, worldly condition, a religious katharsis of his nor-
mal state. In Aristotle’s science of the soul the story will be stripped
finally of its mythological plasticity and translated into the rigorous,
transparent language of the concept.
Conclusion
The poetic legacy taken up by the Orphics (incorporating theogony,

the general Greek sense of pollution and cathartic practices, as well as
the Dionysian ecstasies and their own ecstatic sense of cathartic union
with a god) anticipates the philosophers, who, approaching the same
problem, a conflicted sense of both innocence and guilt, jettison reli-
gious myth for a secular myth about reason and the soul’s education.
But there were important differences in the nuance of their pedagogy.
Heraclitus’ psuchù recalls the divine logos through an intensive, inner
searching (“I searched into myself,” he says, fr. 101), while Parmenides
describes the illumination as a spontaneous grace or fate outside of the
philosopher’s hands. “The goddess greets him at the portals of light:
‘Welcome, since no evil fate has dispatched you on your journey by
this road.’”33 Both represent alternatives to the worldly search champi-
oned by figures like Xenophanes, who compared the imperfect knowl-
edge of human beings to the knowledge of one perfectly omnipotent
god (fr. 24), and later, Hecataeus, whose account is “true” because
it is how “they appear to me.”34 And so at least two centuries before
philosophy brokered its official theories of education in texts such as
31
32
Sophocles Oedipus at Colonus, 964-965.
33
Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 148. Cf. Parmenides, fr. B1, 26. For a general
discussion of different kinds of knowledge and their acquisition, see ch. 7.
34
Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 143. This is the opening phrase of Hecataeus’
histories. While his accounts are ridiculed by the historians to come, Herodotus
for example, it is his “particular achievement that he placed knowledge, as it was
Plato’s Meno and Republic and the opening of Aristotle’s Metaphys-

ics, divergent ideas of how knowledge was acquired, especially divine
knowledge, were beginning to assert themselves: inward striving and
anamnùsis, inquiry in the realm of the senses, or a divine gift received
in the flash of an instant.
Once the philosophers of Athens get to work on individual psychol-
ogy (within the broader frame of the city, and the universal, rational
order containing them both) man’s conflicts will take place within the
domain of reason itself. Aristotle’s moral psychology, we’ll find, re-
tains the notion of personal struggle which developed in the lyric and
spiked finally in tragedy, but there is no more collision between hu-
man reason and the gods, as in tragedy, or, as in the Orphic tradition,
no violence between the gods themselves corrupting man’s nature at
the source of his birth. The Titan myth explained to the Greek his
dual sense of both divine innocence and criminal corruption. This
is the same tragic ambivalence we found in tragedy, improvising now
with the anxiety over the body, over meat, birth, sexuality, death and
especially spilt blood penetrating archaic Greece. The problem of
killing, of violence, and life as violence, was perfectly suited to the
god divided between these trajectories.35 The ritual and myth devoted
to Dionysus was a rehearsal of the struggle between individual forms
of life (bioi) such as man and the eternally regenerative life (zoù) puls-
ing within him, which gave him life only with the same indifference
in which it would inevitably take it. 36 Philosophy usurps the tragic di-
lemma between bios and zoù for itself, between mortality and immor-
tality, following Onomacritus and the Orphic adoption of Dionysus.
The philosophical psychology of the fourth century continues to
develop this strife within the soul between animality and divinity, an
ambivalent guilt, securing further the interpretation of man as this
split and inaugurating a second stage in the penetration and domina-
tion of Greek culture by this drop of alien blood.37 The philosophical
understood by him, in a position whence it could be advanced and augmented.” For

Herodotus’ lambasting of Hecataeus, see Herodotus Histories, 4.36.
35
See J. P. Guepin The Tragic Paradox, generally, and pt. II specifically.
36
For an explanation and references behind the distinction of zoù and bios, see Karl
Kerenyi Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, pp. xxxi-xxxvii.
37
Karl Kerenyi Dionysos:Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, p. 239: “The Di-
onysian religion possessed its own inherent and immanent ‘philosophy’ – its ‘dia-
lectic’ – differing from that of the Orphic literature based on Orpheus’ journey to
the underworld. In the journeys of mortal men (not of gods like Dionysus) to the
underworld, at least the beginnings of a psychology and ethical philosophy are in-
herent: a doctrine of the immortality of the soul and of the punishment of sinners.
care or therapy which Socrates had introduced a century earlier bore

on a soul conceived in light of this Orphic alienation from birth and
death. 38 It revised this primitive need to purify a guilt in terms, now,
of knowledge and ignorance. Unwilling to identify virtue exclusively
with knowledge – as had Socrates, ignoring the independent motives
of the passions – individual moral psychology beginning with Plato
and maturing scientifically in Aristotle absorbs the wild sparagmos
and hķmophagos of Dionysus into the individual soul where it be-
comes a vague animality for reason to tame. 39 Rinsed of the dynamic
This is no longer a mere ‘immanent philosophy’ as in the dialectic of the Dionysian
religion, but rather a pre-philosophical view of the world.”
38
Charles Burnet Socratic Doctrine of the Soul, p. 147 f. Orphism certainly made an
impression on Socrates. Its influence on the “higher thought of Greece was by no
means negligible.” Jaeger’s more current work confirms: “Now this complete coales-
cence of life-soul and consciousness in the conception of the psuchù appears in the
religious beliefs of the sixth century Orphics and Pythagoreans as a presupposition
of their doctrine of the so-called transmigration of souls. It is impossible not to see
in this doctrine one of the most important causes of the diffusion of the un-Homeric
meaning of the word psuchù and its ultimate triumph.” “And when Socrates holds
that the preservation of man’s soul from harm is the thing most important in life,
and that in comparison with this everything else must recede, his emphasis on the
value of the soul, so incomprehensible to the Greece of an earlier age, would have
been inexplicable” without the influence of the Orphic way of life and their belief in
the divinity of the self. Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers,
pp. 83, 89.
Burnet, however, is tentative to draw too close a connection to Socrates, because
for him this Orphic belief does not include anything which might be receptive of
character, the focus of Socrates teaching. It also cuts against his now disputed view
that the soul until the end of the fifth century was a seat of unconscious, dark emo-
tion, not yet identified with the individual person. The Orphic soul is not identified
with the “I,” he says. But this is as false of early fragments such as that of Empedo-
cles, an Orphic figure, as it was for the simple sailors whose graves we read of ear-
lier. For more on these fragments, see page 63, above. The personal, divine nature
of the “second self” of the Orphics was a necessary step between the old and new
story in Greece about the soul. See Werner Jaeger Paideia, vol. 2, p. 38.
Burkert, also, the most recent authority, writes that it is beyond doubt that the
new religious concepts related to metempsychosis played a significant role in the
development of the notion of psuchù. Walter Burkert Lore and Science in Ancient
Pythagoreanism, p. 134 (n78).
39
The point is obviously not that there was a conscious rinsing and internalizing of
this Orphic Dionysus. I am only giving a voice to connections which assert them-
selves between elements in the written culture, laying bare identifications, asso-
ciations, which traditionally go unrecognized. Plato was the first to generalize the
exception of the shaman to an essential human possibility. But the divine spark of
the shaman, their exceptional nature, still shines through, in the divine madness of
the Phaedrus, for example, and also the Republic. See also E. R. Dodds the Ancient
Concept of Progress, p. 109. Plato’s psychological interest in these dialogues, writes,
growth of Dionysian life absorbing the individual destructively in the

anonymity of its effects, the philosopher identifies the former irra-
tionality of the daimķn in man as psuchù with the static impersonality
of the cosmic order or logos. Moral responsibility will rest entirely
on the individual (and, indirectly, his community) whose job it is to
cultivate reason ascetically in his soul. Internal harmony and self-rule
(enkrateia) become an essential human possibility40 and the puritan
strain of thought introduced by the shamans is absorbed even more
deeply and invisibly.
The philosopher is no longer willing to submit to divine transcend-
ence in the violence of tragedy or enthusiasmic possession in the
mysteries. Ethics as science makes tragedy impossible. Aristotle im-
manentalizes this divine transcendence in man and makes it a logos
for philosophy to develop, a divine spark which ascetics can fan into
flame, which will elevate all men, at least potentially and at best tem-
porarily, like the ecstatic bacchants in the wilds of the throng, to the
immortal life of gods (and, incidentally, autonomous agents of reason).
This mundanizing of the soul allows Aristotle to pursue the problem
of the irrational presented by Sophocles’ Oedipus within the confines
of a naturalistic psychology, in which, as we saw in the last chapter, the
gods play no role.
Dodds, concerns “exceptional natures and their exceptional possibilities – those

possibilities which, though the foundation of the Academy, were to be developed
systematically for the first time[.]”
40
See J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, pp. 180-186. The idea of the soul divided
between wisdom and the passions and enkrateia as a moral imperative first appear
in the Sophists, such as Antiphon, and Democritus. But the term itself, in its moral
sense, shows up first in Xenophon. See Xenophon Memorabilia, i.5, ii.1, iv.3, iv.5.
Chapter 5
Psychologizing Oedipus:
Reason and Unreason in Aristotle’s Ethics
Introduction
If Nietzsche was right and Oedipus is a Dionysian mask, the philoso-

pher collects it from the floor of the theatre he empties and refashions
it according to a rational aesthetic, ordering and sanitizing this both
holy and unholy figure for his initiation into philosophy’s human sci-
ence. Aristotle’s conception of tragedy, while no doubt determined
by his ethics and psychology, influence them in return, insofar as his
moral psychology is structured in such a way that the tragic collision
in Oedipus, and any human agent for that matter, is suppressed. In
Dionysus’ theatre we saw the human logos of Oedipus paradoxically
obverted and destroyed by a god. Aristotle translates this combat be-
tween logoi into the language of character psychology, repositioning
the ungovernable exteriority of this god within the confines of a soul
naturally compelled to resolve this immanent difference between rea-
son and the passions.1 Philosophy’s potential mastery of the passions
and desire generally, an essential component of tragic strife and vio-
lence, depends upon its reconception of their very nature.2
The conflict between reason and unreason in man will not mean,
however, ignoring the passions, like Socrates had, or training them
out of existence, as in the apatheia to which Stoics like Chryssipus
aspired. In fact, to our surprise, once we better understand Aristotle’s
language, we’ll see that virtue consists in dealing with the passions
lack of reason on its own terms. The irrationality of emotion for Ar-
istotle is nothing like what we today would describe in those terms,
1
Aristotle Pol., 1254b5-8. It is “intellect” that rules the appetites, naturally, “mind”
that rules “the passionate element.”
2
Nussbaum identifies the tragic potential of passionate attachments, alongside the po-
tential conflict of values, as the two components of tragedy with which anti-tragic
philosophy would have contend. Martha Nussbaum The Fragility of Goodness, p. 9.
and so he grants emotion more prized a place than we are likely to

expect. Practical wisdom (phronùsis), the intellectual virtue reconcil-
ing this split, conceived in a correspondingly ‘strange’ way, not only
depends on the appropriate preservation of unreason, but is, by the
post-Cartesian standards of reflective distance and transparency, only
ambiguously rational. Reason, we’ll find, as it was for Plato, is also
invested, and through a desire all its own, in action and life. 3 But the
terms of this contest of desire in the soul, in which individual charac-
ter, and, by extension, political life are the stakes, are of course set by
Aristotle, and the Poetics’ neglect of paradox is negative proof of the
elimination of tragedy from tragedy itself.4 It points toward an analo-
gous design in the Nicomachean Ethics. How this tragic collision has
been transformed through its transposition into the register of theo-
retical psychology is what we now set out to discover.
Akrasia in the Eudemian and Nicomachean Ethics
What are the consequences in Aristotle’s moral psychology and theory

of culpability for his secularization of the tragic? There are conflicting
accounts of this transformation within the body of Aristotle’s work,
and so we can observe in the alterations of Aristotle’s moral psychol-
ogy between the Eudemian and the Nicomachean Ethics the inter-
nalization and personalization of this divine exteriority with which
Sophocles’ Oedipus collided. The source of Oedipus’ pollution, guilt,
and ultimately violence – as well as its effect on Aristotle’s theory of
moral action – slips from the displaced center of the gods to that of
the rational agent.5
3
See Plato Republic, 580d7-8, where reason is specified as a kind of appetite.
4
Stephen Halliwell “Pleasure, Understanding, and Emotion in Aristotle’s Poetics”
in Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 253. As we have seen, Halliwell confirms that
Aristotle “doesn’t attribute to paradox a central role.”
5
Jaeger gave the definitive argument for the chronological priority of the Eudemian
Ethics over the Nicomachean Ethics, which depended in large part on the elimina-
tion of the “Platonism” in Aristotle’s more ecstatic conceptions of man’s relation-
ship to the divine, and a more pronounced dualism of soul and body. See Werner
Jaeger Aristotle. The prioritizing of the Nicomachean Ethics goes back definitively
to Aspasius, in the 2nd century. A. Kenny argues for a late dating of the Eudemian
Ethics which would place it at least coordinate with the Nicomachean, and perhaps
later. See A. Kenny, The Aristotelian Ethics and Aristotle on the Perfect Life. His
position is based on an examination of the disputed books which the two treatises
share. He concludes that they belong originally to the Eudemian Ethics, which in
other respects proves to belong to the later period of Aristotle’s authorship in Ath-
Psychologizing Oedipus: Reason and Unreason in Aristotle’s Ethics 109
The Eudemian Ethics
Aristotle argues in both the Eudemian Ethics and Nicomachean Eth-

ics that voluntary action should be defined by thought, exclusively,
and not desire (EE, 1223a21-24a7). In the Eudemian Ethics, Aristotle
explains that since both the self-ruled and the akratic man act volun-
tarily, yet both do so from contrary desires, it must be their intention
(dianoia) that defines the voluntariness of the act. Incontinence (akra-
sia) is voluntary in both the Eudemian and the Nicomachean Ethics
because the akratic “in a sense” knows what he is doing (EN, 1152a16)
– the action is intended (EE, 1225a28).6 As in the Nicomachean Eth-
ics involuntary action is defined as dia agnoian (EE, 1225b1-16) –
through ignorance – and akratic action remains voluntary because the
impulses of both desire and reason are natural, and so the dominance
of either expresses itself in voluntary action (that is, action that begins
in the agent [EE, 1224b21-9]).
Akrasia could only be mistaken for involuntary action if the pas-
sions that overwhelm reason in the akratic were something external
ens. Kenny’s view contradicts Jaeger’s and Dirlmeir’s finding that they were original
to the Nicomachean Ethics and filled a gap in the Eudemian Ethics created by a loss
of the original books, and Cooper’s view, as well as Gauthier-Jolif’s, that Aristotle
simply used these books twice, inserting them again in the later work, a rewriting of
the first.
Kenny has failed to persuade the mainstream of Aristotle scholarship, represent-
ed by such figures as Cooper and Erwin in their reviews of The Aristotelian Ethics.
For more on this summary of the debate as well as an overview of the original state-
ment of his position, see the appendix to Aristotle on the Perfect Life, pp. 113-142.
No matter what the chronology, the two treatises represent variant views of Ar-
istotle’s, suggesting some kind of osmosis of the gods between the pathù of a man’s
soul and the heavens of Greek myth, a trace of this something lost or suppressed
operating within Aristotle’s work itself. If we can talk about the rise of philosophy
in terms of secularization, it would be hard to resist Jaeger’s conclusion that the
Nicomachean Ethics represents a later stage in that process, at least in spirit. In any
case, since Burnet’s commentary over a century ago, central works such as Ross’s
Aristotle, Hardie’s Aristotle’s Ethical Theory, Cooper’s Reason and Human Good,
and Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness have found in it a useful supplement to
its Nicomachean cousin and “the modern consensus of scholars” is that both trea-
tises are legitimately Aristotelian.
6
There is an exception at EN, 1147a11-b12, where akrasia, along with all irrationality
owing to the pathù are said be agnoia. But responsibility is not being discussed here,
and it is probably an earlier view (coincident with EE, iv, unlike the modification/de-
velopment at EN, 1152a16. See I. M. Glanville “Tragic Error” in Classical Quarterly
50 [n1]). When responsibility is discussed, Aristotle maintains the “knowledge” of
the agent.
to man, like a god, for instance, exerting a compulsive influence. So

far there is not much shift to anticipate in the Nicomachean Ethics.
The difference between the two is buried just beneath the surface, not
in what acts count as voluntary, but in how Aristotle determines the
psychological model of the voluntary action of akrasia.
For the Aristotle of the Eudemian Ethics, if a passion is unnatural,
beyond “what his nature [physis autou] is able to bear” (EE, 1225a25),
the action to follow is excused as involuntary. “What it is not able to
bear, not being within reach of his own natural desire or calculation, is
not within his control” (EE, 1225a26-27). Reminiscent of the Homer-
ic tradition and the lyricists, for whom Love is a god, and passions sent
by him from without, this applies “for many,” he says, to the passion of
eros, but also to some instances of anger (thumos) and even ta phusika
(EE, 1225a20). Due to the violence of the passion it is “as if” nature
were overpowered. The distinguishing passage comes a few lines later,
confirmed even more strongly later in chapter VIII:
Therefore those who are inspired and prophesy, though their act is one of thought, we
still say have it not in their own power either to say what they said, or to do what they
did. And so of acts done through appetite [epithumia]. So that some thoughts and pas-
sions do not depend on us, nor the acts following such thoughts and reasonings, but, as
Philolaus said, some logoi are too strong for us. (EE, 1225a28-34, my italics)
According to Aristotle, citing the 5th century Pythagorean author,

there exist transcendent logoi which enter the pathù.7 These passions
and thoughts are both ours and not. Our reason is overpowered, like
the akratic who we’ll examine shortly – but unlike the akratic we act
involuntarily. This description is perfectly amenable to Oedipus as
Sophocles bequeathed him.
Divine possession actually introduces the treatise on the first page,
as Aristotle considers the first principle of both ethical works: eu-
daimonia. He wonders if “men become happy in none of these ways
[nature, teaching, or discipline] but either – like those possessed by
nymphs or deities – through a sort of divine influence, being as it
were inspired, or through chance” (EE, 1214a23-26). Nature, teach-
ing, and discipline (askùsis) together constitute the raw material for
Aristotle’s moral science, its inculcation through habit in the man (an
askùsis recalling the cathartic practices of the Orphic-Pythagoreans).
Theos competes with this science for the place left by a sophistic
7
Philolaus’ single work, of which we have fragments and testimony, included the study
of both medicine and cosmogony. He is Aristotle’s primary source on Pythagorean-
ism. Walter Burkert Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, pp. 235-238.
tuchù that Aristotle must systematically exclude in favour of reason.

Though the daimķn does not emerge triumphant in this work, sup-
planted as it is by a logos-governed virtue, it does win a few small
places for itself that are expropriated in the interest of rational nature
and character in the Nicomachean Ethics. The distinction in the Ni-
comachean Ethics, subtle but important, will take place with respect
to these ambiguous cases of divine inspiration when the individual
acts in a sense both dia gnoian and dia agnoian. It is the status of
certain kinds of pathù and their relation to knowledge in these more
ambiguous circumstances reconceived in the Nicomachean Ethics as
hamartema that shifts. In the Eudemian Ethics’ account of divine
enthousiasmoi, acts following from these enthusiasms are unnatural,
and therefore involuntary and blameless. Like the akratic, the agent
does not technically act through ignorance. But the logos and/or the
epithumia transcend him. The enthusiasmic, intentionally, like the
akratic, and yet unviciously (aneu kakos) does wrong (though with-
out blame, while akrasia is blamed). This paradoxical category of in-
tentional, blameless action somewhere in the interstice between these
two texts becomes hamartia.
The Eudemian Ethics further clarifiy the vague coincidence of di-
vinely inspired thought and action with the pathù of epithumia in the
last book of the treatise (EE, 1248a33-b7). A companion to Poetics
XIV’s discussion of eutuchia and the happy ending, the subject is again
the potential threat which tuchù (qua chance) presents to reason, and
the explanation of eutuchia in terms other than chance. How is it that
the lucky aphrones succeed, without art or logos (EE, 1247a13-16)?
Or is it because he is loved, as the phrase is, by a god, success being something coming
from without, as a worse built vessel often sails better, not owing to itself but because
it has a good pilot, namely, the divinity. But it is absurd that a god or divinity should
love such a man and not the best and most prudent. (EE, 1247a24-29)
Since the cause cannot be intelligence or divine protection, it must be

nature, Aristotle concludes. But nature is the cause of the absolutely
uniform, and fortune is the opposite. Fortune surprises. It disrupts
the regularity of things. Aristotle persists in understanding good for-
tune as a natural talent, and concludes that there is no such thing as
a fortunate person, in the usual sense, because this would leave their
success causeless, an impossibility. But there are people with a desire
naturally capable of some unreasoned divination. Their acts do not
actually spring from chance. They only seem to do so.
Still, he insists, either fortune or chance must be the cause of this
natural endowment, man’s starting point for deliberation. Yet, both
introduce an arbitrariness into life which Aristotle’s rational teleology

cannot admit. The solution finally lies in his psychology.
The object of our search is this – what is the commencement of movement in the soul?
The answer is clear: as in the universe, so in the soul, God moves everything. For in a
sense the divine element in us moves everything. The starting point of reasoning is not
reasoning, but something greater. What, then, could be greater even than knowledge
and intellect but God (EE, 1248a24-29, my italics)?
Now at first this divinity seems as if it could be something akin to

the prime mover of the Metaphysics, assimilable to an impersonal in-
telligence. But Aristotle immediately describes this divinity in terms
that are inarguably daimonic. It is greater than the intellect, identified
against rather than with the pure thinking of god in Metaphysics XII.7.
As if addressing the problem of tragedy, an internal mover which is
neither character nor intellect, which is also exterior, he continues:
Not virtue, for virtue is an instrument of the intellect. And for this reason, as I said
awhile ago, those are called fortunate who, whatever they start on, succeed in it with-
out being good at reasoning. And deliberation is of no advantage to them, for they
have in them a principle that is better than intellect and deliberation, while the others
have not this but have intellect; they have inspiration (enthousiasmos), but they cannot
deliberate. (EE 1248a29-33, my italics)
This power beyond reason also makes an appearance in a fragment

of one of Aristotle’s lost works, On Prayer: “God is either reason or
something even beyond reason.”8
The fortune of inspired epithumia (an “unreasoning desire” [EE,
1247b19, 26-28] for the good) moves the fortunate aphronimos secretly
from without. He is a vessel piloted by a god, like Oedipus, but reversed,
hitting the eudaimonos mark, steering successfully past disaster to the
eutuchia of Poetics XIV. Aristotle goes on to draw this divine inspira-
tion together with both a Teiresian prophecy and Oedipal blindness, as
well as a dreamy, perhaps proto-Kierkegaardian melancholy.
This quality sees well the future and the present, and these are the men in whom the
reasoning power is relaxed. Hence we have the melancholic men, the dreamers of what
is true. For the moving principle seems to become stronger when the reasoning-power
is relaxed. So the blind remember better, their memory being freed from concern with
the visible. It is clear, then, that there are two kinds of good luck, the one divine – and
so the lucky seem to succeed owing to God; men of this sort seem to succeed in follow-
ing their aim, the others to succeed contrary to their aim; both are irrational, but the
one is persistent good luck, the other not. (EE, 1248a38-b14, my italics)9
8
Aristotle, Fragmenta, ed. by Rose, fr. 49; Aristotle Die Schule des Aristoteles, ed. by
Wehrli, fr. 1.
9
When Aristotle speaks of the others, who succeed contrary to their aim, he seems to
refer to those who are fortunate by nature, not divinity.
In addition to the citation of the Orphic-Pythagoraean author in book

II, the dreaming mentioned here has been connected by Aristotle in
an early fragment with the flight of the shaman’s soul during sleep, in
which, experiencing a kind of pre-death, it gains the power of proph-
ecy.10 This daimonic order in which the shaman is inscribed inher-
ently contests the rational one that for the mature Aristotle governs
all things in the human soul, as, for Homer, Olympus distantly mar-
shalled the world of men. As the daimones of tragedy contested the
authority of ùthos in Heraclitus’ formulation – ùthos anthropķ daimķn
– so in the Eudemian Ethics individual madness and inspiration in
the soul upset the morally virtuous reign of reason over the passions,
producing action which is only ambiguously one’s own, a trace of the
recently deceased art.
The Nicomachean Ethics
When the ambiguously intended actions of the akratic are examined in

the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle gives us an emended picture of the
pathù. He introduces a generic “nature” (EN, 1149b4) which replaces
“unnatural” inspirations as exculpatory, implicitly excluding these
spontaneous inventions of divinity as an explanatory cause of blame-
less action. While before it was ‘nature’ which made us responsible,
now it excuses us, transforming these unnatural, violent emotions into
a punishable source of guilt (EN, 1148b15-49a20). Instances of emo-
tional violence somehow force us outside of nature, as an aberration.
Unnatural violence is ours. We are responsible for its effects. Since
actions are involuntary only when their archù is exķthen (when their
origin comes from outside of the agent), these unnaturally strong pas-
sions remain culpable because they are still natural to the soul of the
agent. Those that compel us from without, because they are generically
natural, are blameless (EN, 1149b4-7); but these specifically human
compulsions (ta anthropika) are not. But it is also “human nature” that
pardons us. Violent emotions either compel us internally, culpably, ac-
cording to our humanity (de dokei oux ùtton anthropika einai ta aloga
pathù, EN, 1112a32-33), or, in a sense from without, also according to a
shared human nature (tùn anthropin phusin, EN, 1149b4-7).
10
Aristotle, Fragmenta, ed. by Rose, fr. 10. mÒ¿Ë Á¿Ï ÃË Ò× nÎËÍÓË È¿Æq ¿ÓÒÅË
ÁÇÁËÃÒ¿Ç k ÖÓÕÅ ÒÍÒÃ ÒÅË ÇÂÇÍË ¿ÎÍÉ¿ÀÍÓÑ¿ ÔÓÑÇË ÎÏÍÊ¿ËÒÃÓÃÒ¿Ç ÒÃ È¿Ç
ÎÏÍ¿ÁÍÏÃÓÃÇ Ò¿ ÊÃÉÉÍËÒ¿ ÒÍÇ¿ÓÒÅ ÂÃ ÃÑÒÇ È¿Ç ÃË Ò× È¿Ò¿ ÒÍË Æ¿Ë¿ÒÍË
ÕÍÏÇÄÃÑÆ¿Ç Ò×Ë ÑÍÊ¿Ò×Ë.
In fully secularizing the unreasoned pathù of the soul and eliminat-

ing this trace of the daimonic, Aristotle slips into an ambiguous dia-
lectic in which nature both pardons and damns, as does being human.
As an individual over and against nature, wrongs committed because
of emotional violence are punishable. As an individual who, from a
broader perspective, is a part of nature, this same emotionality is an
innocent, proto-Romantic impulse of nature’s fundamental power and
the passionate individual’s connection with it. In either case the inde-
pendent force of the gods which in tragedy intruded upon the human
sphere from within, disappears, leaving another quasi-tragic creature,
ambiguously both a part of and independent from nature.
The gods have now been evacuated from the private stage of ethics,
the moral-psychological scene, as, in the Poetics, Aristotle had forced
them from the public stage of tragedy. Along with them, we lose the
concepts we need to think a man like Oedipus. Since violent emotions
cannot possibly be conceived as “human” in the exculpatory sense
(since only an aberration of nature) the concept of a passion which
comes from without, inspired epithumia, is eliminated.11 The idea that
logoi could enter us from without would be even more anomalous.
Since Sophocles’ Oedipus was no akratic, this makes him an ambigu-
ous and potentially problematic figure for Aristotle of voluntary, yet
blameless, crime – a problem he’ll resolve by introducing hamartia
and, with it, a conspicuously enlightenment Oedipus.
The Eudemian Ethics avoid this aporia into which Sophocles’ Oed-
ipus was placed by the Nicomachean Ethics (EN, 1111a2-7, see earlier
discussion at p. 85) by including a much smaller list of the elements of
voluntary action: one must “act with knowledge of the person acted on,
instrument, and tendency” (EE, 1225b2) of the act (in other words, to
kill rather than save). Oedipus’ mistake at the crossroads could be ex-
plained as exculpable by the admission of divine interference in book
II connected with the possibility that the agent fails to know himself
and therefore his relations. That he might not is the ‘sane madness’
– a madness operating from within the apparently sober operations
of reason – which makes Oedipus a moral philosopher’s nightmare.
Excluding divine madness from the Nicomachean Ethics’ table of ex-
planations, Arisotle replaces his ignorance about who he was and the
11
There is a minor exception, insignificant for my argument, at EN, 1110a23. Certain
types of “mixed actions” in which an individual is compelled by an outside threat to
choose wrongly are said to be involuntary, “when one does what he ought not under
pressure which overstrains human nature and which no one could withstand (tùn
anthropin phusin, EN, 1110a25-27).
truth of his relations with hamartia as a sane version of this mania –

an internal source of involuntary action in an agent who nevertheless
is neither somatically nor religiously deranged. This ambiguity was
also the source of his tragedy for Sophocles. But, as we saw in the first
chapter, this fails to describe the ignorance specific to the fallen king
as Sophocles created him: an ignorance of oneself.
Aristotle’s mature account of human action has no place to situ-
ate Sophocles’ Oedipus, no category to place him. Oedipus remains a
paradox and a challenge to the practical philosopher to truly grapple
with the challenge the irrational poses to the authority of discursive
thinking. He is not akratic, but neither is he mentally sick, nor vicious.
And yet he embodies the worst offense the fertile imagination of the
poet can dream up. The traditional categories of guilt and innocence
cannot apply. He has committed no injustice (adikema) yet there are
his crimes, and human nature construed as part of a larger nature can-
not excuse him, nor, as a pathological source of injustice, can it akrati-
cally explain his guilt. He becomes most human when as a member
of the human community he is destroyed. The paradigmatic guilt of
Sophocles’ Oedipus is a challenge to thought which Kierkegaard, in
the wake of modernity, inspired by philosophy’s return to the well of
tragedy in Schelling and Hegel, will be the first to take seriously.
Aristotle’s Oedipus, Secularizing the Paradox
Like Sophocles, Aristotle presents us with the problem of secularisa-

tion and the ever-expansive limits of human knowledge: the anthro-
pologizing of gods and nature and the naturalizing of man as a part
of this nature. It is within the substance of the individual soul that
Aristotle perpetuates this legacy, the dilemma between an apparent
instability and wondrous irrationality in things, in us, even, in Oedi-
pus as us, and a deeper rational necessity. Though the art of Sophocles
differs deeply from that of Aeschylus and Euripides, in all three fig-
ures the tragedy hinges on two necessities which come into conflict.
In Oedipus this is the necessity of a human reason which tends to ex-
tend itself indefinitely, and the irrational, the logos of the gods which
man’s reason runs up against at its destructive limits. “The price of
Aristotle’s philosophical rapprochement with the problem of tragedy
turns out, at the level of ideal theory, to be secularisation”12 not just
12
Stephen Halliwell Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 233.
of nature and political life, but also the individual soul. His advances
in moral psychology pave the way for a reconciliation between these
opposing forces of necessity, the difference between which by default
becomes the problem of freedom. The irrational is transformed, as
desire, into a part of organic nature. Man remains a point of conflict
where an apparent irrationality can surface, where a new ambiguity
between human nature and nature as such asserts itself.
Aristotle applies the distinction typical of the philosopher between
appearance and reality to the irrational itself, which becomes a sort
of evanescence on the surface of man. Human being, an idiosyncratic
form of life in which a single nature coils against itself, generates the
appearance of irrationality. But this is an unreason with no being of
its own. Man’s submission to chance is a base form of necessity or
slavery.13 The freedom of elements within the whole of nature, one
of which he counts man, is achieved for Aristotle by plugging in to
the necessary order of reason. Irrationality as something to be extin-
guished, like fog polished from a glass, like the apparent ‘causes’ of
tuchù or a daimonic theos behind which lie the necessary truths of a
rational order, only applies to beings with a share in reason.
Now appetites may conflict, and this happens wherever reason and desire are opposed,
and this occurs in creatures which have a sense of time (for the mind advises us to re-
sist with a view to the future, while desire only looks to the present); (DA, 433b5-10)
The intervention of human reason as a mediator in the course of an

immediately rational nature gives birth to a conflict which we can call
irrationality. But this is really just a quarrel between two overlapping
reasons or natures, immediate and mediate, which arise in the single
space of the human soul and must confront their difference.14 The ir-
rational in this sense is kept within human-psychological bounds. It re-
flects a struggle between the ‘time’ of human reason, in which the mo-
ment distends, and a lower nature with no sense of time. It is a function
of temporal difference, not a difference in kind.15 Like everything else
under the heavens, this irrationality can be studied in terms of natural
13
Aristotle Met., 1075a19-22.
14
Aristotle EE, 1224b34-7. Both reason and appetite act, says Aristotle, “in a way,
contrary to nature, and yet, broadly speaking, according to nature, but not the same
nature.”
15
See Henry Richardson “Desire and the Good in de Anima” in Essays on Aristotle’s
de Anima, p. 399. Human achievement and distinction from the animal realm are
marked not by “a new relation to the good,” but because they imply a rational abil-
ity to compare, to conceive of relations, which allows them to deal with “conflicts
among difference aspect of their good.”
causes.16 Akratics, women, and even Greek boys are unreasoning be-
cause they make poor judgments,17 not because they fail to judge.18 One
must have reason to become irrational.
Oedipus solved the riddle of the sphinx only to uncover a deeper
and even more destructive plague: himself. In ridding the city of this
plague, he destroys himself. Still, as a riddle, Oedipus remains. Aris-
totle solves the plague of the irrational, Oedipus’ legacy, the riddle of
the self, as a misrelation within the human soul between two contrary
desires. He lays out the nature of the problem of unreason at the end
of the Nicomachean Ethics’ first book. Like the Socrates of the Re-
public, Aristotle distinguishes the parts of the soul through a descrip-
tion of the impulses of desire at work in akrasia:
For we praise the rational principle of the continent man and of the incontinent, and
the part of their soul that has such a principle, since it urges them aright and towards
the best objects; but there is found in them also another element naturally opposed
to the rational principle, which fights against and resists that principle. For exactly as
paralysed limbs when we intend to move them to the right turn on the contrary to the
left, so is it with the soul; the impulses of incontinent people move in contrary direc-
tions. […] Now even this seems to have a share in a rational principle, as we said; at
any rate in the continent man it obeys the rational principle – and presumably in the
temperate and brave man it is still more obedient; for in him it speaks, on all matters,
with the same voice as the rational principle. (EN, 1102b14-29)
Both incontinence and continence allow us to distinguish the elements

of this contest. In the continent, reason manages to suppress its oppo-
16
The explanation of natural being in terms of the four causes is typically referred
to in the literature as “sublunary.” Heavenly motion, which, since it is circular, for
Aristotle EN, 1147a24-b19 is not really motion at all, but activity (energeia), is ex-
plained in terms of the motion (kinùsis) from potentiality (dunamis) to actuality
(energeia).
17
Aristotle EN, 1111a27. Children and the lower animals act voluntarily, when their
actions are caused through thumon or epithumon.
18
See Aristotle DA, 430a26-8, b5: Phronùsis makes use of nous in forming unified
concepts in a judgment. Cf. Aristotle APo., 100a1: The “ ‘experience’ of animals
who possess logos is radically different from those without it.” Cf. Charles Kahn
“Aristotle on Thinking” in Essays on Aristotle’s de Anima, ed. by Nussbaum and
Rorty, p. 368 f.: [E]ven in the empeiria of medicine, or practical reason, before a
universal is laid down, “sortal concepts” such as man, sickness, etc, the ability to
recognize individual substances such as these, are necessary. Aisthùsis alone can-
not provide these. Deliberative imagination (phantasia bouleutikù) is required
for rational judgments, and it belongs exclusively to the rational animal, as at DA,
434a5-7. This desire provides a unity of conflicting desires by picking out a single
object of desire which corresponds both to appetitive and rational desire. This is
the good as orekton. See Henry Richardson “Desire and the Good in de Anima” in
Essays on Aristotle’s de Anima, p. 398 f.
nent, but not to change its mind. It maintains authority through a con-
stant struggle that makes the contestants easy to pick out. In the case
of incontinence the difference is even more pronounced. Since the
incontinent act despite themselves their regret makes them an easy
mark. In regret or repentance the voice of reason has its arm twisted
behind it, forced to announce its own defeat.
Unreasoning Desires
To say that unreasoning desires have “changed their mind” or that

reason’s “arm” has been “forced” may seem like confusing metaphors
to bring to bear on Aristotle’s soul. Wasn’t the point to separate rea-
son from the desires and passions connected with the body? Aristotle
does seem to identify unreason with the appetites and desires in gen-
eral (thumetikon kai holķs orektikon), splitting them off from reason.
But in the same breath he also gives these appetites and desires the
rational property of voice, and intelligent ears, necessary instruments
for understanding and obeisance. “The appetitive and in general the
desiring element in a sense shares in it, in so far as it listens to and
obeys it” (EN, 1102b30-32). What then is the relation between the pas-
sions and reason? Is reason an absence of desire, and vice versa? Do
reason and unreason overlap at all, and, if so, in what way?
Aristotle distinguishes three different kinds of desire or impulse
(orexis, hormai) (EN, 1102b22): epithumia, thumos, and boulùsis.
Since the objects of desire for Aristotle are logically prior to both the
actual spring of desires and their capacities (DA, 415a18-22), its three
types are each defined teleologically in terms of their objects, rather
than some generic, object-less hunger.
There are three things that are the motives of choice and three that are the motives of
avoidance; namely, the noble, the expedient, and the pleasant, and their opposites, the
base, the harmful, and the painful. (EN, 1104b30-33)
We do not have an experience of hunger, or lust, and then find our-

selves some lunch, or willing flesh. Rather, we have a desire that is al-
ways already directed towards an end (telos, eschaton, hù eneka, DA,
433a15-17), e. g., a hunger for the steak at Chez Jay’s, a lust for that
cocktail waitress, revenge against my brother’s killer. Through desires
we become what we are, move towards the kind of goal that befits us.
The account is explicitly non-mechanical and reflects a Greek spirit
hearkening all the way back to Homer, who doesn’t write of generic
hunger or thirst, but rather desire (eron) for food and drink.19 With-
out some form of this object-drawn desire, for Aristotle, motion is
impossible. Thought (nous or dianoia) cannot independently produce
movement (DA, 433a23, EN, 1139a35). Descartes’ Cogito or the bu-
reaucratic manager, even the psychoanalyst, while measuring, analys-
ing or observing, cannot act, insofar as their thinking is removed from
the source of desires in the bodied world. The action embedding this
thought is just a more sophisticated kind of animal motion for Aris-
totle. The same language of “taking aim” or “shooting at” describes
both the lower animal’s pleasure-seeking and the rational work of the
phronimos (stochazesthai, HA, 542a30).
The lowest form of desire is epithumia or appetite. It is the desire
for pleasures, ultimately those of touch, e. g. sex, sumptuous food, in-
ebriation, etc., which moves “each of our bodily parts” and “leads us
towards” the object (EN, 1147a34-5). Aristotle distinguishes epithu-
mia essentially as that form of desire which has no argument or rea-
son, but “merely springs to the enjoyment” of that which argument
or perception says is pleasant (EN, 1149b34-36). But because of the
different senses attached for us to the word ‘reason,’ Aristotle makes
it extremely tricky to uphold this distinction between rational and un-
reasoning desires. Both the Eudemian Ethics and De Anima warn us
about holding too fast to psychological distinctions like these, which
can only be formal, comparing them to the concave and convex sides of
a single curve.20 There is a kind of reason even in the appetites, which
rely upon imagination. 21 They recognize the sweet, for example, the
shapes attuned to pleasure, as well as pain. This is judgement (krisis),
which, like desire, is implicit in sentience, because sentience implies
motion, and therefore both desire and judgment. The thinking behind
the action motivated by appetite can be put into propositional form:
Pleasures are good. These pears seem ripe, and sweet, probably juicy.
Eating them would be pleasurable. It includes a number of things we
would class under thinking. But this does not make them rational in
19
See Homer Odyssey, viii. 485; xiv. 454.
20
Aristotle EE 1219b32-36. “It makes no difference whether the soul is divisible or
indivisible [into rational and irrational parts], so long as it has different faculties
(dunameis), namely those mentioned above, just as in the curved we have unsepa-
rated the concave and the convex, or, again, the straight and the white, yet the
straight is not white except incidentally and is not the same in essence.” Aristotle
gives similar warnings at de Anima, 432b8-9.
21
See Martha Nussbaum The Therapy of Desire, pp. 80 f. “[A]ll emotions are to some
degree ‘rational’ in a descriptive sense,” “cognitive and based upon belief.”
the moral-psychological frame Aristotle provides. They move in simi-

lar ways, but towards objects which are qualitatively different.
Thumos-desire in a similar way (though with some qualification)
is rational only in a weak sense. Aristotle is nowhere explicit about
the object of thumos, but the virtue of courage clearly depends upon
it.22 Courage turns on the passion of anger (orgù) – linguistic cousin
to thumos – as well as fear (EN, 1115a7-8). But the passion of thumos
at work in courage is conceptually broader than these two passions.
Courage springs from a thumotic desire for more than just relief from
the twin pains of anger and fear, or from the raw inspirations of spirit
itself that boil in the blood (EN, 1116b31-1117a1), the impulses for the
strife of contest and victorious self-assertion assigned to it by Plato
(part of a Homeric legacy which Aristotle, in his theory of this poten-
tially courageous passion, surely inherits, though about this aspect he
is less explicit). 23 Like moral virtue more generally, this desire from
which courage springs aims at a nobility (to kalon, EN, 1115b13) de-
fined essentially by reason and choice, rather than the pure passions
of spirit. 24
Deliberation, then, is not a feature of thumotic desires. For thumos,
like epithumia, once you have perception, desire and action follow im-
22
Jonathan Cooper Reason and Emotion, p. 266. Cooper confirms the absence of an
outright explanation of the object of thumos.
23
See Aristotle Rhetoric ii.2. Anger is a desire to return pain for pain, physical or
otherwise, one attended, unlike thumos, by a certain pleasure, the expectation of
revenge (esp., 1378a32-35, 1379a10-11). On thumos in Plato, see Republic, 581a9-10.
On the Homeric legacy of thumos in Plato, see Jonathan Cooper Plato on Human
Motivation, pp. 130-136.
24
Jonathan Cooper Reason and Emotion, pp. 270-280. Cooper spends several pages
piecing this argument together. He cites the privileging of incontinence with respect
to thumos in EN, vii.6, over appetite, as an essential distinction between these two
types of irrational desire. The elaboration of the virtue of good-temper in EN, iv.5
is marhsalled as further evidence that the mere harnessing of anger cannot qualify
as the virtue of courage, which involves the more primordial desire of thumos, of
which anger is a species. Aristotle, he shows, connects thumos to the praiseworthy,
a relative, perhaps, of the honor thumos seeks in Plato, through the intermediary
of a new object: to kalon. At both Rh. 1366a33 and EE, 124bb19-20 the noble is
identified with the praiseworthy, which is specified at To., 135a13 as “the fitting.”
The identification of nobility with what fittingness appears againt at EE, 1249a9.
Met., 1078a31-b36 explains that the highest nobilities are order, symmetry, and de-
terminateness, properties of mathematics especially, as well as virtuous actions.
The difficult challenge of attaining order, symmetry, and determinateness in action,
of attaining action that is “fitting,” posits Cooper, elicits the contest-lust of thumos
on a path cleared in advance by reason. Thumos must be oriented, he concludes,
through an education in reason, from competitive self-assertion to to kalon.
mediately. Although, like the appetites, thumotic desires can be put

after the fact into propositional structure and exhibit what has been
called a value-thought:25 Dishonor is bad. This man has called me a
dog (a terrible ancient Greek insult). Vengeance is called for. What
Aristotle calls the major premise converts itself through perception
of the particular fact into action: I attack him, maybe verbally, maybe
physically, depending on the situation – who the man is, who else has
heard the insult – and the extent of the damage. This is not quite rea-
son in the strict sense, for Aristotle, but it is “a manner” of reasoning
(EN, 1149a32-33). Nevertheless, in the motions of both appetite and
spirit, emotion is the cause of action, not reason (dia pathos, ou dia
logos, EN, 1117a9-10). This is true despite the fact that thumos, like
epithumia, must discriminate whether or not what is happening ought
to trigger an expression of its desires – as opposed to discriminating
what in fact has happened (whether, for example, this man was merely
calling after “a dog,” not calling me one), and what a good expression
of thumos in this particular circumstance would look like. These lat-
ter discriminations belong to reason proper. Courage without logos,
he continues, “springs from feeling,” and has only “some affinity to
true courage” (EN, 1117a9).
Nonetheless, following Plato’s discriminations between these two
types of unreasoning desires, Aristotle does draw thumos in toward
reason, distancing it somewhat from the more rarefied irrationality of
the appetites, whose only thoughts concern whether or not this is an ob-
ject of pleasure before them, or pain. Appetite takes no cues from rea-
son proper. In some sense, Aristotle exempts spirit from the company
of its hungry, mute tenant below, discovering in it an affinity with reason
which the appetites lack. The impulses of spirit, he writes, help reason
with its work (EN, 1116b31). At 1149a25-b3 he describes how even a
misguided thumos hears reason, but in the wrong way, hastily adopting
a faulty logos before reason has issued its final command. Thumos bor-
rows an evaluation appropriate to reason, but mistakenly, “just as hasty
servants hurry out of the room before they have heard the whole of what
you are saying, and so mistake your order, and as watch-dogs bark at a
mere knock at the door, without waiting to see if it is a friend […] Hence
thumos follows reason in a manner but epithumia not.”
Nevertheless, true courage, the virtue of thumotic desire, requires a
reasoned choice of which the lion of Plato’s soul is not capable. Hence
Aristotle insists against Plato that there can be no virtue of thumos
25
Jonathan Cooper Reason and Emotion, p. 243.
per se, independent of the operations of reason – only one like cour-
age that relies heavily upon the force of its passion, its instinct for
contest and its love of the laurel (EN, 1116b31-1117a5).
Rational Desire
We’ve seen to what extent the passions can be called rational and in
what sense they cannot. They are moved by emotion and not delib-
eration. Deliberation (bouleusis), we’ll find, implies another kind of
desire: boulùsis, a desire for truth. Aristotle divides the rational part
of the soul between scientific and calculative-deliberative elements (to
men epistùmonikon to de logistikon). The function (ergon) of “both
the intellectual parts of the soul,” practical reason as well as theo-
retical reason, is “the attainment of truth” (EN, 1139b12-13). In De
Anima Aristotle is careful to point out, as in the Nicomachean Ethics,
that nous alone cannot make choices, distinguishing between a pure-
ly contemplative mind (nous theoretikos) and one engaged by desire
and motion (nous praktikos). “[M]ind is never seen to produce move-
ment without appetite (orexeķs) (for boulùsis is a form of orexis, and
when movement accords with calculation [logismon], it accords also
with boulùsin)” (DA, 433a23-25). Boulùsis, the impulse of reason that
moves the thinking animal, uses action to express a considered notion
of what is good for oneself, “the truth about what is in fact good.”26
Unlike the static intelligence of nous, epistùmù, or the sophia com-
bining them, 27 phronùsis is inherently motivated, compelled by this
third kind of desire, boulùsis, which translators are tempted into ren-
dering as will or choice, neither of which capture the movement inher-
ent in the word. Not every good can excite this movement, only the
practical good (DA, 433a29-30), exercising what Aristotle elsewhere
deems the secondary virtue (allùn aretù, EN, 1178a9-10) of man as a
composite being (suntheton) in whom the stuff of reason – eternal,
and therefore pre-existent, disembodied, and therefore impersonal
– mingles with the living body of the animal. This synthesis engen-
ders an essentially social and moral being with passions and desires
that both include and guide him in the shared world, and, implicitly
unruly, also need to be disciplined. Aristotle describes this practical
26
Jonathan Cooper Reason and Emotion, p. 242.
27
Aristotle EN, 1149b14-16. The soul achieves truth in affirmation or denial within
the five fields of technù, epistùmù, phronùsis, sophia, and nous.
desire for truth about the good as “a truth-attaining rational quality,

concerned with action in relation to things that are good and bad for
human beings” (EN, 1140b6-8). But this statement in the Ethics is
slightly misleading because it seems to place phronùsis outside of the
action, like a disembodied, Cartesian (or Kantian or Husserlian) cal-
culating from a kind of reflectively deduced distance. This is not how
the deliberative part of the soul (bouleutikon) functions.28
Phronùsis expresses its rational desire in and through its activity.
This “rational wish,”29 the moral reflection it extends, and finally the
perception of the relevant particulars in which, through choice, it con-
cludes, comprise one arc in which a specifically rational kind of desire
expresses itself practically. Desire establishes the mark at which delib-
eration and choice take aim (EN, 1111b27-28), fixing the end for which
the means, not the end, are chosen. The motion that begins with this
rational wish, which includes a deliberate view of the good, proceeds
through a choice about means that Aristotle describes in terms of de-
sire combined with reason (orexis kai logos, EN, 1139a33-35). 30 While
he distinguishes this rational desire in the soul of the phronimos (and,
more specifically, the logistikon) from the unreasoned desires of thu-
mos and epithumia (EE 1223a26-27, 1225b24-26, DA, 414b2, 433a22-
6), in the last analysis, it is unreasonable, he warns, to divide desire
according to the criterion of rationality. “If the soul is divided into
three, appetite [orexis] will be found in each” (DA, 432b8-9). Desire
operates both below and above the line of reason. When it does, Ar-
istotle calls it by different names: boulùsis in the calculative part (tķ
logistikķ), thumos and epithumia in the unreasoned part (tķ alogķ)
(DA, 432b5-7, Cf. EN, 1111b10-12).
The Motions of Akrasia: Contrary Desires in the Soul
Given this arrangement of the soul in terms of a divine reason and

unreasoning desires, we now need to know the nature of the conflict
through which Aristotle distinguished them – where irrationality has
28
Aristotle divides the soul into five parts, according to function: nutritive (threp-
tikon), sensitive (aisthetikon), intelligent (noùtikon), deliberate (bouleutikon) and
appetitive (orektikon).
29
Ross’s translation.
30
Since choice is desiderative thought, or rational desire (orektikos nous hù orexis
dianoetikù, EN, 1139b5-7), in addition to “intellect or thought” (nou kai dianoi-
as), it is also deeply rooted in the habits which sediment cumulatively as character
(hexeķs ùthikùs, EN, 1139a33-35).
been relocated. The first place to look in Aristotle is the phenomenon

of akrasia, or incontinence, where the rule of reason over the passions
fails and the idea of the good is ignored. Reason is the natural ruler,
but at the same time, unreasoning desires are as natural to man as rea-
son. There would be something inhuman for Aristotle about someone
in whom appetites and spirit had been eliminated, who was not moved
as much by the heart and stomach as they were by the head. On what
foundation do the passions, slaves by nature, for Aristotle, build their
revolt, now that philosophy has inverted the tragic collision between
human reason and the gods, identifying the former with the latter and
irrationality as a purely internal, psychic strife – an aberration idi-
osyncratic to our naturally conflicted form of life?
To understand the medicine he applies, in keeping with his own
medically-inspired method, first we have to apply ourselves to the par-
ticulars of the sickness. There are four forms of akrasia which Aris-
totle describes. First, unreason in us at times may overturn reason’s
authority to choose what it knows and can explain to be the good (EN,
1146b31-36). Although I have this knowledge in some passive sense,
I fail to make it real in my actions. When the opportunity presents
itself I fail to be the person I had ideally chosen. This person remains
an impotent potentia. As in drunkenness, madness, or even sleep, my
knowledge is tabled; I act in ignorance, “not conscious of the knowl-
edge at the time.”
The second explanation concerns what is called the practical syl-
logism, where “reasoning on matters of conduct employs premises
of two forms” (EN, 1146b36-1147a10). Here the universal or major
(katholous) premise of my action, that I am a strict vegetarian, for
example, and therefore have chosen to abstain from meat, fails to real-
ize itself in “the minor (kath’ hekaston) premise.” This minor premise
would be the particular fact, for example, of the hamburger, hot and
bleeding, which I am occasionally forced to eat, despite my clear-
headed choice earlier that it is ‘good’ to keep all things bloody off
my menu. During these moments I no longer see something I ought
to avoid, and for such and such reasons. Desire overwhelms the argu-
ments of prudence. I see and think only with my appetites, which, de-
fined by the object that draws them, recognize only a source of pleas-
ure and immediately affirm this pleasure as the good which they seek.
The universal plays the role here of the passive intelligence in the first
instance. Although the akratic mistakes its application to the particu-
lar, he still possesses the universal prohibition (e. g., don’t eat meat)
and so has knowledge “in one way” but not “in another.”
In a third statement Aristotle repeats what he has now twice dem-

onstrated, that the akratic both has and does not have knowledge
of his action (EN, 1147a10-24). He refines the distinction of having
knowledge by pointing out that even having knowledge, the use not-
withstanding, can be understood in two different ways. When the
drunk, the maniac, or the sleepwalker acts, he does it mechanically,
unconsciously, his knowledge no longer a “part of the tissue of the
mind,” like an actor “speaking a part.” Alterations in the body can
disturb the accrued time of moral education, can make moral begin-
ners of us, strip us of the habits of reason and serve us up whole to our
lower halves. We can speak correctly without “knowing” it, “repeat
propositions of geometry and verses of Empedocles; [like] students
who have just begun a subject reel off its formulae, though they do not
yet know their meaning[.]” But just as the drunk, the maniac, or the
sleepwalker acts unconsciously, the state of knowledge, even when we
do not act, is suspended.
Lastly, returning to the syllogistic account, Aristotle explicitly
draws the irrational into the sphere of scientific study with the addi-
tion that we “may also study the cause of akrasia in terms of nature
and causes” (EN, 1147a24-b19). 31 It is the unreasoning desire, he clari-
fies, that opposes the major premise, with its own set of beliefs about
what is good embedded in the tissue of my miseducated impulse. Yet
the logos of the act only “accidentally” opposes the logos of the cor-
rect major premise prohibiting the enjoyment, of, for example, the
juicy hamburger. As in the second example, the major premise is not
being used, and, as in all three of the previous examples, there is a
sense in which desire defuses knowledge. In every case the akratic
both knows and does not know. He acts despite himself, but, Aristotle
says, in a sense voluntarily, because a kind of knowledge is present,
that “derived from sense-perception.” For both reasons this irration-
ality cannot be Oedipus’. He does not act despite himself. His action
is the eminently rational one of inquiry, and his ignorance is not of
the universal (i. e., do not commit incest, do not commit parricide),
31
Aristotle EN, 1139b18-25: “The nature of Scientific Knowledge (ÃÎÇÑÒÅÊÅ) (em-
ploying the term in its exact sense and disregarding its analogous senses) may be
made clear as follows. We all conceive that a thing which we know scientifically can-
not vary; when a thing that can vary is beyond the range of observation, we do not
know whether it exists or not. An object of Scientific Knowledge, therefore, exists
of necessity. It is therefore eternal, for everything existing of absolute necessity is
eternal; and what is eternal does not come into existence or perish.”
but rather, the particular (i. e., this is mother in my bed, this is father
charging me at the crossroads).
Phronetic Presctiptions:
Resolving the Contrary Motions of Desire
In fact, this incontinence is the state in which all human life begins.
Children are rational, for Aristotle, but their reason has not yet
learned to rule, which it does by nature. It is a curious feature of Ar-
istotle’s theory that the authority over bodily desire implicit in reason
is in practical fact hard-won. What is natural to us is also said to be
extremely difficult. Knowing how akrasia works is the clue to how
temperance, the strenuous perfecting of man’s delicate, conflicted
nature as the rational animal will be achieved. Aristotle, like Plato
before him, in an ethics also beholden to the political perfection of
men, followed the methodology of early medicine as a true technù and
model for the philosopher’s care of the soul (psuchùs therapeia). 32 For
Aristotle, who, unlike Plato, distinguishes between the domains and
tools of practical and theoretical philosophy, 33 medicine will be doubly
crucial in developing a new domain of knowledge in the practical arts
and a resolution for the practical-psychological problem presented by
the irrational. The medical model opened the possibility and satisfied
the need for “a different kind of knowledge,”34 attuned to individual
exemplars, experience in the flux and on the ground.
Rejecting the eternal, universal idea of the Good as a ground for
ethics and politics, Aristotle needed to develop the concept of a
knowledge grounded in action, rather than detached, a priori reflec-
tion. A soul undergoing Socrates’ or Plato’s philosophical therapeutic
based purely on theoretical reason will remain practically unaffected,
like the sick patient who disobeys the doctor, because in practical
32
This is Jaeger’s conclusion, whose article I follow generally in the following para-
graphs. In Plato, Jaeger directs us to the Gorgias, 464 (re: care of the self), 500e, 501a-
b (re: as true art [technù]), 517a (re:politics), and the Phaedrus, 270c-d (re: dialectical
method). Though most of the Platonic examples from Jaeger come from the Gorgias,
“[T]here are many passages in Plato in which he refers to medicine as a typical or ex-
emplaric art.” The medical example “served Plato for the same purpose throughout
his life,” down through the Laws (857c-d). Werner Jaeger “Aristotle’s Use of Medi-
cine as Model in his Ethics” in The Journal of Hellenic Studies 77, p. 54.
33
Aristotle Met., 1025b18; EN, 1094a27.
34
Werner Jaeger “Aristotle’s Use of Medicine as Model in his Ethics” in The Journal
of Hellenic Studies 77, p. 55.
philosophy as in medicine the “field of thought is not knowledge but

action.”35
The things concerned with action and that which is useful have nothing stable in them-
selves, just as it is in matters of health. If however the general statements [ho katholou
logos] are of this nature, there is even less accuracy in the statements about particular
cases, since they fall under no art or precept, but the person who is acting must himself
always keep in mind the special circumstances of the moment and what they require.
This is true also of medicine and of the art of navigation. (EN, 1104a3-10)
Navigation was a typical example in medical literature, and both Plato

and Aristotle follow identifiable passages from the Hippocratic au-
thor’s On Ancient Medicine in adopting its methods. 36 The logoi of
both navigation and medicine were subject first to the individual situ-
ation. The centrality for the physician of cultivating aesthùsis becomes
the lynch pin in Aristotle’s program. To properly train other souls to
recognizing the good we must first be able to see it ourselves. Once
we forget how, no amount of reflection on the matter can retrieve the
image, no quantity of logical gymnastics. The radical contingency of
both medicine and ethics meant that instead of presenting a rule, their
only reference was the logos of the perfect artist, be they doctor or
phronimos.37 The Nicomachean Ethics deals with the problem of irra-
tionality explicitly by analogy with medicine. The eye doctor, he says,
must know about the whole human body, just as the politician must
know the facts about the soul, so that this split can be resolved (EN,
1102a18). This parallel between the politikos and the doctor (iatros)
persists throughout the Ethics.38
35
Werner Jaeger “Aristotle’s Use of Medicine as Model in his Ethics” in The Journal
of Hellenic Studies 77, p. 60 f., 58. Cf. Aristotle EN, ii.5.
36
Hippocrates Ancient Medicine, c. 9: “But no measure … can be found except
aisthùsin.” Jaeger compares with the use of aisthùsis at EN, 1109b20. Werner Jaeger
“Aristotle’s Use of Medicine as Model in his Ethics” in The Journal of Hellenic
Studies 77, p. 56.
37
Werner Jaeger “Aristotle’s Use of Medicine as Model in his Ethics” in the Journal
of Hellenic Studies 77, p. 59.
38
Werner Jaeger “Aristotle’s Use of Medicine as Model in his Ethics” in the Journal
of Hellenic Studies 77, pp. 57, 59, 61. The excess and defect by which the mean
of virtue is determined, writes Jaeger, are also borrowed from medicine, because
these vary from individual to individual. See Aristotle EN, 1138b25. Ross confirms.
See W. D. Ross Aristotle, p. 193. The educative model based on an application of
pleasures and pains is, for Jaeger, clearly a mainstay of medical dietetics, one that
also appeared in the Laws’ definition of punishment as a form of therapy (iatreias).
See Aristotle EN, 1104a30-33, b11. Aristotle notes and defends Plato’s theory of
the application of opposites, concludes Jaeger, as the right way to find the mean
and therefore restore virtue. See Aristotle EN, 1104b16. Throughout book vi, the
There is something paradoxical in Aristotle’s concept of akrasia, a

source of general frustration among scholars. If man’s nature is essen-
tially rational, and reason is the natural, divine ruler over unreason,
how can akrasia, the rule of the lower over the higher in us be possible?
How can the natural authority of reason be overturned, or, more tech-
nically, why is the better syllogism achieved via practical reasoning
overcome (EN, 1147a24-25)?39 The difficulty is grounded in a deep-
er ambivalence within Aristotle’s psychological framework between
the logos which defines our essence and form of life, the rationality
through which man is identified with the divine, and the contingency
and unreason endemic to human affairs which he likewise insists on,
which prevents us from achieving this divinity permanently. It is as if
we have two essences, two natures, which contradict one another. In
fact, according to Aristotle, we do. De Anima introduces a theoretical
tension between the two souls – psuchù and nous – one personal, em-
bodied and mortal, the other impersonal and undying – ‘synthesized’
in the human animal as syntheton. This inherently conflicted account
of the soul may simply reflect the “paradoxical structure of the human
condition”40 for Aristotle, a tragic tension and choice between two
ways of life (bioi), one contemplative and divine, withdrawn as much
as possible from the everyday, and the other mundane, emotionally
involved, economically and civically engaged.
phronimos prescribing the authoritative logos in the soul is explained with exam-
ples from dietetics, knowing, for example, and being able to select in particular the
right kinds of fowl to eat. The Hippocratic Regimen, part of the abundant medi-
cal literature on regimen at Arisotle’s time, reminds us immediately of Aristotle’s
examples of choosing correctly from the light and dark meat of birds. Jaeger cites
connections in general between phronùsis and medicine at EN, 1141a22 (re: good is
variable by individual); 1141b14 (re: they relate major and minor premise); 1141b18-
21 (re: dietetics), which corresponds to Hippocrates Regimen ii, c. 46, c. 50, and
eating the right kinds of meats; 1143b25, 1143b31, 1144b10, 1145a7 (re: difference
between sophia and phronùsis). His aiming (stochazesthai) at the good is also bor-
rowed from the Hippocratic author, who, like Aristotle, was developing a technù
stokastikù, a kind of science based on logos, but operating within its own specific
limits.” See Hippocrates Ancient Medicine, c.9.
39
Charles Burnyeat “Aristotle on Learning to be Good” in Essays on Aristotle’s Eth-
ics, ed. by A. O. Rorty, p. 85.
40
Charles Kahn “Aristotle on Thinking” in Essays on Aristotle’s de Anima, ed. by
Nussbaum and Rorty, p. 362. Kahn asks, “[I]s human nature constituted by one es-
sence, or two? I do not see that there is any genuine solution for this tension within
Aristotle’s account of the psuchù. But I want to suggest that this is not so much an
inconsistence in his theory as a systematic attempt on his part to do justice to our
split nature as human beings” (p. 361). Cf. Jonathan Cooper Reason and Human
Good, ch. 3.
Solving this dilemma between psuchù and nous in the text of the
Ethics and De Anima and the kinds of life they recommend is per-
haps impossible, and, for us, unnecessary. More important and less
ambiguous is the nature of this conflict in the mortal, embodied soul
in which the foreign element of nous penetrates the animal life of
man (his psuchù). The virtue of nous, like nous itself, “is separate”
(EN, 1178a23, Cf. DA, III.5). Psychological conflict is possible be-
cause there is a certain sense in which, according to Aristotle, I am
not myself. For a man to choose anything but the life of the mind
would be to “choose to live not his own life but the life of some other
than himself” (EN, 1178a3-4). Yet this other life is what human na-
ture requires. The desires and requirements of moral virtue are mine
insofar as these are my appetites, insofar as I am this suntheton, this
volatile mixture that is man. Strife and rebellion in the soul is the
product of this natural division in man between “two souls” in a sin-
gle, living body.41 The individual psuchù where character sediments
is split between itself as an animal principle, a mere living, and the
pure nous which makes it a specifically human living. Although the
virtues of character partake of the divine element of nous in charac-
ter’s dependence on phronùsis, because of its passionate element this
character and the psychù in which it inheres is essentially embod-
ied, like phronùsis itself and the happiness that belongs to it” (EN,
1178a20-23).42 As the body becomes intelligent, intelligence becomes
embodied. It is exposed to the same persuasion from below, the fog-
giness and chaos of the passions, that these passions ought to heed
from the harmonious clarity of the reason above. The embodiment of
logos in this idiosyncratically composite form of life makes it possible
for us to pervert our nature. We can fail to reason. The slaves in us
can revolt. Even worse, if unreason gets control (as in cases of vice),
we actually begin to reason on behalf of our brute, animal nature.
We deliberate and choose against the good. This risk is what makes
us human. Our decisions matter, from the trivia of how to eat to the
major decisions about education, and culture, because it is possible to
ruin ourselves, for Aristotle, beyond repair. Since knowing the good
will depend on the specific act of perception, we must constantly
practice seeing things in the right way.
41
Jonathan Cooper Reason and Human Good in Aristotle, p. 176. Cooper describes
human nature for Aristotle in just these terms of “two souls.”
42
Jonathan Cooper Reason and Human Good in Aristotle, p. 174. In this sense, prac-
tical intelligence is “an excellence belonging to the mind at all,” insofar as “Aristo-
tle here means to identify a human being with his mind.”
The theme of vision leads us back to Oedipus. Oedipus’ first sight, a

kind of blindness, was replaced by a second sight coinciding with the
loss of his eyes, which, like the prophet’s, Sophocles identified with
a deeper truth. The ignorance which makes his action involuntary is
a permanent feature of the situation.43 There is no abiding character
outside of his crimes to blame for a moment of passionate weakness.
He undergoes a total reversal of vision. For Aristotle, eupraxia, the
goal of ethics, is also a matter of vision. The good really is as the good
man (spoudaios) judges; he “sees the truth in each kind, being himself
as it were the standard and measure for the noble and pleasant” (EN,
1113a30-36). Experience teaches what the good is since it is “a matter
of the particular circumstances, and judgment rests with the faculty of
perception” (EN, 1126b4-5).44 For eupraxia to take place all forms of
desire in the soul will have to come into alignment.
How can the chaos of experience be brought into line with some re-
liable standard or measure (with which, for instance, the legislator can
determine the dispensation of pleasure and pain which the cultivation
of character – vis a vis habit, and once again, proper perception – re-
quires [EN, II.3]) if this standard is derived from experience itself?
This circularity is only a problem if I have issues with the contingency
of the good, its vulnerability to misapprehension and the possibility
of losing this sight of it permanently. It is only a problem if I fail to
recognize that the moral virtue which I require as a stepping stone
to phronùsis is always also the product of phronùsis, a sedimentation
of the habits of desire and moral perception attuned to its orthos log-
os (EN, 1106b36-1107a1, 1144b26-27). But the circle also turns the
other way. In the act, where its syllogism concludes, practical reason
depends on moral virtue for its eyes. The phronetically hohned “eye
of the soul” presupposes moral virtue as its foundation (EN, 1144a29-
31). It is virtue that “chooses” the end and phronùsis the means to
attaining it (EN, 1144a8-9, a20-22). These eyes, if their “moral vision”
(EN, 1114b7-8) is good, have been subjected life-long to the practice
of reason. Experience “has given them an eye for things, and so they
see correctly” (EN, 1143b14). The phronetic intuition (nous) on which
43
Richard Robinson “Aristotle on Akrasia” in Articles on Aristotle, vol. 2, ed. by
Barnes Schofield and Sorabji, p. 86. Robinson uses Oedipus as an example of invol-
untary vs. akratic action.
44
See Aristotle EN, 1114b20-23: “[T]o what degree and how seriously a man must err
to be blamed is not easy to define on principle. For in fact no object of perception
is easy to define; and such questions of degree depend on particular circumstances,
and the decision lies with perception.”
they depend “is both a beginning and an end,” the archù and the te-
los, since the particular fact is “both the starting point and the sub-
ject matter of demonstration” (EN, VI 1143b10-11), and so both the
knowledge and practice of the good abide a certain groundlessness.
Virtue and phronùsis are mutually dependent (EN, 1144b30-33),
like the two lenses of binocular vision. One focuses on the mark of
eudaimonia in the distance, the other on the particular fact as de-
termined by this rational horizon (horismos logos), the (constituent)
means to an (inclusive) end (tas pros telos).45 Eupraxia is that in which
these two eyes come into alignment, producing the one concrete im-
age of sound binocular vision. Aristotle also connects the object of
epithumia (the desire after which boulùsis is modelled) with appear-
ances, but in a different sense.46 While the apparent good qua good at
which virtue takes aim is the object of a boulùsis, the apparent good
desired by the appetites is a good qua pleasure, not qua good. This is
a distinctly different kind of value, just as to kalon, the object of thu-
mos, is a different kind of value. But the authority of the rational wish
operating in phronùsis brings all three values into alignment.
As the soul’s desire is layered, so must be the object of this desire,
which is unified conceptually by nous in the act of judgment.47 The
problem of desire is actually the problem of objects of desire and the
task of phronùsis is the unification of competing objects of desire into
a single object. Judgment (to krinein) in all animals – discrimina-
tions between possible pleasures and pains, objects to be pursued and
45
Commentators have spent ample time addressing the contradiction between Ari-
sotle’s statement in Book iii that deliberation is of the means (EN, 1111b11-12,
etc.), and his statement in Book vi that deliberation concerns both the ends (EN,
1142b30-34) and the means (EN, 1144a7-9, etc.). Cooper and Wiggins, for example,
contra Ross, argue that they are continuous, rather than representing first, a re-
stricted analysis, and then later, an unrestricted analysis. The tension is resolved if
we understand the “means” inclusively, as specifically comprising the end (though
not as parts mechanically comprise a whole), rather than instrumentally. In both
bks. iii and vi we deliberate not about eudaimonia per se, but about how actually to
specify it. David Wiggins “Deliberation and Practical Reason” in Essays on Aris-
totle’s Ethics, ed. by A. O. Rorty, p. 227. The only end which is never deliberable is
the chief end of eudaimonia, fixed by reason’s desire. It is legitimate that an unde-
liberable end for someone is a means for another, and so both deliberable and not,
respectively. Jonathan Cooper Reason and Human Good in Aristotle, pp. 15 f.
46
Jonathan Cooper Reason and Emotion, p. 269. See Aristotle EE, 1235b27: the
pleasant is an “apparent good.” It is what appears good to you in such a way that
you may still not think it good at all.
47
This will be the good as orekton. See Henry Richardson “Desire and the Good in de
Anima” in Essays on Aristotle’s de Anima, ed. by Nussbaum and Rorty, pp. 398 f.
avoided – rests on imagination. Imagination is also a kind of thought

(noùsis, DA, 427b28-30), a process through which “an image is pre-
sented to us,” a “state of mind by which we judge and are either right
or wrong” (DA, 428a-4). To imagine, “then, is to form an opinion ex-
actly corresponding to a direct perception” (DA, 428a28-30) – such
as the blending of the perception of white with the opinion that it
is white. Many animals are said to have imagination, but not opin-
ion, or the beliefs that opinion implies, because these are ultimately
grounded in rational discourse, such as opinions about what is truly
good. Only the human animal will suffer from conflicting desires for
competing objects, because, Aristotle says, reason implies a sense of
time. This is a function of the unique form imagination takes in man
when combined with nous.48
Now desires may conflict, and this happens wherever reason and appetite are opposed,
and this occurs in creatures which have a sense of time (for the mind advises us to
resist with a view to the future, while desire looks only to the present; for what is
momentarily pleasant seems to be absolutely pleasant and absolutely good, because
appetite cannot look to the future)[.] (DA, 433b5-10)
Temporality is the effect of bouleusis, a deliberative form of imagina-

tion (DA, 434a6-9) distinct from the purely aesthetic imagination of
other animals. It only exists in calculative forms of life, namely humans,
as a form of imagination that measures by “a single standard” and so
“implies the ability to combine several images into one” (DA, 434a9-
10) – under the aegis of belief about the good. “[F]or the thinking soul
(dianoetikù psuchù) images take the place of direct perceptions […]
hence the soul never thinks without a phantasmotos (an image)” (DA,
431a14-18). In the instant the phronimos perceives the good that he de-
sires and how best to achieve it, this combination of several into one, of
past and future objects of desire within a single impulse, becomes the
mechanism through which disunity in the soul is overcome.
Learning to see and to desire correctly implies an integration in the
soul as well as the objects this soul desires. In the temperate and cou-
rageous man, the unreasoned parts of the soul speak cooperatively
in the same voice as reason (homophķnei tķ logķ, EN, 1102b27-28).49
48
Charles Kahn “Aristotle on Thinking” in Essays on Aristotle’s de Anima, ed. by
Nussbaum and Rorty, p. 368 f. Even for sortal concepts, the kind used in empirical
work, such as medicine or practical reasoning, this form of imagination would be
required. Aisthùsis alone cannot provide these. Cf. Aristotle APo., 100a1. The “‘ex-
perience’ of animals who possess logos is radically different from those without it.”
49
Their virtues, temperance and courage, are defined by a mean which falls between
two extremes. Temperance is the mean concerning appetitive desire and the ob-
When the brave and temperate soul enjoys an activity “in accordance
with perfect virtue” (EN, 1102a5-6) – eudaimonia – it is because the
immediacy of appetitive desire, the quasi-reflective thumotic desire,
and the fully reflective and temporal desire of reason have become
partnered under the authority of the last. The present moment falls
smoothly into the streaming of past and future, because the image of
the present reflects the images of previous pleasures, beauties, and
goods, as well as those still desired. The perception of the particular
fact in which the practical syllogism both concludes and begins (in the
sense that this perception calls the universal premise into action) is
the opinion (or appearance, doxa) “which causes movement, not the
universal” (DA, 434a20-21). This appearance reflects character more
generally, the relevant concepts of value developed over the course
of one’s lifetime – pleasure, beauty, honor, justice, etc. – with which it
intuitively discriminates the object and organizes its desires.
These phronetic desires are exceptional in that they feature more
than just a cause for action, but also a rational account of this cause
in conceptual terms. While appetite judges soft skin and sweet-smells
pleasant, but does not know why, or care to, and spirit similarly judges
that dishonour ought to be avenged, this rational wish, while in a way
just as spontaneous as the first two, driven on by a kind of necessity,
can give an account of why, for example, socialism is the best form
of government. Its movements are slower, and sometimes stilted, and
it begins life with a kind of clumsiness. But for just this reason it can
eventually learn to cope in highly complex situations in a way that the
lower order desires cannot. Still, we are not constantly deliberating,
nor do we need to. 50 Barring moral conflict, this desire can satisfy it-
self as naturally as its rowdier neighbours below. But the right habitu-
ation settles one’s thought and character in such a way that reasons
could be given, if necessary, and that desires up and down the scale
express this logos at least indirectly through their actual pursuits and
jects of pleasure, specifically touch, located between insensitivity and profligacy.

Aristotle EN, 1118b8. Courage is the mean concerning thumos and things to be
feared or confidently opposed, found between cowardice and rashness. Aristotle
EN, 1116b24, 1117a5.
50
Often enough our choices don’t require any deliberation at all. This might seem, for
Aristotle, to cancel them out as choices, since choice presupposes deliberation (EN,
1112a15-17). But since virtuous action is necessarily chosen (EN, 1105a31-32), this
leaves the virtuous acting in very strange ways, deliberating all the time about sim-
ple matters. This oddity disappears in recognizing that an account could be given,
since choice is the product of a unified habituation of thought and desire, together,
as they intertwine.
avoidances. 51 By repeatedly acting in a virtuous way I develop the

character requisite for virtuous action, which has the right reasons.
This training in justice seals the “impulses” of both passion and intel-
ligence within the single horizon of one “outlook on life.”52 Even if I
don’t deliberate about whether to steal from mom, this time, I have
already practiced my relation to family in a thoughtful way. This does
mean, however, that at one point or another every sphere of action
ought to be reflected on. When we act, this deliberation, essentially,
will still be part of the action.
Conclusion
Practical reason is called upon to construct a narrative about eudai-

monia and the good life which bears on everyone who chooses, as this
particular person, in this particular situation, etc. This conception of
a chief good puts the present choice within the context of past and
future choices, and depends upon the accumulation of these choices
for its strength and concreteness. 53 In this sense reason constructs a
narrative which ennobles choice, first a single choice, and eventually
a lifetime of choices, ultimately a shared lifetimes of choices. It is in
this way that logos affirms as good the human life that Aristotle tells
us is essentially political, in virtue of a shared rationality, the com-
mon narrative reason provides. Despite Aristotle’s insistence on “the
vulnerability of the good human life”54 to the forces of luck (tuchù),
since eudaimonia is always a matter of the reasons, the style and tex-
51
The agent of virtue must “be in a certain state of mind” when he acts. Aristotle
EN, 1105a32-b. It is not what he does, but how. Implicit in this “how” is that “the
person who does them must also have certain properties.” Aristotle EN, 1105a31-
33. He must act knowingly, and choose the actions for their own sake, from a firm
and unalterable character. For a classic discussion of moral education in Aristotle,
see Charles Burnyeat “Aristotle on Learning to Be Good” in Essays on Aristotle’s
Ethics, ed. by A. O. Rorty.
52
Jonathan Cooper Reason and Human Good in Aristotle, p. 8.
53
T. H. Erwin “The Metaphysical and Psychological basis of Aristotle’s Ethics” in
Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. by A. O. Rorty, p. 47.
54
For instance: “Yet evidently, as we said, [happiness] needs the external goods as
well; for it is impossible, or not easy, to do noble acts without the proper equip-
ment.” Aristotle EN, 1099a31-33. Aristotle leaves room, here, for the “not easy”
transcendence of external goods. For the opposite emphasis, see the chapter by the
same name in Martha Nussbaum The Fragility of Goodness, pp. 318-342. Cf. Aris-
totle EN, 1099b3-6, where he prescribes a good birth and sociality as a condition of
happiness.
ture of a certain choice and never the outcome, the true phronimos
may become a kind of superman with the “superhuman excellence”
Aristotle describes as “something heroic and divine” (EN, 1145a19).
His life is “hard to take away” (EN, 1095b25-26, cf. 1100b12), “stable
and in no way easily subject to change” (EN, 1100b2-3, cf. 1101a8-10).
At one point Aristotle seems to seal off his vulnerability to chance
completely: “if, as we said, a man’s life is determined by his activities,
no supremely happy (makarios) man can ever become miserable (ath-
lios). For he will never do hateful or base actions, since we hold that
the truly good and wise man will bear all kinds of fortune in a seemly
way, and will always act in the noblest manner that the circumstances
allow” (EN, 1100b33-1101a2).55
Tragic reversals might not only best be avoided poetically – for the
true phronimos they are impossible. This draws the morally virtuous
intelligence of phronùsis dangerously close to the moral indifference
of theoretical life. “The theorizer has no need of such things (viz. the
external goods) with a view to his own activity, and they are really, so
to say, impediments so far as theorizing is concerned” (EN, 1178b3-5).
Alternatively, Aristotle also grounds his clearest arguments for eudai-
monia’s vulnerability to tragic luck in its activity, which might always
be impeded from the outside: “for no activity is complete when it is
impeded, and happiness is a complete thing; this is why the happy
man needs the goods of the body and external goods, i. e., those of
fortune, viz. in order that he may not be impeded in these ways.” The
argument concludes by extending the opposite claim to its absurd con-
clusion of the happy “victim on the rack,” passively and torturously
restrained. Yet despite these caveats about activity and luck, Aristotle
comes “uncomfortably close to the suggestion that a good man can
indeed be happy on the rack.”56
Although Aristotle’s moral psychology meant to solve the paradox-
ical suffering and culpability Oedipus presents, the drama of Oedi-
55
See Aristotle EN, 1101a6-10: “If things are so, the eudaimon person will never
become wretched; nor, however will he be makarios, if he encounters the luck of
Priam,” who suffered a great reversal of fortune. “Nor, again, is he many-coloured
and changeable; for neither will he be moved from his happy state easily […].” Yet,
Aristotle implies, he could be moved from it. Joachim and Ross defend the inde-
pendence of eudaimonia from misfortune, while Nussbaum, through an analysis of
Aristotle’s texts more generally, argues against their categorical distinction of eu-
daimonia from to makarion. Martha Nussbaum The Fragility of Goodness, p. 330 f.
Eudaimonia, she concludes, remains vulnerable, though immured from the base
wretchedness which athlios connotes.
56
W. F. R. Hardie Aristotle’s Ethical Theory, p. 26 f.
pus’ exclusion returns in Aristotle as a conflicted choice between two

“ways of life” (bioi): the life of the mind or that of secondary or “the
other” virtue (ho kata ton noun bios [or] ho kata tùn allùn aretùn). 57
“Such a life as this,” he says of the philosopher’s bios, “will be higher
than the human level: not in virtue of his humanity will a man achieve
it, but in virtue of something within him that is divine; and by as much
as this something is superior to his composite nature [to suntheton]58
by so much is its activity superior to the exercise of the other forms
of virtue” (EN, 1177b26-30). This nous, like Empedocles’ daimķn or
Plato’s immortal psuchù, is said to come into the body “from outside”
(thurathen, GA, 736b27-28, 737a10, 744b21), to lead a previous and
separate existence as a kind of god. Its only virtue is sophia, which,
like nous, Aristotle distinguishes from the passionate life of the body
occupying moral wisdom (EN, 1178a16-22). At best, virtuous action
will be a potential means for securing the human goods upon which
this aspect of his life still depends.59 The contemplative exists, like
Oedipus, in a space both inside and outside of moral-political catego-
ries, “beyond ordinary moral virtues – though, equally, beyond ordi-
nary vices as well.”60 He is gradually withdrawing himself under his
own power from the human condition. For the energy of the active
intellect, the concerns relating to the body, how to manage it, where to
draw its limits, etc., are simply a tool to rise a little above the human
itself. The practical reasoning and moral virtue which depend on nous
can distract from and even compete with the divine ascetics of contem-
plation it demands. Despite one’s embodiment, and therefore moral-
political nature, “we ought so far as possible to achieve immortality,
and do all that man may to live in accordance with the highest thing in
him” (EN, 1177b34-36); Since the intellect “more than anything else is
man (malista anthropos),” eudaimonia in the fullest sense amounts to
57
De Anima’s distinction between nous, “a different kind of soul [psuchùs genos het-
eron]” (DA, 413b26), mixed in man with the embodied, mortal psuchù (DA, 412b7-
9, 413a3-6, 413b27-32), and the Nicomachean Ethics’ privileging of the purely in-
tellectual virtue of sophia in its last book (along with its definition of happiness as
the activity of reason in book I [EN, 1098a1-18], as well as book vi’s subordination
of phronùsis to sophia, issuing orders “for its sake” [EN, 1145a6-9]), introduce a
conflict into Aristotle’s mature conception of eudaimonia.
58
See Jonathan Cooper Reason and Human Good in Aristotle, pp. 157 f. (note).
Cooper, Hardie, and Joachim take suntheton as living body, not a compound of
body and soul, contra Gauthier.
59
See Jonathan Cooper Reason and Human Good in Aristotle, pp. 163-165.
60
For a nice discussion of the contemplative of Book x, see Jonathan Cooper Reason
and Human Good in Aristotle, p. 179.
the life of the mind (EN, 1178a4-8). The life of moral virtue, the flour-
ishing of the living body in both its rational and unreasoned capacities,
an intelligence mixed with passion, “is happy only in a secondary de-
gree” (EN, 1178a9-10).61 It is “purely human (anthropikai).”
There is a kind of tragic ambivalence in Aristotle’s ideal of eu-
daimonia between the pure, disembodied activity of nous and the
mixed, moral-political life of ordinary men that the body implies.62
We are faced with a contradiction between two definitions of the hu-
man, anthropos: one purely rational and divine, ideally detached from
the human sphere of desire and shared commitments, and the other
a moral-political creature whose body implies desires and commit-
ments invested naturally in the shared space of nature and the city,
requiring the moral-political training ethical theory means to ground.
A phronetic care of the soul serves a divinity and knowledge in man
that still amounts to exile. Oedipus’ is now the happiest of fates, and
gnķthi seauton – as with Oedipus – the Delphic injunction of temper-
ance, still governs it.63 The character which ethics studies and recom-
mends, despite Aristotle’s concerns about the possible impediments
of virtuous activity, moves dominantly toward this transcendence of
the tragic domain of tuchù (specifically distinguishing the “external
goods” of this non-chosen order of good or bad fortune [eutuchia or
dustuchia] from the virtue inherent in character [EN, 1124a12-31]).
Ultimately, his ethics abscond with the problem of the irrational that
tragedy originally expressed, rephrasing it in a rational language about
human nature, character-building and the power and divinity of the
intellect that makes tragic conflict in our souls and our cities some-
thing the philosopher’s science in principle can overcome. It seals the
gap in which the kathartic force of the archaic daimķn, its avatar in
61
Aristotle EN, 1178a17-23: “Moreover, phronùsis is intimately connected with moral
virtue, and this with phronùsis, inasmuch as the first principles which phronùsis
employs are determined by the moral virtues, and the right standard for the moral
virtues is determined by phronùsis. But these being also connected with the pas-
sions are related to our composite nature; now the virtues of our composite nature
are purely human; so therefore also is the life that manifests these virtues, and the
happiness that belongs to it. Whereas the happiness that belongs to the intellect is
separate.”
62
For a lengthy discussion of this contradiction in Aristotle and further citations of
the “hold” of “ethical Platonism of some sort” “over Aristotle’s imagination,” in a
book committed to a thoroughly anti-Platonic, tragic reading of Aristotle’s’ ethics,
see Martha Nussbaum The Fragility of Goodness, pp. 373-377.
63
See Werner Jaeger Paideia vol. 1, p. 167. Gnķthi se auton was originally, at Delphi,
a call to temperance.
the shamans and the mysteries their beliefs encouraged, or the ac-
tual presence of a god, such as Dionysus, irrupted through musical
rite and theatre from an outside beyond human understanding. It is a
gap that Kierkegaard in the throes of the second enlightenment pries
open, returning with a philosopher’s concern for character building
to the original crisis of reason lyricized and dramatized in Dionysus’
theatre.
Part II
Golden Age Denmark
The Rebirth of Tragedy

and the Prospect of Happiness
in Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Lyric
Is there any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the

whispering of the olive trees, people can be with
whom they like and have what they like and take
their ease in shadows and in coolness? Or are all
men’s lives like the lives of us good people?
– Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier
Every angel is terrifying.

– Rilke, The First of the Duino Elegies
Chapter 6
Tragedy as Historical Idea:
Either/Or’s “Ancient Drama
Reflected in the Modern”
The Importance of Tragedy as Historical Idea
Kierkegaard concentrates his thinking on classical tragedy and its re-

ligious reflection after modernity in four of the pseudonymous works:
Either/Or’s essay on the relation between the tragic in ancient and
modern drama, Stages on Life’s Way, The Concept of Anxiety, and
Fear and Trembling. In the opening chapters of part two, I will ex-
plore crucial points of contact between Greek tragedy and these four
works and how these points may align. I want to develop a narrative
in the authorship on ancient tragedy’s rebirth in ‘the present age’ as
further meditation on praxis (deliberate action) at the limits of human
reason. Neither for Kierkegaard nor for the Greeks did this limit al-
ways give itself away in the destruction of royal houses. Conflict with
the irrational, tragedy councils, first in Athens, and then again in Co-
penhagen, is an inevitable feature for all of reason’s projects. Kierke-
gaard, returning to the autopsies of reason on the tragic stage, tailors
the vision of this conflict to the shifting categories of experience in
the modern age. Before we can address the tragic in modern times,
though, a few words on comedy are necessary, since the way towards
tragedy’s rebirth passes under the sign of the comic.
Tragic understanding, ironically, was the property of “the happi-
est individual” (det lykkeligste Individ), property that an inadvertently
comic culture has liquidated (EO1, 145 / SKS 2, 145). Here is the first
parallel between the ancient Greek world and Kierkegaard’s age. Like
the Greece of Aristophanic comedy, the modern age, ‘A’ says, is now
one of disintegration (EO1, 141 / SKS 2, 141). The invisible social-re-
ligious bonds securing the community are in decline. The age and its
passions lack any concrete relation to a unifying Idea. Its ethical com-
mitments have become totally disembodied, abstract, and therefore
Either/Or’s “Ancient Drama Reflected in the Modern” 141
arbitrary. A comic subjectivity presides over the age that “wants to

assert itself as pure form” (EO1, 142 / SKS 2, 142). This generic subject
has no obligations or determinations of any kind, ethically, histori-
cally, biologically, etc., no practices or beliefs which it can’t skeptically
call into question. ‘A’s diagnosis of the comic age depends on an un-
derstanding of tragedy, insofar as the reign of the comic is equivalent
to the loss of tragic possibilities. With the loss of the tragic and the
reign of the comic, the age sympathetically gains despair (EO1, 145 /
SKS 2, 145). The comic age loses the sadness of tragedy, and with this
sadness (Veemod) so goes the possibility of katharsis, tragedy’s “heal-
ing powers [Lægedom]” (EO1, 145 / SKS 2, 145).
Beyond aesthetics as philosophy of art, the historical developments
within the tragic drama are an occasion for reflecting more generally
on the “common consciousness of the age” (EO1, 144 / SKS 2, 144)
and the beginning of an anthropology: human life is either “the sad-
ness of the tragic or the profound sorrow and profound joy of religion”
(EO1, 146 / SKS 2, 146). As the ancient world is modernized and the
comic loss of the tragic develops, the sadness of tragedy turns on its
hinge, revealing the possibility of a deeper, all-encompassing sorrow
and the hope of an absolute joy. Because the modern subject is one
that has become completely “reflected in itself,” that with Descartes
and then Hegel as its expositors has filtered all of reality through the
gaurantor of reflection, its comedies and therefore its tragedies are
more acute than those of the ancients. ‘A’ presents tragedy as primi-
tive stuff reflectively sharpened by the exagerrations of consciousness
in Christian conscience and the modern age. His essay suggests that
understanding tragedy properly in its modern form can deliver the age
from the desperate abstractions of its particular ùthos. The individual,
he writes clearly enough, cannot be happy “until he has the tragic”
(EO1, 145 / SKS 2, 145).
What is it then that the present age has lost in the tragic? What,
correspondingly, has it gained? Kierkegaard continues to explain our
historical situation by analogy with drama. The modernization of
tragedy transforms the nature of dramatic action. Anciently, action
proceeded from more than just thought and character (dianoia and
ùthos, which ‘A’ quotes in Aristotle’s Greek).1 There was a remain-
der exceeding them, beyond the “telos” fixed by human reason (EO1,
143 / SKS 2, 143). This “more” (det Mere), what ‘A’ calls the “epic re-
1
See Pap. III C 34 / SKS Not10:1. Cf. JP 5:5545. Kierkegaard inscribes the german of
Hegel’s Aesthetics concerning this passage in Poetics vi.
142 Part II: Golden Age Denmark
mainder” (EO1, 144 / SKS 2, 144), was the true source of “suffering”
(Liden) in a play. It is what has not merged in the dramatic dialectic
of “lines.” This more is embodied first in the chorus, which is “more”
than the individuality, at times having a privileged perspective, that
of the city, or even the gods, expressing a world-order or objectivity
from which the individual has been estranged. It is also embodied
in the monologue, which is more than the particular “situation” in
which the deed takes place, which exceeds both the immediate scope
of the deed and the broader “action” in which the “epic element” re-
sides, that of family history, religion, the history of the race, etc., all
fodder for the pathos of monologue lyricizing the hero’s exclusion.2
The onset of the epic element divides the chorus and the monologue
against one another, textual symptom of a collision between situation
and action which the characters must address vis a vis reflection, i. e.,
dialogue, eventually understanding the place of the situation within
the action’s broader scope. In the gap between the tragic individuality
and the underlying religious substance, the dialectic of lines unfolds
as a means of resolving their contradiction. The tragedy is a matter of
situation catching up with action. A situation such as Oedipus’ which
is abstract and therefore vulnerable to fate recovers its epic substance,
its meaningful place within the larger story of a people, and, as the
epic element reveals itself, the gap between chorus and monologue is
closed. “The more” disappears.
And so the tragic character of the poem was not just a matter of
content. The structure of the text itself expressed the tragic nature
of the action it presented. The tragic character of the text was this
unimpeachable “more” – the gap between the chorus and monologue
– which set the “lyrical concentration” and pathos of the individual
mind against the extensiveness of the epic event, the deeper logos of
the gods. It was the gap between the individuality’s tragic situation
and the complete action which an entire trilogy embodied, which in
fact extended beyond the trilogy to events implied but never present-
ed, like Oedipus’ parricide, and to myth in general, along with the
relevant religious ritual and legal and political exigencies implied by
the drama.
The tragic character of the text explains A’s insistence that all hu-
man communication take place in fragments (EO1, 151-3 / SKS 2,
2
Our ears may need some adjusting to this language, a remnant of Kierkegaard’s
Copenhagen at the time, and Heiberg, the critic and dramatist, specifically. See Jo-
hansen “Kierkegaard on ‘the Tragic,’” 125 n81-82.
150-2). But the epic “more” is a function of time as well as textual

space: the empty now of dialogue, monological reflections on the past,
and the eternal validity of the gods which dawns as future via the cho-
rus. The split between monologue and chorus, the individual and the
universal (or, the social), is also that between time and eternity, be-
tween the finite, fragmentary coherence in which memory contends
with forgetting, and the elusive glimpse of the Idea, a horizon, always
postponed, against which man strives artistically in his attempt to in-
terpret human life, divided as he is from the unified narrative which a
“view like the God’s” provides. From vast skyscrapers to the darting
of the poet’s pen, all art, claims ‘A,’ is a place for the buried (EO1, 152
/ SKS 2, 151). Everything we make is posthumous (efterladt) because
incomplete. Everything is inherited and at the same time left behind
(Efterladenskab). This is the tragic fact which modernity comically
represses and which Kierkegaard attempts once more to retrieve in a
historically appropriately form.
Hamartia & Katharsis: Aristotle and the Rebirth of Tragedy
In a very Hegelian introduction to the concept of tragedy insisting

on the actual historical development of the content of the universal
concept and the dialectical nature of their relation, in which each is
empty unless mediated by the other, ‘A’ orients the modern concept
of tragedy in relation to Aristotle’s originary definition (EO1, 140 /
SKS 2, 140). 3 Yet, the aesthetician who clings too exclusively to the
Poetics risks emptying the formal definition of its content, and there-
3
As in Hegel’s Aesthetics, ‘A’ reduces the ancient Hero to objective, universal aims:
“Therefore what principally counts in Greek drama whether tragedy or comedy, is
the universal and essential element in the aim which the characters are realizing[.]”
G. W. F. Hegel Lectures on Aesthetics, vol. 2, p. 1206. Hegel’s ideas on modernity
also had a clear influence: “Modern tragedy adopts into its own sphere from the
start the principle of subjectivity. Therefore it takes for its proper subject matter
and contents the subjective inner life of the character who is, as in classical trag-
edy, a purely individual embodiment of ethical powers[.]” G. W. F. Hegel Lectures
on Aesthetics, vol. 2, p. 1223. Beyond this, like ‘A’, Hegel identifies the comic with an
engorged subjectivity. G. W. F. Hegel Lectures on Aesthetics, vol. 2, pp. 1199-1202.
In the Papirer, Kierkegaard makes extended use of Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics,
which he quotes in the German, page and line number. See Pap. III A 186 (1841)
/ SKS Not8:39.1; Pap. III B 28, 29 (1841) (no SKS); Pap. IV C 108 (1842-43) / SKS
Not12:7 / JP 2:1738; Pap. V B 60, p. 137 (no SKS); Pap. V B 72, 33 (1844) (no SKS);
Pap. III C 34, pp. 270-72 (1841-42) / SKS Not10:1 / JP 5:5545; Pap. X 2 A 605, p. 433
/ SKS NB17:32 / JP 6:6602.
fore meaning.4 We should not separate the ancient from the modern
absolutely. On the other hand, abandoning Aristotle’s authoritative
work on tragedy would deprive tragedy of its concept, sentencing it
once again to abstraction. A’s goal appears to be a kind of mediation
between the ancient and the modern, to mark the identity and differ-
ence between them, illuminating the specifically modern features of
what enlightened Europe has made and will make of the concept of
tragedy. ‘A’ clearly orients the question of tragedy and its use in the
diagnosis and treatment of the present age in a reading of the Poetics,
bearing particularly on the twin concepts of hamartia and katharsis.
Hamartia, Then and Now
Aristotle insists, ‘A’ observes, that the hero have hamartia (EO1, 143 /
SKS 2, 143). 5 Hamartia focuses the collision in an agent like Oedipus
For more on Kierkegaard’s use of Hegel, Solger, and Tieck in his philosophy of
tragedy, see Niels Thulstrup Kierkegaard’s Relation to Hegel, pp. 224-229, 276-277.
For the Schelling background, see Anders Holm “Reflection’s Correlative to Fate:
Figures of Dependence in Søren Kierkegaard’s A Literary Review” in Kierkegaard
Studies: Yearbook 1999. For hamartia in the german idealists in general, from
Schelling through Hegel to Von Fritz’s criticism of these speculative interpretations,
see J. M. Bremer Hamartia, pp. 87-89.
In his Jena lectures on The Philosophy of Art, Schelling introduced a new concept
of ‘the tragic’ which departed from the understanding of tragedy in terms of tragic
effect. For a discussion relative to Kierkegaard, see, again, Anders Holm “Reflec-
tion’s Correlative to Fate: Figures of Dependence in Søren Kierkegaard’s A Literary
Review” in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1999, p. 151. For Schelling, the “inner-
most spirit of Greek tragedy” which the philosopher discovers is a struggle between
individual freedom and the power of necessity. In a proto-Kierkegaardian gesture,
writes Holm, “Schelling’s interest in Greek tragedy” is “a kind of autocritique of his
own idealist project: the tragedies teach us that individual freedom is in fact limited
not by external opposition by a kind of internal undermining.” Freedom and neces-
sity, individual and universal, need to establish a higher unity dialectically. Hegel
historicizes this same idea in both his Lectures on Aesthetics, vol. 2, p. 1209, and the
Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 279, where preflective social morality (Sittlichkeit) is
said to divide against itself in the objective laws of state and religion.
4
For an exclusive treatment of Kierkegaard’s use of the Poetics, see Daniel Green-
span “The Rebirth of Tragedy at the End of Modernity: Kierkegaard’s Use of Aris-
totle’s Poetics” in Kierkegaard and the Greek World, vol. 1.
5
See Karsten Friis Johansen “Kierkegaard on ‘the Tragic’” in Danish Yearbook
of Philosophy 13, pp. 121 f. Curiously, Johansen, in his influential article, lumps
Kierkegaard in with post-Lessing scholarship, where he also sticks Hegel, in which
hamartia is interpreted in moral terms and katharsis becomes moral reconstruc-
tion. This is right for Hegel but wrong for Kierkegaard, who goes back to Aristotle’s
of “deed” (Gjerning) and “suffering” (Liden), deliberate action and

the onset of epic event (et episk Moment, Begivenhed) (EO1, 144 / SKS
2, 144). The guilt of tragedy lies between the responsibility of freedom
and the fate one innocently suffers by necessity. As a result, authenti-
cally tragic guilt is ambiguously “guiltless.” Modern tragedies, on the
other hand, turn on the hero’s unequivocal guilt. But this, again, is
less a development of the dramatic category than it is an analysis of
the “common consciousness of the age” (EO1, 144 / SKS 2, 144). In
analysing the art form Kierkegaard’s ‘A’ is engaged essentially in a
historical psychology. Tragic action, when the epic element is taken
into consideration, was as much event as action. But this was a func-
tion of the individual’s determination by the substance of the family,
the state, and finally fate (EO1, 143 / SKS 2, 143). The destruction of
an Oedipus was as much a suffering as it was a deed.
Because modern tragedy deals with a reflected subject, one who
has absorbed the world, without remainder, into thought, there is no
longer any “epic background” (EO1, 144 / SKS 2, 144) against which
choice operates. All situations can be explained immediately in ra-
tional terms, such as those, for example, of biological or historical
determinisms, universally rational imperatives, utilitarian caculi, etc.
In a Sartrean cut, all deeds are instantly cut off from the past, “can
be explained in situation and lines” (EO1, 143 / SKS 2, 143). Every
wound is cauterized instantly with the right theory. Action becomes
transparent in situation, absorbing the excess and deficiency of the
epic element (that more which is always missing) into the presence of
the deed and its immediate circumstances. This transparency of situ-
ation occassions a choice which the tragic figure now bears painfully
as his own, without remainder, occupying a self-same punctum which
hamartia to criticize Hegel’s objectivized reading. It is the ambiguous innocence of
the individual tragic figure in which the tragedy is located. Still, Johansen writes,
“Kierkegaard in no way anticipates modern Aristotelian scholarship.” But despite
his general praise for Lessing, it is clear enough that Kierkegaard’s reading of both
hamartia and katharsis depart significantly from the moralist tradition Lessing
perpetuates. Hamartia expresses the hero’s ambiguous innocence and subjection
to forces beyond his control, outside of a moral scope. It does not, as with Lessing
and his predecessors, as well as successors, concern individual virtue, and katharsis
has nothing to do with morally regenerating an audience, with character building.
On Lessing in Kierkegaard’s authorship, see in particular FT, 88 / SKS 4, 178 f. and
CUP1, 63 / SKS 7, 66.
Clyde Holler, the other more recent commentator on tragedy in Kierkegaard, em-
phasizes the return to Aristotle as a critique of Hegel, especially the leap in inter-
pretation of hamartia. See Clyde Holler “Tragedy in the Context of Kierkegaard’s
Either/Or” in International Kierkegaard Commentary – Either/Or, p. 132.
has swallowed every feature on the moral map surrounding it, every
before and after, all the heres and yonders.
Tragedy reformulated in modern terms demands a reassessment of
the way in which tragic action unfolds, and, especially, the concept of
its source in hamartia, tragic guilt. The introduction of unequivocal
guilt in the modern age, the autonomy of individual reason to think
and choose for itself (the freedom to be culpable), has an immedi-
ate effect on the structure of the drama.6 If the individual and his
deed are the stuff of modern tragedy then it can be distinguished in
the absence of monologue (EO1, 147 / SKS 2, 146-7). Along with the
more of fate and the other epic remainders which converge in a tragic
event, such as family history, divine nemesis, etc., the monologue itself
vanishes, writes ‘A’ (and, he might have added, so does the chorus)
(EO1, 147 / SKS 2, 146).7 As action becomes transparent in situation,
thought becomes transparent in dialogue, which is to say, the textual
remainders of monologue and chorus are absorbed together into the
one totalizing, uncontested logos of the drama.
Katharsis
In considering Aristotle’s notion of tragic katharsis, A’s role as his-

torical psychologist compels him to focus on the emotion of pity
(Medlidenhed), since it is the fragmenting of the social body in its loss
of concretely relatable ideals that defines the comic consciousness of
the age, and redefines hamartia as unequivocally individual guilt. To
help clarify this development ‘A’ introduces the opposition of sorrow
(Sorg) and pain (Smerte). The “suffering” of ancient tragedy diffused
through an epic web of events, drawn away from its center in any indi-
vidual deed. All deeds were absorbed in a mythically vast, anoriginal
6
Kierkegaard’s notion that the liberation of the individual in modernity coincides
with a heightened sense of moral indebtedness, that modernity’s theoretically demo-
cratic impulse expresses itself actually in an ùthos of calculation and submission,
certainly anticipates Nietszche’s analysis in the second essay of the Genealogy of
Morals. For more recent developments along similar lines, see Foucault’s Discipline
and Punish, whose concept of disciplinary power owes considerable debt to Kierke-
gaard by way of Heidegger’s notion of enframing (das Gestell). For a contemporary
reading of enframing and its influence in critical theory, see Dana Belu “Thinking
Technology, Thinking Nature” in Inquiry, 48 6, pp. 572-591.
7
EO1, 147 / SKS 2, 146. The editors of SKS provide the alternate rendering of the pas-
sage, where Kierkegaard does include the chorus in the list of what’s vanished. This
drops out of the Hong translation.
network of violence, and the effect on the individuals ensnared in this

web was sorrow. The tragic figure was never the center of the web,
only its brightest strand. Sorrow penetrated the entire work of a trag-
edy (EO1, 148 / SKS 2, 148) in which the ambiguity between rational
freedom and religious necessity made it impossible for any individual
deed to be blamed. The greater the innocence, then, the greater this
sorrow (EO1, 150 / SKS 2, 149). Ancient tragedies turned on the mini-
mal “element of guilt” which attached this vague sorrow to a certain
individual, like Oedipus. He did, after all, kill his father and share his
mother’s bed, objectively violating the sanctity of two Ideas: ‘Family’
and ‘State.’ But this guilt remains “unreflected,” rather than internal-
ized in the stuff of conscience: pity, upon which turned the katharsis
of the spectator, was the right response.
This in fact would be A’s objection to Hegel (EO1, 156 / SKS 2,
155).8 It is grounded importantly in Aristotle’s insistence that the
tragic effect of katharsis depends essentially on how the poet devises
the hamartia. Kierkegaard drew particular attention to this passage
in his journals, relating it to relevant passages in the Nicomachean
8
See Karsten Friis Johansen “Kierkegaard on ‘the Tragic’” in Danish Yearbook of
Philosophy 13, p. 123. Johansen confirms that it is here that Kierkegaard parts ways
with Hegel. The conflict of objective ideas is most important to Hegel, as opposed to
the sorrow and pain of the hero, since “whereas Hegel is in search of a reconciliation
of ideas, to Kierkegaard it is essential that the conflict is not ideally resolved. The
ambiguity in the hero’s suffering has to be retained.” Cf. Clyde Holler “Tragedy in
the Context of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or” in International Kierkegaard Commentary
– Either/Or, p. 128. Holler echoes Johansen’s interpretation. Aristotle is the tool
Kierkegaard uses to beat Hegel back: “After the opening paragraphs, the reader
may safely anticipate that the Aesthete will confront Hegel’s theory of tragedy with
a reading of Aristotle’s hamartia that undermines the validity of Hegel’s concep-
tion” of tragic suffering as punishment well deserved. See G. W. F. Hegel Lectures on
Aesthetics, vol. 2, p. 1198: “A truly tragic suffering, on the contrary, is only inflicted
on the individual agents as a consequence of their own deed which is both legitimate
and, owing to the resulting collision, blameworthy, and for which their whole self is
answerable.” Hegel focuses too closely on his own reading of Antigone, and neglects
the epic nature of her suffering. Cf. G. W. F. Hegel The Phenomenology of Spirit,
p. 284: “But the ethical consciousness is more complete, its guilt more inexcusable,
if it knows beforehand the law and the power which it opposes, if it takes them to be
violence and wring, to be ethical merely by accident, and, like Antigone, knowingly
commits the crime.” “The critique of Hegel,” adds Holler, “lies in the destruction
of his concept of tragedy, which in turn casts aspersions on both the method and
results of the Phenomenology of Spirit.” Clyde Holler “Tragedy in the Context of
Kierkegaard’s Either/Or” in International Kierkegaard Commentary – Either/Or,
p. 140. For a beginning of a critique of Hegel’s Aesthetics in Kierkegaard’s journals,
see Pap. III C 34, 270-72 / SKS Not 10:1. Cf. JP 5:5545.
Ethics which could illuminate it further.9 Interpreting the Antigone

and ancient tragedy generally (following Hegel) as a dialectical clash
between human and divine law reflects too modern a conception, fo-
cused exclusively on the isolated fact of the deed. Authentic Greek
tragic interest is actually in the “transmission of Oedipus’ fate” (EO1,
156 / SKS 2, 155). It is a world that goes under with Oedipus, not just
an individual. Tragedy unleashes an “objective grief” like “a force
of nature.” Guilt broke upon Oedipus like a wave from behind and
Antigone’s grief is an echo of her father’s. The modern elaboration
of reflection and the ideal of rational responsibility transmute Greek
sorrow into the more local pain of individual conscience, which the
individual himself produces. While “the Greeks fear the hands of liv-
ing gods”, modern man “fears the total guilt of conscience” (EO1,
148 / SKS 2, 148). Enter Raskolnikov, or his Danish cousin, Quidam,
who we’ll meet in the next chapter. Guilt is something the individual
concocts himself in the late hours at his writing table, as will Quidam,
or sick and isolated on his couch.10
Antigone: From the Ancient Tragic to the Modern
The ethical guilt which defines the modern understanding of hamar-

tia, eliminating tragedy from the horizon and reducing action to the
instant of the deed, as ‘A’ explains, marks a break with the innocence
of aesthetic consciousness, be it the total innocence of Homeric man,
whose actions were beyond him, or the relative innocence of the tragic
hero’s ambiguous responsibility. Regaining the tragic means generat-
ing the katharsis of pity despite, or rather, in virtue of, the age’s exag-
9
See note 15, ch. 8.
10
As Raskolnikov’s conscience suffers his murder, he is trapped on the couch in his
sorry student room, where he languishes for most of the book. The languishing of
intelligence becomes an important theme in modern fiction, and Quidam is another
example. A third would be Rilke’s The Diary of Malte Laurid Briggs, which Rilke
himself described in a letter to Clara: “Isn’t it this, that this test surpassed him, that
he did not stand it in the actual, though of the idea of its necessity he was convinced,
so much so that he sought it out instinctively until it attached itself to him and did
not leave him anymore? The book of Malte Laurids, when it is written sometime,
will be nothing but the book of this insight, demonstrated in one for whom it was
too tremendous […] but like Raskolnikov he was left behind, exhausted by his deed,
not continuing to act at the moment when action ought just to have begun, so that
his newly won freedom turned upon him and rent him, defenceless as he was [.]”
‘Oct. 19, 1907’ in Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke vol. 1, p. 181.
gerations of subjectivity. Tragedy’s religious reflection in and past mo-

dernity demands of the age that it develop new categories to think this
pagan-aesthetic phenomena: grace and divine compassion (Naade og
Barmhjertighed) become ethically-religiously what tragedy was to hu-
man life aesthetically (EO1, 145 / SKS 2, 145). These are the “healing
powers” corresponding to katharsis.
Translating hamartia now in New Testament terms of inherited sin,
katharsis returns from Aristotle’s rationalist conception of ‘error,’ a
variety of ignorance, to its archaic sense of religious purification. In-
terpreted modernly, the maternal sympathies of tragedy and the aes-
thetic may disappear episodically into the rigorous paternalism of eth-
ical conscience, but sympatheia returns in the turn back from ethics
to religious subjectivity and its renewed sense of tragedy. The terrible
“discrepancy” of sin had yet to appear in tragedy, whose epic element
ultimately absorbed the sufferer and his sorrow – a kind of prelimi-
nary discrepancy – in tragedy’s “gentle continuity.” With the religious,
the truly terrible nature of the truly discrepant individual can now be
recognized and forgiven (EO1, 145-146 / SKS 2, 145-146), if not by the
“motherly love that lulls the troubled one” which ‘A’ discovers in trag-
edy, then by a reflected version of it. No longer a relative ambiguity,
now the coincidence of total innocence and total guilt transforms for-
giveness into a paradoxical matter of fatherly love, a father’s love for
a son, as an individual, as a moral-intellectual being, whom, however
unfortunately, Kierkegaard tends to think of exclusively as male.
What was guilt to the Greeks after the New Testament becomes
sin. Sin is the category needed to fulfill the essay’s promise, to reflect
the ancient category of tragedy in the modern, which as an exercise
in aesthetics it can never do: “[n]ow, the religious is not an aesthetic
category, and so the question of ‘the true tragic’ is still in suspense,”
even within ancient tragedy itself. 11 The religious concepts which this
11
Karsten Friis Johansen “Kierkegaard on ‘the Tragic’” in Danish Yearbook of Phi-
losophy 13, pp. 117 f.: “The true counterpart is the religious category where the in-
dividual takes upon himself not a specific guilt, but ‘universal sin’ in all its [inexpli-
cable] frightfullness, and therewith the possibility of mercy … Now, the religious is
not an aesthetic category, and so the question of ‘the true tragic’ is still in suspense,”
even within ancient tragedy itself. Johansen continues, “[T]he realm of the tragic is
the ambiguous. To seek a unity of absolute innocence and absolute guilt in abstract
terms is to raise a metaphysical question. To refer to the absolute unity of suffering
and action in Christ is to speak religiously. The tragic must always be kept isolated
from other categories – in this case from the metaphysical and the religious.”
Johansen believes the tragic points towards a supercession in the religious,
whereas in the religious I see its proper fulfillment. It is not that neither the Greeks
reflection demands violate the limits of both the immediacy of the

aesthetic, the undialectical nature of poetic thinking, and the unam-
biguous transparency of the ethical in which modern life is desperately
stuck. Modern tragedy, ‘A’ believes, while it does reduce man and his
misfortunes to the deed, making the individual unambiguosly respon-
sible for what he does and suffers, doesn’t make his sin grand enough.
Ethical responsibility ought to be exaggerated absurdly, beyond the
particularity of the deed, in order to bring the essentially ideal nature
of ethical commitment to light. No longer a single murder, but the
whole of existence becomes a tragic liability, a loss that the individual
conscience suffers, a death for which he is responsible. There ought
to be, he says, a metaphysical guilt (EO1, 150 / SKS 2, 149). Without
it, the inner resolve which ethics contributes is lost in the “half-meas-
ures” of aesthetics. The turn inward is avoided, along with the saving
power of grace, the inexplicable katharsis of modernity.
And so as modern consciousness is the orphan of Greek parents,
‘A’ develops the story of tragedy in the modern age through Antigone,
Oedipus’ daughter. Reflection transforms Antigone’s sorrow into the
pain of conscience (EO1, 154 / SKS 2, 153), but in such a way that
the innocence of sorrow is retained as the reservoir upon which the
pain draws. Her crime is displaced into the past, as her father’s, which
in this version remains a secret to all but her, Oedipus included. Be-
cause a modern Antigone falls under “the category of reflection” her
mood is an anxious one (EO1, 155 / SKS 2, 154). Her anxiety implies
a break with the “present tense” of Greek life, inscribing her within
its emptied space, now, from which she agonizes over past and future.
Anxiety, he says, is a “genuine tragic category,” again suggesting that
nor Christianity satisfies the concept of tragedy, as he implies, but rather that both
do, and the latter in a more radical, more ideal way. The difference turns on the
interpretation of the following passage from Either/Or, quoted by Johansen. Greek
tragedy, he infers, was not truly tragic, because it remained unreflected: “The great-
er the guiltlessness, the greater the sorrow. If this is insisted upon, the tragic will
be cancelled. An element of guilt always remains, but this element is not actually
reflected subjectively; this is why the sorrow in Greek tragedy is so profound.” EO1,
149 / SKS 2, 149. This passage provides Greek tragic sorrow as an example of un-
reflected guilt, where the tragic is NOT cancelled, but preserved ambiguously in
a guilt which both is and is not one’s own. If it was not actually tragic, then there
would be nothing for modernity to reflect, and no occassion for A’s essay. Why,
then, would ‘A’ use the word ‘tragedy’ at all? A’s point is that the tragic problem
has become a subjective one, rather than the objective collision it had been for the
Greeks. It is not a matter of the “true tragic,” as Johansen insists, but what consti-
tutes the tragic at which point in time, in what way tragedy remains the essential
category of human experience.
genuine tragedy begins after both the Greek and modern forms ex-
pire – modern tragedy a historical expense in European culture’s ac-
complishing the essence of a Greek idea (EO1, 155 / SKS 2, 154).12
Antigone’s tragedy is staged now on the invisible scene of interiority,
framed by a heightened self-consciousness that comes with secret-
keeping and the enhanced awareness of time that the mood of anxiety
governs (i. e., the lapse of a criminal present permanently into the past,
and the constant projection into a future one must face, such as that
of forgiveness, or punishment). The modern element is the amphiboly
in her pain that comes with the secret of her father’s guilt (EO1, 161 /
SKS 2, 159). The crime is no longer the deed itself, but knowledge of it
combined with her sympathic sorrowing with the criminal.
Sophocles’ Oedipus, too, contained a secret, but unconsciously, like
a letterbox or a locket. This secret, once reflected on dramatically,
would be evacuated. This is aesthetics, be it the dialectic of drama, or
Hegel’s Concept. A gap in knowledge is filled, an ambiguity resolved –
the locket opened and a single Truth, finally, seen. The self-same voice
of the play, or Geist, mediates and absorbs the difference or conflict
within it. But the ethical-religious secret of the modern Antigone (or
later, of Abraham) cannot be spoiled. She will never know what her
father knew, since he is gone, and couldn’t have asked while he lived
for fear of disclosing it to him. She embodies a kind of moral paradox,
guilty of no crime but his, although he may have inhabited an inno-
cence she has lost due to her ambiguous knowledge. She has “done”
nothing. Her guilt is what she knows, and, even more importantly,
what she doesn’t. It is this ignorance that focuses her sorrow into trag-
ic pain, the secret within her knowledge: she is incapable of discover-
ing whether Oedipus knew of his crimes (EO1, 161 / SKS 2, 160). Like
Quidam, another tragic figure we’ll soon meet, she cannot confess or
repent, because her guilt is ambiguously undecided. This tension, ‘A’
writes, makes her a mother (EO1, 158 / SKS 2, 156). But unable to
12
Admittedly, Kierkegaard is a bit vague here. The text reads: “Furthermore, Anxi-
ety always contains a reflection on time, for I cannot be anxious about the present
but only about the past or the future, but the past and the future, kept in opposition
to each other in such a way that the present vanishes, are categories of reflection.
Greek sorrow, however, like all Greek life, is in the present, and therefore the sor-
row is deeper but the pain less. Anxiety, therefore, belongs essentially to the tragic.”
EO1, 155 / SKS 2, 154. This suggests that the Greeks were neither anxious nor
tragic. But in other works such as Stages on Life’s Way and the Concept of Anxiety
we will read that the Greeks, too, had an anxiety in relation to fate and the oracle,
and that their light-minded, plastic beauty contained a sadness and anxiety as a
latency. It is a matter of developing these in the direction of religion.
marry or consummate her painful isolation with anyone but ‘A’ him-
self, and even then only in his own imaginations (she has breathed
herself into him, as a mood, he confesses, in a night of erotics, [EO1,
153 / SKS 2, 152]), her true husband is this secret (EO1, 157 / SKS 2,
156). It represents a gap or lack in knowledge that corresponds to an
excess – a more which confession, were it possible, would recover. ‘A’
makes her a mother as well as a bride, while paradoxically insisting on
her virginity. How, then, and to whom, or perhaps what, does she give
birth? When does the pregnancy – the secret – parturate?
Tragedy becomes possible again once modern tragedy (and mod-
ern subjectivity) has expired. It becomes possible for children of a new
Antigone. We are children of her virgin marriage to the secret, an Idea
both personal and historical, an immaculate birth generated of the dif-
ference between individual conscience and the universality expressed
in the race. The ‘objective dialectic’ of family in A’s revision of modern
tragedy, the return of piety and a renewed sense of generations, imbues
the individual with a content without which tragic collision is impos-
sible. This was the aesthetically ambiguous element forsaken by mod-
ern tragedy and its German idealist interpreters. Without the accrued
stuff of time and flesh only the transparency of individual thought and
rational responsibility remain. But this renewed sense of substance is
likewise complicated by the absolute cut of the individual from the fam-
ily tree with the advent of a tragic secret. A redemeed tragedy demands
the return of an objective necessity operating on the individual from
above, and, at the same time, a radicalization of individual autonomy
below, through the medium of reflection. The tension that results is an
absolute collision between the individual and the universal, as opposed
to the relative, objective collisions of the ancients (between Ideas, re-
ligious forces such as ‘family’ and ‘state,’ which collide disastrously in
both Oedipus and his daughter).13 This is the amphiboly A’s Antigone
embodies, which demands from the dramatist a renewed and height-
ened ability for monologues (EO1, 162 / SKS 2, 160). Hence, in the
following chapter, we’re forced to sift through more than 200 pages of
Quidam’s diaried soliloquy, a tragic monologue to end all tragic mono-
logues (Frater Taciturnus, as well, could be read as Quidam’s chorus,
13
More obvious in Antigone’s case, for Oedipus, too, tragedy turns on the mutual
crossing of family against city. The truth about his lineage puts him agonizingly at
odds with the moral-political order of Thebes, which he and his royal family, above
all, represent. Alternatively, taking his place in the city as king and wife of the wid-
owed queen puts him incestuously at odds with the moral-religious order governing
the hearth.
commenting on his pathos once the diary has broken off, as if in a con-
cluding ode, from the standpoint of a God).
‘A’ produces the tragic collision in Antigone by introducing roman-
tic love as an obstacle to filial piety. The individualistic theme of erotic
love which in the original play is merely part of the aftershock, break-
ing finally against Creon in the suicide of his son, Haemon (Antigone’s
lover), in Kierkegaard’s modernized version takes over the dominant
role of philia. Rather than the instinctive pieties of a daughter pitting
Antigone against the generic contrivance of the State, ‘A’ gives us a
conflict between the instinct of family and the infinitizing of eros, an
interiorizing drive, on Kierkegaard’s reading, through which Antigone
reflects herself out of the genus of family constituting half the crucible
of the first version of this play (EO1, 163 / SKS 2, 161). No longer the
unconscious universal of family competing against the reflected one
of the state, two objective commitments colliding in the same figure,
Antigone now embodies a conflict between the subjectively private
demands of love and the objective telos of family.
Because of her unique family history, falling in love with Haemon
strands Antigone in a collision between two kinds of love which cus-
tomarily complement one another: eros and philia, the identity of the
family customarily extending itself through the incorporation of the
erotic difference on which eros depends.14 A civilized eros reflects the
universal of family. It is the family one chooses, as marriage and fam-
ily reflect the intimacy of eros universally, making it public business.
For Antigone, eros and philia have become crossed. In her tragically
inverted world it is eros that demands disclosure, the loyal daughter’s
confession of her father’s terrible secret, while the secrets of familial
love become an individuating factor.15 Keeping the terrible family se-
cret makes her impossible as a lover. As in the incest of the original
Oedipus story, the transcendence of eros and the immanence of philia
are divided, crossed, and turned against one another. For Antigone
the competing Ideas of love and ethics are co-conspirators in their
mutual failure, taking her down with them.
With Antigone’s tragic circumstance as a model, Kierkegaard de-
scribes the modern experience of freedom, like her love, in such a way
that the exercise of freedom becomes an impossibility. The collision
between the individual and the universal, then, or a revision of it, in
14
See Giles Deleuze “The Problem of Oedipus” in Anti-Oedipus, pp. 154-166.
15
Hannah Arendt The Human Condition, pp. 51-55. For Arendt, both Christianity
and eros represent purely private impulses of withdrawal from the social world.
which two different kinds of commitment to ‘the Idea’ lock heads – the
aesthetic-erotic and the filial-ethical – in the new Antigone mounts to
the point where action becomes impossible (EO1, 164 / SKS 2, 162).
This is Kierkegaard’s point: it is only through this experience of impos-
sibility that the third type of ideal commitment emerges: the religious.
Only in death does the individual subject to modern tragic choice ar-
rive at the far shore of action. The lover’s task is to wrest her secrets
from her, since the secret is the axis about which eros turns. But when
Antigone confesses her secret, she expires. It is the spiritual knot she
is built around. Only death frees her from this ghost which has her in
its grip; then is she able to love (EO1, 164 / SKS 2, 162). She belongs to
Haemon as she leaves him. To choose to love is to choose to renounce
this love. This is the sad heart of Antigone’s tragedy as ‘A’ adjusts it to fit
modern conceptions. While Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter to the
state, there the state remains, a glorious consolation for his loss. Tragic
choice in ancient tragedy meant the inevitability of a loss. But because
their conflicts were objective (between family and state in both the
Antigone and Iphigenia at Aulis, the two examples upon which Kierke-
gaard draws most extensively), a choice, in theory, was possible, a tragic
choice in which violence in some form could not be avoided.16 Choice
provided relief at a cost. But it was relief, all the same.
Deliberating on action as had the ancient tragic poets, Kierkegaard
insists on the tragic nature of Antigone’s predicament and, by exten-
sion, all tragic heroes, as the impossibility of choice. But now there
are no tragic economies in which one good is sacrificed for another.
When Antigone chooses love at the expense of a daughter’s piety, even
this love is denied her. Not to marry consigns her to a dead parent, a
living burial like the first Antigone within the invisible walls of her
father’s secret, rather than Creon’s underground chamber. Modern
tragedy introduces subjectivity into the tragic equation, dividing the
objective forces of family, rational politics, one god or set of gods and
another, etc., against themselves in the reflective space of individual
conscience: Antigone, for example, is divided erotically between the
obligation to two families, past and future, father and husband. By
subjectivizing ancient tragedy, pursuing the Euripidean line of flight,
that of reflection,17 Kierkegaard turns Greece against Greece and in-
16
See Martha Nussbaum The Fragility of Goodness, p. 25. Nussbaum, most influ-
entially, understands tragic choice as an irresolveable conflict of values, in which
transgression of some kind is inevitable.
17
Fear and Trembling identifies this trend with Sophocles’ Philoctetes, more than any
other play. But it is generally attributed by scholarship to Euripides.
troduces a radicalized tragedy in which any choice, even the choice of

a partial loss, relative violence, is in principle impossible. To make a
choice is to be defeated. It is more Greek than the Greeks. Antigone’s
father and the spiritual laws that protect him, the gods of conscience,
take their revenge on her disloyalty. But they don’t do it in the exterior,
driving her like her father to blindness and exile. They attack her from
within. These are the new hunting grounds of nemesis. This is the true
expression of tragedy for a modern audience which the theatricality of
aesthetes, seduced by a metaphysician’s story about the autonomy of
human reason and its deeds, fails to produce.
The path to a redeemed tragedy moves through the radicalized
guilt of ethics and transplants the pagan holiness of the spectacle into
the sanctum sanctorum of conscience. This inner sanctuary exudes
no aesthetic interest. It is not for being seen (EO1, 149 / SKS 2, 148).
The developments immanent in tragedy as an art form for ‘A’ lie well
beyond Greek tragedy as well as its modern counterpart, beyond both
aesthetics and ethics. They belong to the sphere of tragic religion.
Christianity and the Rebirth of the Tragic
While “[m]odern tragedy is not tragic at all, Greek tragedy is not the
true tragic,” either, “since it is alien to reflected subjectivity.”18 Though
enlightened, ethical consciousness fails to take the collisions of trag-
edy seriously, eliminating exceptional figures of irrecuperable igno-
rance and discrepancy such as Socrates or Abraham in the solvent of
the universal – leavening them rhetorically in Aristophanic caricature
or bourgeois sermons, or sentencing them to death – it does the use-
ful work of inadvertently demonstrating a comic contradiction at the
center of tragedy. In ancient tragedy, the individual representative and
victim of conflicted, objective Ideas such as ‘Family’ or ‘State’ must
annul themself within them. Tragedy makes sport of puppets without
a will or a mind to call their own,19 slaves with no reflective distance or
18
See note 11, ch. 6. For Johansen the metaphysical unity of guilt and innocence is a
philosophical gesture which takes us beyond the aesthetic, but, I would argue, the
religious movement brings us back, again, in a radicalized sense.
19
For the Greeks, will or choice (prohairesis) was typically an extension of delib-
erative intelligence (logizesthai, bouleusthai), and in Aristotle, specifically, always
cooperating with desire, never a separate faculty. It was arguably St. Augustine who
first developed the notion of a faculty of the will, independent of reason and desire.
See Karl Jaspers Plato and Augustine, p. 89; Hannah Arendt The Life of the Mind,
freedom from the Idea they embody.20 Tragic protagonists are moved
about like paperweights, inanimate, but, and here is the joke, speak-
ing nonetheless. This vision of the comic side of tragedy we’ll see in
the next chapter is crucial to the passage from a pagan to a Christian
understanding of it.
According to A’s thoughts on a modern age dominated by an ethics
of the Concept and the abstraction of its ‘deeds,’ the tragic collisions
between individual and universal which ethics allegedly resolves by
absorbing the flesh and history of these collisions into the abstract
eternities of reason, makes ethics (in the Kantian sense of pure cat-
egories of Reason, or the Hegelian sense of a logic of existence) the
biggest comedy of them all. Ethics engenders empty individuals dis-
solved in advance in one or another abstract universal, in state law,
for instance, or a calculative, bureaucratic rationality and the ironic
freedoms of bourgeois routine, rather than the concrete filial or civic-
religious ideas of the ancients. The ethical position represented by
Judge William of Either/Or’s second volume, for instance, becomes
obviously ludicrous: “The personality appears as the absolute that has
its teleology in itself.” 21 This is fantasy at the level of culture, a self-dis-
solving comic parentheses between two stages of collision, the tragic
age of the Greeks and our own.
The correct understanding of tragedy in the modern age, however,
opens the door to the religious ‘more’ of Christ within the tragic texts
circulated by aesthetes, both ancient and modern. Christianity offers
the only true expression for tragedy, which in one sense is no longer
tragic (that is, no longer naive Greek aesthetics), but nevertheless ful-
fills the originally Greek tragic vision, which like Antigone’s love be-
pp. 84-110. According to Arendt, St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans and its notion of
the two laws battling within him (p. 68), spirit and flesh, one of which must be af-
firmed and the other denied, and Epictetus’ development of prohairesis as a “will”
to approve of everything that comes to pass” (p. 76) as an “impression” whose in-
dependent reality and power over him he denies (p. 83), a simple “yes” and “no,”
leads to the notion that there are not two laws, but one will, divided in two, which
either says “yes” or “no” to action, which, in fact, must always divide itself between
an affirmation and a corresponding denial, and is essentially free from deliberation
and appetite (p. 88). See Augustine On Free Choice of the Will, iii.1.8-10, iii.3.33.
20
Cf. SL, 414 / SKS 6, 384. The poet sees the idea, but his hero does not.
21
EO2, 263 / SKS 3, 250. The Judge here is talking about a life reconciled with civic
virtue, a “social, civic self,” in which the isolation of personal life is mediated by
civic affairs, and “appears in a higher form.” EO1, 262-263 / SKS 3, 249-250. On
this, see Joakim Garff “The esthetic is above all my element” in The New Kierke-
gaard, ed. by Jegstrup, p. 63.
gins where it concludes:22 Christ’s parousia is “in a sense the most pro-
found tragedy,” we read, and still “infinitely more” (EO1, 142 / SKS
2, 142), since Christ is an “accidental person,” a man like any other,
but the only one “with universal significance.” The contradiction em-
bodied in Christ (and, we’ll see in chapter nine, in Adam) develops
the aesthetic-objective collision in Sophocles’ Antigone between civic
reason and the world of forces, an epic world of blood, divine nemesis
and overwhelming passions, of irrational powers de-centering the ra-
tional individual and society from without, into a potentially religious
collision within the religiously reflected subject. Christ is a tragic idea
to which modern subjects must subject themselves if the profound sor-
row and profound joy of human life is to be recovered. Although ‘A’
is apparently a creature of aesthetics, it is Christ, he writes, who ex-
emplifies tragedy in the modern age, the unity of absolute guilt and
absolute innocence – Olympic light and the mysteries of earth and
flesh – in a metaphysical category (EO1, 150 / SKS 2, 149).
It will be the Quidam of Stages on Life’s Way, an aesthetic figure
caught in a latently religious contradiction, who inaugurates the leap
from Antigone’s paralysis to the possibility of tragedy’s properly reli-
gious expression in a total, metaphysical guilt. This guilt of Quidam’s,
exaggerated dialectically, idealized to the point of universality, how-
ever, inflames itself ultimately in the interest of a collapse of meta-
physical thinking. It is moved by a desire for self-sacrifice, the recogni-
tion of sin and the katharseis of grace, rather than the metaphysician’s
love of the Concept.
22
Again, on this point, I differ from Johansen, who thinks that Christianity leaves the
tragic behind, rather than realizing its paradoxical essence. For Johansen the true
tragic points beyond both Greece and Modernity, but can never be realized, since it
is an aesthetic concept. This makes it a paradoxical category, on my reading, which
becomes possible as it exceeds its own categories. Johansen would have to conclude,
on the other hand, that it is merely hypothetical. It never existed and it never will.
Rather, here in Either/Or and beyond, Kierkegaard translates religious latencies
in Greek tragedy, in a passage through ethics, and an ethical crisis, which ethics
cannot address, into a more developed, religious expression. Johanssen does just
what Kierkegaard warns against in the first pages of the essay, dividing modern
and ancient tragedy, and inadvertently emptying them both. Rather, ‘A’ implies, we
ought to think them together vis a vis their hermeneutical retrieval in a Christian,
post-modern age.
Chapter 7
Stages on Life’s Way:
Hamartia after Modernity
The Impossibility of Eros and the Tragedy of Recollection
Quidam, the fictional protagonist of Stages on Life’s Way, more than

any other character in Kierkegaard’s ensemble of fictional characters,
pseudonymous authors included, embodies the philosophical way
of life, at least in the modern sense. In Quidam the abstract force
of dialectics pursues the tragically conflicted failure implicit in its
convergence with the passions and ambiguity of human experience,
necessarily, like a fate, heedless of the suffering this imposes on the
dialectician, the individual thinker himself. Stages, however, initially
develops the modern problem of abstract thinking amidst the con-
creteness of Greek marble and the enthusiasms of the grape, through
the metaphor of Eros and the recollection of a drinking party entitled
In Vino Veritas. Despite the obvious parallel between William Af-
ham’s narration of the drinking party with Apollodorus’ recollection
in Plato’s Symposium, neither Socrates nor Plato is ever mentioned.
Platonic language was not a Greek enough Greek to find a place in
the paeans of this lusty crew. Rather, it is the naive Greece in which
thinking was still at home in the world that inspires these speeches.
Socrates, for Kierkegaard, put an end to that. As a figure of absolute
negation – explains The Concept of Irony – the death sentence carried
out by Athens was in one sense a justifiable measure of self-defense.
Of course this vision of an innocent Greece is as naive as the dream-
ing intelligence it imagines. This was not lost on Kierkegaard, as we’ll
soon see. For now, in the mouths of the aesthete, Greece returns with
all the balmy innocence that fantasy can muster, so that the tormented
guilt of Quidam’s diary to follow, when this false innocence collapses,
may carry the reflection of ancient tragedy in modernity forward to
its proper religious expression in Abraham, to which Quidam’s fatally
distorted personality aspires.
Stages on Life’s Way: Hamartia after Modernity 159
The Preface to In Vino Veritas pays tribute, in fact, to an essen-

tial difference between two types of reference to the past: memory (at
huske) and recollection (at erindre) (SL, 9 / SKS 6, 17). While recollec-
tion, including the Platonic variety, will ultimately be the calling card
of a deficient life-view when seen within the authorship as a whole, it
is already one step beyond memory, the spiritless observation that for
Kierkegaard marks the age. Poetic recollection is the “strenuous and
conscientious” birth of ideality in a person (SL, 10 / SKS 6, 18). Rec-
ollection is something one lives and breathes, a crafting within which
the craftsperson includes himself, while the impersonal objectivity of
memory is the indiscriminate (SL, 10 / SKS 6, 18).
As experience, anything that qualifies must be intelligible, memora-
ble as experience, subject to the narratives of recollection, or at least
the ledgers of memory. But a problem arises for philosophers and the
cultures they engender when reason experiences that which lies at the
limit of both reason and experience (of an experience, that is, whose
conditions are prescribed by reason).1 One of these experiences chal-
lenging the authority of the philosopher’s logos is the experience of
God as the impossible, the possibility of the impossible. 2 William Af-
ham explains the central problem of Stages along similar lines. Both
the recollections of poets and philosophers as well as the mechanisms
of modern memory want to recoup a loss incurred by reflection, to re-
cover the hallowed immediacy from which reflection departs, to in-
clude within thinking that alleged plenum which came before it. They
want to close the irritating gap between thinking and being and get an
immediate experience of what is. “That is your problem, there, in the
amygdala. That is your sadness!” says the psychologist. “This, this is
1
More recently this very Kierkegaardian question has flourished in the debate be-
tween the Catholic Phenomenologist, Jean Luc Marion, and his a/theistic compatri-
ot, Jacques Derrida. What is the best description of how an experience of the impos-
sible gets underway? Is it in terms of the Christian mystics hyperousios, as Marion
claims, where conceptual “presence” yields to a super saturated “givenness,” whose
brilliance undermines the operations of the concept? Or, as Derrida claims, is it in
terms of absence and non-appearance, a moment of blindness in which the impos-
sible intervenes in the economies of reason? See Marion “In The Name” in God, the
Gift and Post-Modernism, ed. by Caputo and Scanlon. See Jacque Derrida “Sauf Le
Nom” in On the Name. For an analysis of the debate, see John Caputo “Apostles of
the Impossible” in God, the Gift, and Post-Modernism.
2
The familiar ring in Heidegger of the same formulation sounds in Being and Time’s
analysis of Being-towards-death. Death is “the possibility of the impossibility of
anything at all,” the greatest of all possibilities, that which “outstrips” all the others,
as God, for Kierkegaard, is absolute possibility. Martin Heidegger Being and Time,
sec. 53.
God!” the pagan proclaims, and so on. Memory and recollection both
abide this contradiction between thinking and the loss of immediacy it
presupposes, a condition condemning them to the infinite repetitions
of a recuperation which is structurally impossible, because both mem-
ory and recollection destroy the experience they claim to reproduce.
Why, when I try to remember my trip to Denmark, for instance,
do I first remember the pictures I took while there? Not the place
itself? The better the representation, the more it tends to replace the
original. But, by the same token, only what is forgotten can be recol-
lected, again. The art of recollecting also implies a kind of forgetting
(SL, 13 / SKS 6, 21). Recollection begins with a loss. According to the
doctrine of aesthetic recollection, my trip isn’t represented or remem-
bered in the photos. It returns in and through them as representation.
This poetic recollection is the alternative to the moribund scrutinies
of memory. It allegedly makes the repetition of an experience once
again possible by discerning its essence. The poem, the photograph,
the perfect word or phrase, they capture the feeling: what it is to have
been there. They are better than actually being there, again, could we
go back, because they are rinsed of the accidental, the intrusions of
the meaningless, the yet-to-be formed or interpreted.
We recollect the essential, while the inconsequential details, the
ledgers of memory, are continually being wiped clean. This is the first
of a series of dialectical moves described by and through the characters
of Stages in which reflection tries more or less legitimately to recoup
the lived immediacy of things, such as the joys of childhood or love’s
passions (be it erotic or religious), which the objectifying science of
memory and its facts fails to grasp. But within the dialectical logic of
Stages, we’ll find, this immediacy is always already a romantic abstrac-
tion, the fantastic yearning for nature, for instance, which 19th century
painters, confined to the stink, soot and noise of cities like Copenhagen
expressed in the Rousseauian innocence of their bucolic scenes.3 But
this is a fact yet undisclosed to the celebrants at Constantius’ party.
The first candidate for thinking ‘the impossible’ as erotic imme-
diacy is the poetic recollection of the aesthete.
What is recollected can be thrown away, but just like Thor’s hammer, it returns, and
not only that, like a dove it has a longing for the recollection, yes, like a dove, however
often it is sold, that can never belong to anyone else because it always flies home. But
no wonder, for it was recollection itself that hatched out what was recollected, and this
3
On the relation between the industrialization of city life and the rise of early mod-
ernism’s bucolic ideals, see T. J. Clark Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History
of Modernism, ch. 2 generally.
hatching is hidden and secret, solitary, and thus immune to any profane knowledge –
in just the same way the bird will not sit on its egg if some stranger has touched it. (SL,
12 / SKS 6, 20)
Recollection creates what it recalls. It is a movement immanent to the

genius of the poet himself. The art of recollection, the poet’s art, in this
sense becomes an art of the self. The poet interprets reality as a per-
petual modification of himself and the fruit of his own creative power.
He absorbs and reflects the world in himself, both idealizing and de-
stroying it (a move Judge William, in the name of ethics, will repeat).
This interiority, the romantic dreaming of the aesthete, marks a break
with the mechanical immediacy in which memory tabulates, monies
are exchanged, marriages brokered, etc. This reflective break with im-
mediacy announced in the preface introduces a tension that in Hege-
lian fashion the successive stages of existence – aesthetic, ethical and
religious – staged most clearly in Stages bears out. Poetic thinking is the
first of several attempts to seduce human reflection’s elusive Other into
the ring of reflection, where the rule of mediation has been established
ahead of time and thought can finally return to itself, self-satisfied, like
Aristotle’s prime mover or Hegel’s Concept. It is the first misguided
attempt at the impossibility of thinking what Climacus will call the
“absolutely different,” which, we’ll see in chapter eleven, tragically and
paradoxically both grounds and transcends human understanding. The
aesthete mistakes reason’s Other for a particular (a particular woman,
for instance) in which the Idea, of beauty or enjoyment, in his case, is
reflected, through which he can have it. The incommensurability be-
tween this Idea and actual experience which poetic thinking contains,
although in a repressed form, reflection itself can never resolve, since
reflection is already leveraged beyond its means as an element of what
will turn out to be a fundamentally religious problem.
“Erotic Understanding” and the Repression of Tragedy
In the drinking party that follows, the dream of immediacy reveals itself
as the fantasy of erotic love (Elskov), where passion, intoxication, secre-
cy and evanescence pervade the scene. The participants appear and van-
ish like ghosts with the night. Their world is one which naturally recedes
from view, like dreams or gods upon inspection. Recollection differs
from the durable objectivity of memory, in which, like experimenting
science, I might repeatedly return to the same observation. In this sense,
recollection has an “erotic understanding” (SL, 15 / SKS 6, 23).
Erotic understanding comes with the initiation in which the poet-

lover submits to the god of Love. The “work of recollection is always
blessed” and “not only the one about to give birth but above all the
one who is recollecting is in blessed circumstances” (SL, 19 / SKS 6,
26), says Afham in his speech. Eros presides over Constantius’ sym-
posium as the birthplace of the most rudimentary form of reflection,
the romantic reflection of the aesthete, the divine worship of poetic
recollection. In the classical spirit recalled by their symposium, like
Plato’s Socrates, the work of these poets also has a kind of religious
dedication.4 But as a strictly pagan god, the worship of Eros is imme-
diate, meaning the worshipper relates to the god externally. As Er-
emita announces at the banquet, “‘immediately’ is the most divine of
all categories” and “the departure point of the divine in life” (SL, 23 /
SKS 6, 29). Worship has not yet become dialectical, that is, a problem
for reflection and interiority (as it became in Augustine). 5
Yet the Platonic Eros Afham has on loan, like that of Empedo-
cles or Hesiod, is a mediator.6 It moves between chaos and creation,
non-being and being, as the figure of the poet has already passed in
Stages from the senseless, reflex of memory to the development of a
self within the problematic realm of human freedom. As a mediator,
the force of Eros compels the text at least, if not these characters,
beyond their immediate absorption in romantic cult where the Idea
disappears in the false immediacy of the “here and now” or “this and
that,” the most universal and empty of designations. Romantic reflec-
tion as a kind of reflective immediacy expresses a contradiction that
the aesthete himself cannot recognize. He is too inspired by his god.
This divine immediacy demands a blindness and submission from
the devotee that makes more robust reflection and the resolution in
which reflection concludes, endorsed so optimistically by the ethical
figure of the Judge, impossible. Eros, as the Young Man on loan from
Constantius’ Repetition explains, cannot be explained. Its mysteries
always remain concealed in a darkness (SL, 37 / SKS 6, 42). “Who
would not feel alarmed if time and again people suddenly dropped
4
See JP 3:2408, 5:5699, regarding Symposium, 217e, where In Vino Veritas shows up
as a latinized form of Plato’s own phrasing. Noted by Adrian Van Heerden “Does
Love Cure the Tragic” in International Kierkegaard Commentary – Stages on Life’s
Way, p. 69.
5
See Augustine Confessions, x.1-26. Augustine’s God is discovered in a turning in-
ward, away from the world, to the immanence of memory. Although, the turn toward
immanence leads Augustine finally to the transcendence of this God above.
6
Empedocles, fr. B17; Hesiod Theogony, 120.
dead around him or had a convulsion without anyone’s being able to

explain it” (SL, 36 / SKS 6, 40). This is what love is like. Its think-
ing is terrifyingly archaic. The lover is sentenced to his passion in the
same way that the epileptic was once bound inexplicably to the sacred
disease. But, comically, this is a violent intervention which the lovers
nevertheless celebrate “as the greatest happiness” (SL, 36 / SKS 6,
40). When the gods bring death and chaos we “become alarmed,” but
when they inspire love “one laughs at it instead, for the comic and the
tragic are always in connection” (SL, 36 / SKS 6, 41).
The contradictions fuelling both tragedy and comedy, between
meaning and nonsense, freedom and compulsion, culpability and in-
nocence, make their first appearance in the divine possessions of Eros.
In the first of the speeches, the Young Man connects the influence of
Eros explicitly to both tragedy and tragic sacrifice. As in the pseudo-
nyms more generally, the essence of the tragic is contradiction: “the
tragic is suffering contradiction, and the comic is painless contradic-
tion” (CUP1, 514 / SKS 7, 466). If we were to stop here, Kierkegaard’s
pseudonymous formulation of the tragic (and the comic) would not be
so far from Hegel’s in the Phenomenology, or the Lectures on Aes-
thetics, which, we can say with confidence were a decisive influence.7
But like A’s treatment of tragic guilt, Constantius’ symposium extends
and colors this “painful contradiction” (SL, 38 / SKS 6, 43) beyond
Hegel’s purely dialectical expression. The painful contradiction “for
the thinking person” is “that there is something that exercises its pow-
er everywhere yet cannot be thought” (SL, 38 / SKS 6, 43) – the tragic
influence of the god. By refusing love and clinging to thought, by “let-
ting life pass,” our Young Man, we read, makes either a tragic or com-
ic sacrifice (SL, 38-9 / SKS 6, 43-44). Sacrificing life for an impossible
idea rings of tragedy, as with an Ahab, for instance, destroying him-
self and his crew (all but Ishmael, of course, who lives to tell the tale)
for the heroic ideal of revenge, but also comedy, should we replace the
madness of suffering with the exalted oblivion of a Quixote, spinning
out his life in fantasy. It is all a matter of whether the hero suffers his
contradiction, fuming and stumbling on bone carved from the maim-
ing jaw, or happily plays the fool for his audience, swiping harmlessly
at windmills, scattering defenseless monks to the hills. In both cases,
the contradictions exemplified by the Eros of Kierkegaard’s symposi-
asts lead to the madness pregnant in their attempt to think this power
that cannot be thought.
7
See note 3, ch. 6.
The madness of Eros and the irrational nature of his worship take
on a less intellectual and more openly Bacchic tone when the time
comes for the fashion designer to make his speech. The fashion de-
signer knows women from experience, as a confidante, and outside of
the duplicity of love between the sexes. These women, he says, in truth
“form a chorus of the half-mad” to which he is “high priest” (SL, 71
/ SKS 6, 70). They are “fanatic” and “bite” one another “like taran-
tulas,” passing their madness through the medium of blood. His bou-
tique is the “place of sacrifice” where a woman becomes so “loony”
that “not even a god could dismay her.” Her religious enthusiasms
raise her, like Euripides’ bacchant, to the stature of a god:
He who leads the throngs becomes Dionysus – ¡ÏÍÊÇÍÐ mÑÒÇÐ ¿ÁÅÇ ÆÇ¿ÑÍÓÐ.8
To be filled with the god means death, as it did for the Dionysiac on the
islands of Chios and Tenedos, sacrificed in his place.9 And, therefore,
like the god whose role the bacchant imitatively assumes, one fashioni-
sta, the Fashion Designer invites us to imagine, is slain by the rest.
The religion of Eros is closer to the Dionysian earth and the mys-
teries of death and nature than the Olympian heaven.10 Its language
“is a natural language” made “not of sounds but of disguised cravings
8
Euripides Baachae, 115. As cited and translated by Kerenyi as an attestation to rit-
ual fact. Karl Kerenyi Dionysus: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, p. 203.
9
Walter Otto Dionysus: Myth and Cult, p. 107. Cf. p. 113 (n65a, n66): Plutarch
Themistocles, xiii., et al., in Plutarch’s Lives; Porphyry de Abstinentia, ii. 55. Both
speak of not only “human sacrifice in his cult but also of the ghastly ritual in which
a man is torn to pieces.” For more on human sacrifice in Dionysus’ cult, see Karl
Kerenyi Dionysus: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, p. 202 (37n). We read
of both priest’s and beautiful boys sacrificed in Dioysian cult on Lesbos, instead of
a goat (Pausanias, ix. 8. 2.). Clement of Alexandria also refers to their mortal rite
(Protrepticus, iii. 42.). For a discussion of the paradoxical bacchic joy in death and
suffering, the joy of life and that of homophagy as prototypical for tragedy, see J. P.
Guepin The Tragic Paradox, p. 108.
10
See Walter Otto Dionysus, p. 176. Otto ties Dionysus together with Eros and shows
extensively the connection between Dionysiac cult and the symbology of death, the
Erinyes and Hades. “The dying of the god is basic to his nature, since by it Dionysus
is plainly associated with the powers of the underworld, and what is done to him
is nothing but what he himself does” (p. 191). He is equated with Hades, and, as
Zagreus, was first a chthonic deity (p. 191). The sphinx was said to be sent by Di-
onysus from Hades to Thebes, once a maenad, one of the Theban women Dionyus
drove mad (p. 114). Both Dionysus and the Erinyes are worshipped as ÊÃÉ¿ÇËÇÁÇÐ.
Aeschylus calls them Ê¿ÇË¿ÂÃÐ (p. 114). “[I]t cannot be denied that the god and his
maenads, in their blood thirsty ecstasy of madness, approximate the forms of the
world of the dead” (p. 115). Heraclitus attests that “Hades and Dionysus, for whom
they go mad and rage, are one and the same” (p. 116; fr. B15).
that” like the masked god himself “are continually changing roles”
(SL, 72 / SKS 6, 71). The telos of this nature, the Judge clues us in a
few pages later, is a meaning we touch on “in the mysteries” as op-
posed to an individual’s “act of freedom” (SL, 101-102 / SKS 6, 97).
Romantic reflection attempts to sink back into nature in a Dionysia of
intelligence. Johannes’ speech in turn brings the Dionysian essence
of the erotic into full view. As a devotee of Eros, Johannes “listens
with stethoscopic probity” and “discovers the dithyrambic beat of de-
sire as an unconscious accompaniment” to the beloved’s glance, which
“no thought, even less any word, is able to pursue” (SL, 78 / SKS 77).
As the banquet ends, Afham openly declares the chthonic tenor of
the banquet. These love-drunk aesthetes pour a libation to “the gods
of the underworld,” a typical ritual substitute for the blood of ani-
mals, and hurl away their glasses “into annihilation” (SL, 80 / SKS 6,
80).11 This assembly of poets like the god they worship become ghosts
themselves, “surprised by the dawn” with “an unheimlich effect” (SL,
82/ SKS 6, 80). They are “subterranean creatures” (SL, 82 / SKS 6,
80) who disappear into the earth and night like Dionysus slain or the
avenging Erinyes, the daimones of the god’s tragedies who cleanse
impieties and resolve religious contradictions (i. e., violations) with the
shedding of human blood.12
The Judge: Terror and the Encounter with a God
The banquet of the erotists has come to a close. Erotic love has its god,
but this god is pagan (SL, 99-100 / SKS 6, 95-96), comments the Judge.
Falling in love is an earthly “wonder” (Vidunder), which brings the
understanding to a halt, “for falling in love is nature’s most profound
myth” (SL, 117 / SKS 6, 112). This pre-Christian deity bears every
resemblance to the daimķn that leapt upon Oedipus’ fate, the spirits
of the irrational populating the world that Homer’s Olympus did its
best to destroy. The judge continues to connect Eros with the earth,
and, through earth and nature, with daimonic mystery religions such
as those of Dionysus and Orpheus. If reflection is to have a ground, it
11
See Walter Burkert Homo Necans, p. 25; J. P. Guepin The Tragic Paradox, p. 294.
Both single out Dionysiac cult as the place of substitution.
12
The Erinyes were creatures of the underworld. Dionysus, ritually killed in his cult,
returns again, like a harvest from the seeds of last year’s threshing, the perpetual
indwelling of life in death, at both the vegetable and animal level. See J. P. Guepin
The Tragic Paradox, pp. 179-181, and chs. 7-10 generally.
must plunge beneath it “like Orpheus,” or Demeter in the mysteries

of Eleusis, bringing “the infatuation of love to the light of day” in a
“transfiguration.”
But the judge has a few things to add on the subject of religious
madness, presenting us with a modification of Love’s pagan inspira-
tions, rather than a wholesale rejection of them (although the altar at
which he worships is just the marriage bed, what Kierkegaard would
call the second paganism of a lapsed Christianity). The Judge’s wor-
ship is a resolute romanticism. His marriage perpetuates “the wonder”
(cf. SL, 118, 121-123 / SKS 6, 113, 115-117) of falling in love, a won-
der which emanates from god and which man understands through a
providence that, like Eros, intelligence cannot penetrate. The beloved
“is the god’s gift” and so the lover “must first be proposed to by the
god himself” (SL, 121 / SKS 6, 115). This dispensation calls the un-
derstanding to a halt, which “stands still” in “believing” the wondrous
and worships like a priest (SL, 122 / SKS 6, 116). Wonder is the sign
that “God is present in the consciousness” for “God cannot be there
in any other way” (SL, 122 / SKS 6, 116).
But erotic wonder must be joined according to the Judge to a mad-
ness which “the Jews expressed” “by saying that the person who saw
God must die,” “in the same way as the lover does when he sees the
beloved and, which he also does, sees God” (SL, 122 / SKS 6, 116).
The experience of God, the Judge claims, is a terror that drives one
mad. At the same time, he sanctifies the pagan wonder of Love in
bourgeois marriage and the comfortable obligations of civil society.
The marriage-happy judge miraculously weds the immediacy of pagan
worship and the fleet foot of romantic love with the patience, sobriety
and fear of the Biblical tradition, transforming Greek naiveté with the
import of the concept of sin – he weds them, at least, in word.
The first sign of this terror comes earlier, in William Afham’s preface
to In Vino Veritas, where he alludes to the “terror [det Forfærdelige]
in ‘thinking oneself immortal’ which Jacobi comments on” (SL, 10 /
SKS 6, 18). Here is a terror worming into the heart of the aesthetic,
silently anticipating the religious. The theme of immortality is part of
a more general discussion of recollection, which is said to make a man
immortal by making his life “uno tenore [one breath],” distilling es-
sence from accident. “This terror only intervenes,” he says, “if one can
keep recollection and memory distinct” (SL, 10-11 / SKS 6, 18-19) – if
we can think the thought of recollection. The comment is a disruption
in the text and goes more or less unexplained. Nevertheless, the single
breath which recollection breathes is clearly a matter of relating to
‘the Idea.’ Aesthic reflection is reflection enough to gather a rudimen-

tary form of terror in the thought of immortality and recollection that
“conjures away the present for its own sake” (SL, 11 / SKS 6, 19). Even
poetic immortality is one that annihilates.
The power of the Idea to destroy marks the first incarnation, in aes-
thetic garb, of the concepts of guilt and repentance before the Idea
dominating poor Quidam (SL, 12,14 / SKS 6, 20,22). One should “feel
homesickness for the home even though one is at home,” writes Af-
ham (SL, 13 / SKS 6, 21). Repentance – “a recollection of guilt” (SL,
14 / SKS 6, 21) – in aesthetic terms means the sacrifice of the home one
is nevertheless still living in, the lover one is still engaged with, etc., as
instruments of the eternity of reflection, the birth of a “new ideality”
(SL, 12 / SKS 6, 20) which replaces and preserves them. This possibil-
ity fills the aesthete with a base form of terror. What if this loss isn’t
compensated? What if there is just loss? How do I know I will get this
back? The banquet of In Vino Veritas, for instance, began with the
music from Mozart’s Don Giovanni. An “invisible spirit” had encom-
passed them in the dark of the woods; they were possessed as if by
some daimķn (SL, 27 / SKS 6, 33). And though this was at first glance
a prepossessing admiration which took them in its hand, the recol-
lection of the spirit world invoked by Mozart’s opera also recalled
the daimķn of the Commandatore, who, when the dancing is done,
returns after death, a modern day Erinye, to drag Don Giovanni to
hell. Both the banquet and the poet’s love begin with a loss, a death,
that inevitably catches up with the aesthete. In Mozart’s opera it is the
ghost of the Commandatore, while in the context of Kierkegaard’s
pseudonymous cast it is the ghost of depression and anxiety, like Qui-
dam’s, a madness within which aesthetic pursuits collapse under the
weight of reflection, as the mind engrossed in its solitude gradually
purges itself of any other reality than its own, what one fine reader of
Kierkegaard once called “a sorry hedonism” and “a panicked heart.”13
The Young Man, for one, is terrified. He alone senses this danger, the
incommensurability of the Idea. His fear is “of such a strange kind
that it illuminates specifically the comic,” he says, the unintelligibility
of love: the highest a man can attain is likewise ventriloquism by the
god, the madness of possession. The comedy is easily reversed, mak-
ing the ludicrous a tremendous source of fear instead of laughter, a
matter of tragically inexplicable violence.
13
John Updike Self-Consciousness, p. 221.
These terrors of love which Eremita criticized as effeminacy in the

Young Man, an element of its religious enthusiasms, are something
the Judge has overcome. There is another terror, though, about which
he speaks more cautiously. This is the terror of the “justified excep-
tion.” One must know the “terrible horror” (“forfærdeligt er det, en
Rædsel”) of cutting the “branch of happiness” and subjecting himself
to the “deadly torment” (Dødens Marter), we read, of making himself
a martyr. “The break itself he must feel as a fatality and a horror” (SL,
177 / SKS 6, 164). These terrors and the madness in which they come
are features of a religious encounter dividing the exception against
the customary norms and prohibitions that make social life possible.
Curiously, perhaps comically, despite his excurses on this justified ex-
ception, the Judge ultimately seals the madness of such an encounter
in the institution of marriage, preferring its safety, regularity, and civic
virtues to the suffering of the exile.
The Judge’s defense of marriage as a higher, intensified madness
is no mere upping the romantic ante of individual passion. There is a
specific type of madness he has in mind: the madness of resolution,
and when the climax of resolution and moral responsibility arrives the
authentically tragic nature of reason reveals itself. “The language of
the marriage ceremony is madness” in comparison with that of lov-
ers. It is “dithyrambic” (SL, 92 / SKS 6, 90) and makes the passionate
nonsense of their language (the joyous non-signifying of their laughter
and cooing, writes another)14 safe and intelligible by comparison. The
wedding tongue is more obscure in its divinity, in the bold venture of
its promise, and anyone “who understands but half is bound to lose
his senses” (SL, 165 / SKS 6, 154). Resolution is made in a divinely
inspired language that drives the listener mad. The speaker is beyond
himself, both himself and Other. Language is spoken, but not in the
normal sense, not by anyone.
With this connubial religion, the Judge raises the implicitly tragic op-
position in paganism and its modern variants (i. e., romanticisms and
idealisms) between the individual and the universal, actual moral cir-
cumstance and its governing Idea (Sensualism for the aesthete, Duty
for the Judge), to the higher pitch which his “purification’s bath of reso-
lution” allegedly resolves – though the reader suspects that, unlike Qui-
dam, he has not really encountered the difficulty he describes. While
the sensualists congregating in Constantius’ wooded bunker celebrate
in their speeches a first hand experience of their god, the Judge’s phe-
14
Immanuel Levinas Totality and Infinity, p. 263.
nomenology of religious life seems to take place at what Kierkegaard

in the Present Age calls an “observational distance.”15 It does point,
however, to a madness and terror in the first person that Quidam, in
the diary which follows, records with journalistic rigor – “Whom a god
would destroy he first makes mad” (SL, 267 / SKS 6, 249).
Through the mounting hysteria of intelligence, Quidam develops
existentially the tragic collisions implicit in the romantic devotions of
the poet in the somber direction of religion: “It is religious crises that
are gathering over me” (SL, 216 / SKS 6, 203). Like the occult gather-
ing of the poets in In Vino Veritas, the possibilities Quidam imagina-
tively pursues are conjured “secretly;” they are nocturnal, like ghosts,
and come to life “when the dead emerge from the grave and live their
lives again” (SL, 211 / SKS 6, 198). The terror he manages to produce
for himself are creatures of the individual imagination, like the vi-
sions of poetic Eros, shrouded by night and coming like the dead to
the dead, ghosts drawn to other ghosts. He is a man of passion and
imagination, more like a poet than a judge, which makes sense, since
the collisions which Stages develop seem to leave the Judge relatively
unaffected, the occasion for a healthy, edifying speech notwithstand-
ing. It is in Quidam that the tragedy of logos initiated in aestheticism
strives toward the tragic recognition of religious guilt, and a possible
reversal and release through the climactic suffering of the intellect.
Quidam’s Guilt, Ancient Greece and “the God”
Quidam is a creature of destroyed love. To recover, he must take up

the religious, move beyond the pathos of intelligence and similarly
be destroyed. This progression from erotism to religion is simultane-
ously a development in the object of worship from the pagan god of
Eros lording over both poets and philosophers, inspiring both a Sap-
pho and a Plato, to the paradoxical Christian god, as well as their
corresponding moods. The Greek aesthetic wonder of the philoso-
pher’s Eros joins to itself the Old Testament terror before God, where
‘erotic understanding’ finally encounters the contradiction and limit
it had always already been struggling against. Quidam is one of Kier-
kegaard’s JewGreeks (botched precursor to Abraham, another, and
15
See Adrian Van Heerden “Does Love Cure the Tragic?” in International Kierke-
gaard Commentary – Stages on Life’s Way, p. 84. Van Heerden says something simi-
lar of the Judge, whose “understanding of the religious begins to ring hollow when
sounded against Quidam’s understanding of it.”
son of Adam, still one more), a borrowed expression which suggests a

return to other Greeks than ours, since our Greeks, our enlightened
inheritance, is basically philosophical; “not just [to] Plato and Aristo-
tle, but also Sophocles and the great tragedians, who knew a thing or
two about disasters and torn flesh.”16
For this progression to take place, the understanding will have to
develop a new and tragic relation to the paradoxical experience of
religion. This implicates us in a return to origins, the beginnings of
Greek philosophy and the question of philosophy’s relation to other
fields of thought, poetic and religious. For Kierkegaard, Greek poetry
and Greek religion occupy the same space. It was their inability to
distinguish between aesthetic immediacy and religious revelation that
made the Greeks ‘pagans.’ Greek philosophy is as guilty as the poets
of paganism, at least those pre-tragic poets in whom a logos shined
rather than blinded, Plato and Aristotle no less naive than Homer,
since recollection was a method they shared. It is “[i]n a far deeper
sense than Plato and Aristotle [that] one can say that wonder is the
starting point of knowledge” (SL, 348 / SKS 6, 323), writes Quidam.
“[I]f one understands [forstaaer] to the point of wonder [Beundring],”
one reaches “the point where wonder shipwrecks one’s understanding
[Forstand]” (SL, 348 / SKS 6, 323).17 Religious wonder, Quidam’s self-
destruction demonstrates, is the end and not the beginning of under-
standing, as it had been for Greek philosophy. As a “demoniac char-
acter in the direction of the religious” (SL, 398 / SKS 6, 369) Quidam’s
mad withdrawal into the generic Subject of philosophical reflection
“is the condensed anticipation of the religious subjectivity” which lies
beyond “the frontier of understanding that posits the misunderstand-
ing” (SL, 428 / SKS 6, 397). The inclosing reserve of the endless dia-
lectical circling of his possible guilt, challenging the stamina of the
heartiest of readers, expresses an acculturated depression (SL, 385
16
John Caputo Against Ethics, p. 35. The figure of the JewGreek begins with Joyce’s
Ulysses. Lyotard takes it up in The JewGreek and Derrida returns to it in Violence
and Metaphysics. More recently, John Caputo stakes the claim of his own radical
hermeneutics in the same outlands of this mutually excluded figure. Caputo reads
Abraham as the Jew miscegenating the Greek legacy of the enlightened primacy
of reason. John Caputo Against Ethics, p. 19. But Kierkegaard’s Abraham, and his
Christianity, we’ll see, is already both Jewish and Greek.
17
It ought to be noted that the experience of wonder that strikes the understand-
ing is Beundring, a kind of admiration, while the wonder itself, before which the
understanding comes to a halt, is Vidunderet, more literally “the Wonder” or “the
Awesome.”
/ SKS 6, 357) absorbing individuals like Quidam in its metaphysical

mode of thinking (SL, 476 / SKS 6, 439).
What happens when a god, Sophocles asked us, visits himself upon
these men of reason? How is this encounter best described? Or, bet-
ter still, in what way is it possible? Through Quidam, Kierkegaard
attempts to describe this possibility given the categories of modern
experience, categories that the return of tragedy ought to stretch past
their limit. In Quidam, the path of dialectics doubles back to the
blindness and destructions of tragedy, pursuing the luminous path
philosophy had paved to the comic end in which it tragically falters.
As with Oedipus, it is a matter of recognition, an act of knowledge,
not physical violence, which exposes Quidam to the tragic contradic-
tion embodied first in Stages by the symposiasts of In Vino Veritas: the
moral-ontological center of their world, their god, the Idea of beauty,
was an absurd phantom, a projection. Like the scene of the erotists so
easily dissolved by first light, once the impossibility of the Judge’s pre-
scription dawns on Quidam, once his engagement fails, the house he
has built for himself in the Idea of a resolute love collapses all around
him. Anxiety, depression, and then hallucinations set in. Emotional
and physical reality, the blindness of the passions and the objectivity
of memory, become confused.
As readers, we know that Quidam has merely broken an engage-
ment. His catastrophe is purely intellectual. But his collisions are also,
importantly, contortions of the body, its perceptions, chest and gut.
When the understanding fails, his able body breaks down, exposing
the vulnerability of the flesh so often present in tragic scenes, flesh
that needs protecting, and the possibility of religion in an encounter
with the god.18 The religious madness beyond that of Eros or mar-
riage, a feature of the guilt which brings Quidam to the brink of faith,
brings the religious and physical pollution of plague together with the
madness of animals (Quidam assumes, here, the journalistic persona
of Simon the Leper):
Why must I fill the desert with my shrieking and keep company with wild animals and
while away the time for them with my howling? Are these then, my companions, are
these the equals I am supposed to seek: the hungry monsters, or the dead, who are not
afraid of being infected? (SL, 233 / SKS 6, 218)
It is also, once again, tied to the daimones of the dead, the hungry
ghosts whose appetites our ancestors in Greece once appeased with
18
See John Caputo Against Ethics, pp. 198, 201. Caputo reads the Polynieces of So-
phocles’ Antigone as a paradigmatic figure of the flesh, as opposed to the body.
libations and sacrifice: “The one who is dead is the most powerful of
all” (SL, 265 / SKS 6, 247).19 Unlike the romantic spirits populating
the night of Copenhagen’s woods, Quidam is alone in his worship.
Though, like the lover, it is madness that establishes the relation to the
god, a madness now connected as much with the sickness and terror in
man as it is with wonder, and the beatific power of the divine.
Understanding the Tragic: Quidam’s Guilty/Not Guilty
Connecting tragedy with wonder, Gorgias, as Plutarch recalls, coined

the following motto: The deceived is wiser than one not deceived. As
an eminent artist of deceptions he believes might save his beloved
from his inability to wed, it would be a fitting epigraph to Quidam’s
diary. Instead, we find it adorning the title page of the Judge’s com-
position, a comic-ironic twist, perhaps, on the part of Kierkegaard,
who likewise had the sober hand of the judge pen so much panegyric
to the holy madness of resolute choice. Still, if only in word, the Judge
does issue many warnings against the excesses of logos. This is advice
from which a character like Quidam, who so neatly fits the mould of
the madness he describes, would clearly benefit, whose madness is of a
distinctly dialectical nature, an excess of reason. This defense of tragic
fictions returns in the Judge’s defense of marriage (SL, 119 / SKS 6,
113) as well as Taciturnus’ commentary on the diary (SL, 445 / SKS
6, 412). With the recurrence of this quotation, Kierkegaard seems to
name Attic tragedy as the literature which best introduces the figure
of religious crisis anonymously dubbed Quidam.
So far I have said alot about the tragic nature of a certain kind of
religious encounter, about madness, violence, and the defeat of human
reason, but not much about how the conceptual structure of tragedy
per se applies to Quidam. Applying a specifically tragic structure to
Quidam begins with the category that Quidam cherishes most: am-
biguous guilt, the Guilty/Not Guilty adorning the title page of his
diary, which develops the ambiguity over its torturously protracted
course. The awful wonder, for Quidam, in which someone encoun-
ters a god, is a matter of coming to realize a guilt. Here the tragic
collision of the poet between thinking and the Being whose recovery
19
On the family daimķn and Greek tragedy, see E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the
Irrational, p. 42. The daimķn was thought by Rohde as well as Harrison to be the
trace of an ancestor spirit. See Erwin Rohde Psyche; Jane Harrison Themis. Dodds
argues against this.
it desires – a home to which it longs to return – reaches its breaking

point in the absolutely ambiguous guilt that, as we saw in Either/Or,
builds on a classically tragic conception. Quidam will either expire
in madness and social death, like your typical Greek-tragic figure,
or conclude his repentance and focus his passion in atonement and
a second (senere) immediacy. Since the diary breaks off, we have no
way of knowing.
As the self-satisfied figure of the Judge explains, the contradiction
animating Quidam’s intellectual struggle is a radicalization of the
erotic contradiction introduced initially at the drinking party between
reflection and the aesthetic feint of immediacy.
In this way the wonder of falling in love is taken up into the wonder of faith; the won-
der of falling in love is taken up into a purely religious wonder; the absurdity of falling
in love is taken up into a divine understanding with the absurdity of religiousness. (SL,
163 / SKS 6, 153).
This sends us back briefly, one last time, to Constantius’ symposium.

The Young Man’s terror, it turns out, was no mere effeminacy. “Eros,”
he already explained, “is the greatest contradiction which lets itself be
thought” (SL, 33 / SKS 6, 38) (my trans.). This terror applies as much
to the erotist as it does to any enlightened subject, any agent for whom
the Idea matters and who retains the hope of grasping it immediately,
in the world. Experience will always crush these men of reason in the
vice of contradiction. Thinking, in its search for immediacies, its drive
from reflection back through choice to a truth consonant with Being
or Reality (e. g., the ousia of Love, the Good, etc.), stumbles tragically
into self-parody. Love is an empty signifier, the Young Man claims, and
the experience of love signifies nothing, returning us to the formula,
still unexplained: the comic is the painless contradiction – the tragic
is the pathos-filled contradiction. With the Young Man as our inter-
preter we can begin to make out the elements of this contradiction:
sense, on the one hand, and, on the other, nonsense, empty speech,
signification without any intuition to confirm it, without a signified.
At first, it is the comic aspect of the contradiction that fascinates
the Young Man. The comedy is an effect of the scepticism which he
proudly claims characterizes the age (sceptics and romantics, for Kier-
kegaard, historically, are part of the same crowd). Because the young
man is all reflection, “the third party, observing love,” because he is
an observer to himself, all love is ludicrous to him. To be more precise,
though, it is not love but the object of love, which has the Young Man
stymied. This is where his contradiction resides: “What is it that one
loves?” (SL, 34 / SKS 6, 39). A very Augustinian question, a very Der-
ridean, Augustinian question. 20 Like the Bishop before him and that
other, more recently departed, Algerian, Kierkegaard’s Young Man
has no intelligent response. And herein lies the contradiction between
reflection and the instant of passion, or, better put, the pathos-filled
movement that gets experience (paschein) under way. Like the knight
of faith, “[t]he lover cannot explain anything at all” (SL, 36 / SKS
6, 41). The beloved is everything, a regulative ideal against which all
values are measured, the Atlas-shoulder bearing up the lover’s world,
but this everything vanishes into a nothing when the time comes to
explain its ‘why’ (which is also its ‘what’). The world endlessly falls. A
kiss is not a promise. A promise cannot express itself as a kiss. “The
symbolic,” for the lover, “doesn’t mean anything at all” (SL, 36 / SKS
6, 41, my emphasis), and yet for the erotist the beloved becomes life’s
most powerful symbol.
It is comic, ludicrous, to claim that something meaningless – the coo-
ing, clawing, automatic flesh of lovers – simultaneously means every-
thing. This touches on the question of the unconscious acting on man.21
Constantius further explains this tragic-comic confrontation with the
irrational in a proto-Freudian anecdote. “Suppose, for instance, that
the pope started coughing the very moment he was about to place the
crown on Napoleon’s head or that in the solemn moment of exchang-
ing vows the bride and bridegroom began to sneeze – the comic would
be apparent” (SL, 42 / SKS 6, 45). A psychopathology of everyday life,
for example, spoils the comedy by giving the logos (an account, a ‘rea-
son’) for just why reason might fail and the body take over in the mo-
ment of an absolute choice, a choice that reason itself gaurantees (“Yes,
I believe I will marry you,” is what we really mean). It is no longer
funny that the bride and groom are sneezing when we discover that
the minister’s hands, quite accidentally, have curled themselves into a
potently sexual metaphor, and that both bride and groom are supersti-
tious virgins, terrified of the wedding night ahead. But a sneeze, we
might hear the Young Man lament, is no less a promise than a kiss. Yet
20
quid ergo amo cum deum meum amo – “What do I love when I love my God?” See
John Caputo “Apostles of the Impossible” in God, The Gift and PostModernism,
ed. by Caputo and Scanlon, p. 198. Cf. Jacque Derrida Circumfessions, p. 122.
21
This can be a god, as it was for Oedipus, or the mechanism of instinct, or perhaps
something else acting on/in man, like History in Hegel and Marx, or even language,
as with Lacan’s ‘Symbolic.’ Through characters like Quidam, and later Abraham,
Kierkegaard returns psychologism to its archaic roots, interpreting anxiety and de-
pression, as well as desires, as the expressions of divine possession, a matter of the
involuntary in a “free, rational being.” SL, 42 / SKS 6, 45. He understands these
passions intentionally, defining them in terms of their religious object and/or aim.
this, absurdly, is what finally signifies the marriage. In the eyes of the
observer, love, like a misplaced sneeze, is painlessly comic. To the lover
it is tragic. He suffers so the audience might laugh. The source of his
pain and their laughter, the contradiction embedded in the sneeze, is
identical. Were the Young Man on that altar, a misplaced sneeze would
be a tragic omen of the impossibility of marriage Quidam recognizes
so painfully, fulfilled in the nuptual sealing of the lips.
As the speeches on love continue their round, the relation between
the comic and the tragic becomes clearer and also more clearly con-
nected to the theme of crime, including the sexual. A cuckold like
Othello, Constantius explains, is comic in relation to his wife because
the pain he suffers is meaningless (SL, 49 / SKS 6, 52; SL, 51 / SKS 6,
53). A woman has no ethical collateral with which to act against him.
She is like a child. Serious child crime is in a sense impossible. The
more elaborate the crime, the more ludicrous the effect. It brings the
child’s powerlessness in the realm of moral responsibility more clearly
into view. The comic effect is a matter of the impossible. Because a
woman is no rational agent and therefore has no ethical credentials, to
attack her, to summon her to some confrontation, to force repentance
from her would be a further humiliation, intensifying the comic ef-
fect of his predicament, its senselessness. For this reason, Constantius
continues, Aristotle is right when he debars women from tragedy (SL,
54 / SKS 6, 56) (and, he may as well have added, children too). Like a
table or a chair, they cannot meaningfully be punished. Their crimes
cannot be repented or forgiven.
But in relation to other men and the world whose governance we ex-
pect to find reflected back to us in a meaningful and moral order, this
impossibility has a tragic effect (SL, 51 / SKS 6, 53). A man like Oth-
ello cannot avenge the infidelity against his wife and so he kills himself
instead. If a small child were to commit a murder, another child for
example, then by Constantius’ logic there is a joke in it somewhere. At
least, he believes, this is where comedy and tragedy touch. And, maybe,
in certain company, a certain mood, we might admit it. Still, in this ex-
ample, the comic face changes its aspect; it turns tragic when we think
of the victim’s family. Not because it is sad. The tragic is not ‘the sad’ or
death per se. The tragic intervenes in the economies of justice (of reward
and punishment, punisher and punished, pleasures and pains)22 when
22
For a theory of the roots of justice in the pleasurable dispensation of pains, as sub-
stitute repayment for an unpaid debt, see the second essay of Friedrich Nietzsche
The Genealogy of Morals.
there is no crime with which to charge the killer and no court to indict
him, when there can be no punishment to balance the scales – when in
some sense we can’t take him seriously or make sense of his crime. And
this, quite seriously, is tragic.
Quidam’s Tragic Hamartia: Religion, Aesthetically Confused
This comic-tragic circumstance is a crucial element of Quidam’s trag-

edy, the impossibility of repenting the murder into which his ethically
frenzied mind has distorted his broken engagement (a blood sacrifice,
we’ll examine more closely in a moment). Because he does not know
why he will not undo this crime, return to the engagement, or even
whether the crime has been committed, or will be in the future, he
cannot repent. His situation is a radicalized version of King David’s,
who in Taciturnus’ commentary sends a messenger out on a murder
only to decide soon after that the murderous command be rescinded.
He sends a second messenger to call back the first, but can’t know
for some days whether the murder has been carried out or not (SL,
451 / SKS 6, 417). David, anyway, had reached a decision, decided
against the kill. Quidam has not. “Suppose I become her murderer,”
he writes. But as a figure of indecision, Quidam will never choose. His
messenger will never return. He neither rescues his beloved nor kills
her, assuredly. He neither marries her nor does not marry her.
Quidam has no real insight into the religious impulse which turns
the donation of love into an abomination of the ethical, which could
make a man kill. He has no insight into the religious nature of his
collisions, and so, likewise, no chance for atonement. Therefore the
pain of repentance continues without end (SL, 345 / SKS 6, 321). Like
Oedipus before him he has committed, at least in the juridical sense,
no crime. Still, there is an offense, unintelligible and without explana-
tion, and he suffers the consequences. It appears like a plague, a pol-
lution infecting the intelligence, now, rather than the womb of Copen-
hagen soil or those of its society women. Though he knows not what,
he believes there is some ghostly thing he is guilty of. He waits like
Thebes upon the Oracle and the oracular intelligence of their king
for this thing to emerge. The ineffable quality of this guilt ought to
be a clue to its religious nature. But obsessed with the fact of a literal
crime, Quidam is unable to move past aesthetics. He strands himself
in the no man’s land of the demonic (a break with the Idea of the
Good and the social order it organizes), and in his hyper-intellectual
case a withdrawal into the dialectical gymnastics of ‘guilty/not guilty’

with which he fills his diaries. The objective contradictions unfolding
visibly for the spectator through the crime and suffering of tragic fig-
ures like Oedipus and Antigone, between the archaic religion of the
family and the rational one of the state, repeat themselves subjectively
in Quidam’s tortured soliloquies.
The conflicts into which Quidam must “plunge” on the outlands of
the human and on the brink of religion are, he writes, “within me” (SL,
259 / SKS 6, 241). “O silence, silence, how can you bring a person into
contradiction with himself” (SL, 290 / SKS 6, 269). Both comedy and
tragedy for Quidam are features of interiority. Where the intelligence
witnesses freely to its own mechanism, the tragic collision becomes
great comic material. Imagine, a husband says to his wife, one morn-
ing, in bed, “you’ll never guess what you said in your sleep last night.”
Through his eyes she can see and know herself as this mindless, sleep-
ing thing – a corpse, almost, just lying there – breathing, twitching me-
chanically, and yes, maybe even speaking. The idea of this kind-of-dead
and automated creature speaking, like the classically clumsy zombie, is
funny. Even the worst, another man’s name, for instance, on his wife’s
lips, by lunch-time is a tidy little joke for the husband. Sleep paralysis,
on the other hand, where the mind is anchored to a body which, like the
dead, refuses to wake, though virtually the same phenomenon, anyone
who has experienced can confirm has the terror of the tragic. In this
way comedy acts as a prophylactic against tragedy by acknowledging
and accepting through laughter the traumas of sense the world offers:
the inanity, for example, of agonizing for hours over what brand, of the
hundreds available, of bread to buy, which is as funny for the observer
as it is sad and frustrating for the mind stuck – with no criterion for
rational choice – in such an impossible decision. The struggle between
thought and action, possibility and actuality, freedom and choice, tee-
ters between the tragedy of a soul whose essential appetite for logos
is stuck like Simon the Leper with a language of empty syllables and
the comedy of a passionate individual, a certain style of philosopher,
for example, whose conceptual leaps while evincing all the manners of
thought merely accompany the organ grinding of the academy with the
drone of a voice, rather than the tapping of a monkey’s feet, no more
intelligible to himself or others than the animal.
Even more than the nonsense of animal language, of lovers, philoso-
phers or talkers in their sleep, it is the perfectly grammatical construc-
tions of a desouled body, the robotic freedom of Kubrick’s HAL for
instance, an uncannily human artifact which makes us both smile and
squirm, which best exemplify the tragic-comic in its relation to ration-

al man. “Real competence in the comic,” which trains in “the most
profound suffering,” “with a word magically transforms the rational
creature called man into a Fratze [charicature]” (SL, 245 / SKS 6, 229).
Like the epileptic or the neurotic, or Quidam’s Leper who “voluntar-
ily” bears his “fate” and “freely suffer[s] necessity,” the rational animal
from this perspective becomes a puppet who holds his own strings, as
if puppets weren’t ludicrous enough, as in the calculative eroticism of a
Don Juan, each of whose “1,003 mistresses” indicate that the mass of
them as a whole “have no value” (SL, 293 / SKS 6, 272). The comedy
and tragedy of this is made pathetically clear in Fellini’s version of the
Don Juan Story, Casanova, where the ideally romantic myth collapses
finally into the sexually mechanical body of Casanova’s erotic contest.
The famous lover circles the baroque salon, satisfying woman after
woman in an endless repetition of the same. He moves like a toy that
the child winds in its hand and sets free only to joy in the speed and ac-
cident of its panic, the blindness of its mechanism.
But this contradiction, for Kierkegaard, would not be enough to
make Quidam properly tragic. It is too conceptual, too Hegelian. Re-
ligious terror is always in some sense about spilling blood. “In the
name of pleasing the Lord, of propagating this seed, of fathering a
whole generation, surely something must be killed, cut, and burned.
What, after all, is religion all about?” 23 Quidam is not just a failed
erotist, but also, in his twisted love, a murderer. As a an eminently
modern figure, he ties Kierkegaard’s religious problematic to the an-
cient one of blood-guilt and the sacrifice appeasing it. On this ancient
model, through the repetition of a crime the criminal becomes the
sacrificial victim. His killer becomes an agent of justice in its earliest
form, the bloody economy of the talios (social balance, of vengeance
and merit) in which, as we saw in chapter one, the cult of Dionysus
and its tragic stage were invested especially heavily.24 This crime of
blood – like the crime of Periander’s incest with his mother, another
23
John Caputo Against Ethics, p. 197. See ch. 9 generally, “JewGreek bodies,” for
Caputo’s phenomenology of the flesh of sacrifice, of religion’s desire for flesh, as
well as the impulse of flesh to tend to other flesh, as in the case of Antigone and
Polynieces.
24
See J. P. Guepin The Tragic Paradox, pp. 151-159. Also, on the sexualization of
ritual killing, particularly the killing of women, see Walter Burkert Homo Necans,
pp. 58, 60 f., and ch. 7 generally: “[S]exuality is always intimately involved in ritual.”
“Precisely because the act of killing is sexually charged, sexual abstinence is fre-
quenly a part of preparing for sacrifice, for war, and for the hunt.”
tragic figure from Quidam’s diary whose words recoiled upon him in
madness, becoming an “inhuman monster” – “two who could not be
contained in one person” (SL, 324-327 / SKS 6, 302-304) – is a cut that
places the guilty one outside the bounds of civil society. The criminal
must be excluded, driven out, sacrificed, lest terrible things ensue from
the skies. Like Oedipus, Kierkegaard’s exceptions have “ventured out
into the world from which mankind shrinks” (SL, 180 / SKS 6, 167).
Horror marks out their territory and preserves it from the mass hand
of the profane, who shrink from it instinctively.
Quidam is for the moment a botched precursor of Abraham, what
the Judge describes as the unjustified exception (justified, perhaps, in
de Silentio’s Abraham). While Oedipus was forced into this position,
Quidam, like Abraham, must choose his horror. They are both Pauline
hybrids of Oedipus for the modern world, after Christianity, where it
is now the inner life of thought and will that predominates. But rather
than answer God’s terrible invitation to meet him atop Mt. Moriah,
Quidam concocts his own terrors through the hypertrophy of an intel-
lectual imagination. He has skipped the starting point of actuality and
raced ahead towards pure dialectics, whose contradictions mean noth-
ing without the flesh of the world in which to coil. Quidam’s terror is
the terror of deliberations (Overveielses Forfærdelse) (SL, 183 / SKS 6,
170) – the paroxysm of choice in which his existence has been suspend-
ed. The terror acts on him from within, rather than without, because
“the terrible” (det Forfærdelige), he says, “requires of my honor that I
must think it” (SL, 272 / SKS 6, 254). The encounter with the terrible
happens on the landscape of Quidam’s interior. According to his own
reports the form of this terror is absolute, a sort of pure, phenomeno-
logically reduced terror, an ideal terror when compared to the relative
fears that claim actual objects, one acquired through the infinite varia-
tion of the imagination.25 “Actuality cannot terrify me” (SL, 323 / SKS
6, 301), he diarizes, because “the dreadful terrors of the imagination
far outweigh the terrors of actuality” (SL, 328 / SKS 6, 305).
Religious intelligence transports this daimoniac “out into the ex-
tremities” (SL, 346 / SKS 6, 321). Ancient tragedy, too, like the ritual
of the ephebia, was a way for the city to explore its boundaries and
limits. As Artemis of the hunt led the adolescent ephebe (preparing to
enter into the life of the city) into the outland of the animal where the
laws and customs of civil Greek society were temporarily suspended,
25
For imaginative variation as an essential tool of Husserlian phenomenology and the
eidetic reduction, see Edmund Husserl Cartesian Meditations, iv, par. 34.
Dionysus did the same, first on the mountain, and then, once civilized
by Athens and inducted into Olympus, in the theatre. Murder, incest,
and violences in general committed against the polis, in the context
of religious rite, provided an experience of the limit of human society.
The reality of these crimes clarified the political necessity of marking
and preserving this limit while, at the same time, allowing the wildness
beyond it, the home of divinities, for the Greeks, beyond human con-
vention, to penetrate and revitalize the interior, if only for a moment. 26
Like Oedipus or the Bacchants, and perhaps Socrates as well, Quidam
is a figure with “the courage to venture out into the extremities,” and
in still another resemblance to both the Theban king and the Athenian
gadfly, this courage is a matter of acting without a knowledge, a contra-
diction which stands ambivalently (as does Socrates at the end of the
Symposium) between both the tragic and the comic.
While Oedipus approaches the terrible warily, Quidam seeks rather
than resists the tragic encounter with the terrible. Kierkegaard’s per-
sonae generally appear to have the same lust for the abyss.27 Quidam’s
“depression hunts for the terrifying in all directions” (SL, 374 / SKS
26
See J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “The Masked Dionysus” in Myth and
Tragedy in Ancient Greece and also Walter Burkert Homo Necans, p. 21. Burkert
writes that “[f]eelings of fear and guilt are the necessary consequences of overstep-
ping one’s inhibitions; yet human tradition, in the form of religion, clearly does
not aim at removing or settling these tensions. On the contrary, they are purpose-
fully heightened. Peace must reign within the group, for what is called for outside,
offends within. Order has to be observed inside, the extraordinary finds release
without. Outside, something utterly different, beyond the norm, frightening but
fascinating, confronts the ordinary citizen living within the limits of the everyday
world. It is surrounded by barriers to be broken down in a complicated, set way,
corresponding to the ambivalence of the event: sacralization and desacralization
around a central point where weapons, blood, and death establish a sense of human
community. The irreversible event becomes a formative experience for all partici-
pants, provoking feelings of fear and guilt and increasing desire to make reparation,
the groping attempt at restoration. For the barriers that had been broken before are
now all the more willingly recognized. The rules are confirmed precisely in their
anithetical tension. As an order embracing its opposite, always endangered yet ca-
pable of adaptation and development, this fluctuating balance entered the tradition
of human culture. The power to kill and respect for life illuminate each other.”
27
See Charles Taylor Sources of the Self, pp. 449-455. Taylor places Kierkegaard in
the same category as Nietzsche, that of the “post-Romantics.” They share many fea-
tures of romanticism, passionate individualism, for example, the expressive subject,
who, like the artist, creates both himself and his world. But the post-romantic pic-
ture of the self is no longer a return to the innocent effusions of Nature as a moral-
vital source. Instead, the self is a site of conflict, even evil, transforming the still
reasonable subject of the romantics, descended from the Renaissance Platonism of
Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and the optimism of Rousseau, into a point of contact with
6, 347). All “advice about keeping the terrible away is simply nau-
seating” to him, “because this advice does not understand what the
terrible is” (SL, 374 / SKS 6, 347). There is a conception of the ter-
rible that drives “the guilty one” towards rather than away from it.
This conception is undoubtedly connected with God as the Wonder,
with the rehabilitation and transfiguration of erotic love through the
experience of madness of which the Judge spoke with such convinc-
ing sobriety. “The security of the infinite” is acquired “gradually with
each instance of the terrible,” through an intimacy with “the thought
that what he most fears will happen to him.” Sexual crime, like Peri-
ander’s incest, or Desdemona’s adultery, threatening the social fabric
and individual identity, but especially murder, become the object of
this terror in Quidam. “Suppose I become her murderer” (SL, 370 /
SKS 6, 343). Though Quedam (his beloved) is safe and sound, soon
enough “the most terrible crisis occurs. It seems [to him] as if [he]
were a murderer” (SL, 313 / SKS 6, 290) – “I have a murder on my
conscience, he writes” (SL, 394; cf. 331, 432, 447, 451 / SKS 6, 367; cf.
308, 400, 414, 417).
Quidam’s tragic guilt, of course, bears no real blood. There is no
crime, only the thought of crime, its interiorization. The “finishing
blow of terror” “falls most tellingly when it strikes with his own guilt”
(SL, 424 / SKS 6, 393). Though his guilt strains in the picture-less di-
rection of religion, it nonetheless figures in the shape of Quedam, the
fiancé he betrays for his melancholy retreat into himself. But do we
know for certain that Quedam even exists? All we have is Quidam’s
word – not the most reliable of narrators, by his own admission. In the
diaries, anyway, Quedam has become a ghost that Quidam conjures
himself (SL, 424 / SKS 6, 392). The relief of this guilt depends upon
his recognizing the difference between the aestheticized fantasy of
murder which the mind easily grasps, and the religious reality of a
guilt of a different order, whose representation, conceptual or other-
wise, is impossible, and against which the mind pointlessly strains: the
unity of absolute innocence and absolute guilt which ‘A’ had identi-
fied in the figure of Christ. The difference between the possibility of
murder and the deed itself may be great for some, like King David
in Traciturnus’ story, but for Quidam actuality has been overtaken
by possibility. Possibility, the possibility of guilt, correspondingly be-
comes relativized in its adequation to actuality. Quidam aestheticizes
a non-human source which, though majestically powerful, takes no heed of human

aims.
his guilt and with “the purposeful passion of repentance” “sees ter-
rors that do not exist” (SL, 426 / SKS 6, 395). But he cannot finish
repenting because even the simple, objective guilt of murder remains,
in its spectral character, undecided. Is she dead? Will she die? Might
we still marry, live happily?
A vague sense of doom attended by anxieties and despair, of halting
indecision, introduces a tragic cut in Quidam’s present which divides
it between the innocence of the past and the potential guilt which the
future represents, were her body to float one day to the surface of one
of Copenhagen’s lakes. Crimes committed in the past can be revealed,
repented and atoned for along aesthetic lines, as in drama. All poten-
tially dramatic guilts are capable of being purged, as with Oedipus’
mortification and exile. But there is no definitive discovery in religious
drama. Reversal is always immanent. This is the lesson Quidam fails
to learn, whose failure he suffers as a dialectical exhaustion which
as the diary ends appears infinitely postponed. He is “unwearied in
nonsense” (SL, 390 / SKS 6, 361). Quidam’s crimes are fantastic, loose
shapes hovering alongside countless others in the inspired imagina-
tions of a lunatic. They stand in for something which always escapes
representation: the loss itself which representation or conceptualiza-
tion always incurs, the sham presence of poetic inspiration in which
the Young Man could also smell the offending aroma of sacrifice, the
site of loss where the Idea resides, be it the false enjoyments of ro-
manticism, the abstractions of the ethical universal or the joyful suf-
fering of religion. Through his meditations on the terrible Quidam
“becomes expert in practicing this thought,” wondering terribly “in
his assurance of God’s love” (SL, 375 / SKS 6, 348) and exercising
without conclusion the failure of reflection to recover its ground, the
collision between reflection and actuality, the gate of choice through
which he is no more able to pass than the eye of a needle.
The Unity of Comedy & Tragedy:

Philosophy and the Beginning of the Religious
The paganism which gave us the collisions of tragedy, Frater Tacitur-

nus (author of the fictional character of Quidam) explains, culminates
in Socrates (SL, 422 / SKS 6, 391). Socrates is the pagan precursor of
Quidam’s modern tragedy and the unity of comedy and tragedy which
Quidam suffers (SL, 366 / SKS 6, 342 ). The “atopos tis” (SL, 419 / SKS
6, 388) of Socrates, this strange one “without place,” according to his
admirer and student Taciturnus is a happy Oedipus, whom a comic-

irony protects against both tragedy and comedy. Because he stakes no
rational claims of his own, Socrates can never become ludicrous, like
Euthyphro, for example, proudly willing to commit a terrible impiety
without knowing why. He can avoid tragedy, too, for the same reason,
affirming no meaning which might be reversed, eroded or destroyed.
He is the “dialectically infinitized spirit” who, like Taciturnus, sing-
ing his praises, from his ironic distance sees both the tragedy and the
comedy in the same situation (SL, 420 / SKS 6, 389).
Socrates dwells on the border between paganism and religious un-
derstanding where a new “mental fortitude” is now able “to see the
comic and the tragic simultaneously in the same thing” (SL, 422 / SKS
6, 390). But this unity of comedy and tragedy retains the paradox of
his thought project, the ethical pathos preserving him against the me-
diations of Athenian politics. He preserved the infinity of thought as
a negativity against the diverse fetishes of his age which feigned dis-
cover truths where there were no truths to be found. Like Socrates,
with the comic in view, that is, the day trading in junk bonds of soph-
istry, (making a) living off of unfounded truths, a life of reason with-
out reason, Quidam’s religious pathos separates him from the world
and gives him the power and space to see and avoid stumbling into a
comic role himself (SL, 367-368 / SKS 6, 341-342).
Quidam, we read, knows a woman who feared being buried alive.
For every possible precaution she imagined implementing against this
living burial, the same imagination furnished its failure. Quidam, one
day, lets slip a solution as deafeasible as any of her own, and, suddenly,
accidentally, dispels her fear. That is funny, he thinks. When, in this
way, the mind fails to see itself failing, when the mind Quixotically
mistakes failure for success –windmills for soldiers, security blankets
for security – then you have a stumbling into the comic. But it is not
merely funny. Quidam does not know “whether to laugh or cry” over
this woman, whose situation should remind him so much of his own.
Her fear and imagination, like Quidam’s own penchant for thinking
the terrible, has no determinate end in sight. Their fear is categorical,
total, and it is their passionate idealizing that ensures that this fear will
never find its end in any one particular safety, or, in Quidam’s case,
any one particular guilt. That there is no solution to the problem at all
is tragic. The woman is no safer than before, nor are we. Our vulner-
abilities are endless. The palette of our possible sufferings is infinitely
colorful. As with the woman, Quidam’s forgiveness would be a joke, a
misunderstanding and a false solution. His crime remains unintelligi-
ble, a phantom which only visits him. He has fallen out of context. A
second intelligibility and a return to human life only become an option
with the advent of the religious and the ablutions of paradox.
The contradiction which Quidam embodies has its telos in a “new ide-
ality,” a “religious ideality” (religieus Idealitet) where it continues to be
endured “by virtue of a relationship with God” (SL, 423 / SKS 6, 391).
Unlike Taciturnus, our Socrates, Quidam “sees the comic, but with pas-
sion, so that out of that he chooses the tragic.” “[T]his is the religious,”
Traciturnus admits, “and something that I, who see there both elements
in equilibrium, cannot understand” (SL, 434 / SKS 6, 402). The vacuum
of the ethical consciousness in which Traciturnus and Socrates are sus-
pended draws Quidam past its “metaphysical” solution “into the reli-
gious” (SL, 435, cf. 440 / SKS 6, 402, cf. 407). This is a “higher passion”
in which an apprehension of “the unity of the comic and the tragic” (SL,
440 / SKS 6, 407) bears on actuality, as the ethical collapses upon itself,
a sophistic form of pure negativity. 28 And so “what the tragic hero is in
the aesthetic, the religious prototype (of course I am here thinking only
of devout individuals, etc.) is for the religious” (SL, 439 / SKS 6, 406).
“Religiousness begins” (SL, 422 / SKS 6, 390) with this “higher passion”
that moves beyond the Socratic unity of comedy and tragedy. It is a
pathos-filled return to the tragic-comic scene of rational politics which
Socrates half-quit, in spirit, and then finally in body.29
Quidam, unlike Socrates, suffers the unity of comedy and trage-
dy, though without completing the religious movement which begins
with this newfound pathos. As a figure of religious passion in the self-
enclosed form of the daimonic – that is, as possessed, unexpressed
and unfree – Quidam, Taciturnus writes, nevertheless does express
a “purely Greek” fascination with “the crisis of actuality” (SL, 449 /
SKS 6, 415). Or, put another way, he expresses the Greek problem of
action, choice and the limits of reason. He is particularly engrossing
for Taciturnus in that he survives the actual crisis yet “succumbs,” like
Oedipus, “by his own hand.”
28
In The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard reads Socrates generally as the self-conscious
culmination of sophistry, as pure negation.
29
In the Apology, Plato has Socrates explain that only a man who quits politics is
safe to pursue thought and the investigation of political ideas wherever it might
lead. With no political ties, debts, or enemies, the philosopher is free to tour every
possible channel of the intellect. In the Phaedo, of course, Socrates chooses physi-
cal death, which, he thinks, will be the final liberation of the soul from the body in
which it was mixed.
I fancy the blissful gods creating a person like this in order to have the enjoyment of
the dialectical delight in it. They give him powers in relation to the realm of actuality,
so that he conquers there, but then an interiority in which he himself runs wild. (SL,
449 / SKS 6, 415) (my trans.)
The depression and anxieties haunting Quidam are the concentrated

possibility of this higher passion of faith, a tragic modification of the
ironic unity of the comic and the tragic (SL, 450 / SKS 6, 416) and its
detached, ethical pathos.
Translating Aesthetics Religiously:

Discovery, Reversal and Tragic Guilt
The relation between heterogeneous elements, in Oedipus, for exam-

ple, the elements of Oedipus the King and Oedipus the blind exile,
translate one into the next when Sophocles removes the obstacle for
the understanding: the “third element” (SL, 416-417 / SKS 6, 385-386)
which the shepherd eliminates by identifying Oedipus as the same
child of Laius on which the oracle pronounced its terrible fate. But
within a religious context, the third element, whose dissolution might
relate the disparate elements of a tragically ambiguous self, subjec-
tively guilty yet objectively innocent, cannot be given. The oracles
have vanished. Providence refuses to betray its mysteries.
It was the Judge, of all people, who linked the deceptions of tragedy
celebrated by Gorgias to the defeat of understanding reason. The re-
mark “is an eternal truth,” he says, “and a proper response whenever
the understanding goes astray in its own thoughts and precisely out of
fear of being deceived is thereby deceived” (SL, 119 / SKS 6, 114). In
what circumstances does the understanding fall into such self-decep-
tions? Well, it seems, when religious enthusiasm inspired by the mys-
teries, one of which is erotic love, by the illusions typical of the masked
god and his theatre, and by the madness, holy or unholy, wonderful or
terrible (though often both) with which the god announces himself to
the understanding, come on the scene: “It is indeed true that it takes a
quite different kind of wisdom to remain in the blessed deception of ar-
dour and of mystery and of erotic love and of illusion and of the wonder
than to run away from house and home split-naked, half-sappy from
sheer sapience” (SL, 119 / SKS 6, 114). Ecce Homo; ðccķ Dionysos.
“Behold, the man,” Pilate exclaimed of Jesus in the gospels;30 “Behold,
30
John 19:5.
Dionysus, son of Zeus,” exclaimed the god 500 years earlier in the
opening lines of Euripides’ Bacchae. In both cases, God’s “interven-
tion” manifests itself in a suffering from which also develops a sense of
blessedness, “that there is a purpose, a plan, that the annihilated one
will be rescued. But at the critical moment, the one selected cannot
know about it” (SL, 182 / SKS 6, 169). Suffering is a split (as Johannes
Climacus defines it in the Postscript’s discussion of ‘Religiousness A’),
and the rupture in intelligence is a suffering in which providence stakes
a claim. Fate resolves this misunderstanding by announcing itself, and
it is the “power of a chance word” (SL, 365 / SKS 6, 339) like that of So-
phocles’ lowly, banished shepherd who nevertheless returns to destroy
a king, which also threatens to destroy Quidam.
The polyvalence of language is as crucial to Quidam’s tragic en-
counter with providence as it was to Oedipus’ encounter with fate. As
Taciturnus explain, the tragic is that the two lovers do not understand
one another (SL, 420-421 / SKS 6, 389-390). The comic, of course, is
that they love one another in a misunderstanding which they don’t rec-
ognize. Because she is oriented aesthetically, and Quidam is an eth-
ical-religious figure, the same word – ‘Love’ – has a tragic ambiguity
crossed by the three stages of aesthetics, ethics, and religion. It was this
word which lured Quidam into the predicament of guilt. It is this word
that properly understood, which is to say, understood religiously, might
absolve him. Still, how, in the sphere of the religious can the right words
be spoken? The tragedy of Quidam’s which the chance word reveals is
wholly interior. There can be no literal shepherds. Providence does not
communicate, as had fate, directly, by means of an oracle.
Kierkegaard transforms the “fate” (Skjebne) of pagan tragedy into
the always indirect language of “providence” (Forsyn), in a modern
Christian context where the objectivity of science has long since ban-
ished this superstition. The temporary mystery of fate and the visible
gods recede into the invisible, absolute mystery of time, an infinitely
stubborn oracle, in a sense, which speaks in the absolute intimacy
of an individual encounter with god. Its language can never be deci-
phered or publicly announced. It never shows its cards, even when the
play ends. It is a purely private intuition, like Augustine’s, which is
why religious tragedies must fail on stage, as Taciturnus (anticipating
T. S. Eliot by fifty years) thought of Hamlet (SL, 453 / SKS 6, 418).
If Hamlet is kept in purely esthetic categories, then what one wants to see is that he
has the demonic power to carry out such a resolution. His misgivings have no interest
whatsoever; his procrastination and temporizing, his postponing and his self-deluding
enjoyment in the renewed intention at the same time as there is no outside hindrance
merely diminish him, so that he does not become an esthetic hero, and then he be-
comes a nonentity. (SL, 453 / SKS 6, 418)
“Even if the age of oracles vanished long ago, there is still one thing
[…] the most profound person, if he talks about it, talks mysteriously
– that is: time” (SL, 384 / SKS 6, 356). But this mystery cannot be rep-
resented on stage, or anywhere else for that matter.
Quidam’s guilt or innocence, as a kind of religious drama (Hamlet +
religion, Kierkegaard implies)31 remains undetermined, obscure, and
often irritating and disappointing for the reader. Everything, then, is
in order. As an aestheticization of religious drama, it is meant to frus-
trate, as Hamlet had frustrated Kierkegaard. It is this wishy-washy
hope that his conflict can be resolved in time, that he can get the girl,
avoid the murder, that prevents him from making the religious deci-
sion his personality demands. He has a tendency to relapse into the
position of a kind of Hamlet, thinking his guilt in aesthetic categories,
though aesthetically he is a total failure. He is a hero with no obsta-
cles, defeated anyway. Like Hamlet, he is “neither a religious hero nor
an aesthetic (tragic) hero but something in between. Neither fish nor
fowl. A hybrid creature. In short an aesthetic-religious mess.”32 The
mystery of time that the pagan Oracle embodied as the disclosable
returns in Quidam as a subjection to paradox that time itself and the
publicity of theatre cannot resolve. Human time and the achievements
it houses, not to mention its catastrophes, “are a jest for a providence
that has legions of angels in reserve,” writes Taciturnus, observing his
creature Quidam from above (SL, 411 / SKS 6, 381).
31
See Richard Kearney “Kierkegaard on Hamlet: Between Art and Religion” in The
New Kierkegaard, ed. by Jegstrup. Kearney’s article picks up on a number of points
at which Hamlet and Quidam overlap, though he never says so explicitly, focusing
instead on the following features in Hamlet which he wants to extend biographical-
ly to Kierkegaard himself. I substitute Quidam. In Stages on Life’s Way, “Hamlet’s
misgivings” are said to “take on a purely psychological form of ‘dialectical repent-
ance’” (p. 228). This, of course, is exactly how Quidam’s own stunted repentance is
repeatedly described. Both Hamlet and Quidam are “neither properly esthetic nor
properly religious” (p. 229). Both are characters of inclosing reserve, “too interior,
subjective, shut-up, and inactive to be properly tragic” (p. 231). “Hamlet, like the
ghost who confronts him, is riven with undecidability – and so is unable to mourn
(his father), to love (his mother), to desire (Ophelia), or to act (by taking revenge
on Claudius)” (p. 236). Both have a “summons to amend a wrong that cannot be
atoned for” (p. 232).
32
Richard Kearney “Kierkegaard on Hamlet: Between Art and Religion” in The New
Kierkegaard, ed. by Jegstrup, p. 230. Again, Kierkegaard speaks here of Hamlet,
not Quidam.
Religious dialectic must “reflect itself in the individuality” (SL, 413

/ SKS 6, 382), undergo an “infinite reflection” (SL, 414 / SKS 6, 383)
where the collision takes place within the self, no longer a matter of
good or bad fortune, of oracles and the poet’s mimùsis. The aestheti-
cizing of ethics in tragedies and the categories of fate and chance was
why Boethius was so indignant about poet-productions and Solon for-
bade plays as a deception, why Plato wanted them banned from the
State, according to Taciturnus (SL, 442 / SKS 6, 409). Kierkegaard,
perhaps unexpectedly, places himself as philosopher in this intellec-
tualist tradition. Yet, according to Kierkegaard’s staging of Stages,
a mature, religious understanding of tragedy will bring the “noble
intelligence”33 of a Hamlet or a Quidam, modern counterparts to the
heroic mind of Oedipus, into contradiction with themselves, rather
than the world. As subjects of collision – seething with imaginary de-
mons, incommensurable with actuality, in pursuit of a religious ide-
ality which outstrips the worldly objects it projects itself upon, e. g.,
the wonders and terrors of ambition and its defeat, of love and loss,
fantastic murders, possible guilts, hypochondriacal illness, etc. – they
fall not to Laertian rapiers, but to a spiritual consumption feeding on
them from within.
The ethical, home for both Hegel and Kierkegaard to the Ideas
which the Greek tragic hero serves (i. e., ‘Family’ or ‘City’), secretly
wants to enter into alliance with the religious (SL, 438 / SKS 6, 406),
which like aesthetics slows down its “boundless speed,” its ability to
decide instantly according to the rule. 34 The religious takes the objec-
tive conflict between ùthù in tragedy and turns it inward. Where the
“development takes place […] the scene is in the eternal, in thoughts
and dispositions that cannot be seen, not even with a night telescope”
(SL, 442 / SKS 6, 409). Religion is what happens to the abstractions of
ethics (i. e., Kantian duty, Hegelian Reason) when they develop roots,
content, when they return to the mundane struggles with actuality,
33
G. W. F. Hegel Lectures on Aesthetics, vol. 2, p. 1231. Hegel speaks of modern trag-
edy, of which Hamlet is both a type and an exception: “But this mere affliction is
empty, and, in particular, we are confronted by purely horrible external necessity
when we see fine minds, noble in themselves, perishing in such a battle against the
misfortune of entirely external circumstances.”
34
See G. W. F. Hegel Phenomenology of Spirit, 284. For Hegel, tragedy is the birth of
‘the ethical’ from out of the unconsciousness of social custom (Sittlichkeit), the be-
ginning of ‘culture,’ where the Idea develops the unreflected content which, in trag-
edy, it sacrifices in figures like Antigone. But for Kierkegaard, the conflict of ethical
ideas in tragedy should be magnified in the religious, joyfully retained, somehow,
instead of reconciled historically, in the Concept.
the soil in which they begin, which never, for Kierkegaard, measures
up to a single Idea. 35 The Idea in actuality is something, aesthetic or
religious, we suffer. “[O]therwise it is culpable and it is the sufferer’s
own fault,” tutors Taciturnus. But this has already proven too ‘ethical’
and human-centered a conception to do justice to the exigencies of
actuality and the inevitable collisions in which it engages reason, as
demonstrated by the cast of Stages.
Yet, with the real drama introjected onto the stage of individual re-
flection, history, – that something such as this actually happened – IS
“dissolved in the ideality” (SL, 439 / SKS 6, 406). Aristotle was ap-
parently right to say that tragedy is more philosophy than history. But
how is its Idea, once religiously distilled, to be communicated? From
the standpoint of religion, the resolution of the ethical conflict in time,
the harmonious adequation of the ideal and the actual, can only be
represented “by a deception” (SL, 445 / SKS 6, 412). The question of
deception implicates not only Greek tragedy, but also Quidam and his
pseudonymous author, not to mention Kierkegaard himself. The tool
of deception, or, we might simply say, fiction, which religion borrows
from tragic play, leverages an experience upon the audience which
religion magnifies in the relative irrelevance of historical fact. It is the
idea that matters, an intellectual development. The less the audience
attends to “the facts” the more intensely they experience the idea of
the play, the more intensely they respond, ideally, in a kind of kathar-
sis. And so Kierkegaard gives us Quidam, a fog of a mind in which all
facts seem to disappear.
Katharsis: Sickness, Health and the Tragic Effect of Religion
Not only is the category of tragedy (and comedy) an omnipresent filter

through which the figures of Stages explain the religious education in
paradox and the possibility in Quidam of a catastrophic regeneration,
but the central themes of Aristotle’s reading of tragedy – the pity and
fear of katharsis – return explicitly in Frater Taciturnus’ observations
on Quidam’s diary (SL, 454-465 / SKS 6, 419-430). While the essay on
tragedy in Either/Or privileged compassion, Taciturnus and Stages on
the whole privileges the emotional counterpart of fear. We can read
Stages as a companion to the essay on the relation between tragedy
35
On the failure of both utilitarianism and deonotology as the hallmark moral-philo-
sophical failures of our age, see Alasdaire Macintyre After Virtue, ch. 5 generally.
in ancient and modern times, supplementing its work on pity with the
development of tragic fear.
While sympathy is necessary to draw the victim of tragedy and the
observer together, though “the tale is told of you” (SL, 478 / SKS 6,
440), “[t]he religious healing [Helbredelse] consists first and foremost
in arousing fear [Frygt]” (SL, 468 / SKS 6, 432). Mundane fear, in
typically Greek-tragic fashion, is best expressed for aesthetics in the
annihilation of a house:
Our lord can certainly bring danger and misery to your house; indeed, he can take
your property, your beloved, your children, and he will surely do it if it is beneficial
for you – ergo, since he has not done it, then there is no danger. (SL, 468 / SKS 6, 432)
Taciturnus quotes Aristotle’s greek directly on the relation of tragedy

to the spectator:
ÂÇq ÃÉÃÍÓ È¿Ç ÔÍÀÍÓ Î¿Ï¿ÇËÍÓÑ¿ ÒÅË Ò×Ë ÒÍÇÓÒ×Ë Î¿ÆÅÊ¿Ò×Ë È¿Æ¿ÏÑÇË
by pity and fear accomplishing its catharsis of such emotions. (SL, 460 / SKS 6, 425)
He sees in the Aristotle passage a potentially religious discovery (SL,

461-462 / SKS 6, 426-427). Fear and compassion become something
different when “in turn the religious person has another conception of
what awakens fear, and his compassion is therefore in another quar-
ter” (SL, 461 / SKS 6, 427). The religious point of view departs from
an inversion of the tragic destruction of a house, an objectless object
for our pities and our fears, which discovery can never reveal:
[T]he greatest danger is that one does not discover, that one is not always discovering,
that one is in danger, even if one otherwise had money and the most lovable girl and
adorable children and was king of the country or one of the quiet ones in the land, free
from all cares. (SL, 468-9 / SKS 6, 432-433)
The usual enemies and conflicts typical of tragedy by which the hero is
divided and destroyed disappear. “The superiority of the enemy before
which the hero in the tragic drama falls,” the “hard-hearted fathers” of
Romeo and Juliet and all “unhappy lovers in the tragedy,” or “betrayal
by the person one trusted,” Othello’s Iago for instance (SL, 471 / SKS
6, 434), yield to an ambivalence or guilt which is totally one’s own.
The fate in which the ancient hero suffered an aesthetically ambigu-
ous hamartia, an initial innocence, through the discoveries of plot,
yielded to an ambiguously innocent guilt over some crime. The sanc-
tified revision of Aristotle’s formula for katharsis concerns a “guilt”
(Skyld) which is “sin” (Synd), an ambiguously innocent hamartia to
which everyone is exposed, foreshadowed in the Either/Or essay as
the metaphysical category of a total guilt (which returns in the “Reli-
giousness A” of Climacus’ Postscript). 36 The paradox of sin, we’ll find,

does not yield to dramatic disclosures. It is already the job of tragic
theatre to purify the spectator “of all low egotistical elements” (SL,
461 / SKS 6, 426) and develop his “eye for the idea” (SL, 461 / SKS
6, 426). The religious tragedy “purifies” (renses)37 the passions of pity
and fear further through a “turning inward” in relationship with god
(SL, 462 / SKS 6, 427). By making tragedy a matter of an irresolvably
paradoxical idea, the religious author releases its ethical-religious po-
tential from a formerly aesthetic confusion.
Taciturnus lays down the theory for a radicalizing of tragic kathar-
sis now within the post/modern category of the religious, beyond the
mediations of aesthetics and the stage, as well as a purely discursive
reason. He uncovers this radicalizing of Aristotle’s katharsis as a la-
tency in Aristotle himself. Pity and fear in the Aristotelian sense are
above the aesthetics of the pulpit, he writes, and metaphysical sys-
tematizing (SL, 463 / SKS 6, 428). “The religious speaker,” like the
tragedian, with the benefit of Aristotle’s aesthetic categories can pu-
rify “these passions through fear and compassion” “by letting heaven
remain closed, in fear and trembling” (SL, 464 / SKS 6, 429). It “en-
nobles” them, protecting them against the swoon into “an aesthetic
absorption into something universal” (ethics and system function as
variations of the aesthetic) (SL, 465 / SKS 6, 430). This, of course,
points us toward the tragedy of Abraham, in de Silentio’s book by the
same name, to which we’ll soon turn.
Like Abraham, Quidam was faced with the problem of choice.
What Quidam lacks and suffers is resolution. The judge’s admonition
that decision-making “is the resolution’s bath of purification (Ren-
selses-Bad)” (SL, 164 / SKS 6, 153), 38 subjected to a rewriting in the
“strange tongue” of Abraham or Quidam, a more private language,
less friendly than the Judge to Kantian universals, prepares us for A’s
idea that tragic katharsis is the religious healing which the culture
of modern Europe and its empty subjects require. They need a true
grasp of what it means to choose, and to be able to do it – passionately,
36
CUP1, 29 / SKS 7, 35.
37
Here Kierkegaard uses the word at rense, in the passive, which the Hongs translate
as purifiy. The sense of the word, even more specifically in relation to the katharsis
debate, is one of ‘purgation.’ It is interesting to see Kierkegaard use both the words
for purgation and a more literally religious purification (at luttre) in the katharsis
context.
38
The Judge here invokes the lustral baths of archaic Greece: “As beautiful as the
Greek’s bath before a banquet.” The Hongs direct us to Plato Symposium, 174a.
concretely, to make a beginning. Stuck in the aesthetics of the roman-

tic evasion of ethics, or of an idealizing ethics itself, the non-existence
of the “esthetical-metaphysical” destroys in its abstraction the reality
it recollects philosophically. Religious ideality remains the only path
from the abstract possibilities and conclusions in which the culture is
engrossed back to the passionate concreteness of actuality, where hu-
man life remains in a terminal state of beginning.
Quidam, before the reader’s very eyes, returns katharsis from its
surrogate home on the stage to its birthright of religion. “Do not
dampen my fervor, do not put out its fire[,]” he writes in the diary, “it
is still something good even if it must be purified [maa luttres]” (SL,
232 / SKS 6, 217). Quidam embodies the tragic-religious collision be-
tween reason and experience charged with the God, which neverthe-
less qua experience must somehow be recorded, recalled. Taciturnus
exacerbates the collision in Quidam between reflection and its limits,
where representation, conceptuality, fails. He brings him to this point
of rapture by inflaming both imagination and understanding with the
tragic passion of fear. The theatre of Quidam’s interior purifies this
passion subjectively by inciting it to its highest pitch, these lonely mid-
nights, as he writes in his diary.
If Quidam could recognize his guilt as sin, if his grasp of hamar-
tia could shift from the visibility of crime to the metaphysical crime
of original sin, which, like tragic guilt, is only ambiguously one’s own,
Taciturnus explains in the commentary, his repentance would conclude
in sin’s forgiveness (Syndsforladelse). Neither tragic hamartia nor its
Christian counterpart are crimes for which ethics or the law can hold
you responsible, which you could redeem on your own through some
form of penance. They both represent a taint which only a foreign power
can remove, as in the motions of grace which ‘A’ names in his essay. But
the forgiveness of sin is not over something particular. It implies a break
with immediacy (SL, 481 / SKS 6, 443). Forgiveness is a total reflection
and rebirth, the New Testament metanoia 39 in which everything partic-
ular is affected, all immediacy absorbed and transformed by the projec-
tion of a new ideality embracing the individual’s existence as a whole.
Quidam describes this rebirth more in terms of ascetic practice, ul-
timately, than the spontaneity of the katharsis model which seems to
dominate his religious healing. But Quidam’s ascetics while preparing
him for the kathartic return, through choice, to actuality, tend to shut
him up tighter and tighter within himself, to cure the suffering “by
39
Johannes Climacus pursues this concept in Philosophical Fragments. PF, 18 f. / SKS
4, 227.
making it worse” (SL, 479 / SKS 6, 441). Quidam likens himself to the
“Pythagorean” who “could not step on the earth more anxiously than
I in fear of, as they say, taking any step” (SL, 301 / SKS 6, 281). His
repentance has lapsed ascetically into self-torment, a “sin like other
sins” (SL, 468 / SKS 6, 432). The preparations may be ascetic, but the
healing, if it comes, will be spontaneous, as in the ecstasies of Diony-
sus’s mysteria, or those of Eleusis and the Corybantics’ Kybele. Al-
though “Religious healing is accomplished by repentance” (SL, 468 /
SKS 6, 432), “if healing is to begin for the existing person, the moment
must come when one lets the act of repentance go” and proceeds to
atonement (SL, 451-2 / SKS 6, 417).
Still, in order for katharsis to take place, for the tragic emotions
of pity and fear to arise, the audience members must identify with
the tragic character. Interiorizing the lead in a tragedy to the point
of a Hamlet or a Quidam, or, their more courageous analogue, father
Abraham, risks undermining this effect. Aristotle warned the poet of
disturbing the effect through a poor choice of protagonists, or, more
specifically, miscasting their hamartia. Yet perverting tragic guilt in
such a way that suffering is inaccessible is just what Kiekegaard does.
The sanctifying of tragedy converts a sympathy for the conquering
hero, majestically framed for the theatregoers in Athens by a robust
Nature, illuminated by the Mediterranean sun, into one for the suf-
fering hero alone at his desk, trembling beneath his lamp at the sight
of his pen.40 “The esthetic hero is great by conquering [at seire], the
religious hero by suffering [at lide]” (SL, 454 / SKS 6, 419).
The difference between the aesthetic and the religious hero is a mat-
ter of what sort of catharses, what sort of sacrifices, solicit an audience.
Quidam fails. As an aesthetic hero, he sacrifices himself, yes, but nei-
ther for Love, Politics, nor for anything else, apparently, because there
is nothing apparent he struggles against. His real failure is that this
failure remains unconcluded.41 Marriage and society remain an option
with which he continues to torture himself. For this reason, only in the
40
Sir John Shepphard The Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles. In the preface to his fa-
mous translation and commentary on the Tyrannus, Sheppard inisists that the stag-
ing of the play should respect the robust nature by which the theatre in Athens was
framed, the mediterranean sun which lit the plays.
41
See Joakim Garff “ ‘You Await a Tyrant whereas I Await a Martyr’: One Aporia
and its Biographical Implications in A Literary Review” in Kierkegaard Studies:
Yearbook 1999, pp. 138, 142. In this important article, Garff identifies heroic action
in the modern age of levelling not with individual achievement, which is no longer
possible, but with heroic failure, “a will to powerlessness, which, please note, as will
is no less heroic than that of the hero.” Here Garff connects the distinction between
religious could he attain the heroic, were he to make a terrible sacrifice

of the girl and the ethical along with her. This sacrifice we could pity
as a suffering pure and simple. The religious hero and the daimoniac
alike become “supranatural” through “sacrifices” (SL, 455 / SKS 6,
419). But the daimoniac “demands” his blood as part of some larger
economic exchange, while the religious hero merely “makes sacrifices”
(SL, 455 / SKS 6, 420). He has nothing to gain. If Quidam were a tragic
hero for whom in some devil’s bargain the girl’s life was the price of his
greatness (another Marguerite, like that sacrificed by Goethe’s Faust),
the “nemesis” of the world-order would avenge this death, as on the
tragic stage. An authentically criminal variant of Quidam could have
become, in this way, a purely aesthetic hero (SL, 455 / SKS 6, 420).
But Quidam, as a prologue to the hero of Abraham, wants nothing
from the world except, at times, to return to the small part of it Que-
dam keeps warm. Still, katharsis beckons him out into the spiritual
equivalent of the sea, the wilds of nature where we experience some-
thing “in such a way that there are no escapes” (SL, 379 / SKS 6, 352).
It is a cathartic, Abrahamic leap away from the ascetics of repentance
that prepared it. This is the beginning of the fear of God. The raging
storm. A hungry howling of wolves. If God is an Idea the relation to
which inaugurates a religious ideality, we must conceive it amidst the
robbery of our minor safeties, our “confidence in nightwatchmen and
policemen and the efficacy of distress signals” (SL, 379 / SKS 6, 352).
We must expose ourselves to a new quality of danger, the other side
of a limit, a tragic vision of human life from a perspective other than
man’s. If Quidam lacks this “resolution’s bath of purification,” Abra-
ham has no doubt had his dip.
“two ages” in the literary review with the modern and classical ages of Either/Or’s
essay on tragedy.
Chapter 8
Fear and Trembling:
Tragedy, Comedy and the Heroism of Abraham
In a journal entry entitled Plan from early in the year 1943, Kierke-
gaard sketched the first of the four alternate versions of the Abraham
story with which Fear and Trembling begins. “Abraham’s conduct,”
he wrote, was “genuinely poetic, magnanimous, more magnanimous
than everything I have read about in tragedies.”1 And so from its in-
ception Abraham would be defined both with and against the figures
of ancient tragedy. Kierkegaard himself at first found it hard to dis-
tinguished between them, as the imagery of the sketch testifies: “[A]
nd when he again turned to him, he was unrecognizable to Isaac. His
eyes were wild. His countenance was chilling. The venerable locks of
his hair bristled like furies above his head.”2
Tragedy, Comedy and the Knight of Faith
Despite these supplementary gestures from the journals, the apparent

rejection of ancient tragedy in Fear and Trembling as mere aesthetics
represents the authorships most direct challenge to my thesis. Fear
and Trembling’s apparent dismissal of Attic tragedy spares not a word
for the movements Traciturnus described connecting the accidental
pathos of tragedy to the tragic will of a religious passion, which only
takes volunteers, through the Socratic alignment of tragedy and com-
edy. But the Biblical knight, no longer operating within aesthetic cat-
egories such as fate, suffers more tragically than the tragic hero him-
self. In fact, de Silentio tips us off to the analogy between the tragic
1
Pap. IV A 76 / SKS JJ:87. Cf. JP 5:5640.
2
See Joakim Garff Søren Kierkegaard, p. 255. Garff presents an illuminating jux-
taposition of the two texts. “If we compare the published version with the sketch,
it is immediately obvious that Abraham’s inhuman brutality had originally been
depicted in much more elaborate fashion.” For the sketch itself, see SKS 4, 107.
hero and Abraham by inserting the dying Socrates of the Phaedo as

an “intellectual tragic hero” in the interstice between the militantly
mute Agamemnon and Abraham, who like Socrates must speak. If
we can establish his kinship with the tragic hero, however distant and
broken, Abraham will confirm the hypothesis in Stages of a justified
exception constructed on a tragic model, a religious hero who follows
through in an overturned Socratism on the tragic guilt that crippled
poor Quidam.
De Silentio first introduces the category of tragedy, along with com-
edy, in the following sentence, alluding to a parishioner whom one
Sunday, the preacher, with his sermon on Abraham, convinces to sac-
rifice his own son: “The comic and the tragic make contact here in
absolute infinitude” (FT, 29 / SKS 4, 125). This nebulous statement
as Stages indicated is the key to understanding the return of tragic
pathos in the religious sphere as the “highest passion” of faith (FT,
121 / SKS 4, 209). To see the Socratic-ironic unity of the comic and
the tragic and then take it up passionately, this was the beginning of
religious subjectivity, Taciturnus explained. Quidam was unable, but
Abraham is the figure in which this passionate collision takes place.
Imagine: a parishioner wants to imitate Abraham and slay his own
son. The preacher who rises to his best in persuading the man from
murder proves that on Sunday he really “did not know what he was
saying” (FT, 29 / SKS 4, 125). Here is the comic. Abraham is the ter-
rible joke which the preacher tells without realizing it, making a fool
not of Abraham, but rather himself, and if the comic contradiction is
dialectically-tragically reversed, tragic criminals of his parish. But the
massacre that would follow if they undertook the killing heroized in
Abraham’s story is not tragic simply because someone dies. It is trag-
ic because their sacrifice is a botched sacrifice. Because it can never
express the meaning they intend. There is no expression for human
sacrifice in the polite society of bourgeois Copenhagen, microcosm
of enlightened Europe, only murder. They are sacrificed for nothing,
a comic misunderstanding of the Sunday sermon, a discrepancy be-
tween the meaning intended (the signifying) and the significance of
the deed accomplished (the signified). Every Manson, all sacrifice,
comes off as a freakish threat, a tragic loss with comic reasons. In this
sense, they do become like Abraham, 3 containing the possibility of
3
The Akedah is often read as the story of the Jewish rejection of human sacrifice.
Keirkegaard inverts the story, demanding Abraham’s value as a justified killer. He
returns to the violence of paganism, before the civilizing of Jewish ethics.
Fear and Trembling 197
both the comic and the tragic. That Abraham loves his victim more
than himself only makes his act that much more deranged.
Having established the category of the tragic, de Silentio goes on
to oppose the Greek “tragic hero,” i. e. Euripides’ Agamemnon, who
suffers a “spiritual trial” (Anfægtelse), to the knight of faith repre-
sented by father Abraham.4 Abraham suffers an “ordeal” (Prøvelse),
he says, in an “absolute relation to the absolute” (FT, 56 / SKS 4, 150).
This places him outside the mediations of ethics, the law and custom
in which alongside his city Agamemnon understands himself. As an
individual shipwrecked outside the safe waters of the universal, there
are no maps to guide Abraham atop Mt. Moriah. The goal that Agam-
emnon pursues, the envoy of his conquering navy to Troy, justifies the
means of killing a daughter, the sacrifice of Iphigenia to the gods of
the city. 5 He is intelligible and ultimately forgiven. In fact, the poets go
so far as to eulogize his loyalty to the state, the telos which guides him,
over the more limited considerations of family and its gods. Agamem-
non’s suffering and the tragic choice between family and state forced
upon him by the gods ultimately ennobles his violence, both at home
before Aulis’ refluent tides, and later on the plains of Troy. They are
both the acts of a conquering general, the pagan hero familiar from
Stages, who conquers, rather than the religious hero who suffers. We
can identify Abraham’s suffering, on the other hand, with the absence
of the same elements of intelligibility, forgiveness, and a lack of poetic
possibilities. Put simply, there is no point to the slaying of Isaac. Or,
if there is some meaning in it, it is a secret lost on Abraham, which he
therefore cannot disclose. There is no reason – only the madness of
faith. The killing is an excess which no ethical calculus can recoup be-
cause there is no “outcome” which can account for Abraham’s ordeal.
There is no overweening health or bravado for the poets to admire,
only a black-breasted infertility, the sickness of the climb and the hor-
ror of the kill.
Even before introducing Abraham as the bearer of a redoubled
tragic pathos, de Silentio prepares us by imagining a paradoxical Ag-
amemnon, a non-Greek in Greek’s clothing, transformed by the new
Judaeo-Christian categories adorning Abraham. This paradoxical
Agamemnon would have sacrificed Iphigenia while the Argive fleet
sailed competently to Troy (FT, 58 / SKS 4, 152). In order to save the
4
De Silentio is reading Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis, and not Aeschylus’ Agamem-
non, which the text makes clear.
5
The slaying of Iphigenia followed the ritual model of maiden’s sacrifice, which often
preceded the shedding of human blood in war. See note 21, ch. 9.
paradox, the middle term of the ethical (what Taciturnus called the
“third element” in a tragedy) which mediates and therefore saves the
temporary exception of the tragic hero is removed. Like Abraham, his
crime becomes unintelligible. In addition to giving us this imaginary
construction of an Abrahamic Greek-tragic hero, with his other Ag-
amemnon, de Silentio also briskly connects their geography, placing
Mount Moriah’s peak “sky-high over the flatlands of Aulis” (FT, 61
/ SKS 4, 155) where Agamemnon killed his daughter. He connects
Agamemnon and Abraham via the stretch of the solitary climb up the
mountain, imagining the Greek as the Jew and baptizing the Jew in
Greek waters that extend from the shores of Euripides to those of St.
Paul, since “every more thorough thinker, every more earnest artist
still regenerates himself in the eternal youth of the Greeks.” (FT, 55 /
SKS 4, 148).6
Yet, if we can’t understand Agamemnon, we can’t pity him, or fear
him, since both emotions depend upon identification with the hero
(FT, 61 / SKS 4, 155). When the heroic courage of sacrifice for the
state becomes the absurd courage, Like Abraham’s, which appends
“the little phrase: but it will not happen anyway – who then would un-
derstand them?” (FT, 59 / SKS 4, 153). Instead of jettisoning the tragic
mechanism of katharsis altogether, de Silentio replaces the emotions
of pity and fear with one already familiar from Stages: “One cannot
weep over Abraham. One approaches him with a horror religiosus,
as Israel approached Mount Sinai” (FT, 61 / SKS 4, 155). The ancient
tragic stage was a vehicle for the pleasurable relief of difficult emo-
tion, like the Globe of Shakespeare, where the poet’s secret turmoil,
he imagines, brought him this power of the word to tell other’s dark
secrets, driving “out devils only by the power of the devil” (FT, 61 /
SKS 4, 155). But Abraham, an enigma to his poet de Silentio, has only
horrified observers. The poet himself cannot penetrate his secret, and
so the higher pathos of Abraham isolates both the reader and would-
be poet and turns them back upon themselves.
6
On the question of Hellenism and the Judaeo-Christian tradition, See John Caputo
and Michael Scanlon “Apology for the Impossible: Religion and PostModernism”
in God, The Gift, and Post Modernism, ed. by Caputo and Scanlon, pp. 9 f. “Ter-
tullian’s famous rhetorical question, ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem’ has
returned with new energy to the theological scene, not only in terms of recent criti-
cism of onto-theology but as a pervasive perception that Athens has been for too
long the tutor of Jerusalem as regards proper speech about God.” Kierkegaard, we’ll
see, explicitly endorses a Christian Hellenism, despite the fact that St. Paul himself
was not in dialogue with classical Greece per se, though the language he wrote was
ripe with its influence.
The teleological suspension of the ethical which the Abraham story

contains, that though guilty of murder, in another sense this guilt has
been forgiven, introduces a paradoxical telos into ethics capable of ac-
commodating both an innocence before God and guilt before the law.
Like the religious agos of Oedipus, the terrible avenue to vision of a
god, “if one does not know the terrors, one does not know the great-
ness either” (FT, 75 / SKS 4, 167). Abraham’s life – even to himself
– reads “like a book under divine confiscation” (FT, 77 / SKS 4, 169).
It is a story that turns Abraham, like the reader, back upon them-
selves. Both the tragic hero and the knight concentrate themselves
in a collision with the ethical (FT, 78 / SKS 4, 170), but the individual
tragic hero ultimately takes refuge in the universal, a higher telos af-
firmed by the third element – the middle man of the state – as divine.
The difference, then, is that the “wondrous glory” of the knight says
“‘You’ to God in heaven,” addressing him in the second person, face
to face, “whereas even the tragic hero addresses him only in the third
person” (FT, 77 / SKS 4, 168), with the objectivity of the state in which,
through sacrifice, he includes himself.
The transition from hero to knight takes place in the leap from the
third-person to the first-person encounter, the epiphany where the god
appears, a parousia where the knight of faith “has simply and solely
himself, and therein lies the dreadfullness” (FT, 78 / SKS 4, 170). This
contradiction intensifies consciousness inwardly to the point that the
individual himself becomes the object of tragic understanding: the
knight of faith is the paradox (FT, 79 / SKS 4, 171). The seed of tragic
katharsis contains a deeper suffering which the stage cannot address,
intensified and focused in an absolutely private encounter with a god,
a religious horror like Quidam’s meant to solicit and cathart the same
in the reader.
Peripateia and Anagnķrisis:

Demonic Silence and the Pitch of Madness
The repetition of the tragic hero in the knight also repeats the im-
mediacy in which Greek thinking and art, especially tragedy, are al-
legedly stuck, returning us once again to the question of mediation in
Greek tragedy, or, in the Aristotelian language to which de Silentio
returns, discovery (anagnķrisis). The mediating discovery relieves the
mystery of fate and resolves the agonizing contradictions by which the
tragic figure has been scandalized and made unintelligible. But Ab-
raham’s faith is a “later immediacy” (FT, 82 / SKS 4, 172) (en senere

Umiddelbarhed), not as Hegel claimed of religion (and Kierkegaard
was well aware), the naive first immediacy of representation (Vorstel-
lung) for Reason to reflect into Concept (Begriff).7 Faith is not a sec-
ond but a third immediacy, one which has passed through the “later
immediacy” of the demonic in which the tragic hero must act, with his
back turned to the good, closed in upon himself.8 Kierkegaard returns
once more to Aristotle’s Poetics, again quoting the Greek:
ÂÓÍ ÊÃË ÍÓË ÒÍÓ ÊÓÆÍÓ ÊÃÏÅ ÎÃÏÇ Ò¿ÓÒq ÃÑÒÇ ÎÃÏÇÎÃÒÃÇ¿ È¿Ç ¿Ë¿ÁË×ÏÇÑÇÑ [two
parts of the plot, then, peripety and discovery (recognition), are on matters of this
sort]. Whenever and wherever it is possible to speak of recognition, there is eo ipso
a prior hiddenness. Just as the recognition is the resolving, the relaxing element in
dramatic life, so hiddenness is the tension-creating factor […] In Greek tragedy, the
hiddenness (and as a result of it the recognition) is an epic remnant based on a fate
in which the dramatic action vanishes and in which it has its dark, mysterious source.
(FT, 83-84 / SKS 4, 173-174)
Through the Poetics’ theme of discovery de Silentio goes on to dis-

tinguish the features of the knight against those of the tragic hero,
dividing tragedy religiously against itself. The point is to have “aes-
thetic hiddenness and the paradox appear in their absolute dissimi-
larity” (FT, 85 / SKS 4, 176). But he makes this point using the es-
sentially tragic feature of discovery. With Aristotle’s language in the
background it is impossible not to see the religious hiddenness as a
radicalized version of the daimonic mystery aesthetically concealed
by ancient tragedies, the religious ‘Or’ to Greek tragedy’s ‘Either.’
Modifying hiddenness in such a way that discovery can never be
made, the tension between the hidden and the disclosed never dra-
matically exhausted, de Silentio erects a religious stage in the reader’s
interior more tragic than tragedy itself. Tragedy conceals a relation
“to the idea” (FT, 84 / SKS 4, 174), the unifying element of “heroic
resolution” (FT, 86 / SKS 4, 176) which the present age has lost. This
hiddenness can be disclosed, and its collisions relieved. The hero indi-
vidually affirms the universal will, the idea of the family or the state,
as Oedipus voluntarily went into exile, and Socrates drank the hem-
7
On his concept of religion as Vorstellung, as opposed to Begriff, see G. W. F. Hegel
Encyclopedia, pars. 1-5; G. W. F. Hegel Phenomenology of Spirit, pp. 462 f., 466, 471,
477, 485, 488; G. W. F. Hegel, the Logic of the Encyclopedia (the “Lesser Logic”),
pars. 1-6.
8
As Stages on Life’s Way explained, if Quidam were a tragic hero, he would have to
be daimonic. But Quidam is already too religious for aesthetic daimonism. His is a
daimonism of repentance.
lock, instead of fleeing his sentence as he could have. The gap between
the individual and the universal, the immediacy of family and its gods
and the category of the state, where the tragic figure emerges, can be
closed. This is not the case with religious hiddenness and the paradox
(FT, 85 / SKS 4, 175). The knight lives for a paradoxical idea that the
reversals of plot can never reveal, concealed even from him, a reversal
that is always possible but never actualized, always infinitely and anx-
iously postponed.
Though de Silentio opposes the incommensurable Idea behind
Abraham’s resolve to the finite ideas such as family and state behind
tragic-heroic resolution, Abrahamic resolution shares with the hero’s
deliberation the daimonic feature of concealment and the impenetra-
bility of the hero’s choice. Abrahamic resolution imposes the tension
of the choice, the collision between the individual and all moral cat-
egories, not just for the time being, but as long as the hero lives. The
tragic hero cannot judge by the result, de Silentio tells us (FT, 63-64
/ SKS 4, 157). Yet he must begin, despite the scandal and collisions
which define his choice. Despite eventual Greek applause for Agam-
emnon, spurred on by the poets, “the result (insofar as it is finitude’s
response to the infinite question) is incongruous with the hero’s exist-
ence” (FT, 63 / SKS 4, 157). De Silentio forces us here to identify Abra-
ham as the essential hero, a radicalized Greek general estranged from
all his customary causes, like the paradoxical Agamemnon de Silentio
conjured himself a few pages earlier. While the Greek Agamemnon’s
initially paradoxical ambivalence between the particular obligation as
a father to Iphigenia and the universal one to the gods of the state is
relieved in the higher telos of the state, the paradox embodied in an
Abraham similarly divided between family and religious obligation is
unimpeachable. There is no result which could make sense of what he
chooses to become.
Anciently the silence and withdrawal of the daimonic, de Silen-
tio wrote, was in the plot, not the individual. Again turning tragedy
against itself, converting its aestheticisms (in this case the overt rep-
resentation of the gods) into the modern, religious language of interi-
ority, he introduces this hidden remainder within the objectivities of
plot into the self-enclosure of Abraham’s self-secret purpose. “Silence
is the demon’s trap, and the more that is silenced, the more terrible
the demon, but silence is also divinity’s mutual understanding with
the single individual” (FT, 88 / SKS 4, 178). This makes Abraham,
the figure of unimpeachable hiddenness, always isolated, for whom
the result is always postponed, a would-be hero for modernity rather
than Jerusalem, and, at least for the duration of his climb, another
daimoniac agonizing over the Good. The inability to speak, and, con-
scious of this or not, to give an account of who one truly is – what one
truly does and suffers – is a daimonic feature shared by all tragic he-
roes, from Oedipus and Agamemnon to Hamlet, Quidam, and finally
Kierkegaard’s Abraham, an effect of the soul’s hijacking by a kind of
daimķn. Until he decides, Agamemnon is stranded outside of the uni-
versal, a place where two passions collide, either love of Family or love
of the State, either dedication to the chthonic gods of the hearth and
fear of the avenging Erinyes or to the Olympic gods of the state. Oedi-
pus, too, like Agamemnon, in the time it takes the drama to unfold,
awaits his removal to the outlands of plague and blindness, carried
there by the daimķn at work within his power to reason, a phantom
presence discernible only through the shuddering identified by de Si-
lentio’s title. He is stranded outside the moral-ontological center that,
for the Greeks, was Greece itself.
The merman is Fear and Trembling’s crowning exemplar of the dai-
monic. He can sacrifice Agnes for a greater good and with perfect
intelligibility become “a grandiose tragic hero” (FT, 97 / SKS 4, 186).
The demonic, in this case the tragic hero, at least potentially “has the
same quality as the divine, namely that the single individual is able
to enter into an absolute relation to it” (FT, 97 / SKS 4, 186). There
is “deep [tragic] contradiction in the daimonic,” that this daimoniac
would “save a person with the aid of evil,” but for the sake of the good,
that he would, like Quidam, like Kierkegaard himself, drive his love
away. Crime and justice ambiguously coincide. He would “belittle her,
ridicule her, make her love ludicrous, and, if possible, arouse her pride
[…] spare himself no anguish” (FT, 96 / SKS 4, 185) so that she may be
saved from evil. The daimonic figure is one of exception, both inside
and outside of convention – high and low, wise king and blind outcast
– a poor pious Socrates with power enough to threaten a state – an Ab-
raham, both the father of faith and a barren criminal. But the merman
can speak. He can sacrifice himself and Agnes for the greater good by
confessing the evil he embodies. Agamemnon’s slaying of Iphigenia
is not without its consolations. He knows how the ritual goes because
other fathers like him have passed it down for generations.9 Dialogue
gives him an alibi in his reasoning since “everything permitted to be
said against him has been said ruthlessly” (FT, 114 / SKS 4, 202) and
his rationale for acting has endured. His conflict with the world is pro-
9
Again, regarding maiden sacrifice, see note 21, ch. 9.
visional, and, not before long, over and done. The struggle, also, di-
rects his energies away from himself. But religion makes the knight of
faith’s collision into a knot which no ethics, not even tragic ethics, can
untie (FT, 99 / SKS 4, 188). There is no dialogue, no dialectic of lines,
finally, to mediate his exception – “he speaks in a divine language, he
speaks in tongues” (FT, 114 / SKS 4, 202).10
Abrahamic Madness: Modernity and Tragic Logos
What, finally, then, is Abraham’s fate, whom God blessed and cursed
in the same breath (FT, 66 / SKS 4, 158)? If Greek fate for Kierke-
gaard equals a blind necessity, imposed from Zeus’ distant perch on
Olympus, then Abraham has none. The knight of faith, rather, as had
Oedipus, becomes contemporary with the god.11 His anxiety is the
“anxiety, the distress, the paradox” of seeing “Christ walking about
in the promised land” (FT, 66 / SKS 4, 158). Abraham suffers an en-
counter with the divine on the level ground of a promise: the murder
of your son will be no murder; your loss will be no loss. But to meet
the god, as it was for Oedipus and his precursors in Dionysian myth,
is to be destroyed. Like Oedipus, blinded by the tragic knowledge of
the gods with which Teiresias lived like a stooped, melancholy Silenus,
Abraham ought to be a figure that blinds us (FT, 23 / SKS 4, 119). Ab-
10
In the final section of Fear and Trembling, Problema iii, de Silentio returns once
more to Aristotle for a story from the Politics which sheds last light on Greek trag-
edy and the Knight’s paradox: A bridegroom, for whom the prophets foresee a ca-
lamity whose origin is his marriage, suddenly decides, at the last moment, not to
come for his bride. FT, 89 (89n) / SKS 4, 178 ff. Pol., 1303b-1304. The details of
the story are enough to show that he courts disaster by trying to avoid it, the clas-
sic tragic equation, and that, as with Aeschylus and Sophocles, this disaster stems
from a “contact with the divine,” though “in a double manner – first by the augurs’
pronouncement and next by being condemned as a temple thief.” He pollutes the
sacred. But the problem with Oracles for de Silentio is that they are intelligible to
all. They don’t “eventuate in any private relation to the divine.” FT, 93 / SKS 4,
183.
11
Though the idea of an impersonal fate does operate within Greek tragedy, fate
also takes on a more archaic, less enlightened signification. Rather than one’s ap-
portionment within an order determined aforetime on Olympus, one’s destruction
comes at the hands of the more personal and less stable forces of the daimonic. For
distinctions between the varieties of daimķn, see E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the
Irrational, pp. 39-42. See page 21, note 37, for the connection between the daimon-
ic force of tragedy’s avenging Erinyes and Zeus’ moira. See also Walter Burkert
Greek Religion, p. 181.
raham, writes de Silentio, was “the first to know that supreme passion,
the holy, pure, and humble expression for the divine madness that was
admired by the pagans” (FT, 23 / SKS 4, 119). He refers us here to the
holy madness of which Plato speaks in the Phaedrus: the madness of
prophecy, of purifications and initiations, of poetic inspiration, and
the erotic madness of the philosopher touched by truth. The enthou-
siasmos of holy madness in general was originally a Dionysiac expe-
rience.12 De Silentio translates this pagan madness in which man is
possessed by the god of deathlessly ever-dying nature into an encoun-
ter with the eternal god of spirit. Abraham abandons “the terrifying
battle with the raging elements and the forces of creation in order to
contend with god” instead of nature (FT, 23 / SKS 4, 119). The di-
vine mysteries of nature become the spiritual mystery of man himself.
At the center of this mystery stands reason and the Delphic maxim
both Oedipus and Socrates had tragically embraced: gnķthi seauton
– know yourself, though each discovered in himself a monster beyond
reckoning.13 De Silentio substitutes for the god-inspired dances of the
bacchant a more subtle religious movement in which the pedestrian
strut of a tax collector might express the sublime leaping and dancing
of infinity (FT, 41 / SKS 4, 135).
There is another figure, though, occupying the role of mediator be-
tween the carnal madness of the pagan-esthete and the spiritualized
madness of Abraham: the intellectual tragic hero. The intellectually
or spiritually significant tragic hero – de Silentio gives Socrates as an
example – must have last words. It is in this enthusiasmic logos, a logos
that is also entheos, possessed of a god, that this hero consummates
himself and achieves immortality before the moment of biological
death (FT, 116-117 / SKS 4, 204-205). He affirms himself beyond the
struggles of bare animality. Abraham, another spiritual development
in the scheme of heroes, from the mute Agamemnon to the logos-en-
riched Socrates, also has a need for last words. After all, his ordeal is
a matter of religious ideality. Having leapt past the duplicitous reason-
12
See Hackforth’s commentary, Plato Phaedrus, 243e-245c. Cf. Walter Otto Di-
onysos: Myth and Cult, pp. 133, 135. Otto confirms that “[m]adness is a cult form
which belongs to the religion of Dionysus.” – “Dionysus is the god who is mad.”
Cf. Karl Kerenyi Dionysus: Archetypal Image of Inedestructible Life, p. 131. Cf.
Walter Burkert Ancient Mystery Cults, p. 112. Burkert qualifies that both the cults
of Dionysus and Phrygian Kybele, otherwise known as Mater, or Magna Mater,
which fused early (p. 25), were typified by these mad ecstasies. “Terror,” he says,
“has become manageable for the initiate” (p. 97, re: Plato Republic, 560de). Still, he
concludes that “mania is the special province of Dionysus” (p. 104).
13
For the monster of the self, see Plato Phaedrus, 229e.
ing of both aesthetics and ethics, Abraham must now define himself in
the absolutely foreign language of a god. Hence his ironic statement to
Isaac that God will provide the burnt offering. Abraham’s total pres-
ence is affirmed in these last words (FT, 118 / SKS 4, 207), spoken in
the “strange tongue” (FT, 119 / SKS 4, 208) of irony that both speaks
and says nothing (FT, 118-119 / SKS 4, 207-208). The tragic task of
naming the unnameable forces human thought and language beyond
itself, into a “strange responsibility that consists neither of responding
nor not responding,” writes one reader. “Is one,” after all, “responsi-
ble for what one says in an unintelligible language, in the language of
the other.”14
If there is to be a religious development in the figures of tragedy
beyond the Greek-dramatic sphere there must be a sympathetic in-
novation in how tragedy is to be understood. Apart from Lessing’s
Hamburgische Dramaturgie, which de Silentio singles out of the Ger-
man tradition, the move past the Greeks will be facilitated by the
Greeks themselves, who “presented far better” these “movements
and positions” which he explores in Abraham (FT, 88 / SKS 4, 178).15
The collision in Abraham is not between two opposing logoi, as it
was for Hegel, but rather between thinking itself, which in the figure
of Hegelianism has come to embrace all of world-history, including
knights of faith, and the absolute paradox, an irrational element which
both disrupts and, as we’ll see in the next chapter, conditions this his-
tory. The elements of this collision are not two expressions of a single
reason that a more historically or even individually-therapeutically
developed thinking can somehow mediate, like two dialogical voices
unified in the dialectic of lines. Hegelian tragedy gives us a rupture
14
Jacques Derrida The Gift of Death, pp. 73-77. The notion of naming that which
cannot be named, of speaking about that which must be unnamed, is another theme
at the center of contemporary issues in the philosophy of religion. See Jean-Luc
Marion’s notion of ‘de-nomination’ in “On the Name” in God, the Gift and Post-
Modernism, ed. by Caputo and Scanlon.
15
For Kierkegaard’s attention to Lessing’s interpretation of katharsis in Aristotle’s
Poetics, see Pap. IV C 110 (1842-43). Cf. JP 4:4826. Curtius’ translation and com-
mentary on the Poetics, Aristoteles Dichtkunst, was also an essential source for
Kierkegaard. See Pap. IV C 103, 105, 119, 120, 124 / SKS Not12:2, Not12:4(a),
Not12:11, Not12:12, Not12:15(a). Cf. JP 1:808; 4:4835-4836. But his attention to the
original is clear, which he owned as part of the complete Bekker edition. See the
entries from Pap. IV C 103-125 / SKS Not12:2 – Not12:16, generally. Cf. JP 1:143-
144, 808-809; 4:4826-4839; 5:5604-5606. For example, in the margins of his journal
entry on Curtius’ commentary, Kierkegaard corrects one of Curtius’ citations in
Aristotle’s Greek, relating a passage from the Poetics to the Ethics. Pap. IV C 124
(1842-43) / Not12:15(a).
within the universal Subject of reason itself, in the Concept’s strug-

gle towards self-knowledge, contested by a newborn reflection, vio-
lently, amidst the innocence of self-same Greece. For Kierkegaard,
however, “it is human reason that is in question, and the adjective
is not redundant.”16 Abraham’s sacrifice, rather than launching ships,
wrecks the Hegelian ship of the universal Subject against a paradox
which human reason cannot mediate, which both transcends and tragi-
cally grounds the reason compelled to claim it.17 It exposes this reason
to the groundlessness of its grounds, the darkness and unpredictable
depths of the sea it foolishly tries to chart, not by humiliating reason
formally (the paradox is no logical contradiction),18 but by insisting
on its finite human nature and, through a paradoxical offense, forcing
the eyes of this fragile body toward a religous reality the heart and
stomach cannot contain. That reason has become human bespeaks
not only a conceptual limit where we encounter the absurd, but also
its flesh (sarx) in the pre-modern sense of St. Paul and Luther.19 The
flesh in which one suffers offense at the paradox that in god both man
and god have turned against their nature incorporates every dimen-
16
Merold Westphal Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society, p. 88.
17
See Jacques Derrida The Gift of Death. Derrida generalized Abraham’s sacrifice as
a structure of authentic choice per se: “What the knights of good conscience don’t
realize, is that ‘the sacrifice of Isaac’ illusatrates – if that is the word in the case of
such a nocturnal mystery – the most common and everyday experience of responsi-
bility” (p. 67). “Such is the aporia of responsibility: one always risks not managing
to accede to the concept of responsibility in the process of forming it. For respon-
sibility demands on the one hand an accounting, a general answering-for-oneself
with respect to the general and befor the generality, hence the idea of substitution,
and, on the other hand, uniqueness, absolute singularity, hence nonsubstitution,
nonrepetition, silence, and secrecy. What I am saying here about responsibility can
also be said about decision” (p. 61; cf. p. 77). Still, I wonder if this isn’t allegorizing
away the mysterium tremendum which Derrida so loves in the Abraham story, and
which, perhaps, needs Jahweh, a god, real smoke, warm blood. “Translated into this
extraordinary story, the truth is shown to possess the very structure of what occurs
every day” (78). But as Derrida writes himself, “taking it to be a fable still amounts
to losing it to philosophical or poetic generality; it means that it loses the quality of
a historic event” (p. 66).
18
Merold Westphal The Critique of Reason and Society, p. 100; Robert C. Roberts
Faith, Reason, and History, p. 67; C. Stephen Evans Passionate Reason, chs. 5, 6, &
7; For the opposite reading, see Alastair Hannay Kierkegaard, pp. 106-108; Louis
Pojman The Logic of Subjectivity, pp. 100-102; Brand Blanshard “Kierkegaard on
Faith” in Essays on Kierkegaard, ed. by Jerry Hill.
19
On the Pauline Abraham, see John Caputo “Instants, Secrets, and Singularities –
Dealing Death in Kierkegaard and Derrida” in Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity, ed.
by Matustik and Westphal, p. 219.
sion of an individual’s existence.20 The absurd and the paradoxical

here have a tragic-comic structure, one defined, as we’ve seen, by con-
tradiction. “[I]t lies in the conjunction of elements that are ordinarily
incongruous,”21 such as Hamlet’s oath on a pair of fire tongs or killing
a beloved son for no apparent reason – or, here, the union of the hu-
man and the divine in a single miscegenated nature.
Abraham’s absurd circumstance and the paradox of his innocence,
though madness from the human perspective, are not simply irration-
al, though neither as one reader astonishingly concludes are they “ul-
timately in the service of reason,” catalyst for its fulfilment in man.22
The idea they evince “never originated in the mind of man” (as goes
the passage from first Corinthians [2: 6-9] which Kierkegaard once
preached) and only takes root there through a violence. 23 That some
20
See Merold Westphal The Critique of Reason and Society, pp. 107-111, for a discus-
sion and citations in Luther and St. Paul. Westphal reads Kierkegaard’s critique of
reason as “ideology critique” of modern, instrumental notions of reason, and a re-
turn to the value-laden reason of the praxis of the Greeks, á la Habermas. But this
fails to address the failure of all forms of human reason for Kierkegaard, including
those pre-modern notions which St. Paul and Luther employ, for whom, as with the
pagan Greeks, a purely objective rationality had not yet been conceived.
21
Merold Westphal The Critique of Reason and Society, p. 102. For the example
of Hamlet, see CUP1, 458n, where Climacus gives numerous examples of comic
contradiction. Cf. C. Stephen Evans Passionate Reason, p. 100. Evans echoes this
distinguishing of “incongruous” from “logical” contradiction with Kierkegaard’s
examples of the comic.
22
See C. Stephen Evans Passionate Reason, pp. 97. Like Westphal, though in a deeper,
more far reaching, and so more problematic degree, Evans socializes the irrationality
of Kierkegaardian paradox (p. 118). It is not human reason per se which the paradox
crucifies, but the selfish human reason dominant in the enlightenment, unwilling to
recognize its own limits. Were a non-anthropocentric concept of reason introduced,
the paradox, though “above reason,” as in Acquinas and Kant, would no longer be
“against reason.” Our relation to the paradox is like the physicist’s relation to theo-
retically impossible discoveries in both nature (p. 105) and man (p. 110), through
encounters with radically new phenomena such as “a brain that thinks,” after which,
barring a prideful dogmatism, he comes to a new understanding. But in order to
substantiate these claims, Evans denies faith’s necessary conjunction with offense
(p. 80), which Climacus defines clearly enough (CUP1, 611 / SKS 7, 554; cf. CUP1,
203-204 / SKS 7, 186-187), and tends generally to conflate divine and human reason
(p. 79) (and, therefore, as in the examples of physical science, natural and religious
reality). Lastly, he manufactures a notion of “imperialistic reason” (p. 90) which no-
where appears in Kierkegaard’s texts. If this imperialistic reason can be pacified, he
writes, “reason evidently can conceive the paradox in some sense” (p. 79). His more
recent Faith Beyond Reason echoes the same sociological reading (pp. 94 f.).
23
See Merold Westphal The Critique of Reason and Society, pp. 86, 89, 99. Westphal
distinguishes between the human and divine “modes of thought,” within which Ab-
raham is simultaneously either insanely mad or madly correct. The reality within
ideas are simply not assimilable to human productions, to the speech

and civil orders we establish, is the insight into tragedy which Hegel’s
philosophical bias suppressed, the ‘epic element’ which exceeds the
dialectic between characters, the play of contrary voices (which, like
contrary motion between the right notes, can nevertheless produce
beautiful harmonies). 24 It is that thing25 which never appears, unrep-
resentable, unverifiable, unknowable, a ghost-like thing too vaporous
for science to get a grip, what the Greeks knew in its incipient form as
the darkness of fate, the mystery of time and the oracle.
The real tragedy of logos is that this elusive thing must be named,
this unnameable thing, although the present age is now too clever to
allow mysteries to show. This takes us another step back in the line
of tragic primogeniture. First Oedipus, then Abraham, but finally
Adam – the first of men (like Sophocles’ Oedipus) – will be the figure
in whom Kierkegaard gives an account of this “religious ideality.”26
Expressing this inhuman Idea, language and idea are compelled to
voice their own failure, witnessing to a god which Vigilius Haufnien-
sis, one of de Silentio’s supporters and supplementarians, identifies
in the following chapter with the paradoxical logos behind dialectics.
This logos, we’ll find, belongs to dogmatics. It consummates the prob-
lem of the irrational and the tragic ambiguity of innocence and guilt
in the Augustinian notion of a hereditary sinfulness erected “between
human reason and the truth.”27
which man encounters religious paradox, he gleans from Climacus’ Postscript, is

after all a system for god. The sermon of 1844 is included in Johannes Climacus,
trans. Croxall, pp. 159-173.
24
Merold Westphal The Critique of Reason and Society, p. 89. Westphal points out
that irrationality for Kierkegaard can refer both to the failure of a finite human
reason, or the violation of its “established orders,” a moral offense.
25
See Jacques Derrida Spectres of Marx, pp. 6, 74 f. In this book on ghosts, Derrida
describes the ghost of Hamlets father as a “Thing that is not a thing.” The spectre of
Hamlet’s father, like that of Marx in Europe, signals the vulnerability to the ghosts
of past and future which always haunt the present, the impossibility of the present
every being fully identical with itself. See Richard Kearney “Kierkegaard on Ham-
let” in The New Kierkegaard, ed. by Jegstrup. Kearney ties Spectres of Marx to
Kierkegaard’s reading of Hamlet.
26
See CA, 17n / SKS 4, 324. Haufniensis reads Fear and Trembling as a work con-
cerned with the birth of this “religious ideality.”
27
Merold Westphal Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society, p. 97. Cf. 114: Rea-
son is the “wrongness of fallen humanity,” as in Romans 1:18-23.
Chapter 9
The Concept of Anxiety:
Fate and the Tragic Logos of Second Ethics
The Domain of Logos
Haufniensis is that peculiar Kierkegaardian construction, the author

without any claims.1 His psychology, though “the only science that can
help a little,” still admits that it “explains nothing, and also that it can-
not and will not explain more” (CA, 51 / SKS 4, 356). It is a “strange
tongue” indeed, like Abraham’s, which in the very act of speaking re-
cants what is spoken. But that is the kind we are dealing with here. The
whole problem can be deferred to the larger one of the authorship in
Kierkegaard, which I set aside for the moment, until the final chapter.
It is enough to observe that in dealing with the problem of logos Kier-
kegaard not only speaks in the false logoi of the various pseudonyms
but explicitly has this double talk openly discount itself as either worth-
less, incomprehending, or a fiction of someone’s imagination – in some
cases the imaginary imaginations of other fictive characters, such as
Taciturnus’ invention of Quidam. Does it make any difference then
whose position is nearer to or farther from the flesh and blood Kierke-
gaard, when, as Haufniensis confesses, his “deliberation ends where it
began” (CA, 162 / SKS 4, 461)? It is a claim that could easily find its way
into the mouths of any number of the pseudonyms.
A better question and the subject of Haufniensis’ introduction is
the proper domain of “ÉÍÁÍÐ” (CA, 12 / SKS 4, 321), which in culture
as in the authorship tends to divide itself into contrary voices, each
with its own claim to the ground they must share. The whole stretch
of the introduction is a contestation of the Hegelian appropriation of
religous faith within the larger design of speculative thought, and an
assertion of Paul’s JewGreek logos over the term as it stands in both
1
See the preface, CA, 2-8 / SKS 4, 313-316, as well as the Postscript’s postface, where
none of his authors, Kierkegaard writes, add anything new.
its inaugural Greek innocence and its Greco-German offspring.2 Log-

ic’s (i. e., Hegel’s) appropriation of the two sciences of ethics and dog-
matics, Haufniensis argues, has denatured them both (CA, 12 / SKS
4, 321). Ethics concerns the relation between the idea and actuality
(CA, 16 / SKS 4, 324) and dogmatics, similarly, concerns the actuality
of faith. With what right, Haufniensis asks, can a philosophical logic
claim logos [the dogmatical] (CA, 12 / SKS 4, 321) or ethics for that
matter as its own?
Logic, in itself, is harmless. The trouble starts when motion is
introduced. Motion makes logic illogical and ethics unethical (CA,
13 / SKS 4, 321). This is true at least of the “first ethics” which in
the muck and mire of a philosophical logos has collapsed comically
along with the philosophically appropriated dogmatics into so much
nonsense. Kierkegaard, as a student, wrote such a comedy: The Bat-
tle between the Old and New Soap-Cellars, described by its author
as a “heroic-patriotic-cosmopolitan-philanthropic-fatalistic drama
in several episodes.”3 It featured a Mr. Von Jumping Jack (a veiled
Heiberg, captain of Hegelian philosophy in København intellectual
circles) in which the senseless Hegelian chatter bandied about by his
fellow students is mercilessly lampooned. The problem with logic is
that logically speaking, as with the impotence of Von Jumping Jack’s
wit, nothing “comes about” (CA, 13 / SKS 4, 321). Motion is either
non-existent or immanent in a conclusion which logic itself presup-
poses. Logic, and by this he means Hegelian dialectic, in this sense
is always already finished. Logically, you can never begin. All talk
about motion in logic is talk about nothing. Ethics and dogmatics
only start to make sense when freed from the speculative-philosoph-
ical enterprise.
Ironically, Haufniensis’ objection to logic is a logical one. The con-
flation of logic and ethics disturbs the metaphysical stasis of logic in
such a way that logic must fail. Whatever is logical, is (reminding us
of Stages’ ironic declaration that “everyone knows what a human be-
ing is,” “the observer knows what everyone is”).4 As if exposed to a
terminal virus, the encounter with “the other” (CA, 13 / SKS 4, 321)
2
As the founder of the church, Paul wrote his letters in the Greek of the philosophers.
But Paul, of course, began as Saul, the Jew. Somewhere between Greece and Juda-
ism, that is where the early Christianity of Paul can be found, and, I believe, Kierke-
gaard’s as well.
3
See Joakim Garff Søren Kierkegaard, p. 81.
4
SL, 471-472 / SKS 6, 434-435: And “precisely in that I again see the unity of the
comic and the tragic,” Taciturnus continues.
The Concept of Anxiety 211
of actuality reverses speculative-philosophical Ethics (“first Ethics”)

wherever it is introduced. 5 Preserving ethics and dogmatics from the
dizzy logos of philosophical logic implies a defense of the limits of
this logic against confused Hegelian journeymen smuggling foreign
categories, such as actuality, under their coats. Fortunately, dogmat-
ics has already prepared a suitable defense against the confusions of
mediation (CA, 13 / SKS 4, 321). It is through the canny application
of a dogmatical emetic to this disoriented logic that a “second ethics”
may be saved from the same confusion, preserving experience from
a logos too comprehensive for its own good. This alternative ethics
requires a more humbly inconclusive logos, such as that ‘A’ ascribes
to tragedy – a “more” that is not epic, this time, but religious. The
uncanny element which logic ultimately fails to contain, which re-
pentance must grasp if repentance (like Quidam’s) is to end, is sin
(hamartia).
Without explaining just how, Haufniensis implies that the sin of
the New Testament and the motion that a “first Ethics” can’t con-
tain, the motion of creation, i. e., freedom,6 are bound together. Like
the khora of Plato’s Timaeus to which Derrida has directed our at-
tention, sin has its place as “no place” (CA, 14 / SKS 4, 321).7 The
category containing sin is contradiction (CA, 14 / SKS 4, 321), imme-
diately suggesting an analogy to comedy and tragedy in the sphere of
aesthetics. And so the aestheticizing of sin always leads to either the
comic or the tragic, for just this reason. It is either “light-minded or
melancholy” (CA, 14 / SKS 4, 321). But the comic and the tragic have
no enemy, we read, only “a bogeyman at which one either weeps or
laughs” (CA, 15 / SKS 4, 322). The leap from aesthetics to religion
requires that one vanquish this spook – the “magic picture” of fate
(CA, 159 / SKS 4, 458) – and replace it with something more worthy
of its characteristically religious mood: “earnestness” (CA, 15 / SKS
4, 322). When earnestness vanquishes the ghosts of the pagans, their
5
See CA, 13 / SKS 4, 321. “The other” is distinguished from “the negative,” which
Ethics generates internally, ahead of time.
6
For clarity’s sake, I am dropping this hint which properly pursued would take us
deep into the Philosophical Fragments. It is enough to say that in the interlude of
the Fragments, where the question of motion is explored more deeply than anywhere
else in the authorship, it is kinùsis as creation, a sign of God’s freedom, that stymies
the recollective accounts of motion in both Greece and 19th century Germany.
7
Jacques Derrida “Khora” in On the Name, pp. 89-127. For Derrida’s Kierkegaardi-
anism, see John Caputo “Dealing Death in Kierkegaard” in Kierkegaard in Post/
Modernity, ed. by Matustik and Westphal.
superstitious tendency to aestheticize the divine, sin is what remains.

Sin is the absolutely irrecuperable remainder, infinitely more resilient
than the epic variety operant in tragedy. Sin “retains a dialectical
remnant that no finitude can remove, just as no man will lose faith in
the lottery if he does not lose it by himself but is supposed to lose it
by continually losing when he gambles” (CA, 160 / SKS 4, 458). This
dialectical remnant is clearly a development of the contradiction in
tragedy and comedy.
Sin belongs to ethics only insofar as ethics is “shipwrecked,” that
is, “with the aid of repentance. If ethics is to include sin,” which it
must, “its ideality comes to an end” (CA, 17-18 / SKS 4, 324-325).
Here begins the “religious ideality,” “the ideality that precisely is the
ideality of actuality” (CA, 17n / SKS 4, 324) (an idea which Hauf-
niensis politely credits to Johannes de Silentio). Dogmatics, unlike
the “pseudo-ethical” temptations (CA, 17 / SKS 4, 324) of metaphys-
ics, logic or the sub-science of psychology, “proceeds from actual-
ity” (CA, 19 / SKS 4, 326). For this reason the category of sin which
dogmatics contributes to the problem at hand does not, like Ethics,
deny the presence of sin (CA, 19 / SKS 4, 326) by removing it ahead
of time, childishly repeating the comfort in face of its reality: you
don’t exist, you don’t exist. The unscientific “new science” which
Haufniensis introduces to save ethics (CA, 20 / SKS 4, 327) rests on
the actual existence of sin which dogmatics presupposes, as opposed
to the abstract foundations of metaphysics, its principles of demon-
stration, the entities it backs into aporematically. Extending it to the
point of collapse, the new science closes the gap between actuality
and the elusive ideal of Ethics stricte (CA, 19 / SKS 4, 326). It begins
with actuality “in order to raise it up to ideality” (CA, 19 / SKS 4,
326). It begins with the contradiction, not with “ideal demands” but
with “the penetrating consciousness of actuality” (CA, 20 / SKS 4,
327) – the consciousness of the actuality of sin.
Haufniensis distinguishes this opposition between a “first ethics”
which presupposes metaphysics and the “new science” or “second
ethics” founded dogmatically (CA, 24 / SKS 4, 331) according to the
model of Greek theatre and its connection with Aristotle:
It is common knowledge that Aristotle used the term ÎÏ×ÒÅ ÔÇÉÍÑÍÔÇ¿ [first phi-
losophy] primarily to designate metaphysics, though he included within it a part that
according to our conception belongs to theology. In paganism it is quite in order for
theology to be treated there. It is related to the same lack of an infinite penetrating
reflection that endowed the theatre in paganism with reality as a kind of divine wor-
ship. (CA, 21 / SKS 4, 328)
Ancient Greek metaphysics is a kind of theatre.8 Both ancient theatre

and ancient philosophy purported a divine immediacy in which these
thinkers happily, albeit naively, absorbed actuality. The genesis of the
second science prescinds from the first science defined by Aristotle,
and rehierarchicalizes the Greek model he established, to clarify this
“ambiguity” (CA, 21 / SKS 4, 328) in paganism between theatre, phi-
losophy, and religion according to dogmatic concepts. The Greeks and
Germans can keep their ‘first philosophy’ (or, as Aristotle sometimes
calls it, first science),
and by ÎÏÍÒÅ ÔÇÉÍÑÍÔÇ¿ understand the totality of science which we might call “eth-
nical,” whose essence is immanence and is expressed in Greek thought by “recol-
lection,” and by secunda philosophia [second philosophy] understand that totality of
science whose essence is transcendence or repetition.
og ved ÎÏÍÒÅ ÔÇÉÍÑÍÔÇ¿ forstaae den videnskabelige Totalitet, man kunde kalde den
ethniske, hvis Væsen er Immanentsen, eller Græsk talt, Erindringen, og ved secunda
philosophia forstaae den, hvis Væsen er Transcendentsen eller Gjentagelsen (CA, 21
/ SKS 4, 328).
The three spheres or stages of existence with which readers of Kierke-

gaard are familiar are a clarification of what Haufniensis calls Greek
ambiguity. As their gods were worshipped in the theatre, literally or
figuratively, the theatre of ritual, the ritual of theatre, the Greeks also
idealized the possibility of virtue, the immanence of the idea in ex-
istence (CA, 19 / SKS 4, 326) (or, Being in Becoming, to stay truer
to the Greek categories). In doing so, they confused aesthetics and
ethics metaphysically, since they had no religion in the true sense. By
introducing this second philosophy, or second ethics, Haufniensis at-
tempts to distinguish the theatre from metaphysics, that is, reflective
immediacy from the idea stricte, and both from the worship which the
Greeks distributed promiscuously throughout the ambiguous overlap
of their world-views in these different practices. The addition of sin to
the Greek equation instantly separates the elements in this mixture.
Its paradoxical nature overwhelms both the metaphysical conserva-
tions of thought and the expression of aesthetic ideas in dramatic po-
etry or any of the arts, not to mention collective rite. What, then, is the
nature of this paradox, hereditary sin?
8
Haufniensis confirms the allusions in Stages, for example, that everything other than
religion, including ethics (under the aegis of the logos of metaphysics [i. e., ethics in
Kant and Hegel]), is in some sense a mode of aeshetics, by including the ethnical in
the category of recollection, a typically aesthetic mode of understanding.
Oedipus and Adam
In Kierkegaard’s concept of Adam we see the tragic contradiction be-

tween the individual and the universal intensified, traced back genea-
logically as crime to the first man. The problem is always including
Adam as both member and father of the race (CA, 33 / SKS 4, 340),
both sin’s genus and its species, as Oedipus was both husband and son
to Jocaste, father and brother to Antigone and Ismene, Polynieces and
Eteocles. As human history’s universal condition Adam cannot have
been present within it. “Adam’s sin conditions sinfulness as a conse-
quence” while the sin of every other man “presupposes sinfulness as
a state. Were this the case, were Adam to actually stand outside the
race, the race would not have begun with him but would have a begin-
ning outside itself, something that is contrary to every concept” (CA,
30 / SKS 4, 336). He is both inside and out, “a past that was never
present.”9 Yet as an individual he contributes to this history he fathers
as would have his son, Esau, or anyone else. Adam is the khoric figure
occupying the place outside of history which is likewise history’s be-
ginning. He is both “himself and the race” (CA, 28 / SKS 4, 335).
With Adam as a figure of enhanced tragedy Haufniensis confirms
the anthropology at work within A’s hypothetical reform of Greek
theatre and, along with it, modern culture. Adam becomes the es-
sence of the human, paradoxically safeguarding his descendants from
the philosophical authority of essences, but dooming them to repeat
his collisions. He is the individual from which springs both the uni-
versal necessity of the race and the freedom of individuals like us to
continue to articulate it responsibly. The no place of beginning, the
leap where the individual begins, like Adam, “in the same moment”
is “the place where he should begin in history” (CA, 34-35 / SKS 4,
341-342). Every individual, not just Adam, must “begin anew with the
race” (CA, 34 / SKS 4, 341). Radicalizing this tragic collision between
the individual and the universal with which he breaks transports the
problem of the irrational from the open air of the theatre, the visible
stage of a civic rationality, to the invisible interior of a subjectivity
exaggerated to its limit. While tragic guilt for the ancients was the ob-
jective matter of a predetermined fate, Adam’s collisions are a matter
9
See Jacques Derrida “Differánce” in Writing and Difference, from which the phrase
is borrowed. In a Derridean context, it refers to the ‘A’ within differánce, which
represents a structurally linguistic gap within all languages, acting as their “quasi-
transcendental” condition.
of the freedom of an individual will divided against itself in its share

of sin’s universal inheritance.
The church once knew, Haufniensis writes, how to let thought col-
lide with the unthinkable (CA, 27 / SKS 4, 334). He admires this energy
as opposed to the modern thinking in which the church coddles rea-
son, the way that reason in Medieval times coddled the church.10 Sin,
a revised, fulfilled tragic guilt, re-establishes this collision of the un-
derstanding which destroyed Oedipus, no longer the fact of one man’s
guilt, but the paradoxical idea of the race’s. The wise king wondered:
“perhaps [through some crime] our race had angered the gods long
ago.”11 Kierkegaard answers plainly, “it was Adam’s.” But that answer
is not an answer, only another riddle which there are no wisdoms wise
enough to solve. Thinking this paradox perpetually sends us back to
the well of myth from which Greek poetry draws. Because it offends
the understanding, “ergo it is a myth” (CA, 32 / SKS 4, 339).
Haufniensis uses one myth against another to demythologize what
he calls the myths of understanding (Forstands-Myther). The myth
of Adam is the anti-myth to the demythologizing power of reason.
The present age, he says, reduces Adam to myth in the interest of
mythology’s eradication (CA, 46 / SKS 4, 352). Understanding itself
is a myth, a story that must in defense of its false claims to actual-
ity humiliate the category to which they both belong. But there is
an important difference between the myths of reason and those of
religion. The “myth of the understanding” disturbs or confuses the
concept. Like Hegel’s logic, it is ultimately illogical, while a religious
myth “allows something that is inward to take place outwardly” (CA,
47 / SKS 4, 353).
As in the Oedipus story the meaning of “the Sexual” (det Sexuelles
Betydning) in the Adam story is crucial. “To speak humanly about the
sexual” is an art, writes Haufniensis (CA, 67 / SKS 4, 372). Though in
the role of Christian psychologist he is more interested in the birth of
the sexual per se, in a metaphysics of sexuality, than the actual experi-
ence of it.12 In ignorance, we read, before the fall, the sexual distinc-
10
See Pierre Hadot What is Ancient Philosophy?, pp. 255-258. The function of medi-
val philosophy was to explain and support church dogma. In modernity, the situa-
tion is often reversed. It is now the function of religion to adapt itself to the claims of
reason, as a survival mechanism, perhaps, but more importantly as a way of spread-
ing reason’s dogma. Religion has been enlisted in the service of reason.
11
Oedipus at Colonus, 964-965 (my trans.).
12
Vincent McCarthy The Phenomenology of Moods in Kierkegaard, p. 38: “If Vigilius
is a psychologist, he is supplementing his practice with a good bit of metaphysics.”
tion, like that between soul and body, simply did not exist (CA, 48 /
SKS 4, 354). Sin revealed the sensuous as the sexual, a splitting and
relatedness within Adam (the first man) as man-woman (CA, 48-9 /
SKS 354-355). As the Bible tells us, Eve was a piece of Adam. Human
history begins auto-erotically, and so sexuality here relates directly
to the invocation of history: “without sin there is no sexuality, and
without sexuality, no history. A perfect spirit has neither the one nor
the other” (CA, 49 / SKS 4, 354). A perfect spirit like Adam before
the fall is androgynous, like tragedy’s Bacchus, who “represents the
similarity between manly and womanly beauty” (CA, 65 / SKS 4, 370)
– “and therefore the sexual difference is cancelled in the resurrection,
and therefore an angel has no history” (CA, 49 / SKS 4, 354). Kierke-
gaard anticipates Freud’s Oedipal equation in which sexuality = crime
a half century before the Austrian master. The Fall through sin into
sexuality and likewise history is also the fall into sexual difference,
the anxiety of castration, directed just above the waist now, rib-level,
rather than below.13
All contradiction, Haufniensis writes, is a task. The sexual task,
therefore, is that of becoming sexless (CA, 49, 69 / SKS 4, 354, 373)
as the task of history is to end it. Sexuality expresses the “synthesis
of the psychical and the physical” (det Sjelelige og det Legemlige)14
as a contradiction, related to spirit (Aanden) as a third, which, in one
day putting an end to history, will resolve this alienation of the soul
from the body as well (CA, 43, cf. 71-72, 122, 136-137 / SKS 4, 348 cf.
376-377, 386, 437-439). The tensions of sexuality and the tensions of
history will expire together. But the end of history, of history as desire,
conflict, alienation, and misunderstanding, can’t be accomplished, as
Hegel would have it, in a series of intellectual approximations. It is
only possible as a leap that the nature of man’s situation as a finite
spirit and therefore a sexual and historical being precludes, caught
up as it is in the ¿ÎÍÈ¿Ï¿ÂÍÈÇ¿ ÒÅÐ ÈÒÇÑÃ×Ð – “the eager longing
of creation,” a sign of its inherent imperfection (CA, 57-58 / SKS 4,
13
For good treatment of castration anxiety in Freud, see Ernest Becker’s reading in
The Denial of Death. The recognition of sexual difference and separation from the
mother produces castration anxiety, and the Oedipal desire for sexual union, like
that between father and mother. Taking the father’s place, the child can eliminate
this traumatic difference sexually by reuniting with the mother himself.
14
More literally, this is closer to the difference between soul (Sjæl) and body (Legeme)
than mind and body. Kierkegaard is interested in the moral problem of the embod-
ied soul, not the intellectual problem of a mind obscured by its habitation in a body.
It is a Greek problem, in other words, and not the modern one of Descartes.
361-363). It will be the impossibility of Adam’s sin that provides the

condition of possibility for this leap, paradoxically inviting us to sin as
our way to salvation.
But this mythical language of sex, generation and history only ex-
presses outwardly what is really an unobservable, inward phenom-
enon. The task is not to abstract from the sexual or to annihilate it,
but to spiritualize it (CA, 80 / SKS 4, 383). Herein lie all the moral
problems of the erotic, writes our psychologist, referring us back to
the classical moral psychologists who understood the relation between
desire and reason as their fundamental challenge. But this element of
Kierkegaard’s thought must wait until the following chapters.
The problem of Adam is the tragic one of sex, generation and in-
herited crime, the crossing of father’s and sons, a viral establishment
of the human family in which this family is at the same time crimi-
nally distorted. But while ancient tragedy aestheticized its charac-
ters into an ambiguously objective existence governed by the abstract
necessity of fate, the modern Christian problem at work in Kierke-
gaard’s Adam is that of the individual himself, each of whom is the
same contradiction, both himself and the race (sig selv og Slægten),
an individual who has the Idea as a task (CA, 28 / SKS 4, 335). This
brings us back to motion and to the concept of sin as the inroad to
the question of motion, to the birth of a second ethics from the de-
bauched science of man exemplified in Hegel’s ethics.15 Beginning
was the true task of Adam, as it is for us now. His contradiction is
the primordial task as event from which the history of the race and
its individuals are derived, the original double from which the one,
the idea of man, descends into metaphysics (CA, 30 / SKS 4, 336).
Haufniensis’ analysis of sin is an attack on the entire Greek-philo-
sophical conception of essence and motion, from Parmenides to the
modern science of nature and the physiologized notion of the human
psuchù,16 as well as the ontological history that in Hegel reduces mo-
15
The science of man which dominates our times, Darwinism, was the occassion for
biology and, as a consequence, bio-psychology, to become historical. This would
have been unthinkable without the precedent of Hegel’s philosophy of history, de-
veloped half a century earlier.
16
For Kierkegaard’s relation to the birth of experimenting psychology and the natu-
ralizing of man as an object of scientific study in the 19th century, see Chenxi Tang
“Repetition and Nineteenth-Century Experimental Psychology” in Kierkegaard
Studies: Yearbook 2002.
Wilhelm Wundt opened the first laboratory for experimenting psychology in
1879, in Leipzing, 35 years after the publication of The Concept of Anxiety. This
was the culmination of a movement that may be traced back to Goethe’s research
tion to the stasis of the Idea which governs or grasps it. The indi-
vidual and the race are born simultaneously in the cut of sin between
existence against Idea.
To write of beginnings, of Adam’s beginning, is also to write about
innocence. Innocence (Uskyldighed) for Haufniensis must be distin-
guished from its Hegelian impostor, immediacy (det Umiddelbare).
Immediacy is a logical concept, while innocence belongs to ethics
(CA, 36 / SKS 4, 343). The concept of innocence comes into exist-
ence, he writes, with the corresponding concept of the guilt in which
innocence is lost. There is a forgetting at its origin, a loss. Again, like
the sexual difference and its genealogical gap, which likewise leaves
us open to historical difference, the difference between innocence
and guilt is a moral gap that has never been occupied. It is the loss
of innocence that makes these ethical concepts possible. Innocence
comes into existence “for the first time” “as that which it was before
being annulled and which now is annulled” (CA, 36-7 / SKS 4, 343-
345).17 Like the doubling of the individual and the race in the para-
dox of Adam, innocence and guilt reflect another doubling, that of
knowledge (Viden) and ignorance (Uvidenhed). “The fact that igno-
rance when viewed from without is regarded as something defined in
the direction of knowledge is of no concern whatever to ignorance”
(CA, 37 / SKS 4, 345). While mediation presupposes the immediacy
it reflects, presupposes and therefore contains, this innocent uncon-
sciousness is cancelled by transcendence. It doesn’t flower naturally,
gradually, like history, into knowledge. It is not the Hegelian noth-
ing of beginnings which presuppose their ends, or rather, which the
self-directed end presupposes. The immediacy which comes to life
gradually, embryonically, like the stuff of life is something given to
the animal. “In innocence, man is not merely animal, for if he were
at any moment of his life merely animal, he would never become
man” (CA, 43 / SKS 4, 349). There never was any graduation from
immediacy to mediacy, from blood and marrow to the essence of
man. “The moment he becomes man, he becomes so by being ani-
mal as well” (CA, 49 / SKS 4, 354). Animal innocence is a romantic
on the physiology of perception, in the Farbenlehre (1811). It doesn’t cross over into
psychology until the mid 30’s and 40’s (pp. 101-102), when Kierkegaard’s career gets
into full swing. Tang’s point, that Kierkegaard is criticizing the birth of a new sci-
ence at the time of his writing, is an important one.
17
Nietzsche echoes in the first essay of The Genealogy of Morals, decades later, that
the split between altruism and egoism, good and evil, does not impose itself on pre-
moral man. Of course, he never read Kierkegaard.
fantasy invented along with the metaphysics of man, a dreaming cul-

ture painfully projecting the illusion of a pristine nature left behind.
Still, innocence is something, albeit something lost (CA, 37 / SKS 4,
345). While immediacy is the false beginning of aesthetics, already
recouped by the Judge’s correspondingly abstract idea of the ethical,
or the history of Geist, which both presuppose immediacy as the im-
manently superceded, Adam is the true beginning, without romantic
illusions or the sophistical detachment of a Socrates or a Hegel. He
embodies the paradox that does not reveal itself to the sober scien-
tists of reason or the starry-eyes of poets but preserves itself as a
task for each individual to repeat in the earnestness of religion.
Adam’s Fall: Contradiction and the Fate of Logos
What of that leap from Adam to history, to us? As the tragic hero or
his modern counterpart, the genius, falls to fate, so Adam’s innocence
falls prey to the “foreign power” of anxiety (CA, 43 / SKS 4, 349). The
individual who succumbs to anxiety does so tragically since it is in the
“impotence of anxiety” that “the individual succumbs, and precisely
for that reason he is both guilty and innocent” (CA, 73 / SKS 4, 376).
His fall is not something he does. It is an impotence he performs, a
failure, a loss of power. But rather than a god or fate, as it would have
been on the tragic stage, anxiety displaces the individual from within
through a similar dawning of ignorance. In anxiety the “whole actu-
ality of knowledge” projects itself as “the enormous nothing of ig-
norance” (CA, 44 / SKS 4, 349). It is “a word” that concentrates this
ignorance, three words, in fact, which innocence cannot understand:
good, evil and what it means to die (CA, 44-45 / SKS 4, 349-350). It is
through logos, the word, that innocence encounters the possibility of
guilt and slips into the domain of a first ethics, as it learns to speak this
foreign language from whose tragic hand it innocently feeds.
And so the same paradoxical doubling we encountered in Adam
as the father of the race returns again as the acquisition of moral lan-
guage, i. e., the problem of learning to speak the language of guilt –
‘good and evil’ – which begins with prohibition. Before the fall, these
three words would have been nonsensical, garden chatter, the laughter
of his animals. In coming to morality, Adam faces the problem of gen-
erating new meaning, of hearing something new, which Plato first ex-
pressed in the Meno. But this implies a challenge to metaphysics gen-
erally which emerges first with Kierkegaard:18 how can thinking avoid
the metaphysician’s dictatorship of thought in which all thoughts, eve-
rything intelligible, has already been had ahead of time? The answer
comes in the strange form of a dogmatics of language. The moral au-
thority whom Adam hears in the garden is language itself (CA, 47 /
SKS 4, 353). Language is the teacher who dodges the metaphysical
blow of the Meno, where Socrates reduces all learning to recollection
of a pre-established essence using geometry as his model.
Yet, strangely, it is also Adam himself who speaks. Haufniensis ex-
ploits the myth of Adam in the direction of linguistics and cognition,
discovering in him the paradoxical structure of its origins, that is, how
one gets from non-language to language, from the unnamed and un-
knowable particular – this thing, here, now – to the abstract fluency of
the universal, without presupposing language or the concept itself as
an intermediary step. The ambiguous double behind knowledge and
non-knowledge is now that of speech and silence, echoing that of man
and animal, universal and individual, being and becoming, soul and
body, and even man and woman. But the question of each of these
leaps is unanswerable, another one of philosophy’s trick questions,
posed linguistically, yet presupposing something unspeakably prior
which it now attempts in vain to call forth or recollect (like the aes-
thete recalled his evanescent god in the thiasos of Love-worship, like
Quidam tried desperately to recall his paradoxical guilt). As soon as
the philosopher answers the question he lapses into the comic. Philo-
sophical enthusiasm makes him absent-minded enough that he needs
a good natured, level-headed wife whom he can ask as Soldin asked
Rebecca when in enthusiastic absent-mindedness he also lost himself
in the objectivity of the chatter: “Rebecca, is it I who is speaking”
(CA, 51 / SKS 4, 356).
To quote another German well interested in the limits and falla-
cies of logic, another reader of Kierkegaard, philosophy had better
keep silent when it comes to the world outside of propositions, which
is to say, the world of experience, as opposed to “all that is the case”19
– but especially concerning ethical-religious realities: “He must tran-
scend these propositions and then he will see the world aright. What
18
For more on Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, and the end of metaphysics, see John
Caputo Radical Hermeneutics, ch. 1. See also John Caputo “Kierkegaard and the
Foundering of Metaphysics” in International Kierkegaard Commentary – Fear and
Trembling/Repetition. Repetition is Kierkegaard’s solution/reply to Greek recollec-
tion, which he also identifies with Hegelian mediation.
19
Ludwig Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, prop. 1, p. 7.
we cannot speak about we must consign to silence.” 20 Still, if there is a

language paradoxical enough with which to approach the elusive con-
tours of sin (a trope for human existence as such), the Jewish Greek
of St. Paul provides it. But before we can examine the relevance of
Pauline ‘concepts’ for Kierkegaard’s return to tragedy, we first have to
explore the relation between Greece and Greek-tragic categories and
their repetition in late modernity.
Innocence and Immediacy:

from Greece and Judaism to Modernity
According to Haufniensis, the reign of beauteous health in Greek

culture, the rejection of suffering, expressed a false unaccomplished
synthesis of psuchù and the corporeal in which spirit, the necessary
“third” of the relation, was denied (CA, 65 / SKS 4, 370). Aesthetically
adequating the soul to the body, the beautiful body became a false pic-
ture of the triumphant psuchù. And so Socrates announces the death
of this culture and the birth of the new with the sincerely comic sug-
gestion that “we love only ugly women” (CA, 69 / SKS 4, 373). Spirit’s
recognition of the “foreign” nature of the sexual, its penetration of
the “concealed sham of the erotic” that the “immortal spirit is deter-
mined as genus,” expresses itself in the maxim that “the erotic is both
beautiful and comic” (CA, 69 / SKS 4, 373). Making sport of beauty,
spirit disposes of the contradiction by undermining it ironically from
within in the comic-ironic resolution to love only the ugly.
Greek innocence, such as this, cannot be gained. It can only be
lost. Haufniensis’ perspective on Greece is more radical than it might
seem. On the surface it might simply allude to the obstinacy of history
and the inevitability of a hermeneutical rather than objective under-
standing of the past. Even a move backward is a move forward, since
we always elaborate on the past from a new standpoint, the empty
standpoint of the ‘now’ from which the past is retrieved in a future
interpretation (CA, 86 / SKS 4, 389). We can never attain the past in its
pure state. Even more cannily than this, however, in a hermeneutics of
even greater suspicion, Haufniensis implies that this Greece, at least
for us, never existed. We had never attained the past. The dialectics
between innocence and guilt, ignorance and knowledge, the historical
‘then’ and ‘now’ and the false abstraction of all claims to immediacy,
20
Ludwing Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, props. 6.54 and 7, p. 151.
poetic or philosophic, all point directly to this conclusion. Our Greece

is a reflection of eternity in the fracture of the moment, the mirrors
of past and future (CA, 85 / SKS 4, 388). The first innocence, the in-
nocence of Greece, of reflective immediacy, is false not in the sense of
being incorrect, but, rather, ontologically unjustified. It is nonsense, as
opposed to the contradiction of sin, a token without a type, a postcard
we send our future selves in the empty punctum of the now from some
place that never was.
The dialectic of innocence and guilt repeats itself in the dialectic
between Greece and Christianity, one culture predicated on the ig-
norance of sin and the other on it’s ontological priority for man. But
it is the difference between the two, Haufniensis suggests somewhat
surreptitiously, which makes the distinction possible. The possibility
of innocence, of Greece, emerges when this innocence is lost. Greek
time is past time (CA, 90 / SKS 4, 393), the time of recollection. But
the eternal as the past is an abstract concept (CA, 90 / SKS 4, 393),
whether it is culture we are recollecting or the erotist’s idea of Beauty,
the philosopher’s Truth, or the dazzling face of the Good. The time
of Greece exemplifies a mythic past that was never present, a false
Hegelian image of immediacy, like the romantic vision of nature and
the pure, pornographic passion of the animal, constructed of the dis-
tance between an unclaimed now and an imaginary then. And so the
second innocence, likewise, must move beyond this distinction. This
“victory of love” in which the sexual is forgotten and a true innocence
accomplished, “recollected only in forgetfullness,” is also the commu-
nal leap of the repetition of cultures in which the “cheerful eroticism”
of our imagined Greece is consigned to oblivion (CA, 80 / SKS 4,
383). It is through the relation to fate that this first becomes possible,
through tragedy, the art form in which the harmonious Greece of the
poets and philosophers first revealed its cracks, and Greece itself first
became a thing of the past, even to itself.
Fate without Fate: Providence and the Moment
In Greece, Haufniensis tells us, this anxious relation to spirit as pos-

sibility was external (CA, 96 / SKS 4, 400). It expressed itself in the
complements of fate and the oracle. The genius-lover of romanticism
and the Napoleonic hero are Kierkegaard’s most vivid examples of the
alteration from the outer conflict to the inner, from tragic fate to para-
dox and sin. So we’ll focus now on this world-historical genius, anoth-
er intellectual, whose struggle with the Idea lapses from the promise
of religion into the satisfaction of an inferior desire, not the appetites
of eros, as with Kierkegaard’s aesthetes, but instead ambition, the
spirit of conquest, which drives Napoleon’s fatal winter march east,
through Europe and into Russia. For Kierkegaard, this genius, ob-
sessed by ambition and his own fate, like the anxious, melancholy aes-
thete, fails to understand the collision which has him in its grip. They
both see the relation between self and world, individual and universal,
as something relatively mediable. They both believe they can realize
their Idea in action, in a conquering, be it the maw of the Volga or the
fertile crescent of a young maiden’s thighs.21
Fate here has a distinctly Hegelian ring, defined by Haufniensis as
a necessity which is not yet conscious of itself (CA, 97 / SKS 4, 401).
In relation to the next moment, this necessity operates in the disguise
of an accident. And so it is an accident, for instance, when Oedipus is
rescued as an infant from Kithaeron. It is an accident when he kills the
man who attacked him at the crossroads, wandered past the sphinx
and, after toppling her into the gorge, takes his victim’s place in the
queen’s bed. The necessity unfolding is unapparent. It is an accident
when he utters his fateful curse upon the criminal, upon himself. Fate
is this “unity of necessity and accident” (CA, 97 / SKS 4, 401). Since
fate rests in the ambiguity between necessity and accident, the ora-
cle, the Greeks only advent into fate’s mysteries, becomes the most
ambiguous of institutions. Unlike the modern weather report, which
shamelessly makes up in precision what it lacks in accuracy, the ora-
cle emphasized restraint and, like a modern fortune-teller, palmist
or astrologer kept its numbers up by keeping its predictions nearly
as opaque as fate itself.22 “This is the inexplicable tragicalness of the
21
Traditionally, the sacrifice of young maiden’s like the Seducer’s Cordelia has always
been connected through religious ritual to the hunt. See Walter Burkert Homo Ne-
cans, pp. 63-67: “Man declines to love in order to kill: this is most graphically dem-
onstrated in the ritual slaughter of “the virgin,” the potential source both of a happy
union and of disruptive conflict with the group,” namely jealousy. “In renouncing
love, one’s frustration can be transformed into aggressive ability.” “The maiden
sacrifice provided the basis and the excuse for the subsequent killing, and the res-
titution that followed referred mainly to her “disappearance.” This ritual form is
reflected clearly in Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia, which preceded the Trojan
war as “the sacrifice of Polyxena follows it.”
22
See Grethe Kjær “The Concept of Fate in Stages on Life’s Way” in International
Kierkegaard Commentary – Stages on Life’s Way, p. 246. Kjær draws this parallel
between ancient and modern paganism, evinced in the practices of astrology, palm-
istry, fortune telling or omens.
Greeks,” not the oracle’s ambiguity, but the anxious devotion to its
proclamations, each of which “in turn might signify the exact oppo-
site.” Their tragic character lay, for Haufniensis, in their obsessively
“not being able to forbear counsel with it” (CA, 97 / SKS 4, 401). The
object of their anxiety was the oracular ambiguity driving this tragic
paradox, between fate and necessity, which Christianity discovered
and radicalized in the tidy phrase: “I became guilty by fate.”
The ambiguous omnipotence of fate and oracular language re-
mained ambiguous “because these powers, like fate, are nothing” 23 – a
bogey of man’s invention. Haufniensis diagnoses the culture of oracles
with repression. He sees in fate an attempt to retain control of disas-
ter by positing through the oracle (or perhaps the church, or modern
science) a world-order one has access to, which affords humanity the
possibility of evasion. But as the story of Oedipus is meant to show, the
attempt to control fate through the oracle is bound to recoil. By resist-
ing the oracle Oedipus abandoned Corinth and travelled to Thebes,
where the oracle, of course, was ultimately fulfilled. Like sinewy Ger-
man dialectic all opposition to the oracle is eventually absorbed into
its logic. But, as Napoleon can attest, there is no depending on it. The
star presiding over Napoleon’s great victory over Austria and Russia
at Austerlitz didn’t protect him from the starless skies over Moscow
(CA, 100-101 / SKS 4, 403). 24 And so finally the oracle means nothing.
It is a hollow omen and an empty signifier – an elaborate, cultural fet-
ish. Yet, unsettling as it is, the oracle is the object of a more manage-
able fear than that which it replaced.
The ethical-religious concepts of guilt and sin, however, drive out
this all-present nothing by inventing the single individual “as the sin-
gle individual” (CA, 98 / SKS 4, 401).25 I cannot be made guilty by
fate, at least not on pagan terms. Paganism is too “light-minded” for
the contradiction (CA, 98 / SKS 4, 401). And so the Oedipus of the
Colonnus maintains his innocence. This is absolutely Greek, Hauf-
niensis would say. It takes a thinking as absurd as Christianity’s to
magnify this ambivalence in tragedy to the point of breaking. Only
23
Grethe Kjær “The Concept of Fate in Stages on Life’s Way” in International Kier-
kegaard Commentary – Stages on Life’s Way, p. 247.
24
For more on the allusion, see the Hong’s note 44, on page 247.
25
Yet, this “all present nothing” returns as the “levelling power” of fate in modernity.
See TA, 84, 86, where Kierkegaard identifies leveling as a daimonic force and ‘et
Mere,’ the epic remainder of Greek tragedy he treats in the Either/Or essay. Cf.
Anders Holm “Reflections Correlative to Fate” in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook
1999, p. 162.
when a properly metaphysical guilt breaks forth from the ambiguities

of tragic culpability is fate cancelled and providence posited (CA, 99 /
SKS 4, 403). Fate is directed outwardly, a relation to the contingencies
of “fortune, misfortune, esteem, honor, power, immortal fame – all
of which are temporal determinations” (CA, 101-102 / SKS 403-404).
When providence announces itself the shadow it casts in fate recedes.
It is not the Russian army that defeats a genius like Napoleon, or
Thebes which conquers Oedipus, both of whom take up the mantle of
fate. It is a word, “the significance of which no creature, not even God
in heaven, understands (for in a certain sense God in heaven does not
understand the genius), and with that the genius collapses in impo-
tence” (CA, 100 / SKS 4, 369).
The genius is a man apart from the rest not by virtue of his deeds,
but like Oedipus, through his understanding. Like Adam, he stands
at the beginning, is, a beginning (CA, 105 / SKS 4, 407). He lives all
that is past, an individual who retrieves the universal of the race, its
Idea, and drives it forward. He is “predominantly subjectivity” (CA,
98 / SKS 4, 401), the “omnipotent Ansich” (CA, 99 / SKS 4, 402) of
idealism set over and against the whole world order, 26 a master who
slaves for the Idea, trying to justify himself in it through worldly deeds
whose outcomes are governed essentially by the ambiguity of omen.
The transcendental freedom of genius is a world unto itself which cre-
ates its own rules, thinks what it thinks, makes what it makes, kills
what it kills. But this modern pagan collapses when the support of
his colossal intelligence topples under the anxiety over fate, when the
understanding “rises up with the explanation that it became guilty”
(CA, 98 / SKS 4, 401) – its interpretation of that mysterious word fate
uttered, which even god could not recognize and for which the omens
had been just tropes. But this word was the whispering of genius to
itself: “I am somehow responsible for all of this.” The genius of reflec-
tion can only be undone by the genius himself.
Haufniensis preserves this hero of modern tragedy (a tragedy, again,
which dramatically always fails, because the modern tragic contest
has no external forces which its protagonist must suffer, only the in-
visible pain of ethical responsibility and its struggles with the Idea)
by releasing him from his ominous fates and introducing him into a
new religious category. Here the fates reveal their deeper significance,
26
One is reminded of Fichte’s Ich Ich (I – I). See CA, 153 / SKS 4, 436 f., on construing
the self and its relation to eternity metaphysically – the comedy of a metaphysical
‘I.’
the more profound mystery of individual guilt and sin (CA, 110 / SKS
4, 411). When guilt is freely chosen this freedom returns as repent-
ance (CA, 109-110 / SKS 4, 410-411). The genius struggles unwittingly
against himself and, finally, he loses. Which is to say, he wins. This
omnipotent Ansich was a world. When this world collapses, like an-
ything of cosmic significance, a planet or a star, there is a massive
vacuum, an unbearable lightness where Being abstains. But the total
guilt of this collapse introduces with it an innocence qua lapsed and
the possibility, distinctly religious, now, of its recovery. He becomes
the “genius who is religious” (CA, 107 / SKS 4, 409), whose “special
gift” or “talent” is “that of willing” (CA, 114 / SKS 4, 417). By recog-
nizing divine dispensation, even if its secrets remain unfathomable,
like those of fate, the genius can reconcile himself, take this gift up
freely and decisively as his own responsibility. 27 The accidents of fate
have vanished. There is only providence and comportment – the way I
hold myself, my style – which in chapter eleven we’ll find becomes an
essential part of Kierkegaard’s ethics.
With the actuality of guilt and the “sin-consciousness” (CA, 110 /
SKS 4, 411) driving repentance emerges the new possibility of forgive-
ness and the second innocence. But for this possibility to become real
there must be an interruption within the immanence of the subject.
Guilt and sin are both states originating in the subject, consequences
of pride’s disobedient turn away from God, the rejection of this power
and freedom grounding one’s own. 28 Forgiveness is a foreign power,
like the “foreign power” of anxiety through which the genius stum-
bles into self-declared guilt. A self-forgiving guilt is just short hand for
the spiritual autism of Hegel’s world-historical tautologies, the Pela-
gianism Haufniensis explicitly rejects (CA, 34, 37 / SKS 4, 341, 345).29
Haufniensis warns that the “crazed repentance” in which this subjec-
tivity struggles toward its limit is “a sophism no dialectic can defeat”
(CA, 116 / SKS 4, 418). This is logos gone haywire, which, therefore, no
logos can pacify. As in the case of Quidam, the eloquence of an intel-
27
I follow Kjæer on this point. See Gretha Kjæer “The Concept of Fate in Stages
on Life’s Way” in International Kierkegaard Commentary – Sages on Life’s Way,
p. 249 f.
28
This notion sin as the turn away form god and pride belongs originally to Augus-
tine. See On Free Choice of the Will, bk. iii generally. Kierkegaard pursues the
despairing rejection of God’s establishing power in SUD, 14, 20, 49, 144 / SKS 11,
130, 136, 164.
29
The Pelagians whom Augustine rejected believed man could obtain forgiveness of
sin without god’s merciful grace, under his own power.
lect and imagination inflamed by the consciousness of sin assimilates

every one of reason’s appeals. Forgiveness must come as a rupture.
The repentance of a genius like Quidam’s is “the highest ethical
contradiction” (CA, 117 / SKS 4, 420) – the Christian inheritor to the
tragic art. The contradiction is that ethics requires ideality and re-
pentance gives none. Repentance refuses to barter away the existence
which ideality quickly explains. Yet the deliberation of repentance de-
lays action, while action is “precisely what ethics requires” (CA, 118
/ SKS 4, 421). Another problem with repentance, though, as Quidam
demonstrates, is that without the aid of dogmatic concepts repentance
only ambiguously recognizes what it means to remove. This is what
makes the dogmatic contribution of the doctrine of inherited sin so
crucial. It resolves the tragic ambiguity by magnifying the contradic-
tory terms of tragedy to the point of absolute distance: absolute in-
nocence objectively – absolute guilt subjectively. What had once been
a matter of fate is now one of individual freedom. But this makes
the circumstances more tragic, not less. Only when repentance has
exhausted itself in reflection, arriving at sin – “the dialectical point
where as posited it will annul itself by new repentance and then col-
lapse” (CA, 118 / SKS 4, 421) – does the tragedy end and innocence
begin again, for the first time, in the practice of faith.
Faith achieves the synthesis which for dialectics remains impossi-
ble, since the impossibility of the synthesis was the hermaphroditic
origin the binary logic of all dialectics (e. g., man-woman, knowledge-
ignorance, guilt-innocence, good-evil, speech-silence, animal-man,
Christian-pagan) worked so hard to suppress. Sin and faith are the re-
covery of a dizzy freedom in the concreteness of action, in spite of the
essential mystery and terror which choice involves: that engagement
in marriage might contain a murder, that the wonder of childbirth
might foreshadow the terrible crime of incest or the horror of a living
burial. The madness of agoraphobia, a form of what Haufniensis calls
inclosing reserve, from the perspective of an Oedipus or Antigone
suddenly becomes perfectly intelligible – not because their fates were
fore-ordained, but because only through suffering the impossibility
of choice can God’s providence alert the individual personally to his
presence and give them the power to choose.
Guilt and Logos at the Limits of Reason:

Christianity, Sacrifice and Katharsis
The Christian development of Greek-tragic hamartia allows the ne-

cessity of the hero’s exclusion to become self-conscious and therefore
deliberate. The Greek of the Concept of Anxiety again and again is the
Greek of the New Testament, that is, a Jewish Greek, Saul’s Greek,
that Greek through which Saul became Paul. 30 In tragedies, be they
pagan or Christian, shepherds, literal or figurative, move their human
flock through the word. The power of the word to name, to identify,
likewise reveals a gap in the underlying logos – as the shepherd’s iden-
tification of Oedipus with the infant whom Laius had abandoned on
Mt. Kithaeron reverses all of reason’s claims. But while Greek trag-
edy assigned Oedipus the khoric place in which a divine logos was
displaced into both itself and the human, as a stuttering within it, the
divine logos for Kierkegaard no longer reveals itself as it had to the
Greeks. The wake of modernity has stranded us on these human frag-
ments, which with Hegel have grown out of all proportions, replac-
ing the gods and embracing all of world history. The difference which
shipwrecks the logos this time around is a contradiction immanent to
this universal Subject, which upends the abstract dialectics of recon-
ciliation and salvation and forces each person back into the concrete
task of becoming just that, a human being, where Quidam goes mad in
the Concept and Abraham begins his trek up the mountain.
This existential contradiction is the hamartia of St. Paul rather than
Aristotle. We should translate this Greek word as ‘sin’ and not ‘er-
ror.’ It is a paradox – rather than a mistake to correct – at the heart
of human reason, which reason’s most treasured categories – those
of ‘universal’ and ‘individual’ – presuppose. It is the beginning and
the end of human thinking, not in Hegel’ sense, a Greco-Germanism
in which the whole is immanent in the parts, the ideal in the actual,
but an upended Hegelianism which can never get started because the
beginning is where reason stalls, and if there is to be any beginning
at all, reason must recognize the excluded, expose itself to the abyss
at its foundations. This failure of the “esthetical-metaphysical” (CA,
119 / SKS 4, 422) (and in this odd term we should see Judge William’s
prudence, Kant’s imperative, Bentham’s calculus, Hegel’s Concept, all
of them self-satisfied idealists, successful recollecters, modern pagans
30
Jacques Derrida The Gift of Death, p. 58. Cf. pp. 57 f. Derrida remarks on the sig-
nificance of Paul as a “great Jewish convert.”
in whom the Idea and existence can be comfortably joined), a very

long cultural hiccough interrupting tragedy and Christianity, with the
emendations of sin restores “the significance that tragedy engendered
by showing that the individual was not the source of the tale but had,
in fact, fallen into the hands of another.”31 Now, mirroring the tragic
vision of the aesthete in Either/Or, “the individual’s identity does not
‘as with Wilhelm’ rest upon his identifying with his own history, but
rather upon his identification with a stranger’s storytelling,” with the
Old Testament and Shakespeare. 32
A strange storytelling: “Language, the word,” like it damned the
tragic hero, likewise saves the genius developed religiously from the
suicide path of inclosing reserve (det Indesluttede) (CA, 124, 159 / SKS
4, 425, 458). “Let x signify the demonic, the relation of freedom to it
something outside x. The law for the manifestation of the demonic is
that against its will it ‘comes out with it’” (CA, 124 / SKS 4, 425). What
is this word, then, in which the strange begins to speak, the utterance
of which breaks “sorcery’s enchantment” and wakes “the somnam-
bulist” from his dangerous sleep (CA, 127 / SKS 4, 428)? It is a name:
Oedipus, son of Laius, and so on … Tom, Dick, or Harry. 33 “[A]nd
therefore the somnambulist wakes up when his name is spoken” (CA,
127 / SKS 4, 428). He doesn’t stumble any longer, like the hero or the
genius, accidentally, against the necessities of fate. Suffering and pos-
session by a daimķn, the “foreign power” of anxiety, along with the
proper distortions of intelligence have given him his terrible vision of
providence. He chooses freely, not to be what he wants, but to be who
he is.
The language that calls your name and breaks the muteness of in-
closing reserve is not the language of communication, that sane lan-
guage where the transparency of ideas shift places from one head to
31
Joakim Garff “The esthetic is above all my element” in The New Kierkegaard, ed.
by Jegstrup, p. 63. Garff sees the failure of Judge William’s position in the second
volume of Either/Or as the failure of modernity to learn the above lesson from trag-
edy.
32
Joakim Garff “The esthetic is above all my element” in The New Kierkegaard, ed.
by Jegstrup, p. 65. See EO1, 28 / SKS 2, 37. But this seems to require the fragmenta-
tion of myth and logos which Garff identifies with the modern position and Judge
Wilhelm. This is what makes Wilhelm the editor of his own story. But the frag-
mentation, on the contrary, for A, is what makes all human productions historical.
They are always incomplete, made of what was “left behind,” and then, again, “left
behind” for the next generation.
33
Kierkegaard often refers to the growing mass of merchant bourgeouis as Tom, Dick,
and Harry.
the next. 34 Inclosing reserve, like Hamlet, has “an understanding but
no tongue.” Its victim has become “shut up” in himself, wrapped up in
his collisions and submerged in an “intoxicated state.” He is no longer
“master of himself” but rather a mixture in which one element looks
upon the other, like “someone who was once insane and has retained
a memory of his former state” (CA, 128 / SKS 4, 429). He is divided
against himself like Aristotle’s akratic, the natural state of the soul,
he thought, as reason begins to mature. But the maturity of reason
for Kierkegaard fails to accomplish the predestined authority over the
passions that Aristotle hypothesized, the consolidation of the soul’s
multiple voices under the single voice of reason. Instead, the Idea,
since its embryonic stages in the aesthete’s reflections on his own pas-
sions and pleasures, has up to this point unknowingly pursued its own
destruction.
The self-destructive nature of human logos finally comes to light in
Christian understanding. It places the individual at the hands of lan-
guage per se, another trope for the divine condition that lies behind
the play of man’s dialectics. This is Adam himself, unknowable yet
necessary, impossible but required (CA, 47 / SKS 4, 353). What would
it mean for Adam to be equivalent to a kind of language, not in the
ordinary communicative sense as a kind of tool, since man “was not
the inventor of language” (CA, 47 / SKS 4, 353), but as a paradoxical
leap from the nothing35 of immediacy to the stuff of intelligence, from
the eternally mute body of the animal to the loquacity of the human?
The archù-language of ‘Adam’ would embody the leap of man into his
own history, that leap invoked by/invoking sexual difference (CA, 49 /
SKS 4, 354), the parrying between the individual and the race without
conceivable beginning or end, archù or telos. “To understand and to
understand are two different things,” writes Haufniensis; “for a man
to understand what he himself says is one thing, and to understand
himself in what is said is another” (CA, 142 / SKS 4, 443). Absorbed
in the grammar of faith understanding becomes concrete, free and
34
For an explanation of this conventional understanding of language, see Jacques
Derrida “Signature, Event, Context” in Margins of Philosophy, pp. 311-314. He
takes Condillac’s Essay on the Origin of Human language as its exemplar.
35
This question of the leap, essentially from non-being to being, is the question dealt
with at CA, 82-82 / SKS 4, 385-386, traced by Haufniensis back to Plato’s Parme-
nides. This is exactly the leap which anxiety and faith are meant to accomplish in
the realm of freedom. Plato, however, posed the problem spatially and in meta-
physical terms, thinking being and motion representationally. Still, his concept of
exaiphnùs is one which Haufniensis happily puts to his own ends.
disclosed, yet in a way that holds itself back, caught up in the perform-
ance of the tragic paradoxes embodied in the first of men:
The most concrete content that consciousness can have is consciousness of itself, of the
individual himself – not the pure self-consciousness, but the self-consciousness that is
so concrete that no author, not even the one with the greatest power of description,
has ever been able to describe a single such self-consciousness, although every human
being is such a one. (CA, 143 / SKS 4, 442)
Haufniensis prioritizes logos over being, not the logos of the concept,
but that of action and the self-understanding that takes place in and
through action, not contemplation – through doing, not being. Caught
up in the performance of a contradiction he understands the paradox
more like a swimmer knows how to swim than a physicist knows how
a swimmer swims, terrified at the 70,000 fathoms below and wonder-
ing at his ability to glide above them. Faith’s “capacity to understand”
introduces a new logic that from the human perspective must appear
as “the logic of insanity.”36 “[I]t is not a question of being inconsistent
or illogical, but of deciding what form one’s consistency or logicality
may take.”37
To understand in this way would be to know the god’s language, to
have absorbed this logos through experience which, confirming Qui-
dam’s encounters with a terrible god, Haufniensis describes consist-
ently in terms of violent possession. The eternal is “the wine of life”
which when we drink it turns the present “into something different
from what a person wants it to be” (CA, 152 / SKS 4, 451). The ter-
ror of immortality that haunted both Quidam and the poetic Young
Man removes its kindly aesthetic cloak and presents itself in all of its
destructive and reconstructive force. This begins aesthetically in the
poet’s “profound, unexplained sorrow” and the anxiety with which
the “light-heartedness” of the Greek’s “plastic beauty trembled” (CA,
65 / SKS 4, 370) – the anxiety of the hero over fate and his visits to the
oracle. It proceeds with the modern genius and his omens, concluding
finally in what Climacus calls the crucifixion of the understanding,
a cross for which, by this time, the understanding is ready to furnish
the nails, the katharsis in which “anxiety enters his soul and searches
out everything finite and petty out of him, and then leads him where
36
Training in Christianity, pp. 58, 81, as cited by Westphal. Of course, faith seek-
ing understanding is a familiar theme from Augustine, which Kierkegaad applies.
Westphal gives an account of this other intelligibility of faith. Merold Westphal
Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society, p. 90.
37
J. N. Findlay “The Logic of Mysticism” in Religious Studies 2. As cited in Merold
Westphal Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society, p. 90.
he wants to go” (CA, 159 / SKS 4, 458). In his notion of the logos that
heals, Climacus will return to an ancient analogy between logos and
medical treatment (older, even, than philosophy) in which illnesses of
the soul, especially the perversion of emotion, are subject to the heal-
ing power of words. 38
Following the model tragic plot, anxiety, Haufniensis tells us, dis-
covers and reverses the deception of all finite ends in a tragic encounter
with the god (CA, 155 / SKS 4, 454). Reflected inwardly, this encoun-
ter has now become a matter of how we experience time. Chronologi-
cal, historical time (Tiden), the difference between Greece and Chris-
tianity, for instance – 1800 years between Christ’s appearance and
Kierkegaard’s age – is a derivative, objectivized form of temporality
(Timelighed). It is grounded in an interpretation of temporality based
on the “present.” Construing time in terms of presence implies a “spa-
tialized” understanding built on an “infinitely contentless” now point
through which “every moment, as well as the sum of the moments,
is a process (a passing by).” This is the time of calculations, of regi-
mens and examinations, work deadlines and paid vacations (which,
of course, are always on the clock). But “no moment is a present, and
accordingly there is in time neither present, nor past, nor future” (CA,
85 / SKS 4, 388). Within this ersatz ‘time’ lies the possibility of both
ancient and modern tragedy, the tragic collision depicted by the an-
cient tragedians of the time of the gods with that of men:
[W]hile it is beautiful to listen to a brook running murmuring through life, it is never-
theless comical that a sum of rational creatures is transformed into a perpetual mut-
tering without meaning. (CA, 94 / SKS 4, 398)
This comedy, as we know, with only a small shift in perspective, be-

comes tragic. The contradiction between reason and nonsense is com-
ic from the outside, like the mynah mimicking the profundities I loose
as I pass by its cage. But, from the inside, it is tragic, a soul trapped
inside a body, a human tongue lodged in the mute skull of an animal.
This was the Nebuchadnezzar of Quidam’s diary, an exemplary tragic
38
See Martha Nussbaum The Therapy of Desire, p. 49. Nussbaum cites Iliad, ix. 946:
Achilles’ heart, “swollen up” with the “bile” of anger, Pheonix heals with the di-
vine logoi that go behind strife and exercise a healing function; Pindar Nemean
Odes 8.49 in the Odes of Pindar: his “charm” produces freedom from a troubled
soul; Aeshylus Prometheus Bound, 377: “for the sickness of anger, logoi are the
doctors.”; Empedocles, in frs. B111 & B112, claims to write poems that provide
pharmaka for human ills. See also R. G. A. Buxton Persuasion in Greek Tragedy: A
Study of Peitho.
figure39whose desire for reason (i. e., for meaning, the meaning of a
love, a crime, a death) distorted itself in its expression into something
monstrously foreign: a self-annihilating logos. There is a specifically
tragic form of suffering in this frantic and failed attempt to speak –
possession by an Other that must be expelled through the mouth in
the physicum of words, or even more quiet gestures, traced by the
hand, for instance, in pen and ink.
It is easy to see in Haufniensis’ halcyon description of time as a
babbling brook the obverse image of what a future reader referred
to as the “harassed unrest” which our age has become.40 An abstract
misrepresentation of time as something spatial – something out there,
misrepresentative because based on a representation rather than an
experience or “thought” (CA, 85 / SKS 4, 388) – has terminally di-
minished our sense of reality. The moment has been emptied. But ‘the
moment’ in another sense given to it by St. Paul contains an excess. It
is overfull (CA, 90 / SKS 4, 393).41 The lived flow of human time and
history – ‘temporality’ (Timelighed) – is an overflow, a wash from the
violent intervention of eternity, the wake of its “attempt at stopping
time” (Tiden) (CA, 88 / SKS 4, 392). History, our history, begins with
the spontaneous irruption of the eternal in the purely sensuous and
ahistorical ‘time’ of spiritless nature (CA, 89 / SKS 4, 393) – for which,
ironically, time has no signficance – an abstraction from the concrete
‘temporality’ born of this ‘moment.’ The explosiveness of eternity’s
moment in time is the beginning of a human temporality that the
same generative power all but brings to an end. This experience of the
god in time reprises a vision familiar from tragedy about the limits of
the possible:
No, in possibility all things are equally possible, and whoever has truly been brought
up by possibility has grasped the terrible as well as the joyful. So when such a person
graduates from the school of possibility, and he knows, better than a child knows his
ABC’s that he can demand absolutely nothing of life and that the terrible, perdition,
and annihilation live next door to every man, and when he has thoroughly learned that
39
SL, 351 / SKS 6, 326.
40
See Martin Heidegger “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” in Poetry, Language,
Thought, p. 150.
41
“The fullness of time” is a favored phrase of Kierkegaard’s, from Galatians 4:4. For
Quidam, “The fullness of time is approaching” after his “year of preparation” and
proto-religious disciplines. SL, 202 / SKS 6, 189. Here in the Concept of Anxiety it
is tantamount to the notion of “the moment.” CA, 33n, 90 / SKS 4, 340. It returns in
Climacus’ Fragments as a trope for the “decisive moment” in which the god appears
as teacher, providing the condition of learning, the mark of truth against which the
learner recognizes themselves as untruth. PF, 18 / SKS 4, 227.
every anxiety about which he was anxious came upon him in the next moment – he
will give actuality another explanation, he will praise actuality, and even when it rests
heavily upon him, he will remember that it nevertheless is far, far lighter than possibil-
ity was. (CA, 156 / SKS 4, 455)
Punished by madness, the person who has this experience will choose,
madly, despite the terror that choice implies. His choice is impossible
without it.
Typically the poet restores the harmony between the time of gods
and that of men. Haufniensis, alternatively, displaces this resolution
and relief into which the contradictions of comedy and tragedy and
the anxious evasions of eternity’s event disappear (CA, 154 / SKS 4,
453). In the dramas of human life this resolution would be another de-
ception, he believes, more fodder for aesthetes and pagans. The pseu-
donymous theory of tragedy he completes is more pessimistic than
the Greeks – whom for Haufniensis abide a false harmony between
the flux of the temporal and eternity’s self-same repose – because this
harmony, despite its temporary tragic distortion, Greek thinking even-
tually restores. “The teaching of Christianity cannot be more sharply
illuminated by any opposite than that of the Greek conception that
the immortals first drank of Lùthù in order to forget” (CA, 154 / SKS
4, 453). Plato’s doctrine of recollection, the conception of the world as
an implicitly ordered, meaningful place, a trope for the eternal ideas
which the right instructor can jog from the philosopher’s memory, was
a dream of reason which Greek tragedy disturbed, but a bastard of
logos itself, preserved its yet religious authority in its endings.42 The
language of the gods, eventually, was something men could learn to
speak. Philosophy, too, gave the logos natural to men’s souls power as
a god.43 Greece needed a St. Paul, apparently, and then a Kierkegaard,
to finish the job tragedy had started. Christianity divorces the contest-
ing logoi of tragedy completely and, in the process, subjects the hu-
man logos to a destruction from within, before the kathartic language
of the gods can intervene and clarify the scene.
42
See page 31 and note 65.
43
Both Plato and Aristotle consistently describe reason in terms of god and divinity.
For example, Aristotle Met., 1074b15. “[T]hought is held to be the most divine of all
phenomena[.]” Cf. Plato Republic, 500d, 517d. The practice of philosophy makes
men ordered and divine, like the form of the Good to which it seeks to know, an ob-
ject of divine study. Cf. 518e, 589d, 590d. Reason is divine, and its virtue belongs to
divinity. Cf. 611e. The philosophical element of the soul, that which desires wisdom,
is immortal and akin to the divine.
Closing the Greek byroads of recollection naturally leads to the

question of education, which Kierkegaard was focused on as an
explanation for the limp spirit of his times. The Concept of Anxi-
ety concludes with a Greek fragment concerning the autodidact:
“¿ÓÒÍÓÏÁÍÐ ÒÇÐ ÒÅÐ ÔÇÉÍÑÍÔÇ¿Ð [one who on his own cultivates phi-
losophy]” is “in the same degree ÆÃÍÓÏÁÍÐ [one who tends the things
of God]” (CA, 162 / SKS 4, 460). The cultivation of philosophy as an
art, care, or cultivation of the self is at the same time a cultivation
of god. In chapters ten and eleven, we’ll see just how the philosophi-
cal tragedy Kierkegaard has pseudonymously staged concludes in a
renewed sense of Greek virtue and its care of the self, which, as a
kind of science in Aristotle, had once embraced tragedy to death.
Kierkegaard similarly embraces Aristotle to death, absorbing his
method in fundamental ways but rejecting the rational foundation of
his ethics, recasting the project in the dark light of a reason tragically
conceived, a tragic model of virtue for the present age.
Quoting Hamann in a note on the final page, Haufniensis quietly
adjusts the tune of this project to a tragic drum. The archaic themes
of plague and ritual purification which Aristotle expunged return
in as much technicolor as a psychological manual will allow. “This
impertinent disquiet, this holy hypochondria [of anxiety] is perhaps
the fire with which we season sacrificial animals in order to pre-
serve us from the putrefaction of the current seculi [century]” (CA,
162n / SKS 4, 461). Kierkegaard, via Haufniensis, reverts the logos
of philosophy to that of myth and tragic cult. In the deniers of faith,
should it descend on the Pentheus of our age – the heroic mind of
a Hamlet or a Quidam – this holy madness is terminal. But in the
devoted it leads to a higher logos, the ‘religious ideality’ of a second
ethics. “Whoever has truly learned how to be anxious will dance
when the anxieties of finitude strike up the music and when the ap-
prentices of finitude lose their minds and courage” (CA, 161-162 /
SKS 4, 460-461). The sublime moment in which this dance reaches
its frenzied peak – for those who are able to sustain it, to avoid be-
traying its secret movements in the petty anxieties of hypochondria
or other “finite evasions” (CA, 158 / SKS 4, 457) contrived by the
daimonic (CA, 154 / SKS 4, 453) – smuggles the lance of eternity
past the border guards of the finite. The eternal breaks in upon the
individual in time and “all contradiction is cancelled, the tempo-
ral is permeated by and preserved in the eternal” (CA, 154 / SKS
4, 453). And then the moment passes. The whole terrible motion
begins again. “To think eternity earnestly” (CA, 154 / SKS 4, 453)
for Kierkegaard – and this, he councils, is our present task – means

constantly dancing St. Vitus’ dance.44
44
St. John’s or St. Vitus’ dance was a dancing sickness which spread through medi-
eval Europe, a case of ecstatic possession among Christians analogous to that of
the Bacchants of Ancient Greece. It developed into an annual ritual, and, in some
places, even a festival. See E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 272 (ap-
pendix).
Chapter 10
Moral Psychology in the Pseudonyms,
Search for a Method
Repetition: The Psychologist
While psychology in Kierkegaard’s hands remains a valuable tool in

the care of the self, as it had been for Plato and Aristotle, he never
lays this science of the soul bare in any conventionally scientific way.
Before in chapter eleven we can examine its actual use, the singularity
of his authorship demands an exposition of its principles and method,
since at this point it would be false to presume that we understand
what ‘psychology’ means for Kierkegaard. There are three psycholo-
gists on Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous record, Constantin Constantius,
Vigilius Haufniensis, and Anti-Climacus. A fourth, Frater Taciturnus,
works in “imaginary [experimenterende] psychological constructions.”
Reading these four figures together, it immediately becomes apparent
that Kierkegaard has very strict ideas about the nature of psychologi-
cal investigation, its inherent limits, and the potential dangers implicit
in the naturalistic turn modern psychology is consolidating as his au-
thorship gets underway.
The psychologist for Kierkegaard does not come by his profes-
sion accidentally. He has a distinct personality type with a particular
world-view whose significance only becomes apparent when contex-
tualized alongside other representative types. We can begin by look-
ing at Constantin Constantius, that formerly passionate Stoic whose
“venture in experimenting psychology” (R, 125 / SKS 4, 7) leads the
reader from the melancholy of the Young Man who has fallen into
his council to the religious pathos of Job. Between these passions in
the cool parentheses of his study remains Constantius, an inspector
whose analyses of the passions are only possible given his Stoical re-
move and purely “objective theoretical interest” (R, 180 / SKS 4, 52).
The Young Man he takes into his confidence describes this calculative
mood at which Constantius has long trained (R, 180 / SKS 4, 52) with
an equally passionate protest to its morbidity: “Is it not, in fact, a kind

of mental disorder to have subjugated to such a degree every passion,
every emotion, every mood under the cold regimentation of reflec-
tion!” (R, 189 / SKS 4, 59) – “It is true, every word is true, but it is a
truth so very cold and logical, as if the world were dead” (R, 191 / SKS
4, 27). In addition to this world-murder, the Young Man accuses the
observing psychologist of nourishing himself morbidly on the victims
of his science. “When a girl becomes unhappy, then along come all
those ravenous monsters wanting to satiate their psychological hunger
and thirst or to write novels” (R, 194 / SKS 4, 65).
What Nietzsche later sniffs out in the Birth of Tragedy Constan-
tius demonstrates voyeuristically in his studious relation to the Young
Man, “just as enchanting to the eye as a young girl,” (R, 135 / SKS 4,
13) – as well as the observation of young girls themselves in the out-
skirts of Copenhagen (R, 147 / SKS 4, 24) and at the theatre (R, 167
/ SKS 4, 41): there is an essentially erotic passion underlying the ap-
parently dispassionate inspections of science. They are two variations
on the same interest in “the interesting.” Constantius’ psychological
interest is the cynicism in which the path of the erotist and romanti-
cism dead ends, a truth observed by no less keen an eye than Constan-
tius’, a poet of our own, when she writes that “all romantics meet the
same fate some day, cynical and drunk, and boring someone in a dark
café.”1 And though he’s no drinker he does spend plenty of time, as
did Kierkegaard himself, languishing in cafés. His fate was sealed in
the moment that the poetic zeal of his youthful passion failed him:
At one time I was very close to complete satisfaction. I got up feeling unusually well
one morning. My sense of well-being increased comparably until noon; at precisely
one o’ clock, I was at the peak and had a presentiment of the dizzy maximum found
on no gauge of well-being, not even on a poetic thermometer. My body had lost its ter-
restrial gravity; it was as if I had no body simply because every function enjoyed total
satisfaction [...] Every mood rested in my soul with melodic resonance. Every thought
volunteered itself jubilantly, the most foolish whim as well as the richest idea [...] All
existence seemed to have fallen in love with me, and everything quivered in fateful
rapport with my being. [...] As stated, it was one o’clock on the dot when I was at the
peak and had presentiments of the highest of all; when suddenly something began to
irritate one of my eyes, whether it was an eyelash, a speck of something, a bit of dust, I
do not know, but this I do know – that in the same instant I was plunged down almost
into the abyss of despair, something everyone will readily understand who has been
as high up as I was and while at that point has also pondered the theoretical question
of whether absolute satisfaction is attainable at all. Since that time, I have abandoned
every hope of feeling satisfied absolutely and in every way, abandoned the hope I had
1
Joni Mitchell “Last Time I Saw Richard” on Miles of Aisles.
Moral Psychology in the Pseudonyms, Search for a Method 239
once nourished, perhaps not to be absolutely satisfied at all times but nevertheless at
certain moments, even though all those instances of the moment were no more, as
Shakespeare says, than “an alehouse keeper’s arithmetic would be adequate to add
up.” (R, 173-174 / SKS 4, 46 f.)
And so now, rather than passionate himself, Constantin has become a

psychologist, which is to say, an erotic scrutinizer of passions in both
himself and others. He is a theatregoer, an “observer” who delights
at a distance, whose “duty” and “art” like the aesthete’s is “to expose
what is hidden,” seduce it into the open. He shares not only the form
of poetic existence but also the mood, his observation producing “the
same melancholy effect as being a police officer” (R, 135 / SKS 4, 12).2
He later muses himself that “mental activity and pastimes of the im-
agination” are “the most perfect substitutes for all erotic love,” “not at
all accompanied by the inconveniences and disasters of erotic love,”
evincing “a definite similarity” to what is most beautiful in its bliss (R,
183-184 / SKS 4, 54-55).
“The observer,” however, unlike the beat cop, has a poet’s capacity
for imaginative variation. The ledgers of his psychological practice are
not those of objective memory, but rather the poetic recollection prac-
ticed by the aesthetes of In Vino Veritas, gathered in their worship
of Love. For Kierkegaard’s psychologists, “[w]hat holds for the poetic
production also holds for the scientific.” 3
[W]ith the first shudder of presentiment, my soul has simultaneously run through all
the consequences [...] an observer should be so constituted, but if he is so constituted,
he is also sure to suffer exceedingly. The first moment may overwhelm him almost to
the point of swooning, but as he turns pale, the idea impregnates him, and from now
on he has investigative rapport with actuality. If a person lacks this feminine quality
so that the idea cannot establish the proper relation to him, which always means im-
pregnation, then he is not qualified to be an observer, for he who does not discover the
totality essentially discovers nothing. (R, 146 / SKS 4, 23)
The psychological observer discovers the totality by absorbing the liv-

ing idea of that which he observes, abstracting from the fragments of
individual experience to the categories which govern all phenomena
within one or another category (since “the phenomena within the cat-
egory obey it as the spirits of the ring obey the ring”).4 The idea pene-
2
Vincent McCarthy The Phenomenology of Moods in Kierkegaard, p. 54. Melan-
choly, in Kierkegaard, expresses a frustrated desire for an impossible, erotic object.
3
Kresten Nordentoft Kierkegaard’s Psychology, p. 4. See page 7, pages 1-15 generally,
on Kierkegaard’s methodology, which it is “more natural to compare to the psycho-
analyst.”
4
CA, 127n / SKS 4, 428. See Kresten Nordentoft Kierkegaard’s Psychology, p. 11. He
has a similiar reading of the categorial in Kierkegaard’s psychology as an abstraction
trates him not just intellectually, but also emotionally, until finally the
living nature of his object reveals itself through his poetic-intellectual
capacities.
The phenomena completes itself and acquires its meaning in and
through the psychologist’s artful experience and potential mastery of
himself, through what Constantius later describes as “the passion of
possibility” in which personality first begins to develop (R, 154 / SKS
4, 30-31). The psychologist has an “artistic eye for life” (R, 217 / SKS 4,
84) that he concentrates inwardly on himself. The scientific technique
of psychology is likewise an art of life in the ancient, Socratic sense of
a technù tou biou – an art of the human and care of the self. 5 The ob-
ject of Constantius technique is human life, which he thinks in terms
of moods, of happiness, first of all, but also the unhappiness of recol-
lection (R, 131 / SKS 4, 9) against which he measures the possible hap-
piness of repetition (the repetition of former happinesses he always
fails to achieve) and the infinite mix of other possible passions. “Rep-
etition, therefore, if it is possible, makes a person happy” (R, 131 / SKS
4, 9) – “he who wills repetition is a man, and the more emphatically he
is able to realize it, the more profound a human being he is.” “Life is a
repetition” which one must have the “courage to understand” and the
“desire to rejoice in” (R, 132 / SKS 4, 10-11).
Psychic Collision as Object of Study:

Reason, Language and the Passions
Constantius defines the poet-lovers whom he studies in terms of “po-

etic collision” (R, 140 / SKS 4, 17), “a dialectical resiliency productive
of mood” (R, 229 / SKS 4, 95). This principle of the poetic concerns the
from lived experience, though without the naive 19th century pretense of disinter-
ested self-observation (p. 3). Since psychological phenomena always refer back to
ethically engaged individuals, studying them requires, rather than precludes, involv-
ing oneself in the experiment.
5
Technù in the ancient sense refers to what we would call both ‘arts’ and ‘sciences.’
See Martha Nussbaum The Fragility of Goodness, pp. 94-99. Science in the strict
sense developed by Aristotle, epistùmù, would apply only to mediate knowledge of
immutable things, such as, in modern physics, claims about natural reality underly
the applied science of medicine and the sub-science of psychiatry. See the distinc-
tion at EN, 1140b2, 1112b27. But even in Aristotle the two terms can be used inter-
changeably, as in Met., i.1.
Cf. R, 145 / SKS 4, 22. Constantius makes a similar claim about the “art” of being a
man. “Only he who actually can love, only he is a man. Only he who can give his love
any expression whatsoever, only he is an artist.”
same Idea we have been tracking in other pseudonymous works. The

Idea “was indeed in motion” (and it is the ‘Idea’ that gives every mo-
tion and emotion significance) via the passionate collision of the poet’s
love (R, 140 / SKS 4, 17). For the poetically minded, the actual woman,
for instance, always suffers “the wrath of the idea.” She always comes
up short, “for no beautiful woman can be as exacting as the idea” (R,
141 / SKS 4, 18-19). The aesthetic objects of poetic eros are the visible
form of something the soul seeks elsewhere (R, 141 / SKS 4, 18-19).
And though sober Apollo was leader of their muses Kierkegaard’s
poets are dominated by the “dark passions” which break out wildly
when actuality fails to sustain their erotic idea (R, 139 / SKS 4, 16-17).
The erotist has fallen into contradiction with himself (R, 179 / SKS 4,
50) and so his governing Idea becomes something he suffers. His “soul
has a religious resonance,” leaping with a “dithyrambic joy” one mo-
ment, contorted in an anguish the next, which he finds expressed most
purely in Job, whose tragedy is more tragic than the tragic plays of the
mad god themselves (R, 204 / SKS 4, 73).6
The Young Man’s letters to Constantius speak of the healing which
Job’s words work on the “mute nausea of passion” in his “wretched
soul” (R, 204 / SKS 4, 73). Job becomes a model for moral psychology
at the extremities of religious experience. His “significance is that the
disputes at the boundaries of faith are fought out in him, that the co-
lossal revolt of the wild and aggressive powers of passion is presented
here” (R, 210 / SKS 4, 78-79). The Young Man explains this to the psy-
chologist by grafting Job’s tragedy on to a Sophoclean root. “Nowhere
in the world has the passion of anguish found such expression. What
are Philoctetes and his laments, which remain continually earthbound
and do not terrify the gods? What is Philoctetes’ situation compared
with Job’s, where the idea is continually in motion?” (R, 204 / SKS 4,
73). It is no wonder that the tumultuous language of Job has an ap-
peal for such a passionate Young Man, and a kathartic effect (R, 210
/ SKS 4, 78-79). But most important is the psychological insight that,
as the Concept of Anxiety, we’ve seen, echoes, it is the language itself
that heals the passions. “These I understand; these words I make my
own” (R, 206 / SKS 4, 74). Job’s anguish and horror become his “just
as one becomes ill with the sickness one reads about” (R, 206 / SKS
6
R, 204 / SKS 4, 73. “Nowhere in the world has the passion of anguish found such
expression. What are Philoctetes and his laments, which remain continually earth-
bound and do not terrify the gods. What is Philoctetes’ situation compared with
Job’s, where the idea is continually in motion.”
4, 74). “Half a word – and my soul rushes into his thought” (R, 205 /
SKS 4, 74).
This passionate appropriation of the language of suffering echoes
the psychologist’s own description of how the passionate rift with the
Idea anguishing the Young Man’s soul might be healed, in the midst
of suffering a tragedy:7
In a mountain region where day in and day out one hears the wind relentlessly play
the same invariable theme, one may be tempted for a moment to abstract from this
imperfection and delight in this metaphor of the consistency and sureness of human
freedom. One perhaps does not reflect that there was a time when the wind, which for
many years has had its dwelling among these mountains, came as a stranger to this
area, plunged wildly, absurdly through the canyons, down into the mountain caves,
produced now a shriek almost startling to itself, then a hollow roar from which it itself
fled, then a moan, the source of which it itself did not know, then from the abyss of
anxiety a sigh so deep that the wind itself grew frightened and momentarily doubted
that it dared reside in this region – then a gay lyrical waltz – until having learned to
know its instrument, it worked all of this into the melody it renders unaltered day after
day. (R, 155 / SKS 4, 32)
The picture of an education of the passions in which the soul is tuned

like an instrument is an ancient one, an essential part of the classical
moral-psychological tradition.8 Constantius tips us off to the Greek
influence on his method by placing himself in the figure of the sage,
lamenting that “if only” the Young Man had had some of his wisdom
things might have come off better, since “it is always good to have
done everything human sagacity can prescribe” (R, 216 / SKS 4, 84).
As we’ll see in the final chapter, ‘sagacity’ is typically a trope in the
authorship for Greek eudaimonism. Like the Greeks, Constantius be-
lieves that practice in a logos is how one forms not just a mental life,
but a ‘bios’ in the fullest sense – a form of life – from the toes on up:
“My friend is a poet, and this romantic faith in women is intrinsic to
a poet. With all due respect, I say that I am a prose writer” (R, 218 /
SKS 4, 85).
7
See R, 155 / SKS 4, 31-32: “It is tragic or comic if the individual makes the mistake of
living out his life in it,” writes Constantius, “It” being the “shadow-existence” of the
imagination which precedes the development of personality. “Only the imagination
is awakened to his dream about the personality; everything else is still fast asleep.
In such a self-vision of the imagination, the individual is not an actual shape, but a
shadow, or, more correctly, the actual shape is invisibly present and therefore is not
satisfied to cast one shadow, but the individual has a variety of shadows, all fo which
resemble him and which momentarily have equal status as being himself.” R, 154 /
SKS 4, 30-31. For another description of the young man as tragic-comic figure, see
R, 229 / SKS 4, 70.
8
Werner Jaeger Paideia, vol. 1, pp. xxvii, 293.
Experiments in Sympathy:
A Theory of Psychology in The Concept of Anxiety
If Kierkegaard gives us Constantius as the exemplary scientist of the

soul, Haufniensis, both a psychological and religious writer, delimits
the category of Constantius’ science from the distance of the dogmati-
cian. No clinician himself – without a single patient, such as Constan-
tius’ Young Man – Haufniensis provides the theory which grounds
Constantius’ practice. But hereditary sin, the issue of his psychologi-
cal deliberations, “exceeds any and all science” (CA, 9, 16 / SKS 4, 317,
324). This makes him a paradoxical scientist, operating outside the
boundaries of his own discipline. Approaching the object of his obser-
vations becomes a fragile enterprise. He goes through great lengths to
secure the possibility of an encounter which might yield some credible
discovery by first distinguishing sin according to the Aristotelian cat-
egories of possibility and actuality.
Psychology cannot study sin as it actually exists. The subject of psy-
chology “must be something that remains in restless repose” (CA, 21
/ SKS 4, 329) as opposed to the restlessness of freedom from which
dogmatically sin is said to arise. Psychology therefore can study pre-
dispositions, such as character, and such a “predisposing presupposi-
tion, sin’s real possibility, is a subject of interest for psychology. That
which can be the concern of psychology and with which it can occupy
itself is not that sin comes into existence [bliver til],” or, what it is, “but
how it comes into existence,” its possibility. “Psychology can bring its
concern to the point where it seems as if sin were there, but the next
thing, that sin is there, is qualitatively different from the first” (CA, 21
/ SKS 4, 329).
That psychology stops at “coming into existence [Tilblivelse]” is a
necessary humiliation for psychologists who would arrogate more in-
sight into existence than their science justifies with a simple “confu-
sion” of “the concept” (CA, 21 / SKS 4, 329). This “last disappoint-
ment reveals the impotence of psychology and merely shows that its
service has come to an end” (CA, 22 / SKS 4, 329). It is “unwittingly
in the service of another science that only waits for it to finish so that
it can begin and assist psychology to the explanation” (CA, 23 / SKS
4, 330). Dogmatics provides the ontology of sin which psychological
explanations require, furnishing the ‘ideal’ conditions of possibility
for the ‘real’ possibility of sin embodied in states of character. While
the second ethics, which presupposed dogmatics, “has the actuality
of sin within its scope,” “here psychology can intrude only through a
misunderstanding” (CA, 23 / SKS 4, 330). Psychology must for its own

sake restrict itself in principle to the domain of possibility.
To remain significant psychology must remain within its own quar-
ter (CA, 39 / SKS 4, 345). “[I]t must guard against leaving the impres-
sion of explaining that which no science can explain and that which
ethics explains further only by presupposing it by way of dogmatics”
(CA, 39 / SKS 4, 345). When it does apply itself correctly, further
stipulations apply. “The psychological explanation”9 must “remain in
its elastic ambiguity” by avoiding explanations (like Baader’s) of the
leap from the possibility of sin to its actuality (CA, 39n-40n / SKS 4,
345-346).10 The moral-psychological question of how to cultivate our
desires, as relevant classically as Kierkegaard suggests it remains for
us today, for Haufniensis presupposes the leap which dogmatics ex-
plains through the paradoxical doctrine of Adam’s sin. If ethics is to
apply itself to the problems of desire, it must first persuade science
to step aside and, second, convince this unscientific psychology that
it explains nothing of the actual phenomena it studies, the grasp of
which depends on language it cannot justify. It begins and concludes
in a mystery whose possibility, as observer, it is merely allowed to
describe. It is “the only science that can help,” “yet it admits that it
explains nothing, and also that it cannot and will not explain more”
(CA, 51 / SKS 4, 356). Its quarter is the observatory, though there are
no figures below its deck, only the shadow-existence of possibilities.
“Further than this, psychology cannot go, but so far it can go, and
above all, in its observation of human life, it can point to this again
and again” (CA, 45 / SKS 4, 351).
Haufniensis on Greek Virtue and the Analogy with Medicine
Psychological observation, for Haufniensis, like the ancient moral-

psychological tradition tends to parallel the medical art. The observer
he warns must “exercise the caution of physicians” (CA, 71 / SKS 4,
9
Kierkegaard refers us to Usteri’s psychological explanation of the Fall, Entwick-
elung des Paulinischen Lehrbegriffes mit Hinsicht auf die ubrigen Schriften des
Neuen Testamentes. The Danish translation was part of Kierkegaard’s library.
ASKB 850.
10
Franz Baader is Kierkegaard’s example of one who oversteps the boundaries of his
science, by scientifically using the theology the science itself purports to explain,
specifically the doctrine of concupiscientia [inordinate desire]. CA, 40 / SKS 4, 346.
“At this point psychology has already gone beyond its competence.”
376). The objectivity of the physician, however, would be out of place.11

The observing psychologist has to cultivate the kind of “sympathy”
that “admits rightly and profoundly to oneself that what has happened
to one human being can happen to all. Only then can one benefit both
oneself and others.” Haufniensis continues, “The physician at an in-
sane asylum who is foolish enough to believe that he is eternally right
and that his bit of reason is ensured against all injury in this life is in a
sense wiser than the demented, but he is also more foolish, and surely
he will not heal many” (CA, 54 / SKS 4, 359). The doctor of the mind
or soul ought to bring a sympathy to his work which blurs the profes-
sional distinction between doctor and patient, subject and object, art-
ist and art.
Through these experiments in sympathy the psychologist develops
a “general human flexibility” whose examples, though they lack “fac-
tual authority,” have “an authority of a different kind” (CA, 54 / SKS
4, 359). This requires a poetic originality (such as Constantius’) whose
dexterity with the Idea can “create both the totality and the invariable
from what in the individual is always partially and variably present”
(CA, 55 / SKS 4, 360). The imaginative powers of the poet relate the
individual to the Idea without reducing him to “notarized facts” or
subordinating psychological reality to “a rule” (CA, 54 / SKS 4, 359).
Nothing but a “general practice” (CA, 55 / SKS 4, 360) can provide
this orientation in human life and the “inquisitorially sharp eye” (CA,
55 / SKS 4, 360) behind “true psychological-poetic authority” (CA, 54
/ SKS 4, 359). Psychology – like poetry, lyric poetry in particular – is
both a study and an exercise in the passions. The psychologist “imi-
tates in himself every mood, every psychic state that he discovers in
another,” which are his own creations “by virtue of the idea” (CA, 55
11
See CA, 62 / SKS 4, 367. Haufniensis further distinguishes the existential psycholo-
gist from the physician, whose domain, he suggest, is nature. The difference in at-
titude then corresponds to a difference in object, human life, on the one hand, and
natural life on the other. Cf. CA, 121 / SKS 4, 423. The physician’s “medical-ther-
apeutic” diagnosis mistakes the psychological for the purely “physical-somatic,”
comically treating it with “powders and with pills, and then with enemas!” For a
similar rejection of naturalistic psychology, see CA, 135 / SKS 4, 437. Throughout
the authorship the gap between the psychologist and the physician is essential. He
recognizes that medicine has taken a turn from the Greeks, and so greek medicine
is given impunity from his criticisms of the medical approach today: “Yet in our
day one fears what Socrates somewhere prescribed, to be cut and cauterized by the
physician in order to be healed” (CA, 121 / SKS 4, 423). If there is a kind of therapy
required, it is the cutting and burning of the embodied soul, which he points to at
Plato Gorgias, 479a.
/ SKS 4, 360).12 He “fictitiously invents the passion” which appears “in

a preternatural magnitude” (CA, 56 / SKS 4, 360). What was first de-
scribed as “predisposing presuppositions” takes on the emotional lan-
guage of passions and mood, equated by Haufniensis with “states” of
the soul, or, to return to Aristotle’s language, hexeis. When he muses
that “to speak humanly about the sexual is an art” (CA, 67 / SKS 4,
372) we can easily surmise that the art he refers to here is closest to
the moral psychology of the ancients, a vertiginous adaptation of the
Aristotelian technù of human passions, deprived now of the solidity
of its metaphysical ground. He connects the sexual directly to “all the
moral problems of the erotic” (CA, 80 / SKS 4, 383) and adds that “[i]
f an observer will only pay attention to himself, he will have enough
with five men, five women, and ten children for the discovery of all
possible states of the human soul” (CA, 126 / SKS 4, 427).
These states of soul implicating the psychologist himself in the moral
problem of the passions have a distinctly Greek ring, and so it ought to
come as no surprise when Haufniensis connects this “state” to Aristo-
tle’s notion of movement (CA, 82n / SKS 4, 351).13 Unlike the necessary
“state” of plant life studied by science (CA, 21 / SKS 4, 329), psycho-
logical states pertain to actuality and historical freedom. The mood or
passion which most interests Haufniensis is anxiety, the “psychological
state” preceding sin (CA, 92 / SKS 4, 395). “Ethically speaking, sin is
not a state. The state, however, is always the last psychological approxi-
mation to the next state. Anxiety is at this point always present as the
possibility of the new state” (CA, 114-115 / SKS 4, 417). If psychology
studies states as possibilities, Haufniensis enlists the Greek language of
virtue (states of character, as Aristotle defines it) to study a specifically
modern phenomenon that only comes into focus, he believes, within
dogmatic categories: anxiety as the psychological state which precedes
the actuality of sin as a condition of possibility (CA, 113 / SKS 4, 414).
The intellectual education of the passions in terms of ancient Greek
virtue is an essential part of Haufniensis’ project. Understanding
must develop the virtue of courage, which cannot happen until the
“appetites of the wishing soul” have been subdued (CA, 102 / SKS 4,
404). Otherwise the passions, as in the classical psychologies, can get
the upper hand. The individual can “lose the reigns of government,”
12
See CA, 76 / SKS 4, 379. He speaks similarly of appropriating psychological states
as the task of investigation.
13
See CA, 82n-84n / SKS 4, 386-387. He refers us to both Plato and Aristotle, actually,
but finds in Plato a metaphysical reduction of “the moment” of motion/freedom to
“silent atomistic abstraction.”
dragging “the individual along like a woman whom the executioner

drags by the hair” (CA, 115 / SKS 4, 417) – “The body is the organ of
the psuchù and in turn the organ of the spirit. As soon as the serving
relation comes to an end, as soon as the body revolts, and as soon as
freedom conspires with the body against itself, unfreedom is present
as the demonic” (CA, 136 / SKS 4, 438). The loss of rational freedom
depends upon freedom’s conspiracy with the body against itself. It is
never a matter of the modern Cartesian dilemma of body versus mind,
but rather of the tarrying of ideas in which the direction of the body’s
passions are at stake.
Building on Constantius’ insight, Haufniensis claims that different
types of logos lead to either virtuous or vicious states in the soul. Anxi-
ety, we read, as it drags the individual away from the expansiveness of
the “passion of freedom” (CA, 120 / SKS 4, 423) and deeper into the
self-enclosure of sin becomes the playground of an “ingenious soph-
istry” (CA, 113 / SKS 4, 415). It incites a crazed repentance whose “pas-
sion is far more powerful than true repentance,” in which the passions
have been gripped by anxiety over sin, “a horror” whose “elementary
eloquence” cannot be stopped “by words and phrases” (CA, 116 / SKS
4, 418-419). Instead, “the highest passions” here have taken the reigns
of understanding. They force it to speak a fanatical language bordering
on the senseless, such as the gestural language of hypochondria (symp-
toms as signs of something physical that point, physically, to nothing)
and capriciousness (CA, 124 / SKS 4, 425). It is a battle of logoi in which
the idea collides with itself, forcing the individual into the passionate
self-enclosure of “the demonic,” the state and “possibility” from which
“the sinful act can constantly break forth” (CA, 123 / SKS 4, 425).
Haufniensis follows in the manner of the ancient moralists with a list of
the vices this can produce, which “appear in connection with the sensu-
ous in man (addiction to drink, to opium, or to debauchery, etc.) as well
as in connection with the higher (pride, vanity, wrath, hatred, defiance,
cunning, envy, etc.)” (CA, 116 / SKS 4, 418-419).
The enterprise of Greek philosophy, Plato and Aristotle famously
record, began with wonder. In his own theory of the passions, Hauf-
niensis alludes to Descartes’ theory of the affections and points out
that “the fundamental error of recent philosophy” is that “it wants
to begin with the negative,” that is, with a disembodied doubt, rather
than the Greek passion of wonder (CA, 146n / SKS 4, 445). And so a
philosophy of the passions, ironically, may demand that the philoso-
pher himself undergo a certain education of the soul, in which the
passion of wonder is re-established as a positive beginning for reflec-
tion, rather than the vacuum of skepticism. If wonder is the original

philosophical mood, Haufniensis defines its telos in terms of earnest-
ness.14 He describes this earnestness as “the deepest expression for
what disposition is” (CA, 148 / SKS 4, 449), “the acquired originality
of disposition” (CA, 149 / SKS 4, 450). Borrowing from Rosenkranz’s
Psychology, Haufniensis gives a definition of disposition (Gemyt)
which no doubt sends us back to the Greeks in whose wonder psycho-
logical reflection originated:
[…] that the feeling unfolds itself to self-consciousness, and vice versa, that the content
of the self-consciousness is felt by the subject as his own. It is only this unity that can
be called disposition. If the clarity of cognition is lacking, knowledge of the feeling,
there exists only the urge of the spirit of nature, the turgidity of immediacy. On the
other hand, if feeling is lacking, there remains only the abstract concept that has not
reached the last inwardness of the spiritual existence, that has not become one with
the self of spirit. (CA, 148 / SKS 4, 449)
The collaboration of emotion and reason, their mutual value and de-
pendence, was, as we’ve seen, an exceptional feature of Aristotle’s
psychology. Moral education was a matter of educating the passions
of the body as well as the intellect, not merely enslaving the former
to the latter, or passing through them on the way to another kind of
knowledge.15 The individual phronimos had to learn to feel at the
14
See John Davenport “Toward an Existential Virtue Ethics: Kierkegaard and Mac-
intyre” in Kierkegaard After Macintyre, pp. 276-283.
15
There is nowhere near room enough to compare in detail the status of the passions
for Aristotle, their potential complicity with reason, with their status for Plato. But
it may be worth making some preliminary qualifications as well as gestures toward
places in Plato’s texts from which this question can be broached.
In the Republic the appetites are clearly blind and, while not without cognitive
features (as in the case of Leontius’ pensient for looking at the dead bodies of pale,
young boys, 440a2-3), remain mindless slaves either to reason or their own mad
fatality. T. H. Irwin Plato’s Moral Theory, pp. 123 f., 193-195; Jonathan Cooper
Reason and Emotion, pp. 128-130; Martha Nussbaum The Fragility of Goodness,
p. 205 f., and on Aristotle, pp. 307-309. On the cognitive features of the irrational
parts of the soul, see Terry Penner “Thought and Desire in Plato” in Plato II, ed. by
Vlastos, pp. 99-101, 110. A similar disestablishment of the irrationality associated
with having a body takes place at Timaeus, 69cd, where the immortal daimķn of
reason is said to have attached to it a mortal psychù containing terrible passions.
This other kind of soul is distinct from it, has a different origin, and is kept separate
so as to avoid contamination.
Alternatively, the implicitly rational desire of erotic appetite in the Symposium,
as well as the mad eros of the Phaedrus, which actually holds sway over reason,
seem to represent possible exceptions to the more explicit psychology of the Repub-
lic. On the daimķn of eros in Plato’s Symposium as a mediator between animality
and divine rationality in human being, see E. R. Dodds “Plato and the Irrational
right times, towards the right objects and people, with the right mo-
tive, and in the right way, since feeling brought with it propositional
Soul” in Plato II, ed. by Vlastos, pp. 220 f. Dodds directs us to Symposium, 202e,
207ab, but comments that Plato “remained throughout his life faithful to the prin-
ciples of his master[,]” for whom knowledge remained an “affair of the intellect”
(218). While even the lowest forms of eros in the Symposium are tropes for the
divine illuminations of their philosophic counterparts, the desires of the body are
ultimately supplanted by those of the mind.
Dodds also directs us to Phaedrus, 249e, where erotic madness is made “the
best of all enthousiaseis.” The language of madness Plato introduces to explain the
eros of philosophy and the illumination to which it leads, as well as the emphatic
persistence beyond the body of the passions of the lower parts of the soul, repre-
sented as horses drawn by the charioteer of reason, makes the Phaedrus the biggest
challenge to the more conventionally dualistic and rationalistic interpretations of
Plato’s doctrine of the soul. Beyond the citation, Dodds does little to relieve this
tension. Guthrie, however, resisting the tendency to admit two Platos, a rationalist
and a mystic, makes a strong case for the “fundamentally consistent” simplicity,
independence and superiority of the purely rational soul in Plato – inclusive of the
Phaedrus – a simplicity only compromised incidentally in its commingling with the
mortal body. See W. K. C. Guthrie “Plato’s Views on the Nature of the Soul” in
Plato II, ed. by Vlastos, pp. 242. While the soul of Republic, iv includes bodily ap-
petites and passions as merù or eidù, the psychology of book x echoes the dualism
of the Phaedo, and provides a qualification of that of book iv as merely provisional.
Plato Republic, 611a ff. Guthrie translates, “soul in its truest nature is not like this
– full of variety, dissimilarity and inconsistency. We see it like this now because it
is damaged by its connexion with the body, but ought to consider it in its purity.
Then we should find it a much more beautiful thing. We must look only at its love of
wisdom [íÇÉÍÑÍíÇ¿], and understand that it is akin to the divine and immortal and
everlasting. For a similar division between the independence of a divine, immortal
reason from the passions of the body, with which it strives, cf. Plato Phaedo, 79d
and Sophist, 228b.
While the psychology of the Phaedrus and its glorification of a kind of madness
may appear inconsistent with these other dialogues, even in the Phaedo, Guthrie
alerts us, the most dualistic of texts, Plato writes that a corrupt soul retains the
taint of the corporeal even after disincarnation. Plato Phaedo, 81a ff. Similarly, see
Plato Gorgias, 524de. The Phaedrus’ representation of the lower parts of the soul
as persisting beyond the life of the body reflects the same capacity in the Gorgias
and Phaedo that souls have to retain traces of the bodily appetites and passions
to which they were enslaved while incarnated. The souls of the gods, compared
like the other souls to horses and charioteers, are said to be “all good” and “of
good “origin,” while “the nature of the others is mixed.” Plato Phaedrus, 246a.
And while talk of madness may incite some to attribute to this older Plato a kind
of rapprochement with a passion beyond reason, Platonic eros, even in its ecstasies,
is always moving in the direction of knowledge, a divine knowledge unburdened
by the passions associated with the human body. For a reading of the Phaedrus as
recantation of Plato’s earlier psychology and the introduction of a new psychology,
with a proto-Aristotelian attunement to the inherent value of mortal passions, see
Martha Nussbaum The Fragility of Goodness, pp. 213-223.
weight.16 For Haufniensis, psychology is also a matter of educating

the soul’s passions, which, as in Aristotle, have a kind of intelli-
gence. Melancholy, for instance, “has a meaning,” and likewise with
the more developmentally essential mood of anxiety which has “the
same meaning” “at a much later point” (CA, 42 / SKS 4, 349).17 One
must learn to be anxious in the right way: “[w]hoever has learned to
be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate” (CA, 155 / SKS
4, 454).
This education returns us once again both to the moral-psycho-
logical tradition which Socrates institutes and the medical tradition
from which he borrows, along with his students, Plato, but especially
Aristotle, who developed his itinerancy into a full-fledged theoreti-
cal apparatus.18 Going back to Greece sheds new light on the medi-
cal model that in modern times has reduced the matter of the soul
to the physicum of “pills, powders, and enemas” (CA, 121 / SKS 4,
423). Haufniensis recognizes that medicine has taken a turn from the
Greeks and so Greek medicine is given impunity from his criticisms of
modern medicine: “Yet in our day one fears what Socrates somewhere
prescribed, to be cut and cauterized by the physician in order to be
healed” (CA, 121 / SKS 4, 423). If there is a kind of therapy required,
it is the cutting and burning of the embodied soul, which Haufniensis
here points to in the Gorgias.19 Anxiety becomes the “serving spirit”
that cuts and cauterizes, leading the individual where he wants to go.
“[H]e bids it welcome, greets it festively, and like Socrates who raised
the poisoned cup, he shuts himself up with it and says as a patient
would say to the surgeon when the painful operation is about to begin:
Now I am ready. Then anxiety enters his soul and searches out every-
16
Aristotle EN, 1106b18-24.
17
In general, the theory of anxiety, like the interpretation of the passions of wonder
and fear in the other works, define in typically Aristotelian-Greek fashion a mood
in terms of its object. Emotions are not merely disturbances in the individual’s
body. They define the object intentionally – signify a meaning – and the object,
in turn, shapes the mood and character of the individual as related to it. On the
meaningfulness of moods, see Vincent McCarthy The Phenomenology of Moods
in Kierkegaard, p. 160. On the objectless object of anxiety, cf. p. 50, and on the im-
possible object of melancholy, pp. 79-80. Lastly, see p. 112, where McCarthy argues
that the objects which Kierkegaard’s moods intend are ultimately tropes for the self
in its richest, religious dimension.
18
The theory of education in The Concept of Anxiety is largely mimetic. The child in-
ternalizes a moral sense, as in the Nicomachean Ethics, by example and imitation:
“the power of the example.” CA, 75 / SKS 4, 379.
19
See Plato Gorgias, 479a.
thing and anxiously torments everything finite and petty out of him,
and then it leads him where he wants to go” (CA, 159 / SKS 4, 458).
Ecstatic Virtue
This education, compounding the wonder of the Greeks with the

specifically modern passion of anxiety, after modernity, comes with
a little amendment to Constantin’s sagacity. This place of rest, “the
shrewdness of calculations” (CA, 160 / SKS 4, 459), like all the rest, “is
mere chatter, although in the eyes of men it is sagacity” (CA, 158 / SKS
4, 457). Prudence “becomes helpless and its most clever combinations
vanish like a witticism compared with the case that anxiety forms with
the omnipotence of possibility” (CA, 161 / SKS 4, 460). “Greek eth-
ics,” exemplified, as we’ve seen, and will continue to discover, most of-
ten by Aristotelian concepts, “was not ethics in the proper sense” but
retained an aesthetic factor which Haufniensis once again dismisses
as the “babble” of a “bargaining” mentality. “This appears clearly in
its definition of virtue and in what Aristotle frequently, also in Ethica
Nicomachea, states with amiable Greek naiveté”20 (CA, 16-17 / SKS
4, 324). Silencing this chatter means a reform in Greek ethics that Cli-
macus himself will consolidate, where the passions that the soul must
practice – absurdity, fear and wonder21 – become ecstatic, a possession
rather than a self-possession, where the ideas it inculcates dead end in
paradox rather than the transparency of dialectic.22
“What is the good?” – An ancient question that Haufniensis be-
lieves “comes closer and closer to our age.” The aestheticism of virtue
ethics, its concreteness, on the one hand, makes it the most viable
alternative to the failed idealisms of modernity. It also, however, re-
quires a rehabilitation, since it tends to squander the idea in the par-
ticular, as with Aristotle’s claim that “virtue alone does not make a
man happy and content, but he must have health, friends, and earthly
20
See Pap. V B 49 (no SKS). Cf. JP 3: 3653. The draft explains virtue by the ideal
of kalogathia (meaning noble and good, and used of nobles and gentlemen) which
Aristotle invokes at EN, i.8.
21
See CA, 17n / SKS 4, 324. “[T]he religious ideality breaks forth in the dialectical
leap and the positive mood – ‘behold all things have become new’ as well as in the
negative mood that is the passion of the absurd to which the concept ‘repetition’
corresponds.”
22
See Plato Republic, 532b, 533c. Dialectic is the form of reasoning which can provide
its own ground, which can give a full acount of itself.
goods and be happy in his family” (CA, 16-17 / SKS 4, 324). “As all
ancient knowledge was based on the presupposition that thought has
reality, all ancient ethics was based on the presupposition that [the
ideal of] virtue can be realized” (CA, 19 / SKS 4, 326).23 But Kierke-
gaard’s insistence on the tragic limits and futile desires of the under-
standing makes virtue in the ancient sense an impossibility. “Ethics”
must have “altogether different categories” than either the scientific-
metaphysical or the aesthetic, which pagan philosophy collapsed into
one aesthetical-metaphysical outlook (CA, 17 / SKS 4, 324). Since “no
science can say what the self is without again stating it quite gener-
ally,” “each man who is mindful of himself knows what no science
knows, since he knows who he himself is, and this is the profundity
of the greek saying ÁË×ÆÇ ÑÃ¿ÓÒÍË [know yourself][.]” “It is about
time to seek to understand it in the Greek way, and then again as
the Greeks would have understood it if they had possessed Christian
presuppositions” (CA, 78-79 / SKS 4, 381-382). And so Haufniensis
returns us once more to the passage from Xenophon’s Symposium
with which the Concept of Anxiety concluded, with which Haufnien-
sis, echoing the Socrates who first uttered these words, describes his
own education: “The true autodidact is precisely in the same degree
a theodidact, as another author has said, or to use an expression less
reminiscent of the intellectual, he is ¿ÓÒÍÓÏÁÍÐ ÒÇÐ ÒÅÐ ÔÇÉÍÑÍÔÇ¿Ð
and in the same degree ÆÃÍÓÏÁÍÐ [“A self-cultivator of philosophy”
and in the same degree “a cultivator of god”]24
Christianizing the Method:

Post-Modern Medicine in The Sickness Unto Death
The physicians’ model returns once again in The Sickness Unto Death,
the last of the psychological works. Its ties to ancient Greek ethics, in
which the lines between philosophy and medicine remained blurred,
are even more pronounced. In Sickness Anti-Climacus continues to
reinforce the distinction between a natural and a supernatural heal-
ing. “For example, we say that someone catches a sickness, perhaps
through carelessness. The sickness sets in and from then on is in force
and is an actuality whose origin recedes more and more into the past.
23
See CA, 111 / SKS 4, 413. Haufniensis echoes in a note that “according to Greek
thought” the good is conceived from its “external side (the useful, the finitely tele-
ological).”
24
My translation. See Xenophon Symposium, i.5.
It would be both cruel and inhuman to go on saying, ‘You, the sick

person, are in the process of catching the sickness right now.’” “To de-
spair, however, is a different matter. Every actual moment of despair
is traceable to possibility; every moment he is in despair he is bringing
it upon himself. It is always the present tense;” (SUD, 16-17 / SKS 11,
132-134). Despair – like the unfree subjection to the passions diag-
nosed earlier by Haufniensis – is a sickness one chooses.
Yet this author, like the last, retains ‘the medical’ as an essential
analogy: “Everything essentially Christian must have in its presenta-
tion a resemblance to the way a physician speaks at the sickbed; even if
only medical experts understand it, it must never be forgotten that the
situation is the bedside of a sick person” (SUD, 5, cf. 19, 22, 23, 48, /
SKS 11, 118, cf. 135, 138, 139, 163). But what use in this case is medical
expertise when the traditionally organic aetiologies are no longer ap-
plicable? No longer merely expertise of the body, the psychologist oc-
cupies himself with the health and sickness of the soul (SUD, 23 / SKS
11, 139). Referring the psychologist to the soul, we’ll find, is no mere
spiritual vagueness. It is the specifically Greek-philosophical concep-
tion of the soul that Anti-Climacus has in mind for his psychology, the
exploration in reason, character and moral responsibility inaugurated
by the Socratic doctrine of a care of the self. 25 “Morality is character;”
he writes elsewhere in Greek-aesthetic spirit, “character is something
engraved (Õ¿Ï¿ÑÑ×)[.]”26 As in modern medicine, technical expertise
is required of the psychologist if only because the apparent health of
the patient can easily be imaginary (SUD, 23 / SKS 11, 139). Some-
where inside the staunch body of the triathlete who “feels fine” the
physician detects a life-threatening tumor, a potentially fatal imbal-
ance of enzymes in the blood, etc. The physician of the soul, likewise,
must be able to detect imaginary health, and, if possible, convert this
fantasied thriving into actual well-being.
Anti-Climacus, like the other psychologists on Kierkegaard’s staff,
defines the pathology he studies – despair – in terms of contradiction.
This contradiction is again one of desires, an ambivalent straining,
simultaneous, toward both life and death (SUD, 18 / SKS 11, 135).
The “inconsistency” of contradiction is always a risk for the soul in
which “spirit” is present. While consistency is achieved in “something
higher, at least an idea,” when this idea is lost along with “the total-
25
See SUD, 29 / SKS 11, 145. Psychological phenomena like despair “must be consid-
ered primarily within the category of consciousness.”
26
TA, 77 / SKS 8, 75.
ity in which he has his life,” “the mysterious power that bound all his
capacities in harmony is diminished, the coiled spring is slackened;
everything perhaps becomes a chaos in which the capacities in mutiny
battle one another and plunge the self into suffering, a chaos in which
there is no agreement within itself, no momentum, no impetus” (SUD,
107 / SKS 11, 219).
As “in the realm of the bodily,” a “good healthy body” is able to re-
solve physical contradictions, “so also with faith” and the soul (SUD,
40 / SKS 11, 155-156). The “good health of faith” resolves the contra-
diction between the “powers” of these now dissolute ideas, exempli-
fied by the ambiguously tragic concept that “downfall is certain, but
that there is possibility nonetheless” (SUD, 40 / SKS 11, 155-156). As
with Aristotle, this is a matter of passion, though no longer as stakes
in a contest between rational and unreasoning desires, but rather in
the passionate conflict within reason between opposing ideas. Ant-
Climacus undoes the Platonic objection to the Socratic claim that vir-
tue can be reduced to knowledge, that no one both knows the good
and acts against it. It is not a physical pathos, but rather a “passion of
the understanding” whereby the one who despairs is able to under-
stand that “help is possible” (SUD, 39 / SKS 11, 155), that conflict-
ing ideas (practical ideas, related to desire and action) can be harmo-
nized. Where consciousness is an issue, and therefore a patient seeks
psychological rather than physiological care, distinguishing categori-
cally between melancholy, for instance, or anxiety, and a broken arm,
feeling is always to be found in connection with knowing and willing
(SUD, 30 / SKS 11, 146). Sickness in the soul is liable to distort any
and all of these elements, whose tripartite distinctions are loosely,
though clearly, Greek. 27
The Greeks are a valuable resource for the psychologist, writes An-
ti-Climacus. Unlike the paganism of Christendom (that is, enlightened
Europe), Greek paganism was qualified “in the direction of spirit”
(SUD, 47 / SKS 11, 160). It was the field of a burgeoning consciousness
that peaked in the figure of Socrates, who without Christian concepts
was ultimately unable to complete the revolution he inaugurated from
within Greek culture. He lacked the resources to establish a concrete
ground for the subjects of the first enlightenment, liberated by ration-
al reflection from the objective determinants of family, state, and their
religious accompaniments. Nevertheless, whereas modern thinking
27
See Plato Republic, iv. The soul divides into logistikon, thumos, and epithumia –
the rational, spirited (angry, fearful, or honor-loving) and appetitive elements.
tends to explain itself away, objectively-mechanically, in terms of bi-

ology, history, etc., the Greeks engaged the problem of reason with
all the passion and imagination that the healthy soul exudes. Their
investigations themselves were a model for the health they meant to
produce. Still, they fell short of their mark because of the emptiness
of their definition of sin (hamartia) as ignorance (SUD, 88 / SKS 11,
196) or error.
Sin and Akrasia
The Socratic notion that sin is ignorance marks the essential differ-
ence between Greece and Christianity (SUD, 89 / SKS 11, 203). The
Socratic definition is representative – “genuinely Greek” (SUD, 88
/ SKS 11, 202) – in its ambiguity with respect to knowing and will-
ing. In other words, its being essentially Greek lies in the fact that
understanding the good is equivalent to doing it (SUD, 92 / SKS 11,
205). Without a conception of the will (SUD, 90 / SKS 11, 203) and a
way of distinguishing it from understanding the Greek model fails to
explain, he believes, how “a later ignorance,” a temporary failure to
know, such as akrasia, can arise. 28 The emptiness of the Greek defini-
tion ought not to be dismissed, however, but rather used “to bring out
the latter [Christianity’s] in its radicality” (SUD, 88 / SKS 11, 202).
Christian psychology, as was the case in the tragic Christian drama
inwardized in conscience, is a modification of Greek conceptions.
Because an overweening knowledge is the tragic-comic source of the
present age’s confusions, the Socratic technù of the human soul, ori-
ented against the pathologies of ignorance, a model developed more
28
This at first seems an odd conclusion, since both Plato and Aristotle are clearly moved
by the commonsense objections to the Socratic view that knowing the good will al-
ways translate into doing it. There appeared to be many obvious cases in which we
seem to know the good and still act in spite of that knowledge. The taxonomy of the
soul in Republic, iv and Aristotle’s analysis of akrasia, in EN, vii, which we analyzed
earlier in detail, DO provide explanations of this “later ignorance.” Their relative
success of failure is another issue, but Kierkegaard never says explicitly just where
these explanations fall short. It may be that his sense of the collision involved in this
“later ignorance” outstrips the ebb and flow of reason in the Greek soul overtaken,
temporarily, by the passions: first rational, then not, and then, again, rational. Neither
Plato nor Aristotle can account for the experience of the authentic simultaneity of
knowledge and vice, or, to put it another way, reason and irrationality. This, Kierke-
gaard appears to argue, requires the dogmatic concept of sin.
technically by Plato and then Aristotle, is the perfect place to return

for a new beginning.
The revision of Greek ethics should not make the Greek mistake of
overemphasizing the role of the intellect. On the other hand, neither
should it renounce the role that intelligence plays, and make the health
of the soul a matter of willing alone. “There is indeed in all darkness
and ignorance a dialectical interplay between knowing and willing,
and in comprehending a person one may err by accentuating knowing
exclusively or willing exclusively” (SUD, 48 / SKS 11, 163). Introducing
the “tiny little transition” from knowing to doing reinvokes the whole
problem of self-mastery (SUD, 93-94 / SKS 11, 206-208), 29 though with
the addition now of a “dialectical determinant.” Christianity adds this
determinant in its concept of a will brought into stark psychological re-
lief by the stain of original sin. It adds the paradox of hereditary sin to
establish the limit of reflection, and with it a place where thought stops
and the will may begin (SUD, 93 / SKS 11, 206).
[A]las, for speculation’s secret in comprehending is simply to sew without fastening
the end and without knotting the thread, and this is why, wonder of wonders, it can go
on sewing and sewing, that is, pulling the thread through. Christianity on the other
hand, fastens the end by means of the paradox. (SUD, 93 / SKS 11, 206)
Though, to ignore the influence that thought has on the will, and vice
versa, would be to fall into the error against which Anti-Climacus
cautions. 30 The gap between knowing and willing which Christianity
introduces “is not always quick” – it is not “fast as the wind.” “Quite
the opposite,” he tell us, “this is the beginning of a very long-winded
story” (SUD, 94 / SKS 11, 207-208). Within this story falls the time of
training, the askùsis to which the philosopher originally subjected the
souls in his care. The passions must learn to see correctly (SUD, 65 /
SKS 11, 180). 31 A mood like despair is no “mere feeling.” It is an ac-
29
See Vincent McCarthy The Phenomenology of Moods in Kierkegaard, pp. 135, 160.
McCarthy ties the question of emotion and mood to the ancient Greek practice of
philosophy as a love of wisdom, describing the Christian life-view in Kierkegaard
as a successful “mastery of moods” to which the esthete is otherwise “victim.” “In
the past we have traced in this study, we have observed subjectivity awakening,
victimized by a series of moods and challenged to master them and their deeper
meaning.”
30
Reversing Repetition’s Young Man, who falls ill with the sickness he reads about,
ignoring the time of actuality, Anti-Climacus mocks the person who collapses
thinking sin into being in sin, ignoring the role of the will.
31
See SUD, 65 / SKS 11, 180. “- if someone were to speak that way to him, he would
understand it in a dispassionate moment, but his passion would soon see mistakenly
again, and then once more he would make a wrong turn – into despair.”
complished way of viewing the world, an interpretation of its myriad

details as together signifying one thing and not another. It is, in this
sense, “an act” (SUD, 62 / SKS 11, 171). If we can speak of Christian
virtue in Kierkegaard, its goal, as in Aristotle, would be perceptual,
replacing blurred perceptions with keen ones.
The question of akrasia (acting against reason, choice or, to move
beyond the Greek, the will) returns once more with an additional
concept: the distinction between the Greek “not being able” (akķn)
and the Christian not “willing” (SUD, 95 / SKS 11, 208). The Greek
concepts of being able (hekķn) or unable (akķn), Anti-Climacus rec-
ognizes, fall short of the notion of willing per se. At best, the terms
can be translated as voluntary or involuntary, that is, with or without
coercion. I can do something, uncoerced by an outside force, without
having willed it in the fullest sense. I do not will sitting down to lunch,
or lazing in the park, when the weather and my fancy strike. To think
of such impulses as “chosen” confuses the issue of deliberate actions,
such as practicing philosophy, or Christianity, with the stuff of lunches
and naps. But, with no recourse to any real language of the will, this,
he claims, is what the Greek model does. Emended by the paradoxical
concept of hereditary sin, the relation between reason and the pas-
sions takes on a radically new but still patently Greek tone. Christian-
ity adds that man is “unwilling to understand.” Against the entire an-
cient philosophical tradition, Christianity claims (incidentally, along
with tragedians like Euripides) that though a person knows what is
right, they may will what is wrong. This is the notion of “defiance”
(SUD, 95 / SKS 11, 208). Christianity cannot be arrived at intellectu-
ally. It is either willed or not willed (SUD, 95 / SKS 11, 208). Sin, then,
is still a kind of ignorance. It is a willful ignorance of the paradoxical
sin which Christianity revealed, a refusal to accept a reality that as
Haufniensis descibed strains the understanding to its breaking. This
refusal to believe therefore affects not just the “will” but also “the
individual’s consciousness” (SUD, 95 / SKS 11, 208).
Here re-emerge the two possibilities which Aristotle distinguished
as incontinence and intemperance. Anti-Climacus explains them both
in a single scenario in which the irrationality of a kind of passiveness
slowly gains power over the active, rational part of the soul:
Willing is dialectical and has under it the entire lower nature of man. If willing does
not agree with what is known, then it does not necessarily follow that willing goes
ahead and does the opposite of what knowing understood (presumably such strong
opposites are rare); rather, willing allows some time to elapse, an interim called: “We
shall look at it tomorrow.” During all this, knowing becomes more and more obscure;
alas, for the good must be done immediately, as soon as it is known […] but the lower
nature’s power lies in stretching things out. Gradually, willing’s objection to this devel-
opment lessens; it almost appears to be in collusion. And when knowing has become
duly obscured, knowing and willing can better understand each other; eventually they
agree completely, for not knowing has come over to the side of willing and admits that
what it wants is absolutely right. (SUD, 95 / SKS 11, 207-208)
The “duplicity in all passionateness” can force the individual into a

kind of ventriloquism which makes “the passionate one understand
later, almost to the point of madness, that he has said the very oppo-
site of what he intended to say” (SUD, 111 / SKS 11, 223). The goal of
ethics and the instruments of its psychologies, as with the ancients, is
self-mastery (enkrateia), not just managing the slaves in oneself, but
converting them to the right rule of the understanding, avoiding the
“imaginatively constructed virtues” which subordinate the false sov-
ereign to “the dialectic that rebellion is legitimate at any moment”
(SUD, 69 / SKS 11, 184). The slaves, though, on this model, no longer
represent the irrationality of appetite and emotion. There are no ac-
tual slaves, like the ones that gain the upper hand in the soul as Plato
and then Aristotle define it, only the will not to know (not to know,
paradoxically, sin, that which cannot be known). Though Kierkegaard
believes that all of Greece evaded this problem with an intellectual
sleight of hand between knowing and willing, the possibility of the
problem remains a child of Greek imagination. It is only within the
scope of this tradition, no matter how transgressive, in which his
Christian psychological method makes sense.
The Virtue of the Irrational
As providence replaced fate in The Concept of Anxiety, faith radi-

calizes and replaces the ancient Greek category of virtue. After the
emendations of Greece by Christianity, “the opposite of sin (‘spirit’s
consent’ to ‘the turbulence of flesh and blood’) is not virtue but faith”
(SUD, 82 / SKS 11, 197). The antithesis “sin/faith” “reshapes all ethi-
cal concepts and gives them one additional range. At the root of the
antithesis lies the crucial Christian qualification: before God, a quali-
fication that in turn has Christianity’s crucial criterion: the absurd,
the paradox, the possibility of offense.” If Socratic ignorance was “the
veneration for God” “on guard duty” at “the frontier between God
and man, keeping watch so that the deep gulf of qualitative difference
between them was maintained” (SUD, 99 / SKS 11, 213), he never-
theless worshipped his god by taking dialectical care. The Christian
on the other hand “is an invention of a mad god” (SUD, 126 / SKS
11, 238). Taking care of this god, of the self before this god, requires
a far less moderate tone. Yet Anti-Climacus ultimately parses the
practice of faith that Christian virtue demands in the judicious Greek
language, that of Plutarch, where the collisions of tragedy are exag-
gerated rather than soothed philosophically, where the ethical telos
becomes the impossible appropriation of a divine logos which Kierke-
gaard once again connects with tragedy and sacrifice:
– O my friend, how have you been tried in life! Cudgel your brain, tear away every
covering in your breast and expose the viscera of feeling, demolish every defense that
separates you from the person you are reading about, and then read Shakespeare –
and you will be appalled at the collisions. But even Shakespeare seems to have re-
coiled from essentially religious collisions. Indeed perhaps these can be expressed
only in the language of the gods. And no human being can speak this language. As a
Greek has already said so beautifully: from men, man learns to speak, from the gods,
to be silent. (SUD, 127 / SKS 11, 238-239)
Proper understanding works itself down into the stomach of the soul.
Though the art (like all arts) aims at mastery, its goal is not a modera-
tion of the passions, but their proper incitement. The believer outloves
the lovers. “[W]hen it comes to enthusiasm, the most rapturous lover
of all lovers is but a stripling compared with a believer” (SUD, 103 /
SKS 11, 216). No longer concerned with reasons, the enraptured belief
of the lover simply loves, describing his love, perhaps, enthusiastically,
but never justifying it. That would be “to inform against himself as
not being in love” (SUD, 104 / SKS 11, 216). This joyousness of love is
most joyous “when it sacrifices everything” (SUD, 127 / SKS 11, 238),
when it renounces conservation, economy, the ne quid nimis of Aris-
totle’s golden mean, the “summa summarum of all human wisdom”
(SUD, 86-87 / SKS 11, 200). Faith seeks the quid nimis (SUD, 84 / SKS
11, 198), the divine excess in which human calculations and concepts
breach their limit. Though “god is indeed a friend of order,” “[h]is
concept is not like man’s, beneath which the single individual lies as
that which cannot be merged in the concept; his concept embraces
everything, and in another sense he has no concept. God does not
avail himself of an abridgement” (SUD, 121 / SKS 11, 233). 32
32
God is an actuality to which no concept is adequate, recalling the aesthetic appre-
hension of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, struck by the beauty of an object to which
no concept is adequate, one which exceeds the limitations of imposed by the con-
cepts of understanding, and in that way mirrors the freedom (i. e., creative power)
of god in the world of experience.
Anti-Climacus with his psychology lays the groundwork for a new

ethics of tragic virtue in which the individual practices a passion for
the impossible, a venturing instead of the “prudence” (SUD, 34 / SKS
11, 151) of “worldly wisdom” (SUD, 56 / SKS 11, 172), where the cri-
terion of the self is not what it is immanently, as with the Greeks, but,
with God as the criterion, the transcendence that “a person is not”
(SUD, 79-80 / SKS 11, 193-194). The subjectification of the ancient
hamartia, an objective guilt one innocently suffered, shifts the indi-
vidual of the post/modern age into gear for a new activity over and
above paganism, whose actions Anti-Climacus understands as passive
reactions to the external world (SUD, 99 / SKS 11, 212). He defines the
radicalized hamartia of sin finally in terms of a dramatic script, one
easily seen as tragic:
Figuratively speaking, it is as if an error slipped into an author’s writing and the error
became conscious of itself as an error – perhaps it actually was not a mistake but in
a much higher sense an essential part of the whole production – and now this error
wants to mutiny against the author, out of hatred toward him, forbidding him to cor-
rect it and in maniacal defiance saying to him: no, I refuse to be erased; I will stand
as a witness against you, a witness that you are a second rate author” (SUD, 74 / SKS
11, 187).
These protests within the grammar of his script remind us of Oedi-

pus, whose moral disciplines, now, would will his own erasure, whose
education would conclude in a recognition of failure, a choice to be in
the wrong. The task this Christian psychology sets for the individual
amounts to performance in a divinely ordered play that from man’s
perspective is always incomplete. Yet its Idea, a transcendence, must
be absorbed by the soul, transforming the passions and establishing
the order which god loves, an order now open to revisions, new con-
stellations of ideas, passions and projects rooted in the history of the
soul as a practiced state. Like any author worth his salt, God expresses
a life view in his work through its essential unity. 33
33
In the Book on Adler Kierkegaard distinguishes between the premise author and
the essential author. A premise author makes a beginning, but fails to work out
the conclusions, to draw the work into a unified whole. This echoes Kierkegaard’s
claim in From the Papers of One still Living that the author of novels must have a
life-view with which he imbues a unity in the work. The essential author has conclu-
sions “toward which he conducts the read, even if he does not make them explicit.”
See McCarthy The Phenomenology of Moods in Kierkegaard, pp. 147, 151, and ch,
7 generally. McCarthy correctly extends Kierkegaard’s views on authorship in From
the Papers of One Still Living and The Book on Adler to the cultivation of a unified
life-view in one’s actual life. He identifies this cultivation with “self mastery,” what
A Botched Model For Askêsis:

Stages’ Quidam and the Exercise of the Passions
Frater Taciturnus, our last of Kierkegaard’s psychologists, in addition

to reconfirming the general picture of the soul divided between con-
trary passions for conflicting ideas, gives us a torturous illustration
of the kind of practice a Kierkegaardian moral psychology requires.
Although Quidam’s diary is ultimately the record of a failure, it still
provides a rich picture of what a post/modern Christian ascetics might
look like, and how its aims ought to be understood. Where Quidam
fails, others, if they learn from his errors, might succeed. Taciturnus’
goal will be to outline categorical types, as Constantius and Haufni-
ensis described the psychologist’s intuition of an ideal ‘totality’ in the
individual: in “actual life the case is that passions, psychical states,
etc., are found only to a certain degree. This, too, delights the psy-
chologist, but it is also another kind of delight in seeing passion car-
ried to its limit” (SL, 191 / SKS 6, 179). This requires experiments in
the domain of fiction, like the Quidam Taciturnus generates, where
the ideal personality can be achieved.
All three stages of existence – aesthetic, ethical and religious – de-
mand a practice, an askùsis in which the soul’s passions rehearse one or
another idea, or life-view. As William Afham explains in the preface
to the erotist’s symposium, “to bring about a recollection for oneself
takes an acquaintance with contrasting moods, situations, and sur-
roundings” (SL, 13 / SKS 6, 21). But the ethicist also has his own self-
styled practice. The Judge’s Reflections on Marriage defend the “dark
passions” of jealousy and anger when a “noble love” is befouled. He
considers this condition of the soul “love’s ethical sorrow over some-
one who has died” (SL, 135 / SKS 6, 128). Likewise, there are other
passions he rejects, such as “the icy passion of wittiness. For there is
a hell whose heat blights all life; but there is also a hell whose cold
kills all life” (SL, 135 / SKS 6, 128). The ethical then is not a matter
of extinguishing the passions, but cultivating a moderation between
extremes which avoids the “wild revolt of sensuality” (SL, 180 / SKS
6, 168) unleashed on the Faustian who imprudently rejects the sensual
outright only to have it recoil upon him.
Quidam’s struggle is the familiarly poetic one of passionate con-
tradiction. In keeping with the maieutics of Greek ethics his internal
Greek moralists since the sophists called enkrateia, and recognizes in this a return
to Greek philosophizing.
strife bears witness to the possibility of a birth: “Is this the way it is
to be a mother? wailed Rachel when the twins’ struggle began in her
womb, and many a person has said this to himself when he obtained
what he craved: is this the way it is?” Quidam connects this division
in the self with contrary desires, frustrated by a faulty perception of
their objects. “And is it not as if there were two natures struggling
within me[?]” (SL, 215 / SKS 6, 201). The solution “depends upon”
“the positing of life’s pathological element absolutely clearly, legibly,
and powerfully” (SL, 291 / SKS 6, 270). It depends in other words
upon a good logos of the pathù, a logos which Quidam no doubt lacks.
“What I have shaped myself to be with all my passion seems to be an
error, but I cannot be remade now” (SL, 320 / SKS 6, 297). The prob-
lem of desire, this “contradiction in passion” (SL, 302 / SKS 6, 281), as
with Aristotle, can only be resolved through a kind of ascetics which
first needs the right idea to guide it.
Each of these ideas, equipped with “its reasons,” in Quidam’s case
“wants to provoke [the] mind to rebellion” (SL, 305 / SKS 6, 284).
To become “free in his passion” (SL, 414 / SKS 6, 384), as Tacitur-
nus puts it, would have demanded Quidam practice the right reasons,
which he surely did not. And although the Judge happily concludes
that maturity can arrive in the split second of decision, the “oppor-
tune moment of love” where “eternity intervenes” (SL, 165 / SKS 6,
154), the character of Quidam suggests otherwise. The Judge himself
provides a clue to the false independence and speed of his decisions in
the figure of the justified exception, exemplified by Abraham, rooted
in an actuality against which he inexplicably collides. He “must feel
the torture of misunderstanding just as the ascetic constantly felt the
prick of the hair shirt he wore next to his bare body –” (SL, 180 / SKS
6, 168). 34 Quidam, an unjustified exception, whose romantic shoots of
imagination and intelligence never had time to plant roots in the soil of
experience, likewise develops the theme of ascetics. He cultivates the
“internal and the psychical that determined the mood, […] the opta-
tive passion, the impatient longing, the soul’s emotion of expectancy”
(SL, 205 / SKS 6, 192). Quidam explains how to handle the fitful, self-
enclosed soul of the daimoniac, which the masterful intelligence can
subdue, without recognizing that the soul belongs to him: “[t]he art is
34
For other references to religious “asceticism” in Quidam, see SL, 252 / SKS 6, 234:
“ascetic renunciation;” SL, 253-254 / SKS 6, 235-236: Quidam practices “the flex-
ibility of passion” like “Simon Stylites,” the Christian ascetic, who stood “on a tall
pillar […] bending himself into the most difficult positions and frightening away
sleep and searching for terror in the crises of balance.”
to speak about it a little […] and thus to hold a consuming passion in

the conversation’s firm control so that, just like an equestrian, one can
guide it with a sewing thread and, just like a drive, swing around in a
figure eight” (SL, 218 / SKS 6, 204) (adj. tr.).
Quidam gives us another equine description of ascetics, this time
tying it to the development of a “life view.” “I have taken fifteen years
to form a view of life for myself and to mature in it” and “cannot sud-
denly be altered” (SL, 373 / SKS 6, 346). “[F]or fifteen years and a
day” Quidam “has improved himself in handling thoughts dialectical-
ly, just as the Arab handles the snorting steed” (SL, 377 / SKS 6, 350).
The image of the horse and driver is borrowed from Platonic psychol-
ogy, where reason must learn to properly conduct the passions. 35 But
in Quidam we face a character called to incite his passionate nature
rather than subdue it philosophically. A potentially religious subject
like Quidam “disciplines” his “soul” so that it may keep itself “at the
peak” of its “wish” (SL, 247 / SKS 6, 231). In the case of religious sub-
jectivity the governing ethical Idea must be a passionate one, some-
thing one suffers, a division in the self, and so the risk of rebellion
from below is far more urgent. Quidam exemplifies the pathological
consequences for personality in the case of such a rebellion, where the
crucial balance between knowing, willing and feeling is lost.
Quidam practices the wrong thing, “like a person who wanted to
take his examen atrium [final comprehensive examination] and had
studied beyond measure for seven others but had not studied what was
prescribed and therefore failed” (SL, 223 / SKS 6, 208). Like the Chris-
tian ascetic, Simon Stylites, he incites a “crises of balance” (SL, 253 /
SKS 6, 235) – only to succumb. The “Pythagorean” (SL, 301 / SKS 6,
281) practice to which he subjects his passions remains suspended in
the thinnest atmosphere of the optative – when it was a practice in the
indicative of actuality that was required. Quidam has his own theory
of the delicate relation between theory and practice implied by ascet-
ics. “To grasp a theory is just like embracing a cloud instead of Juno,
and it is also unfaithfulness to her. But to use a theory as a means of
exercising, to unbuckle the soul in it so as to give one’s energy new
elasticity, that is permissible – indeed, it is what one ought to do (SL,
263 / SKS 6, 246). Quidam’s ascetics, however, are ironically ineffec-
tive, a practice in impotence, like this romantic-philosophical love of
clouds. He himself admits, “[i]t is difficult to test oneself in possibility;
it is like someone’s testing whether he has a strong voice without dar-
35
See Plato Phaedrus, 246a-247c.
ing to use his voice” (SL, 295 / SKS 6, 274). Putting the psychological
methods and theory of these four pseudonyms into actual practice
calls for a new voice to enter Kierkegaard’s stage, that of Johannes
Climacus, in whose ethics of eternity, the second ethics which Haufni-
ensis theorized, unfolds the possibility of a tragic practice in religious
subjectivity.
Chapter 11
Ethics Contra Ethics:
Climacus on Eternal Happiness
and Tragic Virtue
Eternal Happiness in Philosophical Fragments
Socrates was a hero for Kierkegaard, an individual thinker to whom

he returned perpetually for inspiration. As we saw in chapter four, it
was Socrates who consolidated if not introduced a newfound sense of
the soul, elements of which had been developing for about a century in
the early science of Ionia, among Greek physicians and sophists, and
especially in the alien religious beliefs of so-called shamans having
immigrated to Greek soil. This soul was both personal and rational, as
well as divine, and it could be found in states of relative sickness and
health. For Kierkegaard, we need go no farther in our talk about the
soul than Socrates. It is the ground on which character is at stake, and
no more. With the technical psychologies of Plato and Aristotle enters
a metaphysics of the soul in which humanity claims to grasp what hu-
man being Is. Kierkegaard’s moral psychology does everything it can
to reverse philosophy’s tendency to deprive this mystery of its force.
Yet despite their Socratic investment in ignorance and the inviolable
religious mystery at the heart of human nature, Aristotelian practical
and metaphysical categories pervade both Philosophical Fragments
and the Postscript. In particular, I want to examine the role of eternal
happiness as the telos of Kierkegaard’s ethics and its inflection by his
return as philosopher to the spirit of tragic poetry – the ‘Salighed’
corresponding to Greek ‘eudaimonia’ – as well as the special kinds of
knowing which the practice of human happiness implies.
Climacus begins the Fragments with a Platonic question, “Can vir-
tue be taught?” (PF, 9 / SKS 4, 219), referring us to four Platonic dia-
logues: Protagoras, Gorgias, Meno, and Euthydemus. He reminds us,
as did his companion, Anti-Climacus, that Socrates defined virtue as
insight and that according to Socrates’ star pupil, rather than learned,
this insight must be recollected. A Platonic1 retreat into the past easily
explains “the contradiction of existence” (PF, 10n / SKS 4, 220). The
contradiction of existence is that through education and choice one
becomes what one is, or, put the other way around, what one is not.
Recollection presupposes a necessary motion, backwards in Plato, for-
wards in the teleologies of Aristotle and Hegel, through which becom-
ing must pass uncreatively (PF, 10n / SKS 4, 220; PF, 80 / SKS 4, 280 f.).
This doctrine of recollection also implies an interpretation of the soul,
and so Plato’s Meno moves quickly from a demonstration of recollec-
tion to that of the soul’s immortality (PF, 9-10 / SKS 4, 219-220). But
if the individual is to become something new, to learn something new
– and in the case of virtue, to learn and to become something new are
identical – the soul must be rescued from its annihilation by ancient
Greeks and modern Germans in foregone, metaphysical conclusions.
As with Socrates, the learner must acquire virtue’s self-knowledge on
his own. While the objective knowledges of science and history (i. e.,
Plato and Hegel) reside in a common fund, when it comes to virtue,
investing in this fund pays dividends in disaster, mediating the real
authority of individual character “in a common lunacy and in a com-
mune naufragium [common shipwreck]” (PF, 12 / SKS 4, 221).
Habit and the Idea of Ethics
Fragments amends the Socratic-Greek understanding of virtue with

Christian categories in order to preserve the time of moral education
against the eternal gravity of recollection under which the Greeks lab-
ored. Climacus recognizes along with Aristotle and Plato that under-
standing is a passion, always moving toward a goal, an object of de-
sire. But whereas Greek desires tend to fulfill themselves in a perfect
actuality, for Climacus “the ultimate potentiation of every passion is
always to will its own downfall, and so it is also the ultimate passion of
the understanding to will the collision, although in one way or another
the collision must become its downfall. This, then, is the ultimate par-
adox of thought: to want to discover something thought cannot think”
(PF, 37 / SKS 4, 243).
Climacus exposes the secret progress of ‘the Idea’ we have wit-
nessed, chapter by chapter, from the erotics of the aesthete to the ethi-
1
See CUP1, 205 / SKS 188. Climacus distinguishes between Socrates the pragmatist
and Plato the idealist, who institutes the doctrine of recollection.
Climacus on Eternal Happiness and Tragic Virtue 267
cal universal and finally to religion. The Idea has a desire of its own:
to exhaust itself, in us. It invents itself upon the thinker like the poem
upon the poet, “insofar as he, thinking, is not merely himself” (PF,
37 / SKS 4, 243). Climacus, who identifies himself as a poet, describes
his own poetizing of the god turned man in terms of this immanence
which is likewise a transcendence. “So perhaps it is not a poem at all,
or in any case is not ascribable to any human being or to the human
race, either.” – “[F]orgive me my curious mistaken notion of having
composed it myself. It was a mistaken notion, and the poem was so
different from every human poem that it was no poem at all but the
wonder” (PF, 36 / SKS 4, 243). Cultivating virtue in the soul, the possi-
bility of eternal happiness, the individual learns to express an author-
less idea, one not his own. Happiness is not a capacity the individual
has ahead of time, not a skill one learns and preserves like gardening
or karate. It is only when the individual retires his tools and prepares
to be hohned by the Idea of a divine Other that virtue can begin to
take shape in the soul. “But because of habit,” he continues, “we do
not discover this” (PF, 37 / SKS 4, 243).
Climacus, then, is interested in cultivating different habits, para-
doxical habits that make life harder, not easier, in which the stride of
thought is constantly stumbling and interrupted. “Similarly, the hu-
man act of walking, so the natural scientist informs us, is a continuous
falling, but a good steady citizen who walks to his office mornings and
home at midnight probably considers this an exaggeration, because
his progress, after all, is a matter of mediation – how could it occur
to him that he is continually falling, he who unswervingly follows his
nose” (PF, 37 / SKS 4, 243). He abbreviates Greek philosophy as the
anthropomorphizing of truth. Its impulse toward knowledge, with
the Greeks, took aim first at human being, as a potentially univer-
sal measure to be “sought, or doubted, or postulated, or brought to
fruition” (PF, 38 / SKS 4, 244). Philosophers tend to subordinate the
originary wonder of “the unknown” to “their own wondrous under-
standing,” the wonder of the latter, in truth, an echo of the former – an
“acoustical illusion” (PF, 53 / SKS 4, 256). And while Socrates may
have initiated this movement he also cautioned against its excesses, or
even progress. As late as the Phaedrus, Socrates was still “not quite
clear about himself, whether he (a connoisseur of human nature) was
a more curious monster than Typhon or a friendlier and simpler being,
by nature sharing something divine” (PF, 37 / SKS 4, 243).
The paradox that reason, according to Climacus, desires, is none
other than the self of reason that Socrates devised, only to impose
self-knowledge upon itself as the crux of its own failure. Socrates got
as far as himself as difference, the self-asserting difference of irony.
The true nature of this difference as sin and the identification of god
as “the absolutely different” upon which this difference depends had
yet to arise (PF, 47 / SKS 4, 253). With the Christian concept of sin the
possibility emerges of an absolute difference which man cannot gener-
ate, a wonder which the progress of human science can never cancel,
which invades the blood of all his arts, especially the art of man him-
self (or, in modern terms, psychology). This “unknown against which
the understanding in its paradoxical passion collides and which even
disturbs man and his self knowledge” must have a name. Climacus
calls this unknown “the god,” though “it is only a name we give to it”
(PF, 39 / SKS 4, 245).
Practicing the passionate failure of reason means practicing the re-
lation to the god. But Climacus’ god is “not a name but a concept” (PF,
41 / SKS 4, 246), 2 a ‘wisdom’ and ‘goodness’ in which the individual
begins to develop a deliberate (and therefore ethical) relationship to
himself and his world. There cannot be any immediate or direct proof
of God’s existence within the order that the concept itself determines. 3
It is an ideality presupposed by belief (PF, 42 / SKS 4, 248) which satu-
rates experience, an omnipresent existence which “is also unknown
and to that extent does not exist,” at least not for the understanding
(PF, 44 / SKS 4, 249). And so the question of moral virtue returns in
the proof for God’s existence, where the understanding relates to the
frontier of the unknown, which “is expressly the passion’s torment,
even though it is also its incentive” (PF, 44 / SKS 4, 250). What must
be recalled – “the absolutely different” (PF, 44 / SKS 4, 249) – cannot
be recalled. Or, if it is to be recalled it must be recalled in some other
2
See SUD, 121 / SKS 11, 233.
3
Here god begins to sound like the Ideas of Kantian Reason, concepts to which no
object is adequate. But God for Kierkegaard is not a feature of human reason, as the
Philosophical Fragments make clear. As an Idea, God works against human reason
from the inside, exposing it destructively to its limit. While Kantian Reason thinks
thoughts which cannot be confirmed empirically (i. e., God, the immortality of the
soul, infinite time), Climacus’ god is a concept which one experiences immediately,
given belief, but which no concept in the determinative sense can contain. As he
puts it, there is “an absolute relation between the god and his works.” God saturates
his creation in such a way that his presence is total and therefore cannot be distin-
guished from it, cannot be proven. This is closer to Kant’s analysis in the Critique
of Judgment of the aesthetic object to which no concept is adequate. For more on
Kierkegaard’s relation to Kant, see Ronald Green Kierkegaard and Kant, the Hid-
den Debt.
way than understanding’s proof. Climacus’ god returns through the

unfamiliar and the unowned, a stranger the understanding welcomes
in fear and trembling, as the Greek feared Zeus in every outcast beg-
gar (from which came their rule of hospitality),4 as Thebes came to
fear its Oedipus and Athens its Socrates. The understanding meets
the paradox in a second understanding, a “mutual understanding”
“present in the moment of passion,” in which the first understanding
“will[s] its own downfall” (PF, 47 / SKS 4, 252).
This passionate mis/understanding follows the analogy of the pa-
gan-religious passion of eros. Though self-love “lies at the basis” of
the love of another, “at its peak its paradoxical passion wills its own
downfall” (PF, 48 / SKS 4, 253). Self-love is taken up into the climax of
erotic love as “spolia opima [spoils of war]”. The “moment of passion”
is precisely where erotic love persuades the self-love in which it be-
gan to surrender. As it is the passion of eros that provides the mutual
understanding between lovers, “[s]o also with the paradox’s relation
to the understanding, except that this passion has another name, or,
rather, we must simply try to find a name for it” (PF, 48 / SKS 4, 253).
In both cases one understanding passionately submits to another (or,
alternatively, an Other).
The question, then, is one of names, of naming desires at the point
of ecstasy where their formative concepts bend. “If the paradox and
the understanding meet in the mutual understanding of their differ-
ence, then the encounter is a happy one, like erotic love’s understand-
ing –” a “happy passion” (PF, 54 / SKS 4, 257) which has yet to be
named (PF, 48 / SKS 4, 253). But this passion has no need of names.
“[E]ven though my happiness does not have a name – if only I am
happy, I ask no more” (PF, 54 / SKS 4, 257). 5 If the difference, alter-
natively, is misunderstood, the understanding suffers offense (PF, 49
/ SKS 4, 254). But the matter of names and language is fraught with
pitfalls for the student of virtue. A student who submits himself to
the literal teaching and cherishes “every instructive word,” “every syl-
lable so that nothing would be lost,” cannot actually “follow” (PF, 60
/ SKS 4, 263). Names are distracting and yet “the via negationis [the
way of negation]” is also foreclosed, as is the “via eminentiae [the way
of idealization]” which begins with the name (PF, 44 / SKS 4, 250).
The student is left in the aporetic space where names are both impos-
4
Homer Odyssey, ix. 304-305.
5
See also PF, 59 / SKS 4, 261, where the happy passion is identified loosely as faith.
“[T]hat happy passion to which we shall now give a name, although for us it is not a
matter of the name. We shall call it faith.”
sible and required. And so we get a paradoxical name, an ironic name

which both speaks and says nothing, as so often they remind us, do
Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms. The name of the happy passion is faith,
“although for us it is not a matter of the name” (PF, 59 / SKS 4, 261).
If as Kierkegaard writes in his journals “[f]aith’s conflict with the
world is not a battle of thought with doubt, thought with thought,” but
rather “a battle of character,”6 then winning this battle means habitu-
ating oneself to something which at every step resists and upends ha-
bituation, acquiring faith as “a person’s second nature” (PF, 96 / SKS
4, 294). To have this nature in advance, as Plato proposed in the doc-
trine of recollection and the “transmigration of souls,” insofar as this
nature “refers to a given historical fact in time” “is just as plausible as
to be born twenty four years old” (PF, 96 / SKS 4, 294). Socrates’ care
of the self ran up against the stumbling block of individual human dif-
ference, ironically unable to decide whether he was a man or a mon-
ster, a site of potential knowledge or futile ignorance, forever stranded
from the truth he tried to generate between himself and other men.7
Climacus, in thinking through the problem of eternal virtue – that is,
whether it can be taught, if we take its historicality seriously – crosses
the limit to dialectics which Socrates approached, but, deprived of
Christian concepts, beyond which he could not pass. The frivolity of
this pamphleteer seizes upon Aristotle’s metaphysically sober “insist-
ence on the absolute and absolute distinctions” (PF, 108 / SKS 4, 305)
in order to draw the most absolute distinction between the virtues, to
the one side, of dialectics, literature and history, and, on the other side
of a limit, Christianity.
The Christian difference this comic poet-dialectician discovers un-
dermines the independence of dialectics, along with all other human
forms of reflection. From this precipitous vantage point he describes
what lies in such a foreign space: “[n]o philosophy (for it is only for
thought), no mythology (for it is only for the imagination), no histori-
cal knowledge (which is for memory) has ever had this idea – of which
in this connection one can say that it did not arise in any human heart”
(PF, 109 / SKS 4, 306) (cf. Corinthians I, 2:7-9). The higher madness
of Christianity “is the only historical phenomenon that despite the
historical – indeed, precisely by means of the historical – has wanted
6
JP 2:1129 / SKS NB11:69.
7
See PF, 91 / SKS 4, 289. When climacus writes that antiquity had a “passion for
distinctions,” he gestures to the epigraph to Concept of Anxiety, where Socrates is
praised for maintaining the distinction between knowledge and ignorance, which
the Hegelian relativizes ambiguously.
to be the single individual’s point of departure for his eternal con-

sciousness” (PF, 109 / SKS 4, 306). It bases the virtue and happiness of
eternity on something historical, whereby it is actually developed and
acquired, whereby it becomes his and his alone. It strains against the
stultifying habits of recollection, assimilating this primordial differ-
ence to the thought it itself engenders, to philosophy, poetry, or even
the history of thought itself.
Parousia and the Idea of Virtue
This point of departure for education in the virtues of eternity is a

god’s presence in time, the parousia of the New Testament (PF, 55 /
SKS 4, 258). The “god’s presence is not incidental to his teaching but is
essential” – This presence itself “is precisely the teaching.” The word
itself – parousia – contains an ambiguity to which Climacus, without
mention, devotes the best energies of this humble pamphlet on the
question of eternal happiness. The Greek prefix ‘para’ can signify a
‘being-present,’ as with the verb ‘pareinai’ (to be present). Or it can
signify a ‘being-other-than,’ the presence of an absence or evasion,
as with the word which this particular pamphlet puts to such exhaus-
tive use – ‘paradoxos’ – meaning contrary to opinion, appearances,
or expectation (hù doxa). That the god’s appearance, in what Clima-
cus calls “the moment” (referring us indirectly back to Haufniensis’
psychology of the traumatic advent of a god), was a historical event,
means that the moment has “decisive significance” (PF, 13 / SKS 4,
221) – that time matters. “Would this not be strange indeed! If it were
otherwise, if the moment did not have decisive significance” (PF, 16 /
SKS 4, 224). Climacus illustrates the point fittingly via a passage from
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (1114a):
The depraved person and the virtuous person presumably do not have power over
their moral condition, but in the beginning they did have the power to become the one
or the other, just as the person who throws a stone has power over it before he throws
it but not when he has thrown it (Aristotle). Otherwise the throwing would become
an illusion, and the person throwing, despite all his throwing, would keep the stone in
his hand, since the stone, like the skeptics’ “flying arrow,” did not fly (PF, 17n / SKS
4, 226).
The image of motion and the flying arrow as well as the force of the
stone’s throw impress upon the reader the near impossible difficulty of
becoming an ethical individual, of realizing the wondrous potential of
the human, a difficulty eulogized in both Aristotle’s and Kierkegaard’s
texts. It is arduous work. It demands patience, upon which the indi-

vidual builds strength of character, but also precision. Like the bow-
man, virtue must take proper aim, and choice must follow through in
the right way.
The teacher-god of Climacus’ essay educates, first, by giving the
student the condition for learning. He provides the student with the
possibility of recognizing his ignorance, and that this ignorance, at
some point, has been chosen. “Let us call it sin” (PF, 15 / SKS 4, 224).
By making sin a historical matter, the historical event of parousia ori-
ents us towards the future. It discloses the possibility of choice rather
than foreclosing on it, recollectively, in a poetic-philosophical nostal-
gia for essence, one which modern science perpetuates every time it
tells us what we are, i. e., a naked ape, a brain-state, an accident of
mathematically-physical nature, etc. A problem born of history needs
the same history to resolve it, since the conditions for the problem it-
self were historical. In this way the student seeks out the same teacher,
once more, as “a reconciler who takes away the wrath that lay over the
incurred guilt” (PF, 17 / SKS 4, 226). In a state crippled by the sin of
his choosing, he solicits the teacher’s grace.
The first teacher whom Climacus visits is Socrates, the example of
the highest pedagogically between one person and another, in which
the ignorance of the teacher throws the student, as teacher, now, back
upon himself (PF, 24 / SKS 4, 231). This Socratic ignorance turns out
to be of the same tragic variety that Oedipus suffered, a zealous dis-
cipline of himself which Socrates generously extended to others and
“in which he loved the divine” (PF, 23-24 / SKS 4, 231-232). This di-
vine love was a kind of masochism that punished the human with “the
same divine jealousy” (PF, 23-24 / SKS 4, 231) that a century earlier
had fuelled the gods’ vengeance (nemesis) on the tragic stage, dili-
gently guarding the borders of mortality. If Socrates’ gentle prodding
had been the sting of a gadfly, the god now has a need for bigger tools
and grander effect. The victim of Socrates’ wit may have been turned
around a bit, as Alcibiades describes in the Symposium, though better
off in the long run, but the student of the god whom no man repre-
sents, not even Socrates, the student whose “heart pounded as vio-
lently as Alcibiades, more violently than the Corybantes” (PF, 23-24 /
SKS 4, 232), risks much more than dizziness – he risks death. In fact,
he seeks it out.
The Fate of the Self
“This was indeed the god’s concern, for the shoot of the lily is tender
and easily snapped” (PF, 30 / SKS 4, 237) like “the individual’s tender
shoot” – and “to see the god was death” (PF, 30 / SKS 4, 237). Yet
the god gives the moment its decisive significance by entering into it.
Again, as Haufniensis theorized in The Concept of Anxiety, it is the
excessive presence of the god that produces the moment, catastrophi-
cally, through a fullness which time cannot contain, an incommensu-
rable love and vitality entering into an incommensurable self nour-
ished by them. Like the tiny oak nut that soon splits the clay pot, the
wine that overfull bursts the wineskin, “when the god plants himself
in the frailty of a human being,” what happens “if he does not become
a new person and a new vessel,” an infinite vessel capable of infinite
containment (PF, 34 / SKS 4, 240)? If the student resists the god’s art,
if he cannot be remade, the results are shattering.
If the student of virtue does not resist the invention of this god,
the consequences are equally shattering, but the fragment of this
other shattering can be healed through choice. The paradox of this
god – which can also be called “the moment” (PF, 51 / SKS 4, 256)
– discloses the possibility of choice by claiming that the understand-
ing rather than the paradox itself is the absurd (PF, 52 / SKS 4, 256).
The paradox is the wonder that makes room for the sober “foolish-
ness” (PF, 52 / SKS 4, 256) of the only possible decision, to be the
creature god made. It was Jesus, as Climacus’ describes him, who
best exemplified this simple how, though perhaps any well-adjusted
vagabond would do: “he went his way as one who owns nothing and
wishes to own nothing, as unconcerned about his living as the birds
of the air, as unconcerned about house and home as someone who
has no hiding place or nest and is not looking for such a place” (PF,
56-57 / SKS 4, 259-260). Although, as the companion discourse ex-
plains, man is not mere nature, not a lily or a bird, a similar way
can be inculcated in him. 8 “The question is this: may a human being
express the same thing? – for otherwise the god has not realized the
essentially human. Yes, if he is capable of it, he may also do it” (PF,
57 / SKS 4, 260).
Though the Greeks mistook the transcendence of the divine for a
sublimnity in the self (PF, 45 / SKS 4, 260), this regeneration in Christ’s
image nevertheless becomes a matter of something like Greek tem-
8
See “The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air” in Without Authority.
perance, the virtue of the irrational parts of the soul with which, by
analogy, Aristotle explained, all the virtues function, and upon which
the keenness of a phronetic eye depends. “If he can become so ab-
sorbed in the service of the spirit that it never occurs to him to pro-
vide for food and drink, if he is sure that the lack will not divert him,
that hardship will not disorder the body and make him regret that he
did not first of all understand the lessons of childhood before wanting
to understand more – yes, then he truly may do it, and his greatness
is even more glorious than the quiet assurance of the lily” (PF, 57 /
SKS 4, 260). First the appetites and then the will must take their cue
from this paradoxical understanding that the god provides. Unlike the
Greeks, “human willing” in the light of sin “is efficacious only within
the condition” (PF, 62-63 / SKS 4, 264-265), since man does not im-
manently possess the condition for self-knowledge and actualization.9
He must voluntarily “close his eyes,” though not like Oedipus, blinded
forcibly by the god, or like the philosopher departing Plato’s cave,10
blinding the eye of the body by the light of the soul. In matters of
virtue the passions are not the enemy. They are the moving cause of
change and rebirth (a key concept of Climacus’ on loan from the New
Testament).11
This rebirth or metanoia, against the disembodied nous of phi-
losophy, marks the return through faith and choice to the passionate
knowing of a concernful body. This becoming, explains Climacus, is
“an extremely pathos-filled matter” (PF, 21 / SKS 4, 230), and faith
is precisely this “happy passion” which unites the contradictories of
eternity and history, being and becoming (PF, 61 / SKS 4, 263). Be-
tween the historian’s knowledge of the temporal and the philosopher’s
knowledge of the necessary and eternal (PF, 62 / SKS 4, 264) there
stands faith, on the frontier of the understanding where choice be-
9
Climacus discusses this largely in terms of Socrates, for whom virtue, a feature of
the intellect, could be recollected. But even in the Platonic-Aristotelian scheme,
where virtue becomes a matter of the relation between intellect and the passions,
man, as an essentially rational creature, in whom reason is naturally authoritative,
would for Climacus possess the condition of his own perfection. Again, like Hegel,
the Greeks would fall under the category of a kind of Pelagianism.
10
See Plato Republic, vii. Plato discusses the difference between normal human vi-
sion and the philosopher’s perception of essence, which makes ordinary vision
equivalent to a kind of blindness. Leaving the cave, there is a temporary blinding.
Climacus, too, refers to the “eye of the soul” in which the student sees the god, eyes
closed, as if, Platonically, he possessed the condition himself. This mistakenly turns
the god into a “form.” PF, 63 / SKS 4, 265.
11
PF, 19 / SKS 4, 227 f.
comes possible, where the pristine character of ideas is spoiled by the

facts, and that of facts by the ideas always already interpretatively at
play, such as the concept of ‘fact’ itself.12
As in the classic, Aristotelian account, choice is a matter of delib-
eration, grounded and concluding in an intelligent perception. The
superfluity of reports on whatever matter happens to be under con-
sideration, Climacus observes, is just the understanding’s “attempt
to put off deliberation with chatter” about the facts (PF, 93 / SKS 4,
291). Neither the eye of the body nor the recollective eye of the meta-
physician’s soul, the god “opened for [the follower] the eyes of faith”
in which the flesh that “the follower has seen and touched with his
hands” do matter. They don’t matter enough, however, that were he to
fail to recognize the teacher, one day, he would also fail to believe, and
not in such a way that their significance could be revealed without the
condition that the god provides (PF, 65 / SKS 4, 266). In this “external
form” (PF, 65 / SKS 4, 266) there is both everything and nothing to
see. The presence of the god to his contemporaries is mediated by the
condition (PF, 68 / SKS 4, 269) – absent to those present, and present
to those not. Climacus complicates the perspicacity of Aristotle’s ph-
ronetic eye, making it dialectical, now, with respect to its object. Yet,
at the same time, in terms of its passion and concreteness, moral life
remains aesthetic, as in the original Greek establishment to which
Climacus’ ethics both return and strive beyond.
Concluding Unscientific Postscript: Climacus’ Tragic Ethics

A Return to the Passion of the Greeks
In the section entitled Actual and Ethical Subjectivity, Climacus re-

peatedly introduces the image of the Greek thinker as a standard of
measure for his assault on the thinkers of modernity. Greek philoso-
phy “was not absent minded” (CUP1, 309 / SKS 7, 282) – “The Greek
philosopher was an existing person” (CUP1, 309 / SKS 7, 282). The
Socratic model which readers of Kierkegaard tend to isolate in his
admiration for the Greeks only represents the more general moral-
religious spirit of Greek philosophical thought, that its beliefs, es-
pecially its commitments to the divinity of the soul, could move the
thinker “to suicide or to dying in the Pythagorean sense” (CUP1, 309
12
For an intellectual-historical discussion of the concept of ‘the fact,’ see Alasdaire
Macintyre After Virtue, ch. 7.
/ SKS 7, 282). The soul’s practice in death by which Socrates defines

philosophy in the Phaedo, Climacus recognizes, was part of a broader
practice which extended beyond the borders of philosophy per se to
the Orphic-Pythagorean religious exercises and ideas embedded in
the philosopher’s bios, or way of life.13 To philosophize was an act
(CUP1, 331 / SKS 7, 303) of “concrete thinking” (CUP1, 332 / SKS 7,
304); Socratic dying was such a thought in concretio.14
For this reason “every Greek thinker was essentially also a passion-
ate thinker,” since “existing, if this is not to be understood as just any
sort of existing, cannot be done without passion” (CUP1, 311 / SKS 7,
283). Climacus echoes Kierkegaard’s psychologists, emphasizing the
need to return to the study of mood both in oneself and others. “It
must walk along every path, must know the habitat of every error,”
that is, “where moods have their hiding places, how passions regard
themselves in solitude” (CUP1, 428 / SKS 7, 389). Happiness depends
upon the self-regarding intelligence of the passions, but also the inher-
ently mysterious nature of mood which is “like the Niger river in Af-
rica; no one knows its source, no one knows its outlet – only its reach
is known!” (CUP1, 236 / SKS 7, 214). This is why Aristotle has to be
Climacus’ best choice from the catalogue of Greek moral philosophy.
He is the classical thinker most committed to thinking the life of the
mind in its passionate reality, where thought does justice to the thorny
particularity of life as it moves, and the desire, human or divine, which
drives it. From Socrates to the Stoics only Aristotle leaves room in
the soul for the passions to assume a positive role in the good life
on their own terms. Happiness, in fact, at least the mortal kind, for
Aristotle, is impossible without them. He devised a new category of
thought to contain what Climacus calls the “concrete thinking” of the
Greeks, which Climacus cites directly with uncharacteristic precision:
“Abstraction is disinterested, but to exist is the highest interest for an
existing person. Therefore, the existing person continually has a telos
and it is of this telos that Aristotle speaks when he says (De Anima,
III, 10, 2) that ËÍÓÐ ÆÃÍÏÃÒÇÈÍÐ [theoretical thought] is different from
13
For a more recent echo of the same idea, see Pierre Hadot What is Ancient Phi-
losophy?, p. 38. Hadot quotes Plutarch: Socrates suicide’ in the Phaedo was an act
of philosophy. This, argues Hadot, is the natural, Greek way to understand not just
Socrates, but both Plato and Aristotle’s authorships, as well as the Stoics, as exer-
cises in philosophy, not theory.
14
See CUP1, 168 f. / SKS 7, 155 f. Climacus discusses the act of thinking death, where
the individual thinks what is thought by developing it existentially, taking it up in
his living.
ËÍÓÐ ÎÏ¿ÈÒÇÈÍÐ Ò× ÒÃÉÃÇ [practical thought in its end]” (CUP1, 313 /

SKS 7, 285).15 Distinguished by its absorbtion in the body’s passions,
Aristotelian practical thought returns us once again to the matter of
desires in the soul and the ends that they crave.
The Aesthetics of the Self
Like Socrates and the students of his philosophical way of life, for
Climacus the task “ethically understood” is “to become a whole hu-
man being” (CUP1, 346 / SKS 7, 317). “In existence, the important
thing is that all elements [of the human being] are present simulta-
neously. With respect to existence, thinking is not at all superior to
imagination and feeling but is coordinate” (CUP1, 346-7 / SKS 7, 317).
The true, the good, and the beautiful were unified in the Greek way
of life and thought, exemplified best in the celestial visions of Plato’s
Symposium. Cimacus reunites the truth, goodness and beauty that
the modern hierarchicalizing of discursive knowledge above moral in-
tuition and the grasp of perception divorced – not in the conceptual
architectonic of a Kantian reason, as objects of the distinct faculties
of understanding, reason, and aesthetic judgment,16 but in the already
simple, impenetrably dense medium of a fully human life. Knowledge,
morality and art come together in the space of contradiction where
thinking struggles infinitely with existence as an ethical task. “The
task is not to elevate the one at the expense of the other, but the task is
equality, contemporaneity, and the medium in which they are united
is existing” – “The true is not superior to the good and the beautiful,
but the true and the good and the beautiful belong essentially to every
human existence and are united for an existing person not in thinking
them but in existing” (CUP1, 348 / SKS 7, 318).
Existing – like ethics, like poetry – is an art, a technù. Classically,
the virtues of art and practical wisdom were both a function of the de-
liberative faculty, to logistikon, whose object unlike the objects of sci-
ence and intuitive knowledge, the virtues that comprise philosophical
wisdom, are by definition contingent. The ends of ethics, like all arts,
15
Aristotle DA, 433a.
16
See Immanuel Kant Critique of Judgment, introduction, sec. ix. The principles
of morality are determined by the faculty of reason, the practical determinant of
desire, those of knowledge by the understanding, and those of beauty, as with all
feelings of pleasure and displeasure “independent of concepts and sensations,” by
judgment. These three “powers” cohere in a “systematic unity.”
are external to it.17 Both Aristotle and Climacus locate this end in the
actual life that the individual leads, the state of virtue in the soul and
its expression in specifically human action. It is in this sense that the
ends of practical thought differ from those of theoretical thought: the
means about which practical thought deliberates are likewise its ends.
Its goal is to actualize the specifically human capacities for thought
and the passions they inflect in the best possible way. And so this
“subjective thinker” is “not an ethicist even if he is also an ethicist.”
He is “not a scientist-scholar; he is an artist” (CUP1, 351 / SKS 7, 320)
– if not like Aristotle’s ethicist, then, at least like his phronimos, a
practitioner of moral wisdom relieved now of Aristotle’s view of man
as a potential product of practical science or the metaphysical psychol-
ogy grounding it.
Collapsing Aristotle’s distinction between the ‘art’ or ‘science’ of
ethics and the act of phronùsis, Climacus’ revival of the ancient task of
virtue identifies the artist and the art, the thinker and his thought, not
by abstracting the concrete, as had Greek ethics, he believed, but rath-
er by moving in the opposite direction and “understanding the abstract
concretely” (CUP1, 351 / SKS 7, 321). The ethical task was to invest the
Ideal with the inevitable collisions and discrepancies, but most of all
the passions, of rational man. Like Aristotelian virtue and the happy
life it engenders – crafting the soul in the intertwining of logos and
action, acting for the right reasons, reasoning about right action – the
deliberate transformation of desire into human action is an end in itself
where the individual “understands himself in existence,” (CUP1, 351 /
SKS 7, 321) the “prodigious contradiction” between thought and being
in which he always remains (CUP1, 123 / SKS 7, 118).18
Climacus defines the way in which the individual, subjective thinker
takes up this sense of existential paradox performatively, in terms of
‘style’ (CUP1, 357 / SKS 7, 326). Style is a category applied as easily
to Greek ethics as to their Christian retrieval by Climacus, a point he
doesn’t fail to recognize. “To understand oneself in existence was the
17
See Aristotle EN, 1140b6.
18
See Frederick Copleston History of Philosophy, vol. 1, p. 338. “Aristotle’s treat-
ment of the virtues betrays the fact that he was under the influence of the predomi-
nantly aesthetic attitude of the Greek towards human conduct, a fact that appears
in a clear light in his treatment of the “great-souled” man. The notion of a crucified
God would have been abhorrent to him: it would most probably have seemed in his
eyes at once unaesthetic and irrational. On the aesthetics of Greek ethics, cf. Jaeger
Paideia, vol. 1, p. 35. “In early Greek thought there was no separation between eth-
ics and aesthetics.”
Greek principle,” but “also the Christian principle,” except that with
the Christian appropriation of Greek ethics “this self has received
much richer and much more profound qualifications that are even
more difficulate to understand together with existing” (CUP1, 352-
353 / SKS 7, 321-322). If the essence of the Greek philosopher’s style
was the passion it expressed, the style of subjective thinking after the
dialectical, after Hegel, after modern “scientific scholarship (CUP1,
556 / SKS 7, 506),” ought to express “a new pathos” born of dialectics’
fatal return to the pathos-filled (CUP1, 555 / SKS 7, 505). Once again,
we are returned to the doctrine of hereditary sin which accentuates
existence paradoxically, and the god in time through which eternity
also becomes paradoxical (CUP1, 353-354 / SKS 7, 322-323). These
two elements together make the believer’s existence “even more pas-
sionate than that of the Greek philosopher,” because this paradoxi-
cally accentuated existence “yields the maximum of passion” (CUP1,
354 / SKS 7, 323). His eternal happiness, the “absolute good, has the
remarkable quality that it can be defined only by the mode in which
it is acquired” (CUP1, 427 / SKS 7, 388). Its definition is as long and
multiple and idiosyncratic as the individual lives by which it is ap-
propriated – a kaleidoscope of mimùseis where the representing and
the represented coincide. We only grasp its concept via the kind of
groundless representation Nietzche’s Zarathustra later celebrates; all
imagining, image through and through; all copy – a religious “imagi-
nation imagining itself imagine.”19
Aristotle theorized the potential deliberateness of the passions and
this deliberation returns as an essential element of Climacus’ paradox-
ical virtue, though transformed into an art of possibility that action
both requires and against which it defends. The “art is to think every
possibility; the moment I have acted (in the inner sense), the transfor-
mation is that the task is to defend myself against further deliberation”
(unless, that is, it must be repeated) (CUP1, 341n / SKS 7, 313). Clima-
cus defines the movement through choice from the posse of “thought
action” to the esse of “actual action” in Aristotelian terms of “ÈÇËÅÑÇÐ”
(CUP1, 342 / SKS 7, 313).20 But this “concrete eternity in the existing
19
William H. Gass Willie Master’s Lonesome Wife, p. 5. Willie’s wife is a personifica-
tion of language, a whore who, like language, is available to everyone, and also, like
language, sings wonderfully for those who solicit her with care. The line belongs to
her.
20
Kierkegaard’s Aristotle was heavily influenced by his reading of Tennemann’s Ge-
schicte der Philosophie. The Hongs, in their commentary to this citation, provide a
translation of the relevant section, iii, pp. 125-127, where the way in which the “ac-
person” whereby continuity is achieved obtains through “the maximum

of passion,” not Greek temperance. Climacus models this “idealizing
passion which anticipates the eternal in existence” (CUP1, 312 / SKS 7,
284) on Aristotle’s ideal of the unmoved mover, who provides his own
“ÒÃÉÍÐ [end, goal] and ÊÃÒÏÍË [measure, criterion]” (CUP1, 312 / SKS
7, 284). But he consolidates the personality under the authority of an
idea of happiness that, adjusted to the requirements of the age of in-
dolence and reflection, depends upon the aggravation of the passions,
their enlargement as opposed to their mildness. Though no romantic
himself, this is part of Kierkegaard’s romantic inheritance.
Eudaimonism, Again
Applying these categories hijacked from metaphysics to the ethical,

Climacus draws the sagacity oft criticized in the authorship together
with Aristotle’s eudaimonism and deliberation’s art of possibility:
It has been said that the good has its reward in itself, and thus it is not only the most
proper but also the most sagacious thing to will the good. A sagacious eudaemonist
is able to perceive this very well; thinking in the form of possibility, he can come as
close to the good as is possible, because in possibility as in abstraction the transition is
only an appearance. But when the transition is supposed to become actual, all sagacity
expires in scruples. Actual time separates the good and the reward for him so much,
so eternally, that sagacity cannot join them again, and the eudaemonist declines with
thanks. To will the good is indeed the most sagacious thing – yet not as understood by
sagacity but as understood by the good. (CUP1, 342 f. / SKS 7, 313)
Eudaimonism suffers from what in Philosophical Fragments Clima-

cus terms the “acoustical illusion.” Just as the understanding mistak-
enly believes that its limit in the unknown is a difference oriented
by the understanding’s identity – while in truth its identity is a mere
echo of the absolute difference of the god, whose identity and concept
cannot possibly be realized – the eudaimonist confuses his rewards
with wisdom and the good. In reality it is the good that defines this
wisdom, and the rewards of actuality, as far as the conserving good
sense of eudaimonists are concerned, is always something different, 21
tualization of the possible” is emphasized likely seduced Kierkegaard into the per-
version of introducing Aristotle’s doctrine of kinùsis from the Physics (200b) and
Metaphysics Æ into the domain of practical thought. Not atypically, Kierkegaard
takes what he wants, does with it what he wants, and moves on without apology.
21
See CUP1, 421 / SKS 7, 383. Making the same point, Climacus explains using the
example of illustration that “identity is a lower view than contradiction, which is
more concrete.” In Aristotelian fashion, we begin with what is closest, but progress
something deferred. The gap sin places between the Idea of the Good
deliberation tries to specify and the actuality of choice introduces a
break and a suffering into eudaimonism which the classical, Aristote-
lian form cannot contain. Classically, the transition from reflection to
action is totally smooth, the naturally self-accomplishing immanence
of desire, like the flourishing of the lilies and birds in Kierkegaard’s
discourse, or the waxing and waning of the moon.
Climacus expresses this “existence-contradiction” (CUP1, 380
/ SKS 7, 347) radicalizing Greek passions and virtue in terms of a
similar radicalizing of the worldly telos borrowed from eudaimonism,
the absolute telos of eternal happiness (CUP1, 386 / SKS 7, 351). And
though Climacus insists that any thought operating with the same cat-
egories as paganism cannot be Christianity (CUP1, 368 / SKS 7,336),
the equation for his own ethics could easily be ‘paganism + the leap.’
The absolute telos like Aristotle’s chief good is a guiding reason that
“cannot be included” among the particular, secondary goods one
chooses (CUP1, 393 / SKS 7, 358). It must “absolutely transform”
(CUP1, 393 / SKS 7, 358) existence as a whole, which it can do only by
remaining outside of it and allowing one’s own existence to tranform
itself “into a testimony to it” (CUP1, 394 / SKS 7, 359). It does this as
the one thing which is willed absolutely “for its own sake” (CUP1,
394 / SKS 7, 359), namely, existence itself, which paradoxically resists
assimilation into a foregone, concluding Idea. Aristotle’s pagan error,
for Climacus, was that he relativized this absolute telos aesthetically
by rendering the accomplished human life equivalent to it, reducing it
to a certain ordering of what was already ready to be disposed.22 Rath-
er than demanding the absolute venture of this life, happiness became
the actualizing of a prior possibility – what one already was, and pos-
sessed – in which it was latent (CUP1, 404-5 / SKS 7, 368-369).
Climacus erects his first defense against the worldliness of Aristote-
lian moral wisdom by attempting a redefinition of “the path of virtue.”
He distinguishes its path from the aestheticizing “path of pleasure”
towards what is real. For Climacus, we begin with identity, our own abstract per-
spective, but this identity is constantly annulled by the existence in which ethics
forces it to begin. “[T]he principle of identity is only the boundary; it is like the
blue mountains, like the line the artist calls the base line – the drawing is the main
thing.”
22
Justice, then, in the Republic, is a matter of giving everyone their due, in the popu-
lar sense, and in the philosopher’s sense, setting the elements of the city and the
soul to their own proper work. Cf. Aristotle EN, 1131b17, 1132a2. Justice is defined
similary in terms of distribution, both in the arithmetic and geometrically propor-
tionate sense (of redistribution and distribution) of the mean.
(CUP1, 403 / SKS 7, 367) that “sets forth a telos in time,” reducing
the teaching about virtue into “a doctrine of sagacity” (CUP1, 404 /
SKS 7, 368). He thinks eudaimonism against itself, rescuing the eudai-
monist’s concept of virtue from the “eudaimonistic thinking” in which
virtue falls flat. All worldly wisdom, he claims, can be summed up by
the Delphic inscription which Aristotle defends philosophically in his
ethics: ne quid nimis [nothing too much] (CUP1, 404 / SKS 7, 368). The
doctrine of the mean, defining virtue against excesses to be avoided, is
the antithesis of Christianity (see CUP1, 524 / SKS 7, 477). “It would
be almost the wittiest objection, tinged with humor and devoid of any
attack on the historical and eternal truth of Christianity, that would
simply excuse itself from relation to it with these words: ‘it is much too
much, Your Reverence, that the god allows himself to be crucified’”
(CUP1, 404 / SKS 7, 368). The rescue of virtue in the classical sense
(a state of character) accomplishes what the student of Aristotle could
not. This student “trusts in the asseverations of all the philosophers”
which prompt “him to want to be jolly well included, to want to make
an intellectual transaction, a profitable stock-exchange speculation, in-
stead of a daring venture[.]” The virtue ethicist “prompts him to make
a simulated movement, a simulated pass at the absolute, although he
remains completely within the relative, a simulated transition such as
that from eudaimonism to the ethical within eudaimonism” (CUP1,
423, cf. 602 / SKS 7, 385, cf. 547) (my emphasis). The motion Climacus
describes from eudaimonism to the ethical within it authenticates this
absolute that eudaimonism simulates.
How then can this transition actually be accomplished? If worldly
knowledge establishes the limits which every human being ought to
abide (CUP1, 468 / SKS 7, 379) it only aids religious understanding in
locating these limits which it must happily leap past. And so the last
time Climacus invokes this release of the ethical within eudaimonism,
it is eudaimonism’s “sagacity,” its ne quid nimis, where he locates the
obstacle. 23 Climacus turns the ‘means as ends’ theory of Aristotle’s
inside out, so that the means, now, though they are still the ends, while
before moderate, are never enough. The end is always a transcend-
ence one suffers and fails to achieve, rather than an immanence in the
enlightened activity natural to rational man. The ‘end’ of eternal hap-
23
See CUP1, 602 / SKS 7, 546. “Just as some have deceitfully wanted to form a tran-
sition from eudaemonism to the ethical through sagacity, so it is also a deceitful
device to want to identify becoming a Christian as closely as possible with becom-
ing a human being and to want to make someone believe that one becomes that
decisively in childhood.”
piness is immanent in the ‘means’ of a human life as a self-defeating

transcendence. What the eudaemonist never acquires is infinite ab-
straction. But this is “the first step of the ethical” (CUP1, 426n / SKS
7, 388) – which understood eudaemonistically “is lunacy.” Climacus,
then, were he less ambivalent about his pagan inheritance (labouring
less under what Harold Bloom calls the anxiety of influence), might
just as easily describe his own ethics as a lunatic development of eu-
daemonism. Having uncovered the first step to the ethical within eu-
daemonism, a step that was no step, but rather the preliminary leap
of a Judge’s madness, he posits the second leap of faith’s higher mad-
ness, a move back through choice to the second lunacy of action and
responsibility.
Teleology, albeit paradoxically, is essential to Climacus’ account.
He has set himself the task of describing an ethical framework that
can function with no end in sight, no overarching logos of its own,
no archù or origin accounting for its telos. The representations and
concepts in which the religious speaker trades operate “with the lack
of an end.” Their end is always a failed end, “the absence of a result”
(CUP1, 442 / SKS 7, 402). But the lack of an end, again, put another
way, amounts to the phronetic telos always under revision and concre-
tized in the life of action, the perpetual idealizing of action which Cli-
macus insists on. The danger and difficulty for the phronimos, or here,
ethical-religious subjectivity, is that only a paradoxical idea refuses to
betray the contours of actuality. Authenticating the classical notions
of moral wisdom, happiness, and the virtue underlying them required
the introduction of companion Christian notions, the twin paradoxes
of hereditary sin and the god’s parousia. “The religious speaker who
does not know how the task appears in everyday life and in the living
room could just as well keep quiet,” although, describing everyday life,
one will “become hard pressed by the inadequacy of language” which
“compared with existing in actuality” is “very abstract” (CUP1, 465 /
SKS 7, 423). Frustrated by the paradoxes of religious understanding,
the poetic speaker, even the Sunday preacher, communicates this “one
and only concrete understanding” metaphorically, at best. It is, after
all, “the most difficult understanding” (CUP1, 470 / SKS 7, 427).
Like the phronùsis which aims at eudaimonia the thought of eternal
happiness is a form of comprehension in which the difficulty of the
simple is maintained not as an objectivity or a thought-problem, as
“the mathematician describes a circle” (CUP1, 429 / SKS 7, 390), that
of a what, but the how of action and choice. Any what will suffice,
as the idea which joins “its view with the particular moment on the
particular day, with this and that particular state of mind, with this
and that particular circumstance” (CUP1, 495, cf. 611 / SKS 7, 449, cf.
554).24 In classical Greek fashion Climacus’ example comes from the
medical art: the “usefulness” of his “medicine” “depend[s] simply and
solely on the way it is used, so that the manner of use is actually the
medicine” (CUP1, 188 / SKS 7, 173). But returning to a more primor-
dial stratum of Greek culture, he joins the image of medicinal healing
with that of ecstatic katharsis.
The Telos of Eternal Happiness:

Tragedy, Madness and Religious Encounter
The Greek assumption that “the God-relationship was the harbin-

ger of madness” (CUP1, 484 / SKS 7, 439) is more to Climacus’ taste
than the graduated ascent of the philosopher’s intellect. To see the
god was death to the Jews, and madness to the Greeks (CUP1, 484
/ SKS 7, 439) – a tragic fact for those who sought him out in cult, or
unintentionally solicited him through tragic crime. The logic might be
reversed. To see death, to go mad and leave the human behind, meant
to see the god.25 Long before the Greeks built the stages for their trag-
edies, crime was ritualized in these outlands of the human, playing out
the tragic ambivalences of passion (of sexuality and violence) – that,
possessed by these passions, we are both ourselves and not ourselves,
both responsible and not for what we do. 26 The same dialectic returns
24
See Aristotle EN, ii.9. Aristotle also defines phronetic undertstanding in terms of
both difficulty and particularity. And the reasons for choosing likewise breakdown
into “what, at what time, in what way, for what purpose and towards whom.”
25
See John Caputo “The Experience of God and the Axiology of the Impossible”
in The Experience of God, a Post/Modern Response, ed. by Hart and Wall, p. 37.
“Here, at this limit point, in extremis, when we are or when someone we love is
struck by a potentially fatal disease, a qualitative shift takes place in our experi-
ence and we enter another domain where things slip out of our control. Speaking in
strictly phenomenological terms, the things that are not under our control, where
we have run up against the limits of our own powers, are the raw materials of reli-
gion, the stuff of which it is made, the occasion upon which the name of God makes
its entry.” I wonder, though, if treating God as an epistemological limit, a noume-
non, is not still a bit too Kantian for Kierkegaard, for whom God is more than a
metaphysical prescription about the limits of knowledge, for whom the reality of
God is experienced.
26
Walter Burkert Homo Necans, pp. 77-78, 72. “In the pictures showing the god [re:
Dionysus, Artemis, Hera] and his sacrificial animal side by side in almost inner
communion, we recognize the heartfelt ambivalence of sacrifice which made it pos-
in Climacus’ ethics, complete with a mad god of tragic circumstance.

Holy madness was a mark of ethical earnestness in the throes of its
highest enthusiasm (CUP1, 137 / SKS 7, 128).
In the Postscript, the “absolute difference” (CUP1, 492 / SKS 7, 446)
of the god of Fragments takes on lived reality in the believer’s humil-
ity and worship before him. Philosophy’s job was to discover this dif-
ference. “Dialectic in its truth” leads the way past one knowledge to
another, “where in unknowing the difference between knowledge and
non-knowledge collapses in absolute worship, there where the objec-
tive uncertainty resists in order to force out the passionate certitude
of faith, there where in absolute subjection the conflict about right
and wrong collapses in absolute worship” (CUP1, 490-491 / SKS 7,
445-446). The philosophical contradiction between reason and unrea-
son dissolves before the god, along with the conventional categories of
morality, overwhelmed by a larger force which for the moment trans-
forms the strength of the collision, redirecting its force in the direc-
tion of a different activity, that of a worshipful, religious subjectivity.
The (objective) contradictions of reason are passionately redoubled
in a “tragic assimilation” “into the religious person’s consciousness,”
(CUP1, 483 / SKS 7, 438) who themself, before a paradoxical god, be-
comes the contradiction.27 The task of philosophy concludes in a ‘rep-
etition’ of the tragedy it originally suppressed.
While Kierkegaard’s retrieval of tragedy no doubt borrows creative-
ly from Aristotle’s interpretation, the Poetics also provide the target
at which his religious destruktion28 of aesthetics takes aim. “Aristotle
remarks in the Poetics,” writes Climacus, “that poetry is superior to
history, because history presents only what has occurred, poetry what
could and ought to have occurred, i. e., poetry has possibility at its
disposal.” 29 The same idea recurs with thinly veiled reference to Aris-
totle in the section in Stages on Life’s Way entitled The Tragic Needs
History More than the Comic Does; the Disappearance of this Dif-
ference in the “Imaginary Construction.”30 Here Taciturnus retrieves
sible for the Greeks to create tragedy.” “Mutually deteriminant and interwoven,
both [sexuality and death] are acted out in the sacrificial ritual, in the tension be-
tween renunciation and fulfilment, destruction and reparation.”
27
See chapter 7, above. The same movement was also described by Frater Taciturnus.
Climacus restates the same schematic at CUP1, 520-522 / SKS 7, 472-473.
28
I use the term in the hermeneutical sense given it by Heidegger. See Being and
Time, sec. 75.
29
CUP1, 318 / SKS 7, 290.
30
SL, 437-446 / SKS 6, 404-413.
the aesthetically absorbed ideality of Aristotle’s theatre that Clima-

cus criticized (echoing Haufniensis), applying it as an instrument of
tragedy’s religious reflection. The philosophical nature of tragedy dis-
cerned by Aristotle needs to be critically reflected upon, making it
a subjective rather than an objective issue, as for Quidam it became
a matter of choice and the Idea. But it is not until the Postscript that
Kierkegaard explains this outright.
Climacus discusses the meaning of comedy and tragedy for the is-
sue in Fragments in a long note to the section by that name, using
Aristotle’s Poetics as a foil and criticizing his aesthetisizing of the Idea
(CUP1, 514 / SKS 7, 466n.). He adds a dose of reflection to Aristotle’s
conception of comedy, magnifying the tension between the aesthetic
and the ethical until ‘the Idea’ emerges explicitly, and with it the dif-
ference is posited between the tragic-aesthetic, its loss in the universal
ideality of ethics, and its return in the concrete ideality of religion.
According to Climacus, what applies to the comic equally suits the
tragic: “The tragic and the comic are the same inasmuch as both are
contradiction, but the tragic is suffering contradiction, and the comic
is painless contradiction.”31
The Aristotelian definition (Poetics, V): ÒÍ Á¿Ï ÁÃÉÍÇÍË ÃÑÒÇË gÊ¿ÏÒÅÊ¿ ÒÇ È¿Ç
¿ÇÑÕÍÐ ¿Ë×ÂÓËÍË ;È¿Ç= ÍÓ ÔÆ¿ÏÒÇÈÍË [The ludicrous may be defined as a mistake or
deformity not productive of pain or harm to others] is not of such a nature that it does
not allow whole families of the comic to be secure in their ludicrousness, and it does
indeed become doubtful to what extent the definition, even in relation to the comic
it embraces, does not bring us into collision with the ethical. His example: that one
laughs at an ugly and distorted face if, please note, this does not cause pain to the one
who has the face, is neither entirely correct nor so aptly chosen that with one stroke, as
it were, it explains the secret of the comic. The example lacks reflection, because, even
if the distorted face does not cause pain, it is indeed painful to be so fated as to prompt
laughter merely by showing one’s face. 32
This note demanding that the spectator reflect ethically on the idea
behind one or another tragic-comic fate, the pseudonymous author-
ships last word on tragedy and comedy, goes on to orient the comple-
mentary arts with respect to time and telos.
The temporal nature of tragic suffering and the anodyne of comedy
“consist in the relation of the contradiction to the idea” (CUP1, 515-
516 / SKS 7, 466-468). The comic contradiction is painless because
31
See CA, 19 / SKS 4, 326. Vigilius Haufniensis, the pseudonym to treat “religious
ideality” most explicitly, explains that rather than the Greek actualizing of the idea,
it is the idealizing of actuality, a project which is always incomplete, and deliber-
ately engaged with human life.
32
CUP1, 514n / SKS 7, 466.
comedy sneaks out of its contradiction through a back door, while

the tragic interpretation sees the same contradiction and “despairs
over the way out” (CUP1, 516 / SKS 7, 467). Where comedy retreats
philosophically into recollection, a tragic logos pushes onward into
the unknown. Viewing the idea ahead, is pathos; behind is the comic,
although the “subjectively existing thinker” is always as “bi-frontal as
the existence situation itself” (CUP1, 89 / SKS 7, 88). Even in the face
of his tragic striving a relation to the contingency of the past – to one’s
history, the history of one’s choices – is required. “A pathos that ex-
cludes the comic is therefore a misunderstanding, is not pathos at all”
(CUP1, 89 / SKS 7, 88). “From a pathos-filled perspective, one second
has infinite value (CUP1, 92 / SKS 7, 90),” since, in this moment, I
can say Du [the familiar ‘You’] to God (CUP1, 90 / SKS 7, 88); while
“from a comic perspective, ten thousand years are but a prank, like a
yesterday, and yet the time the existing individual is in does consist of
such parts” (CUP1, 92 / SKS 7, 90).
In the comic, time evaporates insignificantly into a self-negating
history, one already accomplished, a necessary Hegelian future built
recollectively-Platonically into the past. An ethics grounded in phi-
losophies of immanence, Climacus parries, cannot teach us how to
live, because its teachers are always “dead and gone,” even in relation
to themselves (CUP1, 147 / SKS 7, 136) – or, but this amounts to the
same thing, they never were. The education that tempers the comic
vacuum of an ethics of pure thinking with the weight of the future, of
choice and responsibility, bids the airtight thinking of philosophers of
immanence farewell, breathing now the unfamiliar atmosphere where
the I-Thou takes place. The “relationship with God” renounces these
vain attempts at human understanding “in order always to be able in
divine madness to give thanks” (CUP1, 178 / SKS 7, 164).
But Climacus is no irrationalist or mystic. While this divine madness
may drive philosophers to the end of their philosophical wits, particu-
larly German philosophers, Climacus ought to be “understandable
to every Greek and to every rational human being,” every “existing
spirit” (CUP1, 191 / SKS 7, 176). In this madness the understanding
reconciles itself religiously to an experience of the irrational that from
the Christian perspective, employing its logos, makes sublime sense of
human life on a strictly case by case basis.
Climacus identifies the healing effect of grace and mercy, analo-
gized by ‘A’ with the effect of ancient tragedy, with a renewed, reli-
gious version on the verge of taking shape in the wake of a modernity
dominated by an unwittingly comic and despairing self-interpreta-
tion. The concept of sin that Socrates lacked (though “his merit was
precisely to emphasize that the knower was existing,” the existing de-
nied by the “back door” of Platonic “recollection” [CUP1, 208 / SKS
7, 192]) guarantees that flight backward is impossible (CUP1, 583,
208 / SKS 7, 531, 192). Historical damage must be repaired within the
arc of that same history. Fantasied solutions that fall behind or be-
side the conflict leave the conflict itself unaffected. This is as true for
personal psychological collision as it is for the world-historical kind,
and Climacus would include them both in the category of the histori-
cal. The consequence of war, for instance, must be dealt with at both
levels. Post-traumatic stress and guilt in the soldier, who, taking hu-
man life, undoes the moral framework of the society in which he was
raised, like the physical and economic devastastion of a bombed out
country, continues to determine the personality of that soldier, or that
place, until the trauma is dealt with, no matter what philosophy they
adopt. 33 We “ought to interpret the contradiction as tragic” because
this “is precisely the way to its healing” (CUP1, 520 / SKS 7, 472).
We must recognize that we are creatures of other creatures’ damage.
Even though there is no “way out” from the tragic, “no remedy for
repentance that disregards repentance,” or, like Quidam, is unable to
complete it (CUP1, 524 / SKS 7, 473). We choose it, or at least ought to,
not accidentally like Oedipus, but deliberately, trained as much in the
ascetic, phronetic art of philosophy as we are in the ecstatic catharses
of tragic poetry and religion.
Climacus concludes ancient tragedy’s historical repetition (to bor-
row a phrase from Constantius, its “recollection forward”) with the
invocation of its sinister numen in the figures of the Erinyes, an aes-
thetic expression for the “total guilt” of the religious. “Therefore the
Furies were visible, but their visibility made the inwardness less ter-
rible and because of their visibility a boundary was established for
them: the Furies did not dare to enter the temple.” – “But the visibility
of the Furies symbolically expresses the commensurability between
the outer and the inner, whereby the guilt-consciousness is finitized,
and satisfaction consists in the suffering of punishment in time, and
33
The same idea could be justified psychoanalytically, on both a personal and cultural
level. Entire worlds are constructed around repression, entire histories, and those
worlds, however diminished and painful, remain undisturbed unless the content of
the repression becomes conscious. For a psychoanalytically historical account of
modern culture, which Freud himself invites in the closing remarks of Civilization
and its Discontents, see Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death, as well as Mar-
cuse’s Eros and Civilization.
the reconciliation consists in death, and everything ends in the sad ex-
altation that is death’s mitigation, that it is all over now and there was
no eternal guilt” (CUP1, 542 / SKS 7, 493). The Furies are a trope for
the terror of the coming of a god which no literature expressed better
than tragedy. It was said that Aeschylus’ representations of them were
so horrifying that they incited pregnant women to miscarry. 34 But “[i]f
the terror in the old days was that one could be offended, the terror
these days is that there is no terror” (CUP1, 215 / SKS 7, 196). We have
a choice between terrors, the banal or the religious. These days, the
terror of the religious can function, ironically, as a balm. The liberat-
ing force of an ancient terror returns with the tragic advent of a god,
though one freed by modern conceptions from the aesthetic relativ-
izing of myth and theatre; a god who comes in the form of a terrifying,
impossible Idea which one not only thinks but lives and practices; an
Idea which grasps the imaginations and passions of the body as well
as the intellect, liberating our age from the unholy madness of a cal-
culating abstraction, the insane banality and comedy of a melancholy
science. 35
The Christian thinker like his Greek ancestor, with a look forward
now, rather than back, relates himself to the Idea. So long as he lived,
the Greek philosopher practiced its accomplishment, not intellectu-
ally, since the Greeks had no scholarly journals or professional aspira-
tions, but in the whole human being, the life of the body, its appetites,
desires and imaginations, and, of course, its reason. Like the student
of Greek virtue, 36 Kierkegaard’s religiously subjective thinker prac-
34
See Ernest Rhys’ introduction to The Lyrical Dramas of Aeschylus.
35
Natural science was a source of comic despair for Kierkegaard. See Pap. VII 1 A
189 / SKS NB:76A. Cf. JP 3:2811. “Of all the sciences, natural science is the most
vapid, and it has amused me to consider how year after year something that once
caused astonishment becomes trivial … What excitement was aroused by the use
of the stethoscope! […] Then someone else will invent an instrument for listening
to the beating of the brain. It will arouse enormous excitement until, in fifty years’
time, every barber can do it. Then, at the barbershop, after you have had a haircut
and a shave and have been stethoscoped (because by then this will be quite ordi-
nary), the barber will ask, Perhaps you would also like me to listen to your brain
beating?” Cf. Pap. X 4 A 32 / SKS NB:23-32 and Pap. VII 1 A 182 / SKS NB:70. Cf.
JP 1:1086 and 3:2807. “[N]ew cultural consciousness” will “make natural science its
religion,” and with this apotheosis of science comes the “dreadful” explaination of
human life in terms of “natural necessity.”
36
Kierkegaard would exclude Plato from this group. Socrates, of course, is the pro-
totypical existential thinker, as well as Aristotle, in his practical philosophy. Kier-
kegaard tends to ignore Aristotle’s teleology, the metaphysics in which he inscribes
man’s destiny. Even kinùsis, the transition from possibility to actuality which Kier-
tices this Idea existentially as an end in itself governing all others,

since it is “in the very moment of passion that [one] gains the mo-
mentum to exist.” To deliberate and choose means revitalizing and
revising the role of the passions in human life and the habits of intel-
ligence in which they’re formed. This passion for this Idea protects the
individual against “the power and bondage of habit,” which through
sheer frequency and inertia chisels away at the transition from think-
ing to acting, making it “faster and faster” “at his expense” (CUP1,
340 / SKS 7, 312). But, departing from Greece, Climacus warns that
so long as one exists the Idea lies somewhere ahead, instead of comi-
cally behind in a foregone eternity – so long as existence matters, the
choices, victories and defeats which one can never reclaim in their
purity. The experience of sin compels our look forward, subjecting
us to the exigencies of time, making us it’s creature. Now matter how
longingly I recall time past, sin forces me “to exist, situated at the edge
of existence, by virtue of the absurd” in a god-relation which begins
internally, where the “thought-passion” finally “understands what it
means to break in this way with the understanding and thinking and
immanence,” an immanent transcendence, as opposed to the Greco-
German “foothold of immanence, the eternity behind” (CUP1, 569 /
SKS 7, 517).
There is a “solitary wellspring,” writes Climacus, “in every human
heart, that wellspring in which the god resides, that wellspring in the
profound silence when all is quiet” (CUP1, 183 / SKS 7, 169). The ethi-
cal in eudaimonism breaks out from this divine exuberance, where
the “enthusiastic ethical individuality uses the understanding to dis-
cover what is most sagacious in order not to do it” (CUP1, 568 / SKS
7, 516). This god-relation, though anathema to habit in any traditional
sense, must still be habituated, take root in the soul. Keirkegaard’s
Christianity inserts these three little steps of sin, faith, and grace in
the classical account of the action from which habits are formed. The
consciousness of sin – that all of god’s creation, especially my own
and the god who wells from within, is a contradiction – intensified
dialectically through repentance and expelled once more through
the resolution of faith, habituates us to “the greatest possible risk”
(CUP1, 572-573 / SKS 7, 519-520). This uncanny intelligence governs
a hexis through which the mood and reality in which a god appears,
kegaard irreverently violates in his crucial appropriation of it now applies to human

freedom. CA, 82 / SKS 4, 385.
the danger of the encounter, become more and unfamiliar rather than
better rehearsed.
The story, though, despite the revisions, is still the classical one of
being human, minus the being. We might say, instead, becoming hu-
man, which Climacus insures is an infinite task. “It is really the god-
relationship that makes a human being a human being” (CUP1, 244
/ SKS 7, 202). 37 Despite the requisite inwardness, a kind of aesthetics
paradoxically claims the god-relationship in its highest form, where a
god, once again, comes upon man from the outside.38 This religious-
ness demands a quasi-theatrical return to illusion, not backward to
poetry’s “illusion before the understanding,” but rather forward to
“the happy illusion” of religion, between which “worldly wisdom” and
“sagacity” perform their vaudeville (CUP1, 457 / SKS 7, 414). From
a lack of imagination, a paucity of illusion, Aristotelian vaudeville
succumbs to the illusion of “probability” and “the reliability of a fi-
nite teleology,” replacing the deliberate deceptions of poetry with the
more sober prevarications of philosophy, an initiation into a decep-
tion which the teacher as well as the student embraces as authentic.
The religious illusion, on the other hand, embraces the reality that all
of man’s truths construct themselves in this false dichotomy between
fact and fiction, which the religious exposes, placing man in the gap
where construction takes place (the construction of differences, for
instance, between real and constructed) not by his hands, but by the
hands of a divine Other/author. Both illusions, that of poetry and the
ne quid nimis of Aristotle’s moral psychology, dissolve “as soon as the
infinite stirs” (CUP1, 457 / SKS 7, 414).
Although Climacus criticizes eudaimonism for its calculating sa-
gacity, the deeper claim is that its wisdom, limited aesthetically to
happiness and pleasure, is not enough. 39 The wisdom in happiness and
pleasure from a more developed religious perspective amounts to suf-
37
See CUP1, 566 / SKS 7, 515. This is the paradoxical god. “The paradox is connected
essentially with being a human being, and qualitatively with each human being in
particular, whether he has much or little understanding.”
38
See CUP1, 561n / SKS 7, 510. In Religiousness B, “the upbuilding is something
outside the individual; the individual does not find the upbuilding by finding the re-
lationship with God within himself but relates himself to something outside himself
in order to find the upbuilding. The paradox is that this apparently esthetic relation-
ship, that individual relates himself to something outside himself, nevertheless is
the absolute relationship with God.”
39
Kierkegaard rightly identifies eudaimonism with the pursuit of happiness and
pleasure, a view he recognizes in Chryssipus as a developmentally late example of
an older model. Pap. IV A 246 (n. d. 1843) (no SKS). Cf. JP 5:5636.
fering and stupidity, as the pain and foolishness of religious illusion40

relates to the eternal wisdom and happiness that “comes afterward”
(CUP1, 457 / SKS 7, 414). In ancient eudaimonism all choice is worked
out deliberately, dialectically. On Climacus’ re-reading dialectic re-
mains a necessary step, but only as negative proof of Christianity’s
difficulty (CUP1, 430 / SKS 7, 391). The deliberations of dialectic be-
gin and end in a mystery that ecstatically compels its downfall. To
commit oneself earnestly to the ethics of Salighed is to be “touched
by god” – “in the throes of madness,”41 or salig. And so “Let us go to
the theatre to be deceived, let the actor and spectator cooperate beau-
tifully to fascinate and to be fascinated in illusion: it is magnificent”
(CUP1, 417 / SKS 7, 379), not because theatre brings us any closer to
an absolute, but rather because the illusions of theatre and tragic thea-
tre in particular prepare us for the radicalized illusion of the religious.
Its art of fiction exposes the stupidity behind sagacity’s representation
of reality as solid ground, a representation which, ironically, the poet’s
distinction between reality and play negatively confirms.42
40
The eternal happiness (Salighed) at which Climacus’ ethics aims bears the anglo-
saxon root of our “silly” (salig). Ibrahim Khan Salighed as Happiness?, p. 85.
41
For ‘salig’ as ‘divinely mad,’ See Ibrahim Khan Salighed as Happiness?, pp. 86 f.
42
See CUP1, 457 / SKS 7, 414. Climacus distinguishes the illusion of poetry, of im-
mediacy (which poetry confirms, in which its poetry-reality distinction dwells), the
illusion of obtusity/sagacity, all from the happy illusion of the religious.
Chapter 12
Kierkegaard and the Tragedy of Authorship
It would be unfair to conclude a study of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous

debt to tragedy without some attempt to place this debt structurally
within the authorship as a whole. It goes almost without saying that
the religious ideal presented in the signed works – some universally
edifying, others specifically Christian – cannot be a tragic one.1 The
eternities of Religiousness A or B (the first, pagan-philosophical, the
second, Christian) dissolve the tragic collision between time and eter-
nity into the second term in which all wounds are healed: Only when
it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally secured against every
change, eternally made free in blessed independence, eternally and
happily secured against despair (WL, 44 / SKS 9, 36). In this victory
of eternity over time in Works of Love we hear an echo of the odes to
eternity in which Greek tragedies tend to conclude. Kierkegaard as
author, however – like the figures suffering this education in eternity
on the tragic stage – remains irrevocably temporal, a point of which he
was all too conscious. Despite the solace of the Christian ideal which
the authorship allegedly strives to present, mortal language can ex-
press the eternal logos of the religious only through a kind of failure.
Until kingdom come our mortal perspectives, this applies to authors
most of all, must remain tragic. An analysis of Kierkegaard’s writings
on his authorship – On My Work as an Author, The Point of View on
My Work as Author, and Armed Neutrality 2 – shows that the struc-
1
See PV, 115 / SV1 XIII, 601. Not yet Christian, and therefore, also essentially poetic
and pagan, “the point of departure of the upbuilding discourses is in the upbuilding,
that is, in the universally human.”
2
In their historical introduction to The Point of View, the Hongs explain the genesis
of these works: Kierkegaard originally wrote “The Point of View” in 1848 to be pub-
lished simultaneously with the second 1849 edition of Either/Or, wanting to main-
tain the counterbalance of signed and pseudonymous works in his authorship. Pap.
X 1 A 147. Cf. JP 6:6361. But the possible publication of this work and the issues it
raised concerning direct and indirect communication agonized him. Pap. X 1 A 501.
He decided to postpone its publication, but not so decisively that he didn’t consider
ture of the authorship itself in Kierkegaard’s case is classically tragic,

not as a means of representing images or ideas, but as a ritualized act
of literature in which human language and concepts fail and, through
the sacrifice of the author cum protagonist, a God appears.
Kierkegaard as Self-Described Religious Author
“The authorship, regarded as a totality, is religious from first to last” –

so begins On My Work as an Author, the only autobiographical work
Kierkegaard published under his own name. 3 His pseudonymous po-
ets and philosophers, On My Work reports, have all along been in-
struments of a divine education always already absorbed in a move-
ment from the pagan to “the essentially Christian” (OW, 5 / SV1 XIII,
over the course of the following year publishing the piece under two different pseu-
donyms, Johannes de Silentio and A-O. “The Point of View” was of a piece with the
other signed works on the authorship accumulating over the course of the same year,
including “Armed Neutrality,” but also “A Note” (“The Accounting”), and “Three
Notes.” In 1849 Kierkegaard considered publishing an eponymous “On My Work as
an Author,” consisting of “Point of View,” “Three Notes,” “A Note” (“The Account-
ing”) and “The Whole in One Word,” along with another volume in which “Armed
Neutrality” would appear as an appendix to “The Sickness Unto Death.” Pap. X 5
B 143. It was not until two years later, however, that Kierkegaard published On My
Work as an Author, a very truncated version of “Point of View,” describe the Hongs,
which included “The Accounting” as well as part of the third of the “Three Notes”
as a preface. The Point of View for my Work as an Author along with an appendix of
the remaining “Two Notes” and a “Postscript” to these “Notes” was published four
years after Kierkegaard’s death, by his brother, Peter Christian. It wasn’t until the
first edition of Kierkegaard’s Efterladte Papirer that Armed Neutrality saw publica-
tion, although, as the subtitle suggests, Kierkegaard had already reworked it and
included it in On My Work as an Author as “My Position as a Religious Author in
‘Christendom’ and My Strategy.”
3
The “First and Final Explanation” of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript might
also be included. In addition, the Poscript’s Appendix, “A View of a Contemporary
Effort in Danish Literature,” also belongs to that group of Kierkegaard’s writings
on Kierkegaard’s writings, although here we are dealing with the pseudonymous
work of Johannes Climacus. A pseudonym, of course, cannot unlock the secret of
pseudonymity. But the “Explanation” Kierkegaard provides in the Postscript only
problematizes The Point of View’s account of the essentially religious nature and
construction of the authorship as a whole. See Joakim Garff “The Eyes of Argus:
The Point of View and Points of View with Respect to Kierkegaard’s Activity as an
Author” in Kierkegaardiana 15, p. 32. The “third party” position of “reader” Kier-
kegaard assigns himself in the Postscript undermines the authorial privilege which
in The Point of View authorizes his claims about the true, religious nature of the
authorship as a whole.
Kierkegaard and the Tragedy of Authorship 295
494). The true author has enlisted them in a common aim: “to make
aware of the religious” (OW, 12 / SV1 XIII, 501). The posthumous
The Point of View for My Work as an Author begins with as una-
bashed a declaration: “The content, then, of this little book is: what I
in truth am as an author, that I am and was a religious author” (PV, 23
/ SV1 XIII, 517). Like On My Work, it also insists on the essentially
religious nature of the authorship as a whole, subjecting the thoughts
and passions of the pseudonyms, pagan and Christian alike, to a cal-
culated ordering after the fact. This ordering explains everything in
terms of the strategies of seduction, at first, and, more fundamentally,
communication. From Either/Or forward Kierkegaard has levied the
instrument of poetic appeal on the unwitting reader, soliciting them
sensuously on behalf of a religious Idea, to which the aesthete, once
caught up in the momentum of the authorship’s concept, must even-
tually yield. The movement of the writings was allegedly completed
in advance, like the man, Climacus jokes, who tumbled 24 years old
from his mother’s womb (PF, 96 / SKS 4, 294). Kierkegaard presents
himself as such a man – cut off from life by a titanic reflection whose
“task” was religion (PF, 97 / SKS 4, 295).
But for a philosopher so determined to head off all human con-
clusions at the Hegelian pass, the story, surely, cannot end here. No
surprise, then, The Point of View immediately problematizes its “di-
rect communication” and “report to history” in which the authorship
receives its concluding interpretation. The essence of the Christian
authorship, Kierkegaard tells us, is “self-denial” – more strict an ef-
facing than the ironic strategy of pseudonymity. We can never have a
complete explanation of his work as an author because concluding the
true nature of the authorship would make his God-relationship public
(PV, 25 / SV1 XIII, ) – a structural impossibility. Writing for Kierke-
gaard IS the God-relationship and so the truth about his authorship
must remain irremediably concealed. Like the secret of Abraham’s
faith and his justification for killing Isaac, it is in principle unable to
be disclosed.
The Aesthetic and Religious Duplexity of the Authorship
As in the pseudonymous works, theatre, in The Point of View, re-

mains a dominant metaphor for the aesthetic dissipations of the age.
It stands in for various types of reflection through which the feeble
subjects of the age of enlightenment bow out of the exigencies of ac-
tion and choice. Hegel and his enthusiasts, such as Martensen, are no
less theatrical – comic, in fact – than the coterie surrounding Heiberg
and the Danish theatre (no less influenced by the German master):4
The medium for being a Christian has been shifted from existence and the ethical to
the intellectual, the metaphysical, the imaginational; a more or less theatrical relation-
ship has been introduced between thinking Christianity and being a Christian – and in
this way has abolished being a Christian. (AN, 130 / SV1 X5 B107, 289 f.)
Kierkegaard’s writings on his writings struggle both to remove this

ambiguity between the dramatic-poetic and the religious – to purge
actuality of these aesthetic-philosophical abstractions – and, simulta-
neously, to deepen it.
The Point of View insists on the essential “duplexity” (Dupliciteten
or Tvetydigheden) of his authorship as both aesthetic and religious
(PV, 29 / SV1 XIII, 521). The duplexity in the most literal sense was
never an either/or between aesthetics and ethics. It was the both/and
of poetry and religion. Kierkegaard was careful to both open and
close the authorship not only with doubled names, “false” and “true,”
but more importantly the doubles of “pagan” and “religious.” In 1843,
the pseudonymous literary-moral essays of Either/Or landed on the
shelves at Reitzel’s. Its surreptitious companions, Kierkegaard’s Two
Edifying Discourses, followed after another three months. Five years
later Fædrelandet serialized Kierkegaard’s little essay on theatre,
“The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress,” signed ‘Inter et
Inter,’ three months after the publication of Christian Discourses (PV,
30 / SV1 XIII, 522). There is no chronological progression from the
concealment of aesthetic and philosophic pseudonymity to the reli-
gious disclosures and satisfactions of a second authorship. There is
only one authorship whose true nature will not be disclosed through
signatures or dates. 5
4
Heiberg was a celebrated playwright, director of Copenhagen’s Royal Theatre, and
husband to the eminent actress, Johanne Luise Heiberg, as well as a philosopher
and poet. Already a central cultural figure in the Copenhagen of Kierkegaard’s
young adulthood, Heiberg’s philosophical journal, Perseus, was “the express organ
for Danish Hegelianism.” Jon Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsid-
ered, p. 91. For more on Heiberg’s aesthetic appropriation of Hegelian philosophy as
theoretical justification for the practice of ‘speculative drama,’ see George Pattison
Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious – From the Magic Theatre to the Cru-
cifixion of the Image, pp. 16-26.
5
Works such as Sickness Unto Death and Practice in Christianity show us that a
pseudonym could signify the excessively accomplished Christianity of the author’s
perspective as easily as it could the pagan deficiencies of works born of seducers, op-
timistic philosopher-types, and other variations on the aesthete. Although, if Anti-
While the insistence on duplexity means to substantiate the claim

that this religious author did not develop into a ‘religious author’ from
an esthetic one – that though he is “hardly anything but a poet” (OW,
18 / SV1 XIII, 507) the religious upbringing of the reader, himself
foremost, has held permanent sway over these flights of passion and
imagination – inadvertently, it winds up doing double service. The
original doubledness of the author invites a question: is it really pos-
sible for Kierkegaard to corral the multiple voices of his authorship
under the religious designs of the self-same author of the The Point of
View? Always already double, originating in a liminal space between
poetics and religion, from what reserve can Kierkegaard summon
identity enough to authorize a univocally religious interpretation of
the authorship – to own some works and disown others? Even when
Kierkegaard does sign works such as Works of Love, Christian Dis-
courses, and the Eighteen Edifying Discourses (1843-1844) as well as
the Edifying Discourses in Various Spirits (1847), which are expressly
religious and often Christian, he authorizes those ‘discourses’ and
‘reflections’ in a highly qualified way. Christian composition accom-
modates an exceptional kind of author: one without authority (and in
that sense, they tend toward the Socratic). On My Work qualifies the
entire authorship as “without authority” and Kierkegaard “rather as a
reader of the books, not as the author” (OW, 12 / SV1 XIII, 501).6 Like
those writings in which he plays the role of editor the signed works are
neither pseudonymous, since his name appears, nor veronymous in
the strong sense, since, as an individual he cannot be held accountable
for what has been written.
In order to assign authority in the strong sense – the kind of legal
authority I have to responsibly commit a crime, enter into a contract,
etc. – his reading public must be able to identify the author – ‘Kierke-
gaard’ – that the signature announces. The identity of the author is not
a matter of police line-ups – recalling a face – putting a face to a name
(fairly easy, in Kierkegaard’s case, given his infamously eccentric pro-
Climacus represented too accomplished a Christianity for Kierkegaard to claim it
as his own, his perspective was also too technical, conceptually, too philosophically
complex, to qualify as Christian. Dialectics are paganism. The Christian, for Kier-
kegaard, is always the simple. In On My Work as an Author he distinguishes the
religious author’s aim: “to reach, to arrive at simplicity.” PV, 7 / SV1 XIII, 495. And
again, in The Point of View: “The movement is not from the simple to the interest-
ing, but from the interesting to the simple – becoming a Christian.” PV, 94 / SV1
XIII, 579.
6
See PV, 78 / SV1 XIII, 563. “[I]t is all done without authority,” writes Kierkegaard.
“[T]eacher I am not – only a fellow pupil.” Cf. PV, 118 / SV1 XIII, 604.
file). Authorship is a matter of consciousness. The author does not

give himself away in the unambiguous language of the birthmark. The
term does not pick out the physical author of a text (as demonstrated
in cases of dictation). It picks out a source of ideas. More difficult,
then, will be the matter of locating the single individual – ‘Kierke-
gaard’ – not legally or historically – attaching a certificate at birth or
baptism and tracking him physically – but rather as an author in terms
of thought.
The Duplexity of Author-Consciousness
Kierkegaard grounds the problem of his authority as a writer in a clas-

sically tragic paradox at the center of his authorship. He both knows
and does not know what he does.
What I cannot understand is that I can now understand it and yet by no means dare to
say that I understood it so accurately at the beginning – and yet I certainly am the one
who has done it and with reflection has taken every step […] To that extent, then, what
has developed earlier, that all the esthetic writing is a deception, proves to be in one
sense not entirely true, since this expression concedes a little too much along the line
of consciousness. Yet it is not entirely untrue, because I have been conscious […] from
the beginning. (PV, 77 / SV1 XIII, 562)
The duplexity in the authorship runs deeper than distinctions between

signed and unsigned or aesthetic and religious work. The duplexity re-
sided in the author himself. An ambiguous double – poet-Christian –
was there from the start, both reflected out of aesthetics, and yet, not.7
This original duplexity between the poetic and the religious was not a
matter of theatrics on the part of the author, an aesthetic requirement
of the age for religious writings to satisfy. The distinction between a
‘real’ and an ‘artificial’ location for the author cannot be made since
the duplexity was no mere matter of appearances and stagecraft. Kier-
7
This unstable aesthete mirrors the ‘A’ of Either/Or’s essay on tragedy, too conscious
to remain an aesthete, yet not reflected enough to leave poetry behind. Kierke-
gaard’s literary-religious passion placed him in the same tragic circumstance. Not
yet religious, but too self-conscious to abide the life of pagan immediacy, ‘A’ was pro-
pelled toward a life-view and categories of experience in which the experience and
language of tragedy was no longer possible. Yet, the pagan language of tragedy was
the only tool available. Tragedy, too, had its goal beyond itself, and so – anonymous,
forgetful of its name – was unaware of its true form, did not yet know itself. This is
a recognition only available, historically, once the relative ambiguity of tragic guilt
yields to the total ambiguity of Christian sin. For a full explanation, see chapter one,
above.
kegaard begins in two places at once. The duplexity was “assimilated

in the author’s consciousness” (PV, 85 / SV1 XIII, 569). A single au-
thor – ‘Kierkegaard’ – is nowhere to be found.
The work of both poets and religious authors for Kierkegaard is
the presentation of an allegedly redemptive Idea (as opposed to ‘the
facts’ of existence mechanically reproduced, or merely ‘probable’ re-
constructions of them). It is only as possibility that an Idea – aesthetic
or religious – presents itself. Both aesthetic and religious writing oc-
cupy the category of possibility for Kierkegaard, but possibility is not
just one of twelve concepts on Kant’s table of Categories.8 It is some-
thing to which the individual is exposed – which he lives – an infinity
disturbing the self from within. It is through this infinity of possibility
that God’s transcendence first announces itself. In the time of writing
the author assumes the dizzying position of a possible perspective,
one not actually his own. The anxiety and thrill of navigating the thin-
ner air of the infinite propels his writing forward into spaces that have
up until that point remained not just unconceived, but inconceivable.9
The Kierkegaardian author does not know – until pressing pen to pa-
per he departs from the pre-established densities and relative mobili-
ties of the finite – what possibilities await his readers (of which he is,
in a sense, one).10 Describe Kafka’s castle, for instance, before reading
the book. It is not a matter of physical space, adjustments made to
pre-established architectures. ‘The Castle’ is no representation of a
physical structure. ‘The Castle’ is an aesthetic idea that no one before
Kafka wrote it into being could have conceived – not even, on Kierke-
gaard’s account, Kafka himself.
As a Christian author Kierkegaard sought a perfected version of
the transparency through which aesthetic authors express the passion
of infinity resonant in the ideal possibilities presented in their work.
8
Immanuel Kant The Critique of Pure Reason, p. 113. The secondary literature at
times traces Kierkegaard’s interest in the categories of actuality and possibility,
and their relation to necessity, to Kant or Leibniz. The evidence, though, supports
a dominantly Aristotelian influence. While Kantian or Leibnizian ‘necessity’ may
have thrown scant light on the issue, it is clearly a Christian modification of Greek
concepts, and kinùsis in particular, that primarily motivates the authorship in its
treatment of the “change” or movement from possibility to actuality. See CA, 82n /
SKS 4, 386 and PF, 73 / SKS 4, 273.
9
Haufniensis explains the metaphysics of this motion in Concept of Anxiety in terms
of the “annulment” of actuality in possibility, and, through choice, the annulment
of possibility in the move back to actuality. Choice, then, is a double negation.
10
See PV, 12 / SV1 XIII, 500. Here, in On My Work as an Author, the Idea reveals
itself as virginally to him in the act of writing as it does to the reader.
In the case of religious writing the resonance is also a disillusioning

and a catharsis, and so Kierkegaard was forced for maieutic reasons
to disappear more completely than your average poet. He explains the
process in a metaphor likening the reader to a writing tablet, previ-
ously inscribed, and the author to a catalyst through which the true
meaning of these significations are clarified:11 “Likewise, there is also
a difference between writing on a blank piece of paper and bringing
out by means of chemicals some writing that is hidden under other
writing” (PV, 54 / SV1 XIII, 541). Religious authors approach their
readers through a deception in which the standpoint of the reader dis-
solves into that of the author, absorbed into the body of the reader’s
thoughts like an undetectable liquid in their drink – and then their
blood. We come to works of literature with languages of our own,
through which the author must speak if he is to gain entrance to our
delusions (PV, 54 / SV1 XIII, 541) and work on them from within. Au-
thors speak through our language, not theirs, until our meanings blur
and slip and their web like a hammock suddenly abandoned spins and
flips, a battery of signs pointing now in an unforeseen direction.
Pursuing the logic of Kierkegaard’s image of the writing tablet the
author must be the chemical itself, transparent, useless apart from the
bond of reader whose edification proceeds through a series of stains:
aesthetic, ethical, and religious – dissolving with each application one
into the next.12 Turning back the final page of a work of Kierkegaard’s
the reader should wince – blinded – as if rubbing the startling chemi-
cal of him from their eyes. The poetic-religious duplexity of the au-
thorship amounts to this tragic reversibility of the reader’s language
and situation. It is only possible insofar as the author qua author does
not exist. It is only possible insofar as his writing, like the colorless,
odorless chemical applied to the tablet of the reader, is nothing – akin
to the khora of Plato’s Timaeus, a transparent medium for some other
appearance. As the fictional characters brought dramatically to life on
stage thrive from the recusal of the playwright – whose face, if shown,
11
Freud makes similar analogies throughout his writings, from the Project for a Sci-
entific Psychology (1895) to “Note on the Mystic Writing Pad” (1925). For a dis-
cussion, see Jacques Derrida “Freud and the Scene of Writing” in Violence and
Metaphysics, pp. 196-231.
12
See PV, 7 / SV1 XIII, 496, as compared with PV, 43 / SV1 XIII, 531. This maieutic
theory of authorship applies both to the indirection of the pseudonyms, soliciting
and undoing the apathetic reader’s base curiosities, sensual and intellectual, from
within, as well as banishing the illusion of Christianity into which Christendom had
fallen, also removed “indirectly,” undone from within.
deprives them of their own – the possible perspective Kierkegaard af-

fords the reader remains only so long as he recedes anonymously into
shadow, goes unnamed.
‘Double Anonymity’ and the Single Individual
To what extent can the concept of anonymity rescue us from the dou-
ble binds of ‘pseudonymous-signed’ and ‘aesthetic-religious’ to which
Kierkegaard condemns his readers? Readers of Kierkegaard in eng-
lish translation have since his arrival been herded by commentators
through the impossibly narrow gate of these Eithers and these Ors.13
13
It was Walter Lowrie, that earliest of Kierkegaard’s champions in english, who set
the terms under which pseudonymity would be regarded. He contended that both
before and after the so-called first authorship concluded, the pseudonyms could be
read back into Kierkegaard himself. See the Lowrie’s translation of The Concept of
Dread, p. vif., as well as his translation of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. xvi.
According to his critics, the harshest of which is likely the deconstructionist Roger
Poole, Lowrie makes an epiphenomenon of the pseudonyms and of the indirect
nature of the authorship more generally. Poole labels these readings exemplified
by Lowrie, which impose a fixed, univocally religious meaning onto the essentially
mobile texts of the pseudonyms, “blunt.”
According to Poole’s analyses of Kierkegaard, blunt readings ignore the formal,
literary elements of his texts, distracted by a sham philosophical component, merely
one of their multiple effects. Poole follows Louis Mackey, whose Kierkegaard: a
Kind of Poet (1971) first countered Lowrie’s indelicate hermeneutic, insisting that
the literary reading of Kierkegaard was primordial, and all others derived. It is
at the level of structure and style that the truth of Kierkegaard’s indirect commu-
nication lies, the “conceptual reality” that the texts of each pseudonymous voice
embodies, writes Poole. See “Towards a Theory of Responsible Reading” in Kier-
kegaard Studies: Yearbook 2002, p. 407. Later, in Kierkegaard: the Indirect Com-
munication, pp. 11-13, Poole writes that “the pseudonyms themselves are fakes, the
dummies that mime and simulate a drama of inwardness which is at one unendur-
able and inexpressible […] They do not mean but are, and the rules of their being
have to be discovered by the reader.”
Deconstructive readers such as Poole reject the univocally religious interpreta-
tion of the authorship such as Kierkegaard offers in The Point of View, siding in-
stead with the Kierkegaard of the appendix to the Postscript, where he insists on the
total independence of his dramatically constructed pseudonyms. See Roger Poole
The Indirect Communication, pp. 4, 24, 263. But Poole distinguishes himself from
other deconstructive readers, such as Joakim Garff, in his insistence on “the reality
of the self” independent of these texts. While he deems even signed texts such as
Christian Discourses and The Point of View indirect, the journals, for Poole, are
apparently exempt from the post-structuralist motto he otherwise can’t help but
refrain: Il n’y a pas de hors texte. The famous Gilleleje entry in which Kierkegaard
longs for an idea for which he might live or die (Pap. I A 75 / SKS AA:12.2-12.10 /
Kierkegaard introduces the concept of anonymity most explicitly in

condemnation of the abstraction of the press and other large-scale
communications between nobodies. Instead of this anonymity, the
JP 5:5100) becomes the skeleton key to the authorship as a whole, for it reveals “the
fact that, for Kierkegaard, the self is a reality so intensely present, that one has a
duty to know how to deal with it, direct it, understand it.” “Towards a Theory of Re-
sponsible Reading” in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 2002, pp. 440 f. Poole does
briefly suggest that the ‘self’ of The Point of View is one of many selves between
which Kierkegaard dramatizes the possibility of selfhood. He is careful to note, in
fact his entire study is in a sense meant to demonstrate, that the authorship remains
indirect even after 1845, despite the proliferation of religous works, several bear-
ing Kierkegaard’s signature. Roger Poole The Indirect Communication, p. 263. But
Poole conspicuously fails to address The Point of View, where the final accounting
of the authorship takes place most fully. Perhaps this is because he does want to
draw a fixed boundary around Kierkegaard’s texts, to mark them off from Kierke-
gaard himself, the young man in the Journals who does, after all, explain to Poole
the meaning and purpose of the Indirect Communication.
Fenger was the first to take a direct crack at The Point of View, the thickest and
ostensibly least flexible joint in Kierkegaard’s authorial armor. See Henning Fenger
Kierkegaard: the Myths and their Origins, pp. 19, 26, 31, and ch. 1 generally. Fenger
discovers in Kierkegaard’s recollection of the authorship a loose patchwork of at-
tempts to edit, after the fact, his humiliations in the Corsair (beginning in 1846)
into the plan of his writings. This deception, though, is not a deception, because
Kierkegaard is “someone for whom the boundary between illusion and reality has
been erased.” He revises his stories and others as “an actor-poet, who writes his
own role” and it is “neither Kierkegaard’s fault nor responsibility if the learned
men, the scribes, docents male and female, have taken him at his word.” Kierke-
gaard’s The Point of View, on Fenger’s reading, suppresses the independence of the
pseudonyms to rewrite not only literary history but also personal identity.
Cf. Joakim Garff “The Eyes of Argus: The Point of View and Points of View
with Respect to Kierkegaard’s Activity as an Author” in Kierkegaardiana 15, p. 40.
Garff, with an unmatched command of the near-endless mass of source material in
the Papirer, concludes decisively that in Kierkegaard’s case literary history and per-
sonal identity are inextricably interwoven. Consequently, The Point of View should
be read as “documentafiction,” and Kierkegaard, the author whom it represents,
becomes merely its central character. It is a radical view, but Garff’s reading of The
Point of View is persuasive. No one else marshalls more convincing text, or spends
as much time carefully teasing out the implicit from the explicit, the unconscious
from the conscious, and poising content against form. For instance, Pap. X 1 A
510 / SKS NB11:204, p. 328 / JP 6:6431: “All the material about my activity as an
author is absolutely unusable, because it is obvious that in bringing it up I only dig
deeper into the interesting instead of coming out of it, and it will seem the same to
my contemporaries.” ‘The interesting’ here functions as a Kierkegaardian syno-
nym for the aesthetic. What’s more, Kierkegaard had considered publishing The
Point of View under the aesthetic pseudonym of Johannes de Silentio. Pap. I A
78 / SKS AA:12.4.1, cf. 300. Cf. JP 5:5103. There were other pseudonymous inter-
ventions Kierkegaard had had in mind for the central work on his authorship. An
author, he warns, ought to be interpreted as he was in antiquity: “an

individual human being, no more and no less, which also an author
certainly is, no more and no less –” (PV, 57 / SV1 XIII, 544). This ‘bad
anonymity’ inherent in what Kierkegaard labels ‘the Press’ relieves
the writer of the burden of responsibility by abstractly identifying him
with a represented “Public” (PV, 110 / SV1 XIII, 596).
[With] the help of the press an anonym can say what he pleases day after day […] the
slightest part of which he perhaps would not in the remotest way have the courage to
say personally in a situation of individuality, can instantaneously address thousands
upon thousands, can get thousands upon thousands to repeat what was said every time
he opens his, well, it can hardly be called a mouth, opens his craw – and nobody has re-
sponsibility […] – nobody, an anonym the author, an anonym the public, at times even
anonymous subscribers – consequently nobody! Nobody! (PV, 110 / SV1 XIII, 596)
Because Kierkegaard is so critical of this type of anonymity – reca-

pitulated perhaps more famously by 20th century critics of mass so-
ciety like Heidegger, Arendt and the Frankfurt school – it is easy to
overlook the virtues he assigns to an alternative form, its dialectical
counterpart. There is a theory of “double anonymity,” good and bad,
implicit in the theory of authorship which needs to be explained: “this
unpublished preface survives in which the author ‘A-O’ undermines Kierkegaard’s

authority, again, as a creature of fiction. “I have now dared to make this poetic ex-
periment. The author himself speaks in the first person, but bear in mind that this
author is not K. (M. A.), but my poetic creation. – I certainly have to apologize to
Mr. K (M. A.) that I have dared, right under his nose, so to speak, to conceive of him
poetically, or to make a poetic creation out of him. But this apology is … all that
I need do. For as a poet I have, in fact, completely emancipated myself from him.
Indeed, even if he were to declare that my conception was factually untrue in any
particular aspect, this would not mean that it was poetically untrue. The conclusion
could also, of course, be reversed: ergo, K. (M. A.) has not measured up to or real-
ized the poetic truth.” Pap. X 2 A 171 / SKS NB14:8a.
For a more moderately deconstructive view than Poole’s, see Joel Rasmussen’s Be-
tween Irony and Witness: Kierkegaard’s Poetics of Faith, Hope and Love. Cf. John
Caputo How to Read Kierkegaard, pp. 72-73, where Rasmussen is invoked in the
name of a more mildly deconstructive approach to the either/or of theology/philoso-
phy in Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard can share many of the views expressed by the pseu-
donyms, “some of which are to be found verbatim in his Journals,” without revoking
the pleasures we take in their literary-philosophical play. Moderate readings such as
this leave the difference between the textual ‘I’ and the empirical ‘I’ intact. Garff’s
more radical view insists on the erasure of this difference. This seems right. Our inter-
est as readers is never in Kierkegaard the man, but rather Kierkegaard the writer, an
ideal, poetically produced figure. A truly empirical Kierkegaard would leave us cold,
offended: Kierkegaard at his breakfast table, or on the toilet; Kierkegaard clearing
his nose. All men’s sheets, genius or not, after a few nights’ sleep share the same rank
odor. Their muddy boots evince the same absence of literary clues.
doubleness [Dobbelthed] is precisely the dialectic of the single indi-

vidual. The Single Individual can mean the most unique of all, and the
single individual can mean everyone” (PV, 115 / SV1 XIII, 601).14
The bad anonymity of the crowd draws the good anonymity of the
single individual – the individual writer, for instance, to the reader,
or the individual reader, to the writer – into painful relief. Kierke-
gaard imagines for us pseudonymously this individuality so radical
that something so uniquely one’s own as a name can be forgotten,
“which signifies not so much forgetting his name as the singularity
of his nature [væsen]” (CUP1, 120 / SKS 7, 117). The solitary exist-
ence of the ‘I’ is so bare that even this intimacy is foreign to it. Single
individuals as well as those captives of modernity’s daily-rag-reading
mobs are liable to these bouts of anonymity – the self-forgetting that
characterizes the light-headed, occasionally, but authors on a regular
basis and also the reader, “That Single Individual” to whom Kierke-
gaard dedicates his work:
Dear Reader! Please accept this dedication. It is offered, as it were, blindly, but there-
fore in all honesty, untroubled by any other consideration. I do not know who you are;
I do not know where you are; I do not know your name. (PV, 105 / SV1 XIII, 591)
The Point of View concludes by (pseudonymously, in the voice of “his

poet”) unveiling the identity of this anonym: “if no one else was that,
he himself was and became that more and more” (PV, 97 / SV1 XIII,
582).15 The task of literary production was to become this anonymous
single individual (PV, 118 / SV1 XIII, 604) which according to the
“supreme criterion is beyond a human being’s grasp.” Kierkegaard
strove to become his own best reader, transformed by the solvent of
his prose. So where does that leave ‘Kierkegaard’ the author?
The name: ‘Kierkegaard.’ It pointed vacuously, an empty signifier,
to an essential futility at the core of this individual. He understood
early on in “depression’s understanding” in his “innermost being”
14
My concept of ‘double anonymity’ is inspired by a loosely related notion in Mer-
leau-Ponty The Phenomenology of Perception, p. 448. “[E]ach one of us must be
both anonymous in the sense of absolutely individual, and anonymous in the sense
of absolutely general. Our being in the world is the concrete bearer of this double
anonymity.”
15
See PV, 123 / SV1 XIII, 609. Socrates was the first and last to use this category of
the single individual in a “dialectical and decisive way” He also bore an anonymity
rooted more deeply than false names. The referent for this “Socrates” could not be
unambiguously picked out. He did not know, Kierkegaard reminds, “whether he
was a human being” or a Typhon-like monster. PV, 141 / Pap. X5 B 107, p. 301. On
this Socrates, see Phaedrus, 229d-230a.
that he “actually was good for nothing” (PV, 81 / SV1 XIII, 566). And
so he became “an observer” – “idle” – “not really living” – “entering
into a person and coming out of a person” (like his staff psycholo-
gist, Constantius). With a lepidopterist’s thrill he pinned Copenhagen
to his plate. This empty character, Kierkegaard, was in life as in art
actually a series of “false” characters consumed by imitation (the dis-
sipated form of the elusive “repetition” [mimùsis] that his Constantin
Constantius tells us brings a person from depression back to life) (PV,
82 / SV1 XIII, 567). “I actually am reflection from first to last” (PV, 83
/ SV1 XIII, 567) – always two things at once, dialectical through and
through – so isolated by reflection, so lonely, that, like Nietzsche, he
multiplies and makes company of himself.16 But the trajectory of Kier-
kegaard’s writings traces a repetition in which this ‘bad anonymity’
characterizing the abstract subjects of the age of reflection converts
into the ‘good anonymity’ of the would-be single individual, passion-
ately imitating this Ideal. Since it remained “beyond a human’s grasp,”
Kierkegaard remained from first to last no one.
Divine Possession and the Madness of Authority
Yet the personal existence of Kierkegaard, this nobody, perhaps for

more than any author, bears on the form of his literary production. It
would lead him toward a dramatically tragic possibility, both literarily
and personally. Of course, in a market town like Copenhagen, where
authors of Kierkegaard’s stature could be numbered on one hand, this
biographical element might be a simple de facto inevitability. It was
easy enough to preserve his pseudonymity, for instance, as the au-
thorship began. A five-minute appearance at the Royal Theatre, well-
timed, and all of Copenhagen could note an idleness incompatible
with such Herculean literary labors. Satisfied in his ruse, he returned
to his writing desk to complete Either/Or. Was he merely exercising
the incidental advantage of a readership small enough to manipulate
into reading him the way he preferred, or is there something peculiar
to his authorship which makes an intimacy with his person essentially
16
Friedrich Nietzsche Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, p. 18. “I call my-
self the last philosopher because I am the last human being. No one talks to me
other than myself… For my heart refuses to believe that love is dead, cannot bear
the terror of the loneliest loneliness: it compels me to talk, as though I were two”
(notes, 1872). Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche Ecce Homo, p. 678, where Nietzsche’s self has
a “double origin.”
relevant? That he was, in fact, an exceptionally colloquial author, one

whom, to understand, one has to imagine possibly running into at the
theatre?
It is not that his personal life is the hermeneutical key to the au-
thorship, but that, rather – as Garff persuades through his exhaustive
biography – his personal life was as much art and as much a means of
communication as were his writings. The two were essentially coop-
erative. In neither case do we get the true Kierkegaard – if, by true,
we mean that artist standing freely outside of and above his art. The
writings, Kierkegaard himself insists, cannot function outside of the
stylistic choices governing his personal life: to appear lazy, to appear
insane, etc. This explains the subtitle of The Point of View: “A Report
to History.” Through a historical report, Kierkegaard the author sup-
plies future readers with the chapter missing from the collected texts:
the representation of the author himself.
If the author of the aesthetic-philosophical works had to disappear
ironically-maieutically, “my personal existing,” Kierkegaard wrote,
“had to be conformed to the turning point in my entire work as an
author, inasmuch as it poses the issue: becoming a Christian” (PV, 63
/ SV1 XIII, 549). The turning point he refers to follows the publica-
tion in 1846 of The Concluding Postscript. For the proper deception
to take place, the Christian author required another “existence-form”
to support “that kind of work as an author” (PV, 65 / SV1 XIII, 551).
“I had to try to give my contemporaries another impression of my
personal existing.”
The artistic and moral functions of his work, however, were insepa-
rable from his life not merely as he dramatized it for others, but as it
was lived. The final stage of the authorship closes the gap between
public dramas (such as feigning trips to the theatre) and the solitary
task of writing one’s way into being this single individual. The Chris-
tian ideal cannot be obtained in solitude. Always polemical and,
therefore, recognizable as the object of attack (PV, 67 / SV1 XIII, 553),
the religious author needs a mob to hurl himself against. The public
representation of the ‘mad author’ became as crucial as Kierkegaard’s
pseudonymous vanishing had been earlier, subjecting himself daily
to the “drenchings of rabble-barbarism” in the streets – incited by his
bouts with Goldschmidt and the Corsair – where he had formerly been
accustomed to wandering freely amidst the merchants. It was all part
of a shrewd means of dissuading potential adherents of the Kierke-
gaardian cause. “[I]nstead of the incognito of the esthetic” he now had
“the danger of laughter and grins,” “a kind of insanity” growing in the
mass of Copenhageners incited by the image of the stooped author

with the uneven pant-legs. The author was now poised amidst a hail of
stones from the mob to properly communicate a Christian message.
While Kierkegaard did expose himself to the crowd, removing the
ironic masks of the pseudonyms, the mad comedy he (claims to have)
staged in Copenhagen’s streets was in fact an even more effective
method of ironic distancing than the pseudonymity of the aesthetic
(PV, 67 / SV1 XIII, 553). What the “highly cultured public regarded
as madness” (PV, 70 / SV1 XIII, 556) became an elevated form of
Christian irony essential to the times and the turn his writings had
taken. Ironizing an ironically detached age demanded the standpoint
of the madman as the object of it’s venom. The madness belonged es-
sentially not to Kierkegaard but rather the laughter and grins of the
mob, which arose compulsively and en masse in a kind of automated
response to the jibes of ‘the Press.’ Kierkegaard mirrored the insanity
of the crowd’s “blather” and “brutish grinning” (PV, 67 / SV1 XIII,
553) artistically with a madness of his own, forcing them to reflect
upon and possibly negate their collective hallucination – that Chris-
tianity was thriving in Copenhagen – in the consciousness that the
madness they opposed in the single individual was actually theirs and
that their putative sanity had been a bad reflection of his own. It was a
Christian Socratism, substituting an ironic madness for an ironic igno-
rance. When the maieutics concluded Kierkegaard’s opponents would
appear as mad as Socrates’ were ignorant. Kierkegaard would appear
as sane as Socrates was wise, that is, sane enough to know what he
does not know, or, what he is not yet, namely, a Christian.
The Point of View, however, spends an entire section – Governance’s
Part In My Authorship – calling into question Kierkegaard’s artistic
mastery over this image of himself as a mad-man who, once ingested by
the madness of the crowd, would cure it homeopathically. It describes
the task of the authorship from its first stroke to its last in terms of di-
vine possession. “When it was a matter of boldness, enthusiasm, zeal,
almost to the border of madness, what was this pen not able to present”
(PV, 72 / SV1 XIII, 558). The border of madness at this stage has only
been glimpsed, not crossed. Still, a psychological border does not di-
vide the country of the sane from that of the mad one-dimensionally in
the neatly managed geography of a child’s map. It has colors and depths
and ambiguous territories to either side. It is hard if not impossible to
conceive of a reconnaissance which does not to some degree stray into
this border-territory. The Point of View’s records of the anticipation of
writing read increasingly like entries in a log from such a trip. Prepar-
ing to write, Kierkegaard describes, “a poet impatience awakens in my

soul” and “it seems that if I had a winged pen, indeed, ten of them, I
still would be unable to keep up with the abundance offered to me”
(PV, 73 / SV1 XIII, 558). This preliminary to madness and devotional
writing “has been continually experienced,” he confesses, “during all
my work as an author” (PV, 73 / SV1 XIII, 559). The symptoms mag-
nify until “the poet passion” or “the thinker passion” translates into
“divine worship” (PV, 73 / SV1 XIII, 559).
Are we really justified in describing Kierkegaard’s writing in terms
of divine possession, or is this all a bit medieval and melodramatic? On
his account, yes, we are justified. There is a part of Kierkegaard that is
not Kierkegaard, through which the invisible eye of God interrogates
both author and reader alike – a providential god with his spyglass on
each and every soul, employing spies like Kiekegaard himself – “hid-
den in a deception” – in “higher service” to the Idea of Christianity
(PV, 87 / SV1 XIII, 571). His writings can be read as transcripts of this
interrogation in a hand that is not his own, composed on the other
side of a dark glass behind which God – the spy of all spies – silently
observes all who read, Kierkegaard included. While the author has a
double understanding – the Christian he is and the poet he is not – the
poet he reluctantly plays at and the Christian he is not yet – so does
God have an understanding encompassing the author’s. Kierkegaard
may have “dialectically maintained supervision over the whole” but
from a divine perspective this mastery was a fake (PV, 97 / SV1 XIII,
97). The second level of double understanding pairs a blindness or
gap in the human author’s craft-knowledge with the total mastery of
a divine author: Kierkegaard “could not attribute [the authorship] to
any human being, even less would he attribute it to himself,” the third
person voice of a poet informs – another one of Kierkegaard’s God-
sanctioned spies, enlisted, this time, to report on the author himself
(PV, 97 / SV1 XIII, 97).
Kierkegaard further distinguishes the madness of this possession
by drawing it into contrast with the inspirations of the romantic gen-
ius (the enlightenment’s translation of an archaic madness visiting the
poet as well as the initiate into Greece’s mystery religions).17 The tal-
ent of the genius, like the work it fosters, belongs to the genius alone.
17
Socrates may have inverted the tradition of the Greek daimķn by transforming it
into an instinctively prophylactic intelligence, but the New Testament returns to the
more archaic concept of “psychic possession,” to use Dodds’ term. It is the Greek
of Mathew’s gospel, not that of Socrates, that Kierkegaard retrieves with the word.
It is a gift of nature.18 Nothing resembles Kierkegaard’s conduct less

since he has “basically lived like a scribe in his office. The possession
was not temporary and did not originate in an individual’s exceptional
character – like the genius’ “outburst” with its “tumultuous breaking
off.” It was total (PV, 74 / SV1 XIII, 559) and came from without.
From the very beginning I have been as if under arrest and at every moment sensed
that it was not I who played the master, sensed it with fear and trembling when he let
me perceive his omnipotence and my nothingness, sensed it with indescribable bliss
when I related myself to him and the work in unconditional obedience. (PV, 74 / SV1
XIII, 559)
The fertile influence of divinity upon the author volatilized him in such
a way that dependence upon this God was magnified. “I have frequently
experienced and at all times have been horribly aware of a terrible tor-
ment that is akin to starving to death in the midst of abundance, to be-
ing overwhelmed by wealth –” (PV, 75 / SV1 XIII, 560). Kierkegaard’s
abilities would “crush” him, he believed, were he to release them with
a poet’s impulsiveness “all at once” in lieu of the steady work-plan God
administered. To stave off this death he wrote with a measure to match
his measureless diligence: the unbroken evenness of the scribe who,
echoing thoughts and passions not his own, each day copies a specific
part of an already printed book (PV, 76 / SV1 XIII, 561). It was a re-
straint made possible only by the intervention of a divine author.
The banner – “without authority” –which Kierkegaard hangs above
the authorship as a whole denotes more than the ironic stance of a
Christian Socrates, veiling himself in maieutic self-restraint. Without
authority suggests, more deeply, that the authorship was paradoxical-
ly out of the author’s hands. Writing is a process which Kierkegaard
constantly describes in terms of madness and possession. When God
visits Kierkegaard qua author, it sets not only the world (i. e., Copen-
hagen) against this scribe, but his own imagination, its “most dreadful
possibilities” – even human language itself (PV, 75 / SV1 XIII, 560).
Captive to a thought that was not his own there were times when he
“could not even make myself understandable to myself” (PV, 75 / SV1
XIII, 560). But the goal, after all, is not madness per se, but author-
ship and worship. The act of writing, however, does not call off the
madness. Rather, cathartically, in a purging and transformation, it
consummates it.
18
See Immanuel Kant The Critique of Judgment, par. 46. When Kierkegaard writes
of genius directly, however, he identifies the notion with Schelling. See CA, 114 /
SKS 4, 417.
The possession began with the authorship itself and Kierkegaard’s

passion for the poetic. He would have preferred to forego the aesthetic
authorship but the only way to shake off this daimķn was to do its bid-
ding (PV, 86 / SV1 XIII, 570). Kierkegaard used the pseudonyms in
connection with the aesthetic production as a religious distancing from
thoughts and feelings that were not “my own” (PV, 86n / SV1 XIII,
570). The approximately 600 pages of Either/Or he fills inside of a year
he diagnoses as a “poetic emptying” or purgation imposed on him by
an “alien” force against which “he could not do otherwise” (PV, 35 /
SV1 XIII, 526). These thoughts and passions that inspired the veils of
poetry were alien to the Christian Kierkegaard, but in a deeper sense
were so much a part of him that he had no choice but to yield to them.
So when does the “emptying out” of the esthete in him conclude? It is
a question Kierkegaard has already answered. It concludes with the
authorship itself. “The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress”
plays counterpoint to the Christian Discourses. These two notes, these
two voices and personae – poetic and religious – either sound together
in Kierkegaard’s work or not at all.
It wasn’t just poetry that possessed Kierkegaard, of which he’d be
forced to empty himself according to strictly ritualistic parameters –
write according to a god-given measure – lest his enthusiasms overtake
him. He describes the religious authorship similarly in terms of pos-
session, by the God of Christians, now, rather than pagan poets and
philosophers. “[I]t was not my intention to become a religious author.”
He had planned upon his release from the daimķn of poetry to break
suddenly into a new role: country pastor (PV, 86 / SV1 XIII, 570). But
that role like the others was bound strictly to the imaginary. When the
image of Kierkegaard the pastor faded from his mind the writer set to
work on the religious authorship, his way of “satisfying the religious”
(PV, 86 / SV1 XIII, 570). His need to write was so overpowering that
he “could not do otherwise” (PV, 86 / SV1 XIII, 570). Three months
after Either/Or came Two Edifying Discourses. Powerless again, to
yet another daimķn, the authorship to no one’s surprise but his own
continues – unto death. Satisfying the religious in Kierkegaard was no
less an emptying than the poet-production, purgations he failed over
the course of a decade to complete.19
19
Beginning with From the Papers of One Still Living (1838) and ending with the date
of The Point of View’s composition (1848). Kierkegaard did not include this work or
The Concept of Irony (1841) in The Point of View’s account of the authorship.
Parousiac Madness and the Making of a Martyr
“[I]n relation to God I offer this my entire work more shamefaced-

ly and bashfully than a child who gives its parents a gift the parents
have given the child” (PV, 89n / SV1 XIII, 573) – First to last Kier-
kegaard considered himself an instrument of divine self-satisfaction,
suggesting a parallel with the autoerķmenon of the God of philoso-
phy, though in a poetic and therefore embodied register, rather than a
purely rational one.20 Religious writing for Kierkegaard always shares
in the poetic because passionate thought is the province of the poet,
whose language is irrevocably that of a body moved by its passions.
Without a man’s body to speak through, the God of Luther haunting
Kierkegaard’s thought would have been as immanently solitary and
rational as the Prime Mover, while Kierkegaard’s God is a personal
God, a maker of covenants, a source and object of love. Speaking po-
etically is the Christian author’s means of insisting on the mortality of
the author – his fragility and ignorance, a tragic conception expressed
Christianly in the concept of inherited sin – and the transcendence of
the divine.21
To see the god, as the Jews knew, both the Judge and Climacus
remind us, meant death (SL, 122 / SKS 6, 116; CUP1, 484 / SKS 7,
439), as it was the “torment of death” that threatened Kierkegaard
constantly with a divine abundance of thought and the devil’s bargain
of ten winged pens. Kierkegaard draws the author’s mad conscious-
ness of mortality together with the appearance of God. “[I]t was reli-
giously my duty that my existing and my existing as an author express
the truth, which I had daily perceived and ascertained – that there is
a God” (PV, 72n / SV1 XIII, 557). Becoming the single individual and
becoming an author were for Kierkegaard part of a single movement
through which a God appeared, not as in the old days, conjured by
some Dionysian throng, but rather inwardly and in a solitude no less
passionate.
Every more earnest person who knows what upbuilding is, everyone, whatever else he
or she is, high or low, wise or simple, male or female, anyone who has ever felt built
up and felt God as very present, will certainly agree with me unconditionally that it is
impossible to build up or to be built up en masse, even more impossible than to “fall
in love en quatre [in fours]” or en masse – upbuilding, even more decisively than erotic
love, pertains to the single individual. (PV, 117 / SV1 XIII, 603)
20
See Aristotle Met., xii.7.
21
See Friedrich Nietzsche The Birth of Tragedy, 1st essay, sec. 23. Nietzsche identifies
Luther with the renewal of Europe’s tragic spirit.
Kierkegaard’s literary compulsion belongs to that particular gen-

re which the Attic Greeks practiced in Dionysus’ theatre in which
through catastrophe and offense the limits of human order and intel-
ligibility are broached and a god appears among men: “If you could
not go out into the street – and see that the god is right there in that
appalling spectacle, and that this is what would happen to you if you
were to fall to your knees and worship him – then you are not essen-
tially a Christian.”22
Paralleling Sophocles’ ancient plots, Kierkegaard’s theory of au-
thorship turns on the catastrophic development of divine knowledge
in the author, who, in a modern twist, self-consciously pursues this
disaster under the heading of the Idea of the martyr: “A true martyr
has never used power but has contended by means of powerlessness.
He contended people to become aware” and “understood that the
momentum of his work began precisely with his death,” the elevation
of the author’s “self-denial in relation to [his] cause” and the “idea-
impression” he means to make (PV, 51 / SV1 XIII, 538). The physi-
cal violence of martyrdom is the last note The Point of View sounds,
blunt punctuation to the images of mental violence characterizing the
authorship up until that point. “[T]o make sacrifices, to be sacrificed –
which must indeed become the consequence of not seeking to become
a power in the external world – [.]” The single individual is the cat-
egory of sacrifice, essentially opposed to politics and the established
order (PV, 121 / SV1 XIII, 607), for which sacrifice no longer has any
meaning. There is only bargaining and self-promotion, more or less
shrewd, more or less successful, at which, if we fail, our failures are
justified according to our own power and merit. The unrecognized
sacrifice is the final anonymity of the single individual, the anonymity
of the sacrifice that goes unrecognized because the world now lacks
the vocabulary. The human race’s “rebellion of reflection” has sub-
jected God to the criterion of human reason and what as an abstract
body of reflection it could stomach (PV, 121-122 / SV1 XIII, 607-608).
There is no longer sacrifice. Only murder.
22
PC, 65 / SV1 XII, 62. As trans. by Kirmmse in Joakim Garff Søren Kierkegaard,
p. 659. Cf. Pap. X 5 A 89 (no SKS): In this journal entry subtitled “My Task. And
About Myself” Kierkegaard testifies personally to the individual experience of this
parousia dividing him against the categories of human thought and culture: “What
is absolutely the decisive factor is that Christianity is a heterogeneity, an incom-
mensurablity with the world, that it is irrational with respect to the world and with
respect to being a human being in a straightforward sense.”
Christianity, for Kierkegaard, is an inhuman Idea. It demands the

inhuman of us. An Idea demanding to be thought, it compasses a
world from which the human mind naturally shrinks and by which
it is at the same time compelled. Education in this Idea begins with
the recognition of a more preliminary (im)possibility, another Idea(l)
which in principle resists conceptualization and to which we are never
quite adequate: ‘the single individual.’ Yet, ‘the single individual’ is not
an idea or a concept in the traditional sense. Human thinking cannot
compass it and so it “cannot be taught directly” (PV, 123 / SV1 XIII,
609). It is an “ethical task” and an “art” – a “practice” which tends to
make sacrifices of its practitioners. The logic of the authorship’s pro-
gressions seems to lead to bloodshed: “If the age is waiting for a hero,
it surely waits in vain; instead there will more likely come one who
in divine weakness will teach people obedience – by means of their
slaying him in impious rebellion, him, the one obedient to God, who
would still use this category on an even much greater scale, but also
with authority” (PV, 124 / SV1 XIII, 610).
Sacrificial victims, however, are not authors such as Kierkegaard.
The victim of this collective violence is not the author – he is the mis-
sionary. Although, these two characters do share a common goal.
It is ‘the missionary’ who introduces Christianity dialectically into
Christendom by drawing Christendom into opposition to the single
individual. He makes a sacrifice of himself through which Christen-
dom reflects both on its failure and his ability to present the Christian
Ideal, opening once again to the possibility of Christianity’s return.
The missionary after all is the only true author – the only author “with
authority.”
It has been Kierkegaard’s task as an author to “present the picture
of a Christianity in all its ideal, that is, true form,” but also to submit
himself above all to the judgment of this ideal – “that I do not resem-
ble this picture” (AN, 129 / SV1 X5 B107, 288). As an author, admit-
tedly, the resemblance is slight, given the aesthetic detachment inher-
ent in the writer’s stance. But the author does not complete his work
with one last dip of the quill. Instead, he replaces his pen on the desk
and strolls head-first into the mob. Only when the writing has ceased
and the authorship concluded has the writer become an author. The
captivating “idea” and “task” (PV, 125 / SV1 XIII, 611) of Christian-
ity and the pagan passions it incites in the poet-writer conclude in the
missionary’s sacrifice. Across the pages of Armed Neutrality resolves
the phantasied image of Kierkegaard the missionary / martyr. A few
pages after decrying the theatricality of modern Christianity he con-
cocts an imaginary scene with as much drama as any at the Royal

Theatre he might, in his younger days, have strategically feigned at-
tending:
In other words, I am not afraid of dying, but I do fear to say too much about myself.
I do not cowardly flee from a martyrdom, but I must be aware of and be of one mind
about how I can defend falling as a martyr. (AN, 135 / Pap. X 5 B 107, 294)
I pray to God, whatever danger comes in the form of bloody persecution or in the form
of mockery, laughter, and ridicule, whether the suffering is physical pains or spiritual
pains, that he will give me the strength not to deviate a hair’s breadth from the under-
stood truth. 23 (AN, 139-140 / Pap. X 5 B 107, 299-300)
The dialectic familiar from Fear and Trembling returns, between the
lyrical observations of the tragic poet and the actions of his hero – if
no longer the hero that the age is waiting for, then the martyr it re-
quires. In the last years of his life Kierkegaard seemed to relocate
the madness, catastrophe and sacrifices of tragedy to this possibil-
ity impregnating his own life. It was as if he was preparing for the
role of “modern tragic hero” towards which a decade of writing had
gestured.24 “He wanted to actualize writings whose basic theme was
deeply, sometimes obscurely, connected to the idea of sacrifice.”25
Kierkegaard connects this sacrifice to the themes of irrationality
and a tragically ambiguous guilt.26 “The misfortune and fundamental
defect of the times was – reasonableness,” he writes. “What was need-
ed was indeed – the ecstatic.” 27 The spiritualized ecstasies of the mys-
tic would not suffice. Kierkegaard hopes rather for the animal passion
released in the kill: “In order to receive eternity once again, blood will
be required[.]”28 Like Stages’ Quidam, he imagines real bloodshed.
This time, it is his own. One 1854 journal entry attests that the mad-
23
He needs to die without declaring his Christianity definitively, without making it a
matter of his own knowledge or that of the crowd. All he can do is trust that God
will accept him.
24
See Joakim Garff “ ‘You Await a Tyrant whereas I Await a Martyr’: One Aporia
and its Biographical Implications in A Literary Review” in Kierkegaard Studies:
Yearbook 1999, p. 143. Garff makes Kierkegaard “a modern tragic hero” in the will
to catastophe he finally embodied with his deeply humiliating entanglement with
the local media.
25
Joakim Garff Søren Kierkegaard, p. 633.
26
Pap. XI 2 A 58-63 (no SKS). Cf. JP 1:1067.
27
Pap. X 2 A 286 / SKS NB14:108. Kierkegaard’s pseudonym H. H., author of Two
Ethical Religious Essays (1849), indulges the same speculations on human sacrifice.
The age requires a martyr to imbue it with the necessary passion … to put him to
death. See Joakim Garff Søren Kierkegaard, p. 629.
28
Pap. IX B 20, pp. 317 (no SKS).
ness and catastrophe needed to set his pathologically reflective age in

motion includes his execution.29 Five years earlier, a series of entries
similarly phantasies his violent death at the hands of a mob. This he
decides would be “the maximal result of my life.” 30 The root of all
this violence is a tragically ambiguous crime: “I came into existence
through a crime. I came into existence against god’s will. The crime
– which in a sense is not my crime, even though it makes me guilty in
god’s eyes – is to give life.”31
Imitating this image of the martyr required the end of literary imi-
tations, of poetic or philosophical imaginations corresponding to con-
cepts or pictures of ‘objects’ that stand before the writer and outside
of his text. Writing about the martyr does not conclude in the read-
er’s understanding or an enhanced reserve of imaginations. The act
of writing for Kierkegaard was one element in a performance – with
clear ritual elements – that with the potential martyrdom and self-
sacrifice of the author finally blurred the distinction between writing
and praxis.
The last word in The Point of View belongs not to Kierkegaard but
his poet. The “direct report” promised on the title page has hardly
been direct at all, interrupted frequently by this alien voice, allowing
Kierkegaard to report on himself (as one of these heavenly spies) from
the distance a poet’s detachment affords. The poet does have certain
qualifications for keeping company with Christian authors. Like Kier-
kegaard he has “suffered for an idea” (PV, 95 / SV1 XIII, 580) – albeit
the wrong one. But unlike Kierkegaard – at least the phantasied image
of Kierkegaard this anonymous informer provides – his poet survives.
Magister Kierkegaard seems to have died on his feet – bolt upright at
his writing desk, pen dripping ink, hand rotating across the page – the
ghost of the poet against whom he struggled lifelong still animating
his corpse. It is a dead man writing the concluding words of The Point
of View, Kierkegaard eulogizing himself in the guise of the poet: “the
author, who historically died of a mortal disease but poetically died of
29
Pap. XI 2 A 265 (no SKS).
30
Pap. X 1 A 280, pp. 188-189 / SKS NB10:199. See Joakim Garff Søren Kierkegaard,
pp. 632 f.
31
Pap. XI 2 A 439 (no SKS). Cf. JP 6:6969. See Joakim Garff Søren Kierkegaard,
p. 792. This was Kierkegaard’s last journal entry, the last thing he ever wrote. Hav-
ing willed himself through this merciless campaign into a position of almost univer-
sal ridicule in the village of Copenhagen he died with “double facial pareses that
forced him into a stiff, straight-ahead smile, like a petrified ironist.” Kierkegaard
tragically suffered the starring role in a comedy penned in his own hand.
a longing for eternity in order unceasingly to do nothing else than to

thank God” (PV, 97 / SV1 XIII, 582).
No accident, then, that The Point of View was left in the journals
to be published posthumously. It was written posthumously – that es-
sentially tragic feature of all human communication (EO1, 151-153 /
SKS 2, 150-152). 32 The reader, for Kierkegaard, has no monopoly on
anonymity. The writer, too, communicates anonymously, as if dead, as
if all books were merely epitaphs extended. 33
32
In his essay on tragedy ‘A’ defines “the More” as the essential element of tragic
writing – a conclusion or coherence which is always delayed – and human reality by
analogy as essentially fragmentary, posthumously interpreted according to things
left behind, broken artifacts, incomplete texts, and therefore perpetually in need of
a supplement.
33
See EO1, 219 / SKS 2, 213. ‘A’ enjoys reading epitaphs, and draws the analogy be-
tween the richest grave inscriptions and book titles so interesting, so pregnant with
meaning, that for the reader they replace the contents of the books themselves.
The emptiness of the grave, he writes – and, if we follow the analogy, the death of
the author – becomes the condition for this signifying. For a similar analysis of all
meaning as posthumous, erected like a monument, a pyramid, upon a constitutive
loss or death, a “past that was never present,” see Jacques Derrida “Différance” in
Margins of Philosophy, p. 24.
Bibliography
Works by Søren Kierkegaard in Danish, abbreviations
SKS Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, ed. N. J. Cappelørn et al., 4th ed., Co-
penhagen: Gads Forlag, 1997-.
SV Samlede Værker, ed. A. B. Drachmann et al., 1st ed., Copenhagen:
Gyldendal 1901-1906.
Pap. Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, ed. Thulstrup and Cappelørn, 2nd
ed., Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1968-1978.
Works by Søren Kierkegaard in English, abbreviations
AN Armed Neutrality in Point of View, trans. Hong and Hong (Princ-

eton: 1998).
ASKB Auctioneer’s Sales Record of the Libray of Søren Kierkegaard, ed.
by H. P. Rohde, (Copenhagen: 1967).
CA The Concept of Anxiety, trans. Thomte and Anderson (Princeton:
1980).
CD Christian Discourses (Princeton: 1997).
CI The Concept of Irony, With Continual Reference to Socrates, trans.
Hong and Hong (Princeton: 1989).
CUP1/2 Concluding Unscientific PostScript to the Philosophical Frag-
ments, 2 vols. (Princeton: 1992).
E/O1/2 Either/Or, 2 vols., trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: 1987).
FT Fear and Trembling, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: 1983).
JP Journals and Papers, ed. and trans., Hong and Hong, 7 vols.
(Bloomington: 1967-78).
OW On My Work as an Author in The Point of View, trans. Hong and
Hong (Princeton: 1998).
PC Practice in Christianity, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: 1991).
PF Philosophical Fragments, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton:
1985).
PV The Point of View for My Work as an Author in The Point of View,
trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: 1998).
R Repetition, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: 1983).
SL Stages on Life’s Way, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton 1988).
SUD Sickness Unto Death, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: 1980).
318 Bibliography
TA Two Ages: A Literary Review, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton:

1978).
UD Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, trans. Hong and Hong
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Works by Aristotle, commentaries, abbreviations
APo. Posterior Analytics, text and trans. Treddenick (Cambridge:

1960).
DA De Anima, text and trans. Hett (Cambridge: 1957).
DC On the Heavens, text and trans. Guthrie (Cambridge: 1939).
EE Eudemian Ethics, trans. Ross (Clarendon: 1908).
EN Nicomachean Ethics, text and trans. Rackham (Cambridge:
1926).
GA The Generation of Animals, text and trans. Peck (Cambridge:
1942).
HA History of Animals, text Peck and trans. Peck and Balme (Cam-
bridge: 1965-91)
MP Metaphysics, text and trans. Tredennick (Cambridge: 1938).
OB On Breath, text and trans. Hett (Cambridge: 1957).
OS Sense and Sensibilia in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 1 of
2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Pronceton: 1971).
Phy. Physics, text and trans. Wicksteed and Cornford (Cambridge:
1957).
Po. Poetics, trans. Halliwell (Cambridge: 1996).
Pol. Politics, text and trans. Rackham (Cambridge: 1950).
Rhet. Rhetoric, text and trans. Freese (Cambridge: 1926).
WA Without Authority, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: 1997).
Aristotle on the Art of Poetry, text, trans., and commentary Bywater (Oxford:
1909).
Die Schule des Aristoteles, texte und kommentare, ed. Wehrli (Basel: 1967-
69).
Fragmenta, ed. V. Rose. (Stuttgart: 1967).
L’Ethique a Nicomaque, introduction, traduction et commentaire, trans.
Gauthier and Jaulif (Louvain: 2003).
Nicomachean Ethics, text and commentary J. Burnet (Methuen: 1900).
Nicomachean Ethics, commentary H. H. Joachim, ed. Rees (Clarendon:
1951).
Works by Sophocles
Ajax, text and trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge: 1994).

Antigone, text and trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge: 1994).
Elektra, text and trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge: 1994).
Oedipus at Colonus, text and trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge: 1994).
Bibliography 319
Oedipus Tyrranus, text and trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge: 1994).

Philoctetes, text and trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge: 1994).
The Trojan Women, text and trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge: 1994).
Other Classical Texts and Collections

IG Inscriptiones Graecae, ed. D. M. Lewis, 3rd ed. (Berlin: 1981).
SIG Sylloge Inscriptionum Graecarum, ed. W. Dittenberger, 3rd ed.
(Leipzig: 1915-24)
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Index of Names
Abraham 5, 151, 158, 169, 170, 174, 179, Breuer, Josef 75

191, 193-209, 228, 263, 295 Christ 8, 149, 156-157, 203
Achilles 29, 50, 58, 85, 232 Chryssipus 107, 191
Acquinas, Thomas 4, 207 Cleisthenes 16
Adam 157, 170, 208, 214-220, 225, 230, Cybele (see, Kybele)
244 Davenport, John 6
Aeschylus 12, 24, 61, 82, 101, 115, 164, Deleuze, Gilles
197, 203, 289 Delphi 18, 22, 33, 77, 137, 204, 282
Agamemnon 57, 154, 196-198, 201-202, Demeter 166
204, 223 Derrida, Jacques 1, 24, 35, 159, 170, 174,
Ahab 163 205-206, 208, 211, 214, 228, 230, 300, 316
Alcibiades 272 Diodorus 77
Alcmaeon 31, 84, 100 Dionysus 9, 17-18, 21, 28, 33, 38, 44, 68,
Anacreon 60, 62 70-72, 76-77, 79, 93-95, 97-98, 100-117,
Anaximenes 11, 29, 55, 97 138, 164-165, 178, 180, 185-186,
Antigone 10, 11, 28, 42, 46, 63, 66, 68, 203-204, 284, 311-312
87-88, 147-148, 150-157, 171, 177-178, Don Giovanni/Don Juan 167, 178
188, 214, 227 Don Quixote 163, 183
Antiphon 48, 83, 106 Eleusis 79, 166, 193
Aphrodite 60, 227 Empedocles 30, 95, 97, 98-101, 125, 136,
Apollo 19-23, 27, 35, 36, 45, 54, 77, 158, 162, 232
241 Euripides 12, 43, 48-49, 61-62, 64, 70-71,
Apollodorus 54, 77, 158 84-85, 87, 96, 102, 115, 154, 164, 186,
Archilocus 59 197-198, 257
Arendt, Hannah 26, 153, 155-156, 303 Faust 194, 262
Ares 21, 33 Fellini 178
Aristophanes 62, 67, 70-71, 140, 155 Foucault 2, 5, 8, 67, 96, 146
Artemis 21, 64, 179, 284 Freud 24, 28-29, 37, 42, 75, 174, 216, 288,
Asclepius 100 300
Athena 21, 58, 77 Furtak, Rick 5
Athens 11-13, 16, 19, 33, 62, 70, 96, 102, Gass, William 279
104, 140, 158, 180, 193, 198, 269 Goethe 74-75, 194, 217
Bacchus and related words 21, 39, 43, Gorgias 83, 172, 185
76, 164, 204, 216, 236 Hades 43, 50, 55, 62, 164
Becker, Ernest 216 HAL 177
Bentham, Jeremy 228 Hamann 235
Bloom, Harold 293 Hamlet 186-188, 193, 202, 207-208, 231,
Boethius 188 235
Brandes, Georg 3 Hecataeus 103-104
328 Index of Names
Hegel 10-11, 115, 141, 143-145, 147-148, Oedipus 2, 9-46, 53, 62-71, 73, 75,
151, 156, 161, 163, 174, 178, 188, 200, 77, 79, 81, 83-87, 89, 90-93, 101, 103,
205-206, 209-211, 213, 215, 217-220, 106-115, 117, 119, 121, 123, 125,
222-223, 226, 228, 266, 270, 274, 279, 127, 129, 130-131, 133, 135-137, 142,
287, 295-296 144-145, 147-148, 150-153, 165, 171,
Heiberg, J. L. 142, 210, 296 174, 176-177, 179-180, 182-186, 188,
Heidegger, Martin 146, 159, 220, 233, 193, 199-200, 202-204, 208, 214-215,
285, 303 223-225, 227-229, 269, 272, 274, 288
Heraclitus 14, 29, 31, 46, 57, 95-96, 99, Onomacritus 101-102, 104
103, 113, 164 Othello 175, 190
Herodotus 82, 93, 103-104 Parmenides 31, 95, 99, 103, 217
Hesiod 12-14, 162 Pausanias 102, 164
Hippocrates 17, 100, 127-128 Philoctetes 67, 154, 241
Homer 3, 11, 13-14, 25, 28, 34, 36, 45-47, Phrygia 76, 79, 100, 204
49-65, 67-69, 72, 79, 82, 85-87, 93-95, Pilate, Pontius 185
97, 100-102, 105, 110, 113, 118-120, 148, Pindar 12, 13, 25, 28, 45
165, 170, 269 Plato 2-3, 19-20, 23, 29-30, 33, 39, 47-50,
Horace 72 52, 58, 62-64, 67-69, 71-72, 77, 82-84,
Husserl, Edmund 123, 179, 220 92, 96, 100, 102, 104-105, 108, 120-121,
Iago 190 136-137, 155, 158-159, 162, 169-170, 180,
Ionia 11, 13-14, 17, 19-20, 29, 31, 42, 55, 184, 188, 191, 204, 211, 219, 230, 234,
57, 62, 68-69, 97, 99, 101, 265 237, 245-251, 254-256, 258, 263, 265-
Ishmael 163 266, 270, 274, 276-277, 287-289, 300
Job 237, 241 Plutarch 164, 172, 259, 276
Kafka 299 Polynieces 171, 178, 214
Kant, Immanuel 123, 156, 188, 191, Prime Mover 112, 161, 280, 311
207, 213, 228, 259, 268, 277, 284, 299, Prodicus 83
309 Raskolnikov 148
King David 176, 181 Rilke, Rainer Maria 139, 148
Kubrick 177 Rousseau 160, 180
Kybele 76-77, 100-101, 193, 204 Sappho 58, 60, 101
Lessing, Gotthold 74-75, 144-145, 205 Sartre, Jean-Paul 4
Levinas, Immanuel 168 Schelling, Friedrich 115, 144, 309
Luther 56, 206-207 Semonides 62
Macedonia 96 Socrates 3-4, 14, 30, 33, 48-50, 54-55,
Macintyre, Alisdair 4, 6, 96, 189, 248, 57, 62, 64, 67, 70-71, 98, 105, 117, 126,
275 155, 158, 162, 180, 182-184, 195-196,
Manson, Charles 196 200, 202, 204, 219-221, 240, 245, 250,
Martensen, H. L. 296 252-255, 258, 265-270, 272, 274-289,
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 304 297, 304, 307-309.
Mitchell, Joni 238 Solon 11, 13, 25, 34, 61, 103, 188
Mozart 167 Sophocles 2, 3, 10-51, 53. 55, 57, 59,
Napoleon 174, 222-225 61-69, 71, 73, 82, 85-92, 96, 99, 103, 106,
Nietzsche 18, 50, 107, 175, 180, 218, 238, 108, 110, 114-115, 130, 151, 154, 157,
305, 311 170-171, 185, 193, 203, 208, 228, 312
Nussbaum, Martha 3, 78, 91, 107, 109, St. Augustine 155-156, 162, 173-174,
117, 119, 128, 131-132, 134-135, 137, 186, 208, 226, 231
154, 232, 240, 248-249, 324-325 St. Paul 156, 179, 198, 206-207, 209-
Odysseus 50, 58, 67 210, 221, 228, 233-234, 244
Index of Names 329
St. Peter 8 Updike, John 167
St. Vitus 236 Wittgenstein 220-221
T. S. Eliot 186 Xenocrates 102
The Corsair 302, 306 Xenophanes 25, 90, 100, 103
Theognis 13, 34, 60 Zalmoxis 99
Thrace 17, 49, 58, 88, 95, 98, 102 Zeus 20, 21, 27, 32, 33, 36, 52, 86-87,
Thucydides 12, 82, 96 100, 102, 186, 203, 269
Index of Subjects
absurdity; the absurd 111, 135, 150, 105, 108, 110, 113, 115, 118, 124, 126,
171, 173, 198, 206-207, 224, 242, 251, 128, 131, 133, 140, 144-145, 158-159,
258, 273, 290 182, 189, 191, 195, 209-211, 214, 220,
actuality 117, 177, 179, 181-182, 194-185, 230-231, 234, 237, 242, 245, 252, 253,
188-189, 192, 210-213, 226, 234, 239, 241, 260-261, 266-267, 274, 276, 280, 286,
243-244, 245, 252, 256, 259, 263-264, 291, 293-317
266, 280-281, 283, 286, 289, 296, 299 bastard 80, 234
adultery 181 biology 37, 141, 145, 204, 217
aisthùsis 117, 127, 132 bios 104, 136, 242, 276
agoraphobia 227 birth 11-12, 22-23, 31-32, 28-39, 44,
agos 16, 20, 89, 105, 199 66, 68, 99, 101-105, 116, 134, 139-140,
aitia/aitios 18-20 143-144, 152, 155, 159, 162, 167, 188,
akrasia 84, 88, 108-111, 117, 123-126, 192, 208, 215, 217-218, 221, 227, 238,
128, 130, 255, 257 262, 274, 298, 311
anagnķrisis 73, 199 blood 17, 19, 21, 29, 40, 52, 57, 63, 95,
anamnùsis 104 97, 100, 104, 120, 124, 157, 164-165,
animal; animality 2-3, 17, 43, 54-55, 68, 176, 178-181, 194, 197, 206, 109, 218,
77, 98, 104-105, 116-117, 119, 122, 126, 253, 258, 268, 300, 313-314
128-129, 131-132, 165, 171, 177-179, body 1-2, 50-56, 62, 93, 95, 97, 98, 100,
204, 218-220, 222, 227, 230, 232, 235, 108, 122, 125, 129, 135-137, 146, 171,
248, 284, 314 174, 178, 182, 184, 206, 216, 221, 230,
anonymity 96, 106, 172, 298, 301-305, 238, 247-249, 253, 263, 274-275, 289,
312, 315-316 300, 311
anxiety 36, 40, 57, 62, 100, 104, 140, boulùsis 51, 52, 118, 122-123, 131
150-151, 167, 171, 174, 203, 209, 211, chance 18-19, 38, 41, 73, 110-111, 116,
213, 215-217, 219-221. 223-235, 241-243, 135, 176, 186, 188
246-247, 250-252, 254, 258, 270, 273, character 3-4, 6-6, 12, 37, 39, 46, 48-51,
283, 299 58-59, 62-68, 76, 78-80, 85, 89, 91-92,
aporia 114, 193, 206, 212, 269, 287, 314 96, 105, 107, 111-112, 123, 129-130,
arab 263 133-134, 137-138, 141-143, 145, 158,
archù 20, 88, 113, 131, 230, 283 160, 162, 172-174, 182, 187, 193,
art or care of the self (or soul) 12, 48-49, 208-209, 211, 224, 243, 246, 250, 253,
67, 100, 126, 137, 235, 237, 240, 253, 270 262-263, 265-266, 270, 272, 275-276,
askùsis 28, 92, 101, 110, 256, 261 282, 300, 302, 304-305, 309, 312-313
astrology 223 child; children; childhood 1, 5, 8, 12,
atù 36, 45, 86-89 15, 17, 31, 38, 41, 43, 55, 61, 77, 102,
atopos tis 182 117, 126, 152, 160, 175, 178, 185, 190,
author; authorship 1, 3, 4-9, 11, 14-15, 212, 216, 227, 233, 246, 250, 258, 274,
17-18, 24, 36, 39, 46, 56, 77, 100, 102, 282, 307, 311
Index of Subjects 331
Christianity 8, 150, 153, 155-157, 166, dialectic 10, 15, 20, 47, 56, 68, 105,
170, 179, 210, 222, 224, 228-229, 231, 142-144, 148, 150-152, 157-158, 160,
234, 255-258, 270, 281-282, 290, 292, 162-163, 171-172, 177, 179, 182-183,
296-297, 300, 308, 312-314 185, 187-188, 196, 203, 205, 208,
cocktail waitress 118 210, 212, 221-222, 224, 226-228, 230,
continence; incontinence 88, 109, 117- 240, 251, 256-258, 263, 270, 275, 279,
118, 120, 124, 126, 257 284-285, 290, 292, 297, 303-305, 308,
corybant 76-77, 93, 100-101, 193, 272 313-314
courage 13, 52, 62, 100, 120-121, 132- dikù 13-14, 19, 24, 26, 35, 38, 40, 56, 63,
133, 138, 189, 193, 198, 235, 240, 246, 82, 88, 115
303 discovery 73, 91, 182, 185, 190, 199-200,
crime; criminal 17, 20-21, 23-24, 31-32, 243
38, 41, 44, 49, 82, 86, 103-104, 114-115, doctor 12, 69, 77, 126-127, 232, 245
121, 130-131, 133, 147, 150-151, 159, 175- drama 7-8, 10-11, 14, 17-18, 23, 35, 40,
182, 184, 190, 192, 194, 196, 198, 202, 43, 61, 70, 72-74, 78-79, 84, 89, 91, 135,
214-217, 223, 227, 233, 284, 297, 315 138, 140-143, 145-147, 149, 151-153,
crucifixion 207, 231, 278, 282 155, 157, 182, 187, 189-191, 200, 202,
cuckhold 175 205, 210, 213, 225, 234, 255, 260, 289,
cult 17, 18, 36, 55, 68, 71, 75-77, 79, 93, 296, 300-302, 305-306, 308, 314-316
95, 98, 100-101, 162, 164-165, 169, 178, drinking 59, 84, 101, 119, 124-125, 158,
204, 263, 284 161, 165, 173, 231, 238, 247, 274, 300
cure (see also, remedy) 12, 17-21, 27, dunamis 117
37, 44, 76, 78, 82, 97-100, 162, 168-169, ecstasy 5, 57, 68, 71, 77, 79, 93-94, 101,
187, 192, 216, 243, 257-258, 286, 293, 103, 106, 108, 164, 193, 204, 236, 249,
307, 314 251, 269, 284, 288, 292, 314
curse 8, 22-24, 36, 168, 203, 223 education (see also, learning) 7, 28-29,
daimķn 2, 33-36, 41, 46, 55-57, 61, 79, 45, 63, 78-79, 91-92, 103, 120, 125, 129,
94, 98-101, 96, 111-114, 116, 136, 137, 134, 189, 235, 242, 246, 247-248, 250-
165, 167, 171-172, 184, 194, 200-203, 252, 260, 266, 271, 287, 293-294, 313
224, 229, 235, 248, 263, 308, 310 eiresiķne 16
death 1, 10, 16, 21-22, 31, 33, 40-41, emotion 1-3, 5-7, 47, 49, 54, 57-58, 60,
44-45, 50, 54-55, 66, 68, 70, 97-98, 62, 67, 69, 71, 73-80, 84, 90, 92, 107,
100, 102, 104-105, 113, 150, 154-155, 108, 113-114, 119-122, 128, 131, 146,
158-159, 163-165, 167, 173, 175, 180, 171, 189, 190, 193, 198, 232, 238, 240,
184, 194-196, 211, 216, 221, 228, 233, 241, 246, 248, 250, 256, 258, 263
235, 252-253, 272-273, 276, 284-285, enkrateia 106, 258, 261
288-289, 294, 296, 309-312, 314-316 enthusiasm 38-40, 76, 79, 106, 111, 158,
deception 172, 185, 188-189, 232, 291, 164, 168, 185, 204, 220, 259, 285, 290,
298, 300, 302, 306, 308 296, 307, 310
depression 19, 167, 170-171, 181, 185, epistùmù 3, 122, 240
304-305 epithumia 63, 110-112, 114, 118-121,
desire 2, 48, 3, 7, 32, 41, 45, 47-48, 51, 123, 131, 254
55, 59-60, 90, 94, 101, 107-112, 116-133, Erinye 33, 36, 56, 164-165, 167, 202-203,
137, 155, 157, 173-174, 178, 180, 187, 288
216-217, 223, 232-234, 239-240, 244, eros 60, 110, 153-154, 158, 162-166, 169,
248-249, 252-254, 262, 266-267, 269, 171, 173, 223, 241, 248-249, 269, 288
276-278, 281, 289 eternal; eternity 14, 59, 104, 122, 125-
despair 36, 65, 141, 182, 226, 238, 253- 126, 143, 156, 167, 185, 188, 198, 204,
254, 266, 287, 289, 293 222, 225, 230-231, 233-235, 245-246,
332 Index of Subjects
262, 264-267, 269, 270-271, 273-275, 267, 269, 271, 273, 275-277, 279-281,
277, 279-285, 287, 289-293, 314, 316 283-285, 287, 289, 291-292
ùthos 2, 46, 92, 113, 141 healing 2, 19-21, 22, 41, 76-77, 98, 101,
eudaimonia 2, 6-7, 44-46, 48, 79-80, 149, 190-193, 232, 241-242, 245, 250,
92, 110, 131, 133-137, 234, 265, 283, 273, 284, 287, 288, 293
294, 303 hermaphrodite 227
faith 14, 38, 96, 171, 173-174, 185, 195- hero; heroism 10-12, 15, 17, 21, 25, 28,
197, 199-200, 202-203, 205-207, 209- 38, 45, 50, 71, 82, 93, 103-104, 135, 142-
210, 212, 227, 230-231, 235, 241-242, 145, 147-148, 154, 156, 163, 184, 187-
249, 254, 258-259, 264, 269-270, 274- 188, 190, 193-202, 204, 210, 219, 222,
275, 283, 285, 290, 295, 303 225, 228-229, 231, 235, 265, 313-314
fate 10-12, 24-25, 31, 36, 39, 44-46, 56, hķmophagos; homophagy 43, 105, 132,
73, 80, 103, 137, 142, 144-146, 148, 151, 164
158, 165, 178, 185-186, 188, 190, 195, hubris 46, 66, 68
199, 200, 203, 208, 209, 211, 214, 217, hypochondria 188, 235, 247
219, 222-227, 229, 231, 238, 258, 273, illusion 18, 93, 185, 219, 267, 271, 280,
286, 323, 324 291-292, 300, 302
fear 1, 5, 25, 35-36, 41, 57, 66, 69, 73-74, imagination 18, 56-57, 62-63, 100, 115,
76, 78, 81, 120, 133, 140, 148, 151, 154, 117, 119, 132, 137, 152, 169, 179, 183,
166-167, 179-181, 183, 185, 189-195, 192, 209, 227, 242, 255, 258, 263, 270,
197-199, 201-203, 205, 207-208, 220, 277, 289, 291, 296, 299, 315
224, 245, 250-251, 254, 269, 309, 314 immanence 2, 30, 36, 68, 104-105, 107,
feeling 51, 53, 56, 58-61, 64, 65, 73-74, 153, 155, 161-162, 182, 210, 213, 219,
76, 78, 97, 98, 100, 121, 160, 180, 238, 226, 228, 260, 267, 281-283, 287, 290,
248, 249, 254, 256, 259, 263, 277 311
fiction 85, 93, 148, 158, 172, 182, 189, immediacy 133, 150, 159-162, 166,
209, 246, 261, 291-292, 300, 302-303 170, 173, 192, 200-201, 213, 218-219,
fortune-telling 223 221-222, 230, 248, 298
freedom 63, 96, 103, 116, 144-148, 153, immortality 15, 49, 55, 64, 95, 99, 104,
156, 162-163, 165, 177, 211, 214-215, 166-167, 204, 231, 266, 268
225-227, 229-230, 232, 242-243, incest 23, 32, 40, 84, 125, 152, 153, 179,
246-247, 259, 290 180, 181, 227
furies (see also, Erinyes) 195, 288-289 inclosing reserve 170, 187, 227, 229-230
genius 32, 48, 161, 219, 222, 225-227, innocence 21, 38, 61, 82, 103-104,
229, 231, 303, 308-309 115, 145, 147-150, 155, 157-158, 160,
ghost; phantom; bogey 56, 67, 154, 161, 181-182, 187, 190, 199, 206-208, 210,
165, 167, 169, 171, 176, 181, 184, 187, 218-219, 221-222, 224, 226-227
202, 208, 211, 224 inspiration 18, 22, 27, 34, 39, 43, 56,
grace 7, 103, 149-150, 157, 192, 226, 273, 72-73, 79, 95, 103, 110-115, 120, 124,
287, 290 158, 162-163, 166, 168-169, 182, 185,
grammar 42, 230, 260 204, 265, 304, 308, 310
grief 1, 10, 20-21, 36, 44, 148 intemperance; temperance 6, 117, 126,
hallucination 171, 307 132-133, 137, 257, 280
hamartia 2, 10, 13, 19, 28, 34-35, 41, 46, intention; intentional 83, 87, 109, 111,
61, 71-73, 80-92, 111, 114-115, 143-147, 174, 186, 250, 284, 310
149, 158-159, 161, 163, 165, 167, 169, 181, interior; interiority 65, 87, 151, 153, 161-
183, 185, 187, 189-193, 211, 228, 255, 260 162, 177, 179-181, 185-187, 192-193, 200,
happiness 2, 7, 9, 13, 44-46, 48, 90, 95, 214
129, 134-137, 139, 163, 168, 240, 265, jokes 156, 175, 177, 183, 196, 295
Judaism 166, 169, 170, 178, 196-198, memory 60, 95, 101, 112, 143, 159-162,
209-210, 221, 228, 284, 311 166, 171, 230, 234, 239, 270
justice 1, 13-14, 19, 24, 27-28, 34, 40-41, mercy 36, 149, 287
46, 61, 67, 81, 83, 88, 102-103, 125, 128, metaphysics 48, 90, 112, 134, 149-150,
133-134, 175, 178, 189, 202, 276, 281 155, 157, 170-171, 184, 190-192, 210,
karate 267 212-213, 215, 217, 219-220, 225, 228,
katharsis 2, 19, 31, 40, 42, 48, 70-81, 246, 252, 265-266, 270, 278, 280, 284,
89-93, 100-102, 103, 141, 144-150, 289, 296, 299-300
189-194, 198-199, 205, 228, 231, 284 miasma 19, 77, 101
khora 35, 211, 300 monsters 37, 171, 179, 189, 204, 267, 304
kinùsis 20, 34, 117, 212, 280, 289, 299 mood 89, 93, 150-152, 169, 175, 211,
kiss 174 215, 237-240, 245-246, 248, 250-251,
laughter 21, 163, 167-168, 175, 177, 183, 256, 261, 263, 276, 290
211, 219, 223, 286, 306-307, 314 moral psychology 2, 5-7, 9, 47, 49, 67,
law 10, 12-14, 17, 23, 26, 35, 46, 52, 57, 74, 114, 108, 116, 120, 126, 135, 237,
72, 75, 77, 80, 82, 87, 101-102, 126-127, 241, 246, 261, 291
144, 147-148, 155-156, 174, 180, 92, 197, murder 15, 19-20, 23, 32, 34, 38, 44,
199, 229 58, 84-85, 97, 148, 150, 175-176, 178,
learning (see also, education) 28-31, 180-182, 187-188, 196, 199, 203, 227,
33, 38, 128, 132, 134, 219-220, 233, 272 238, 312
leprosy 171, 177-178 music 76-79, 84, 93, 98, 101, 138, 167,
logos 2, 10, 11, 13-14, 26-27, 30-31, 35, 42, 235
47-49, 69, 71, 85, 88-90, 100-101, 103, mynah 233
106-107, 111, 115, 117, 121, 123, 125, 127- mystery 1-2, 8, 14, 38, 48, 56-57, 64, 71,
134, 142, 146, 159, 169-170, 172, 174, 177, 76-77, 79-80, 92, 99-101, 106, 138, 157,
203-204, 208-211, 213, 219, 226, 228-235, 162, 165-166, 185-187, 193, 199-200,
242, 247, 259, 262, 278, 283, 287, 293 204, 206, 208, 223, 225-227, 244, 254,
luck 32, 39, 44-45, 89-90, 111-112, 134- 265, 276, 292, 308
135 mystic; mysticism 39, 47, 159, 231, 249,
madness 2, 8, 34, 36, 38-42, 45, 56, 72, 187, 300
75, 77, 85-86, 93, 101, 105, 113-114, mythos 12, 47
124, 163-164, 166-169, 171-173, 179, narrative 4, 6, 10, 37, 73, 103, 134, 140,
181, 185, 197, 199, 203-204, 207, 227, 143, 158-159
234-235, 249, 258, 270, 283-285, 287, navigation 127
289, 292, 305, 307-309, 311, 314 nobility; the noble 11, 66, 70, 92, 118,
maenad 21, 38, 43, 164 120, 130, 134-135, 188, 251, 262
maieutics 262, 300, 306-307, 309 nomos 26, 35
mania 22, 29, 32, 24-35, 37, 39, 42, 77, nous 2-23, 26, 36, 38, 63, 102, 17, 19,
115, 125, 204, 260 122-123, 128-132, 136-137, 171, 216,
marriage 24, 32, 66, 152-154, 161, 166, 225, 238, 246, 274
168, 172, 174-176, 182, 193, 203, 218, nymph 39, 110
227, 261 opium 247
martyr 168, 193, 311-315 oracle 18-20, 22, 23, 32, 33, 37, 72, 151,
meat 104, 124, 128, 235 176, 185-188, 203, 208, 222-224, 231
medicine (see also, doctor) 12, 48, 69, orexis 118, 122-123
80, 99-100, 110, 117, 124, 126-128, 132, Orphism 47-48, 52, 55, 74, 79, 92, 97-
240, 244-245, 250, 252-253, 284 105, 110, 113, 150, 164-166, 167, 276
melancholy 19, 112, 181, 203, 211, 223, ousia 76, 79, 111-112, 157, 173, 199, 249,
237, 239, 250, 254, 289 271-272, 283, 311-312
paradox 87, 14, 18, 21-22, 28, 38, 43-45, 181, 185, 189, 196, 208, 213, 217, 219,
60, 87, 91, 104, 107, 108, 111, 115, 128, 222, 224, 226-227, 232-233, 240, 243-
135, 149, 151-152, 157, 161, 164-165, 244, 246-247, 251-254, 258, 262, 264,
169-170, 178, 183-184, 187, 189, 191, 268, 272-273, 279-281, 285, 289, 295,
197-201, 203, 205-208, 213-215, 217, 299, 302, 305, 313
218-221, 224, 228, 230-231, 243-244, praxis 11, 130-131, 140, 207, 315
251, 256-258, 267-271, 273-274, pregnancy 89, 152, 163, 289, 316
278-279, 281, 283, 285, 291, 298, 309 prime mover 112, 161, 280, 311
parousia 157, 199, 271-272, 311-312 providence 186, 185-187, 222, 225-227,
parricide 23, 32, 84, 125, 142 229, 258
passion 1, 5-7, 34-36, 49, 51, 53, 62, 67, pseudonym 2, 5, 7-8, 140, 158, 163, 167,
76, 81, 105-107, 110, 113-114, 118, 120, 189, 209, 235, 237, 239, 241, 243, 247,
122, 124, 129-130, 134, 136-137, 140, 249, 251, 253, 257, 259, 261, 263-264,
149, 157-158, 160-161, 163, 168-169, 171, 270, 286, 293-297, 300-302, 304-307,
173-174, 177, 180, 182-185, 189-192, 195- 310, 314
196, 202, 204, 206-207, 222, 230. 237- psuchù 34-35, 47-55, 57, 59, 62-64, 67,
242, 246-251, 253-256, 258-264, 266, 93-103, 105-106, 126, 128-129, 132,
268-270, 274-281, 284-285, 289-290, 136, 217, 221, 247
205, 297-299, 305, 308-311, 313, 314 psychology 2-3, 5-9, 47-53, 55, 57, 59,
pathos 3, 73, 84, 92, 107, 109-111, 113- 61, 63-65, 67, 69, 71, 74, 78, 80, 82-82,
114, 121, 142, 153, 169, 173-174, 183- 93-97, 99, 101, 103-108, 112, 116, 135,
185, 195-198, 237, 254, 274, 279, 287 145, 209, 212, 217-218, 237, 239-241,
perception 33, 53, 58, 119-121, 123, 125, 243-251, 253, 255, 257, 259-261, 263,
129-130, 132-133, 171, 198, 218, 257, 265, 268, 271, 291, 300
262, 274-275, 277, 304 purification 16, 19, 20, 23, 40, 41, 44,
peripateia 73, 199 74-77, 79, 92-93, 98, 101-102, 105, 149,
pharmakos 15-17 168, 191-192, 194, 204, 235
philia 153 Pythagoreanism 48, 52, 55, 79, 92-93,
photography 160 96, 99-100, 105, 110, 193, 264, 275-276,
phronùsis 11, 14, 21, 26, 33, 46, 63, 74, 321
88, 91, 108, 111, 117, 119, 122-123, 126- recollection 99, 158-162, 166-167, 170,
133, 135, 137, 248, 274, 278, 283-284, 213, 220, 222, 234, 235, 239, 261, 266,
288 270-271, 287-288, 302
physics 230 remedy 18, 288
physis 14, 48, 66-69, 72, 80, 102, 110 repetition 160, 162, 178, 199, 206, 213,
pity 62, 69, 73-74, 76, 78, 81, 92, 217, 220-222, 237, 240, 251, 256, 288,
146-148, 189, 190-191, 193-194, 198 305, 317, 321, 326
pleasure 37, 73-79, 89-91, 108, 119-121, representation 13, 18-19, 44, 56, 84,
124, 127, 130-131, 133, 175, 230, 247, 160, 181-182, 192, 200, 230, 233, 249,
281, 291, 303 279, 283, 289, 292, 299, 306
plot 5, 24, 73, 75, 81, 89, 102, 190, repression 2, 47, 62, 143, 161, 224, 288
200-201, 232, 312 reversal 18-19, 29, 71, 73, 91, 130, 135,
pornography 222 169, 182, 185, 201
possession 22, 34, 36, 55, 77, 98, 100, rite; ritual 15-18, 23-24, 28, 44, 71, 76-
106, 110, 163, 167, 174, 184, 204, 231, 77, 79, 99, 100-102, 104, 142, 164-165,
233, 236, 251, 284, 305, 307-310 179, 197, 202, 213, 223, 235, 315
possibility 2, 13, 20, 29, 71, 91, 93, 96, romanticism 114, 160-162, 165-166,
105-106, 111, 114, 126, 130, 141, 149, 168-169, 172-173, 178, 180, 219, 222,
153-154, 167-159, 161, 171, 175-176, 238, 242, 263-264, 280, 308
sacrifice 16-18, 21, 38-40, 154, 157, 163- terror 1, 7, 19, 22, 24, 36-37, 56-57,
164, 167, 172, 176, 178-179, 182, 188, 89-90, 165-169, 172-173, 177-179, 181,
193-194, 196-199, 202, 206, 223, 228, 188, 199, 204, 227, 234, 263, 289, 305
258, 284, 294, 312-315 Thargelia 15-16
salighed 7, 44, 265, 292 the comic; comedy 18-19, 98, 140-141,
secrecy 8, 53, 112, 150-154, 161, 169, 143, 146, 155-156, 163, 167-168, 171-178,
188, 197-198, 201, 206, 226, 235, 256, 180, 182-186, 189, 195-197, 207, 210-
266, 286, 294-295 212, 220-221, 225, 232, 242, 245, 255,
self-deception 185 270, 285-287, 289, 296, 307, 315
sex 66-68, 96, 104, 119, 164, 174-175, the moment 222, 232-235, 238-239, 253,
178, 181, 215-218, 221-222, 230, 246, 262, 269, 271, 279, 283, 285, 290, 309
284-285 the press 303, 307
shaman; shamanism 92, 97-101, the public 303
105-106, 113, 138, 265 the unconscious 29, 37, 62, 85, 97, 102,
sick; sickness 2, 12-13, 15-17, 19-22, 105, 125, 151, 153, 165, 174, 188, 218, 292
27, 38-39, 41, 77, 115, 117, 124, 126, the will; willing 226, 254-258, 263, 274
148, 167, 172, 189, 197, 232, 236, 241, theatre 13, 18, 65, 70, 76, 79, 91, 93, 107,
251-254, 256, 265, 294, 296 138, 180, 185, 187, 191-193, 212-214,
sin 80, 149-150, 157, 166, 202, 211-214, 238-239, 286, 289, 292, 295-296,
216-218, 221-22, 226-227, 229, 243-244, 305-206, 312, 314
246-247, 255-256, 258, 260, 268, 272, theogony 14, 52, 97, 99, 102-103, 162
274, 279, 281, 283, 288, 290, 311 theoria 20
sophia 27, 122, 128, 136, 213 therapy 5, 48, 75, 77, 79, 100, 105, 119,
sophism 37, 48, 65, 70-71, 83, 106, 110, 126, 127, 205, 232, 245, 250
119, 184, 219, 226, 249, 261, 265, 220 thumos 35, 39, 51, 53, 55, 58, 62-63, 67,
sophrosynù 68 97-98, 110, 117-118, 120-121, 123, 133,
soul 3, 6-8, 14, 17, 20, 31, 34, 35, 47-80, 254
91-133, 136, 137, 177, 184, 202, 216, 220, Titans 52, 97, 102, 104, 295
221, 230-232, 234, 237-239, 241-243, to kalon 120, 131
245-251, 253-268, 270, 274-278, 281, transcendence 2-3, 37, 48, 106, 110,
290, 308, 321 134, 137, 153, 162, 213, 218, 260, 267,
sparagmos 105 273, 283, 290, 299, 311
stoicism 5, 74, 107, 237, 276 trauma 177, 216, 271, 288
style 134, 177, 226, 261, 278-279, 301, truth 14, 22-23, 26-31, 37-38, 40-43, 45,
306 71, 97, 115, 116, 122-123, 130, 151-152,
subjectivity 141, 143, 148-150, 152-155, 164, 173, 183, 185, 204, 206, 208, 222,
170, 177, 187, 192, 196, 214, 225, 227, 233, 238, 267, 270, 277, 280, 282, 285,
256, 264, 275, 278-279, 283, 285-287, 289 291, 295, 301, 303, 311, 314
talios 178 tuchù 19, 38, 79, 88, 90, 111-112, 116,
technù 3, 48, 72, 80, 122, 126, 128, 240, 134, 137
246, 255, 277 universal 14-15, 29, 44, 68-69, 74, 84,
teleology 25, 67, 74, 77, 93, 112, 118, 97-98, 104, 117, 124-126, 133, 143-145,
156, 188, 199, 205, 252, 266, 283, 289, 149, 152-153, 155-157, 162, 168, 182,
291 191, 197, 199-201, 206, 214-215, 220,
telos 6-7, 38, 118, 131, 141, 153, 165, 223, 225, 228, 267, 286, 293
184, 197, 199, 201, 230, 248, 259, 265, violence 2, 14, 21, 38, 52, 64, 68, 78, 80,
276, 281-284, 286 102, 104, 106, 108, 110, 113-114, 147,
temporality 116, 132-133, 225, 232-234, 154-155, 167, 170-172, 180, 196-197,
274, 286, 293 207, 284, 300, 312-313, 315
virginity 152, 174, 223, 299 woman 22, 31, 43, 59, 64, 66, 77, 117,
virtue 4,-7, 28-30, 66, 74, 79, 91, 93, 161, 164, 175-176, 178, 183, 216, 220-
96, 105, 107-108, 111-112, 120-122, 221, 227, 241-242, 46-247, 289
127, 129-134, 136-137, 145, 148, 156, wonder 7, 56-57, 73, 89-90, 165-166,
168, 184, 189, 213, 225, 234-235, 244, 169-170, 172-173, 181, 185, 188, 227,
246, 248, 251-252, 257-260, 265-275, 247-248, 250-251, 267-268, 273
277-279, 281-283, 285, 287, 289-291, worship 55, 98, 162, 164-166, 169, 172,
303 213, 220, 239, 258, 285, 308-309, 312
voluntary; involuntary 23, 83-86, 88- writing 2-3, 8, 62, 66, 109, 148, 191, 214,
89, 109-111, 113-115, 117, 125, 130, 174, 218, 260, 293-300, 302, 305-309, 311,
178, 200, 257, 274 313-316
war 57, 223, 288 zoù 33, 104

The Passion of Infinity: Kierkegaard, Aristotle and The Rebirth of Tragedy

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The Passion of Infinity:

Kierkegaard, Aristotle and

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

The Passion of Infinity

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

Edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

bright, beautiful and beyond conceiving

And of course, I need to thank Dana, for standing so close by me

1. Reason and the Irrational: Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus . 10

A. Kierkegaard’s Retrieval of Greek Tragedy

6. Tragedy as Historical Idea: Either/Or’s “Ancient Drama

10. Moral Psychology in the Pseudonyms, Search for a Method 237

In his essay on Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, a work in which

To better interpret the phenomena of emotion, “We would need to

scientific psychology for the first time reduces man’s irrationality to

Foucault.”11 Most recently, in Wisdom in Love, Rick Furtak enlists

company of Greek philosophers, the tensions that ought to result are

on the problem of the irrational. It is Kierkegaard’s philosophical le-

“manifestation of non-being” 20) beneath reason in the soul, enlarging

Tragedy, Happiness and the Problem

Dionysus has still his votaries or victims, though

The gods have become diseases.

like a force of nature, in its own terrible consistency, and Antigone’s

thought whose fundamental preoccupations it expressed and from which it borrowed

embodying the troubled heart of reason in the city’s breast, isolated

in the Tyrannus is contrived in order to enforce Sophocles’ faith in

Sickness and Purgation

Already in the prologue of the first of the Theban plays, we have an

its course. In ridding Thebes of its affliction by the winged maiden,

tution of this troubled city.29 Though here Creon speaks of a reversal

Terrible Knowledge, Tragic Speech, Third Wisdom

Oedipus’ expiation is accomplished through sunlight, the pure god.37

take on the aspect of darkness and terror which Teiresias ascribes to

real.40 Patriarchs as well as the priests of Apollo were thought to have

be the speakable element of Teiresias’ knowledge that we ought to be

“things will come of themselves, even if I veil it in silence” (341). If

Tragic Vision and Moral Education

Sophocles illustrates through Oedipus man’s learning of an inhuman

Oedipus responded to the danger inherent in the more instructive

We hear an echo of the physical inversion of nature which struck the

longer see what there is to be seen. He will have discovered nothing on

Tragic Crime and the Onset of Mania

What is it that forces this terrible knowledge upon Oedipus? Where

Sophocles’ view is “a product of religious and philosophical thought,” he writes,

the Theban choristers as a “bull, limping sadly with sore-wounded

A more literal translation is helpful: “For with regards to that which

(828-829), he asks. Oedipus also invokes the interference of the gods

Though language also functions in a way to which the methods of

biou) in a line of generation (genos), he must sacrifice this individual

Madness, Katharsis and Language

The mounting enthusiasm and anxiety of Oedipus and his chorus, as

This wretchedness and mania, the ambivalences he embodies, cannot

The ‘showing [ephanthùn]’ of Oedipus’ ‘becoming’ depends essen-

longer the darkness which illuminates. It is no longer the sun which

Happiness and Moral Wisdom

Once the terrible knowledge of the third scene is secured, Sophocles

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