How to be a Terrible Teacher: Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments on what Education is not

Abstract

I argue for an approach to Philosophical Fragments that allows it to be philosophical (as opposed to theological) and fragmentary (as opposed to systematic), and that pays particular attention to the fragments, or crumbs, that seem least important. One such overlooked crumb is the theory of merely human education in the book—education that does not enlist God as the teacher, where humans simply try to teach and learn from each other. I argue that Philosophical Fragments defends this theory of education with several reductio ad absurdum proofs that are especially useful because they clarify why merely human education so often fails. Finally I apply the theory of merely human education in Philosophical Fragments to Kierkegaard’s authorship as a whole and argue that it gives us a paradigm for understanding all of Kierkegaard’s texts that is more fundamental than the distinction between direct and indirect communication.

Keywords

Kierkegaard education theory pedagogy Socratic teaching teaching and learning indirect communication

What should we do with the very strange book called Philosophical Fragments (hereafter PF)? The book itself suggests two distinct options.

On the one hand, the text invites us to treat it as an unruly, anarchic, unsystematic mess; a random assortment of scraps—mere philosophical crumbs.¹ The title, of course, suggests this approach, and so does the book’s author, Johannes Climacus, who insists that what he has written is not really even a book: It is merely a pamphlet “without any claim to being a part of the scientific-scholarly endeavor in which one acquires legitimacy,” not even “as an absolute trumpeter” (PF 5).² The author further confesses that he is a lazy, thoroughly indolent fellow (PF 5) who has written his pamphlet just to appear busy, since everyone else around him seemed to have so many serious and important things to do, and he did not want to be seen as “the only loafer among so many busy people” (PF 6). He also considers it too much of a burden to have any opinion of his own and he is indignant that anyone would even want to know what his opinions are (PF 7). Why then should we bother to read his pamphlet? The only reason he gives us is that he is not a bad dancer—“for I have trained myself and am training myself always to be able to dance lightly in the service of thought” (PF 7). As a dialectical dancer, with no fixed convictions of his own, he plans simply to follow the arguments wherever they lead, and we are welcome to follow along.

The net result of this unscripted dialectical dancing is, Climacus is proud to say, a large collection of philosophical fragments or crumbs; and the worst fate he can imagine for his work is that some well-meaning systematizer might try to impose order on these crumbs by sweeping them up into a neat and tidy pile, which would “prevent a kind and well-disposed reader from unabashedly looking to see if there is anything in the pamphlet he can use” (PF 7). Please do not clean up my crumby book, Climacus begs. Please allow this pamphlet to remain an unruly, anarchic, unsystematic mess, a happy assortment of philosophical scraps and crumbs; and then perhaps among the crumbs you will find something useful. I will call this approach to the book the crumby approach, since it embraces and celebrates the book’s crumbiness and vows to resist any attempt to impose a system on the fragments of philosophy that fill its pages.³

On the other hand, Johannes Climacus also seems to strongly suggest another approach to Philosophical Fragments that directly contradicts the crumby approach. I will call this the authoritative approach because it places Philosophical Fragments, along with its much longer, weightier, and more famous sequel—The Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments—under the authority of a single thesis statement or question which is announced with some fanfare on the title page.

Can a historical point of departure be given for an eternal consciousness; how can such a point of departure be of more than historical interest; can an eternal happiness be built on historical knowledge?

The reader, confronted by this very somber and serious three-part question before she has even had a chance to turn the page and read the first word of the book, is immediately tempted to think of the book as a systematic response to a very stern and systematic set of questions, in spite of any apparent protestations to the contrary from the author. This approach leads to regarding the Philosophical Fragments as fragmentary only in the sense that it is just part-one of a larger systematic discourse in response to a single set of questions (which just happen to be of interest primarily to Christian theology, thereby making it very easy to think of both the Fragments and the Postscript as aufgehoben into the larger system of Christian Theology⁴). The authoritative approach to the book makes it very easy to dismiss all the noise from this very noisy author about “fragments” and “crumbs” and “please spare my book from the system” as nothing more than sound and fury, signifying nothing. The authoritative approach does a neat job of simplifying and streamlining Philosophical Fragments; it sweeps up all the crumbs and organizes them into a larger systematic whole, and for most readers this possibility has proven to be an irresistible temptation.

Because Climacus offers us two interpretative approaches to Philosophical Fragments that seem to be polar opposites, it is natural to assume that only one approach can be correct. That is not my argument in this paper. Instead I want to argue that the text supports both readings, both the authoritative approach and the crumby approach. However, the authoritative approach has attracted almost all the attention, while the crumby approach has gotten almost none; so my humble project in this paper is merely to make some space for the crumby approach so that the rich dialectical and multifaceted character of Philosophical Fragments can be more fully appreciated. Philosophical Fragments confronts us with two interpretative paradigms that appear to be mutually exclusive, and this gives us the opportunity to resist the seduction of an exclusive, either/or, style of thinking. Here again we should be grateful to Climacus for making good on his promise to create difficulties for us everywhere (CUP 186–187).⁵ To restore some balance to our understanding of Philosophical Fragments I will argue for the crumby approach to the book, which resists all temptations to sweep up or clean up these crumbs into something resembling a system, and whenever I mention the authoritative approach to the book, it will be for the purpose of contrasting the two approaches or simply pointing out how dominant the authoritative approach has been; my purpose is never to argue that the crumby approach alone is correct and therefore the authoritative approach must be wrong.⁶

The crumby approach to both Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript requires us to ignore the “thesis statement” that supposedly organizes both books and instead proceed in the spirit of the fragmentary epigrams that launch each book with the sound of a rather uncertain trumpet (clearly not from an absolute trumpeter).

“Better well hanged than ill wed.”

Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (Act 1, Scene V)

(Better to hang as a single benighted and confused individual who at least has integrity than to enter into an ill-conceived bad marriage with a systematic omnibus/fellowship/corporation/partnership.)

“But I must ask you, Socrates, what do you suppose is the upshot of all this?”

“As I said a little while ago, it is the scrapings and shavings of argument, cut up into little bits.”

Plato, Greater Hippias (304a)

(Indeed.)

The crumby approach also suggests that we should pay special attention to the crumbs that are left behind after the main course has been eaten, the serving trays cleared away, and the dinner guests thinking about retiring for a nap. These crumby ideas are the leftovers which are easy to ignore. They are the ideas which were introduced to serve as a bridge to some larger and grander conclusion, but then were tossed aside or left behind once they have served that purpose. These leftovers may turn out to be far more interesting, and far more useful, than the main course, even though the main course was spectacular and delicious and therefore attracted everyone’s attention.

In Philosophical Fragments two different theories of teaching and learning are presented: One that focuses on education when all of the parties involved (both teachers and students) are merely human (all too human); and a separate theory of education that considers how everything changes when God gets involved.⁷ The first theory of merely human education is clearly the crumbier of the two, while the second theory of divine education is obviously the main course. Climacus had so much more to say about the second theory in Philosophical Fragments—and even this was not enough, so two years later he published the much longer Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments in which he continues to explore all of the consequences for education when God takes the job as teacher. Also the second theory of education ventures rather spectacularly into the territory of passion, paradox, and incommensurability, which leads to many dazzling dialectical fireworks and some very memorable imagery concerning leaps of faith and the special kind of madness that belongs to objective truth; and these rhetorical explosions are hard to ignore. For these reasons it seems like the first theory of merely human education in Philosophical Fragments functions primarily to set up the second theory, and the first theory easily gets left behind like so many crumbs once the second theory takes the stage. It is easy to run right past the first theory of education—the human, all too human theory—without even noticing it; but that would be a great loss because it is a truly amazing and profound theory of education, and it certainly contains many useful ideas.⁸

My defense of the crumby approach to Philosophical Fragments will rest on a purely pragmatic foundation: I will argue that the crumby approach yields some truly fascinating and useful results, just as Climacus suggested in the preface. I will focus on a few of the really excellent crumbs and/or fragments in this book and/or pamphlet which concern how merely human teaching and/or learning are possible—and also how they can utterly fail. This really ought to be a topic of interest to the entire human race since education is the key to our survival, but we are obviously not very good at it.⁹

The ideas in Philosophical Fragments about the possibility and impossibility of merely human education are also useful to a much smaller and stranger sub-culture within the human race: That very odd congregation of lost souls who desperately desire to understand the bizarre menagerie of texts assembled under the name “Søren Kierkegaard.” This menagerie includes writing attributed to at least 28 different pseudonyms, many more texts published under Kierkegaard’s own signature, and an enormous collection of journals, papers and scraps which were published posthumously. Whatever else you may think of this eclectic and unruly body of work, it is at least clear that it is an extraordinary attempt to pass along some ideas within the human, all too human sphere; and if some of Kierkegaard’s own ideas on teaching and learning in Philosophical Fragments could be applied to some of the central puzzles in his own very complicated authorship, that would certainly be awesome.

To make a case for the value of the theory of merely human education offered in Philosophical Fragments I will proceed in three stages. This educational theory is presented in crumby fashion, with bits and pieces scattered throughout the book, so first I will bring these scraps together and clarify the five essential attributes of what Climacus calls “Socratic” teaching. Then I will do the same for Climacus’s defense of his Socratic theory of education, which is presented as a series of reductio ad absurdum proofs. I will argue that these proofs are especially useful because they clarify how education fails because we love paradox and mystery more than simple human truths and therefore tend to conceptualize the educational enterprise in religious terms, as if teaching and learning were utterly beyond our limited human abilities and therefore only possible by means of divine intervention. Finally I will apply the theory of merely human education in Philosophical Fragments to Kierkegaard’s authorship as a whole and argue that it gives us a paradigm for understanding all of Kierkegaard’s texts that is more fundamental than the distinction between direct and indirect communication, which has been the primary focus of those lost souls who have labored for so long to make sense of these strange texts.

The crumby theory of merely human education in Philosophical Fragments: Five essential attributes of “Socratic” teaching and/or learning

“Can the truth be learned and/or taught?” Chapter one of Philosophical Fragments begins with this question—however, it is worded much less awkwardly in Danish because the single Danish word laere means both “to teach” and “to learn.” This is, I believe, a brilliant insight on the part of the Danish language, since teaching and learning really are inextricable. Because laere means both “teach” and “learn,” to choose one or the other in English translation would be merely arbitrary;¹⁰ so I am going to embrace the limitations of the English language when it comes to expressing the inextricable nature of teaching and learning and always use the awkward phrase “learn and/or teach” or some variation thereof in this paper in spite of how annoying this will be to you, dear reader.

“Can the truth be learned and/or taught?”¹¹ In the “Thought-Project” that initiates his answer to this audacious and awkwardly worded question Climacus immediately summons Socrates for assistance. “It was a Socratic question,” he insists, “or became that by way of the Socratic question whether virtue can be taught—for virtue in turn was defined as insight” (PF 9). Since from this point on Climacus will refer to authentic human teaching as “Socratic teaching,” we should address the historical accuracy of this reference, lest anyone object that Climacus is guilty of getting Socrates all wrong.

To avoid all such nagging questions concerning historical accuracy, I think we should recognize right at the outset that the theory of teaching and learning that Philosophical Fragments calls “Socratic” really has no necessary connection to the historic Socrates. Socrates merely serves as the occasion for Climacus to conceptualize a system of education that he calls “Socratic,” a system that certainly includes a few well-known elements of Socrates’ maieutic method but also goes well beyond what Socrates himself actually said or did. This is a “thought-project,” not a history or biography project, and in this respect Climacus is just continuing the somewhat ignoble tradition that began with Plato, of putting your own ideas in the mouth of Socrates. For example, even though Socrates himself said that he was not a teacher, and actually thought of teaching as a shameful and disreputable profession since he equated it with sophistry,¹² Climacus unabashedly names a full-blown pedagogical theory after him. This is roughly the equivalent of naming a theory of how to be a happy and successful capitalist after Karl Marx, or naming a theory about the mental health benefits of religious faith after Sigmund Freud. Clearly it is not fair or accurate to attribute to Socrates all of the pedagogical principles that Climacus does assign to him, but that is really beside the point, so it would be a mistake to allow this to stand in the way of appreciating the theory itself. I will continue to call the theory of teaching and learning presented in Philosophical Fragments as “Socratic,” following Climacus, but if the name “Socrates” offends, please replace it with “Diogenes” or “Prodicus” or “Sara” or “Clarence”: it really makes no difference.

Philosophical Fragments outlines five essential attributes of “Socratic teaching,” and all of them are really fascinating, so if I enthuse over them at even greater length than Climacus did, please forgive me.

First, a Socratic teacher is a midwife who helps the student give birth to his own ideas. A maieutic relationship is the highest and best possible relationship that can exist between two people, Climacus argues, and so a Socratic teacher must establish such a relationship not out of necessity but rather out of principle (PF 10). Socrates demonstrated this in this own life because “[h]e was and continued to be a midwife not because he ‘did not have the positive,’ but because he perceived that this relation is the highest relation a human being can have to another” (PF 10).

This is one aspect of “Socratic” teaching that, of course, can be ascribed directly to Socrates, who explained to anyone who would listen that all he ever tried to do was help people give birth to their own ideas. However, Socrates gave his version of the maieutic method a different spin when he insisted that it was precisely because he aspired to nothing more than midwifery that no one could ever accuse him of trying to be a teacher—which was fine with him because he thought of teaching as sophistry, and therefore wanted no part in it. So Climacus borrows only some of Socrates’ ideas about teaching and midwifery, not the whole story, and this is one more example of how what the Philosophical Fragments calls “Socratic teaching” bears no necessary connection or resemblance to the historical Socrates. For Climacus maieutic teaching is indeed teaching, and in fact the highest possible form of teaching.

The second essential attribute of Socratic teaching concerns temporality. Viewed Socratically, when does teaching and learning occur? Climacus’ fascinating answer to this question is: never. Or, to say the same thing: always. Or, to say the same thing yet again, but this time with far more words: Teaching and learning have no instant or moment, they have only an occasion, which amounts to a vanishing point—a moment in time that is capable of performing a disappearing act, and transforming past, present and future along with it. Contrary to what you are probably thinking right now, these answers are not pure nonsense.

“Viewed Socratically,” Climacus writes, “any point of departure in time is eo ipso something accidental, a vanishing point, an occasion” (PF 11). Therefore the time of Socratic teaching and learning is accidental and vanishing. A moment of instruction and enlightenment occurs in time, but then vanishes from time, because time itself is transformed. This argument about the unique temporality of teaching and learning has this fascinating implication: Learning Socratically transforms the student’s past, and present, and future simultaneously. But this does not happen in a moment; rather, it has always already happened.

Several thousand years ago Plato expressed something similar about the temporality of teaching and learning using his theory of learning as recollection, which maintains that what we call “learning” is really just “remembering.” According to Plato, the truth, now recollected, was within you all along, and now that you have remembered it all the time of your entire life is transformed at once. Climacus gives Plato’s theory of recollection a different spin, which emphasizes the temporal transformation that is inherent in human learning and leaves behind all the metaphysical baggage required for Plato’s theory of Forms.

The temporal point of departure is a nothing, because in the same moment that I discover that I have known the truth from eternity without knowing it, in the same instant that moment is hidden in the eternal, assimilated into it in such a way that I, so to speak, still cannot find it even if I were to look for it, because there is no Here and no There, but only an ubique et nusquam [everywhere and nowhere]. (PF 13)¹³

Though this may sound suspiciously like a magical incantation, or a description of a paradox that simply cannot be thought, Climacus insists that neither is required to explain how human, all too human, education occurs. In the other theory of teaching and learning presented in Philosophical Fragments, which concerns how teaching and learning are transformed when God enters the picture and assumes the role of teacher, paradox and the supernatural are essential parts of the story; but Climacus insists that they have no part in teaching and learning between mere humans. In fact, as we will see later on, Climacus uses the absurdity of relying upon paradox or the supernatural to explain merely human teaching and learning as the punch line in many of his reductio ad absurdum arguments in defense of his Socratic model of teaching.

But in addition to the reductio ad absurdum or indirect proofs that Climacus will offer later on in Philosophical Fragments, there is also empirical—or more accurately, phenomenological—evidence for these surprising claims about the temporality of teaching and learning. All you have to do is reflect honestly and thoroughly on your own educational experience, in all of its dimensions, to recognize that these claims about teaching and learning are true. Time really is transformed whenever learning occurs, and past, present and future are always already transformed together. Gaining a new insight retroactively resets one’s past and proactively reconfigures one’s future; so past, present, and future are all transformed in the same (vanishing) instant. It is as if the truth was there all along, as in Plato’s theory of recollection, just waiting to be recovered.

Third, just as the moment of Socratic teaching becomes a vanishing point, the teacher herself must also vanish. “Viewed Socratically, any point of departure in time is eo ipso something accidental, a vanishing point, an occasion. Nor is the teacher anything more, and if he gives of himself and his erudition in any other way, he does not give but takes away. Then he is not even the other’s friend, much less his teacher” (PF 11). Time provides a template for the teacher to imitate, but the teacher has to understand the need to follow this template—he has to have the insight to know that “if he gives of himself and his erudition in any other way, he does not give but takes away,” which would make him “not even the other’s friend, much less his teacher” (PF 11).

To successfully imitate the way the moment vanishes and time transforms itself when learning occurs, a Socratic teacher must practice and perfect a vanishing act. She must learn how to disappear and never be found, thus leaving a student transformed but not indebted to anyone. Climacus emphasizes how much self-understanding and will are required in order to perform this disappearing act. There is nothing natural, instinctive or easy about it; self-discipline and self-sufficiency are required, as well as love. “Socrates had the courage and self-collectedness to be sufficient unto himself, but in his relations to others he also had the courage and self-collectedness to be merely an occasion even for the most stupid person” (PF 11). It is far more natural for a teacher not to disappear, to linger in a student’s life and continue to cast a long shadow while collecting praise, honor, glory, money, and perhaps even teacher of the year awards. To will her own disappearance a teacher must be truly wise and in touch with the temporality of teaching and learning, and also truly motivated by a desire to benefit the student—because anything less than a total vanishing act will harm the student. To practice this art of transforming oneself into a vanishing point or accidental occasion in the life of a student requires,

rare magnanimity—rare in our day, when the pastor is little more than the deacon, when every second person is an authority, while all these distinctions and all this considerable authority are mediated in a common lunacy and in a commune naufragium [common shipwreck], because, since no human has ever truly been an authority or has benefited anyone else by being that or has ever really managed successfully to carry his dependent along, there is better success in another way, for it never fails that one fool going his way takes several others along with him. (PF 11–12)

As is obvious from the text above, a fourth essential attribute of Socratic teaching is closely connected to the self-understanding that leads a good teacher to make herself disappear: A true Socratic teacher does not think of himself as an authority. This is another striking claim, but it follows quite naturally from the paradigm of teaching as “deliberately vanishing midwifery” in an “accidental and vanishing transformative moment of time” that Climacus has outlined so far. There is definitely an art to teaching, but it is the art of catalyzing the student’s own creative process and then erasing yourself—vanishing before anyone notices (which is no mean art); it is not the art of possessing or asserting authority. A Socratic teacher stands on the same plane and shares the same world as the student; there is no hierarchy of authority that makes the teacher transcendent. “Understood in this way…the teacher stands in a reciprocal relation, inasmuch as life and its situations are the occasions for him to become a teacher and he in turn the occasion for others to learn something. His relation, therefore, is at all times marked by autopathy just as much as sympathy” (PF 23). This is one more aspect of Socratic teaching that is counter-intuitive to the point of appearing paradoxical, but again Climacus insists that there is no unthinkable paradox here: This paradigm of teaching follows naturally and logically from everything else that he has argued about teaching and learning so far.

Finally, a true Socratic teacher recognizes that the student who learns from a teacher who is a mere vanishing point and accidental occasion—for such a student, learning amounts to creating his own truth. Here again Climacus is borrowing some ideas from Plato’s argument that all learning is recollection, but adding some key modifications of his own. Instead of learning as remembering, the spin that Climacus gives to this theory turns it into something more like learning as creating or inventing. Again all the metaphysical baggage of Plato’s Forms is no longer necessary; all that is required to support the conclusion that a student who learns creates her own truths is taking seriously the other four essential attributes of Socratic teaching that Climacus has already outlined, especially the idea that a Socratic teacher has abundant skill and art but zero authority: “[T]he teacher is only an occasion, whoever he may be…because I can discover my own untruth only by myself, because only when I discover it is it discovered, not before, even though the whole world knew it” (PF 14).

If this is the case with regard to learning the truth, then the fact that I have learned from Socrates or from Prodicus or from a maidservant can concern me only historically or—to the extent that I am a Plato in my enthusiasm—poetically. But this enthusiasm, even though it is beautiful…Socrates would say is still but an illusion, indeed, a muddiness of mind in which earthly distinction ferments almost grossly. Neither can the fact that the teaching of Socrates or of Prodicus was this or that have anything but historical interest for me, because the truth in which I rest was in me and emerged from me. Not even Socrates would have been capable of giving it to me, no more than the coachman is capable of pulling the horse’s load, even though he may help the horse do it by means of the whip.…If I were to imagine myself meeting Socrates, Prodicus, or the maidservant in another life, there again none of them would be more than an occasion, as Socrates intrepidly expresses it by saying that even in the underworld he would only ask questions, for the ultimate idea in all questioning is that the person asked must himself possess the truth and acquire it by himself. (PF 12–13)

The absurd defense of Socratic teaching and/or learning: How education gets confused with religion

Climacus summarizes these five essential attributes of Socratic teaching in only five pages, thereby demonstrating that he is capable of writing very succinctly when he wants to. This is something that will seem nearly miraculous to anyone who has weathered the seemingly endless prolixity of Either/Or Part 2, or Stages on Life’s Way. This admirably brief summary is followed by many more pages of “proofs” that follow a classic reductio ad absurdum model—and this is where the argument really gets interesting. To prove that the truth can be taught and/or learned only when the principles of Socratic teaching and learning summarized above are followed, we are asked to assume the contrary: That somehow the truth is learned even though these principles are not applied—and then we are led to see that laughable consequences follow, thereby demonstrating that the assumption that led to these consequences had to be false. Though this proof is much longer than five pages it is never boring because Climacus seizes on the comic possibilities inherent in reductio ad absurdum arguments and exploits them fully, turning them into a very entertaining comedy show.¹⁴

All of these reductio arguments follow the same pattern: If we imagine that the truth can be taught and/or learned in a non-Socratic way, it follows that merely human education becomes indistinguishable from religion. This is quite funny, and therefore obviously false, because—as anyone who has spent 10 minutes inside any school knows with perfect certainty—there is nothing less like the sublime and transcendent mysteries of religion than the messy and inefficient realities of a classroom. Nothing is less worthy of worship than the human, all too human, comedy of one mere mortal trying to teach another mere mortal; nothing else on earth would make a more ridiculous religion. A religion of human, merely human, education is reminiscent of “The Ass Festival” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, when Zarathustra’s followers—wanting desperately to worship something—decide to worship an ass. In their zealous desperation they quickly construct an elaborate system of dogma and rituals so that they can worship, with appropriate solemnity, the ass they find lingering outside Zarathustra’s cave; however, even the ass who is the object of their adoration immediately recognizes how ridiculous this is and finds the whole spectacle hilarious.¹⁵

There are scraps of reductio ad absurdum arguments concerning the necessity of Socratic teaching and/or learning scattered throughout the Philosophical Fragments, in keeping with the generally crumby nature of this book. In what follows I will bring these crumbs together to form a series of classic reductio ad absurdum proofs. Since the five essential characteristics of Socratic teaching and/or learning naturally overlap to form a package deal, a proof of each of the five would be tedious and unnecessary. Instead Climacus provides three indirect proofs: (1) If merely human education occurred in a non-Socratic way, what would the consequences be for temporality? (2) What would the consequences be for the teacher? (3) What would the consequences be for the student? The real value of all three of these indirect proofs is that they clarify how education so often fails: They explain how to be a terrible teacher; how to be an unhappy student; how to be utterly disappointed by the whole educational enterprise.¹⁶

(1) If merely human education occurred in a non-Socratic way what hilarious consequences would follow for temporality?

This is a question about the meaning of the “moment” when teaching and/or learning occurs. In the Socratic model of education this moment is accidental and vanishing; but if teaching and/or learning could be imagined to occur in a moment that were neither, that moment “must have such decisive significance that for no moment will I be able to forget it” (PF 13). Every moment when something is learned would become a great earthquake in the student’s life, absolutely dividing the past from the future. “A moment such as this is unique. To be sure, it is short and temporal.…and yet it is decisive, and yet it is filled with the eternal. A moment such as this must have a special name. Let us call it: the fullness of time” (PF 18).¹⁷ So if you imagine that merely human teaching and/or learning were possible in a non-Socratic way, the moment when learning occurs would have to be understood as something like the second coming of the Lord.

This is the first instance in the book of Climacus deploying highly sarcastic religious imagery to clarify the absurdity of non-Socratic teaching and/or learning. In all of these reductio arguments, religious imagery is introduced only to demonstrate the absurd consequences that follow whenever we imagine that humans can teach and learn in a non-Socratic fashion. Religion appears in these proofs only to make the point that if education is not understood in the merely human terms that structure Socratic pedagogy, then education becomes something completely mystical and mysterious to humans and we have to confess that only a god can save us.

A non-Socratic paradigm requires the moment of learning to be a miracle, an interruption of the temporal continuum that will dominate and overshadow the student’s life forever. According to this paradigm, every time anyone learns anything a moment so miraculous has occurred that no other moment could possibly match it; but then if one manages to learn more than just one thing in life one soon has an accumulation of miraculous moments that threaten to drown out the normal flow of temporality completely. Just one such miraculous moment deserves to be worshipped forever; so would not just two educational instants be completely overwhelming? For anyone who hopes to learn more than one thing in her life the situation becomes completely untenable; there simply is not enough time for so many miracles.

This story is absurd, obviously, but that was the whole point: to demonstrate by means of an obvious absurdity that the assumption which led to this bizarre result must be false. (Reductio ad absurdum arguments are supposed to be funny. They are the stand-up comedians of logic.)

(2) If merely human education occurred in a non-Socratic way what hilarious consequences would follow for the teacher?

Since the moment in which teaching/learning occurs is a miracle, teachers must now be understood as miracle workers. But even this grandiose designation is too humble; more accurately teachers really must be recognized as gods. This is quite obviously hilarious, since no one could possibly be less god-like than a teacher—especially a college professor who teaches four classes every semester while also serving on five different committees and advising 48 students, and who is expected to spend any time that remains calling and writing the state legislature begging them not to cut the university’s budget again: no one would ever mistake this frazzled and frantic soul for a deity. So it is not difficult at all for Climacus to bring out the absurdity of this particular conclusion. The sarcastic honor and glory that he piles upon this imagined, deified version of a merely human teacher is boundless. The strains of Handel’s Messiah can almost be heard playing in the background as one reads the following description of a god-like teacher.

What, then, should we call such a teacher?…Let us call him a savior, for he does indeed save the learner from un-freedom, saves him from himself. Let us call him a deliverer, for he does indeed deliver the person who had imprisoned himself, and no one is so dreadfully imprisoned, and no captivity is so impossible to break out of as that in which the individual holds himself captive! And yet, even this does not say enough, for by his un-freedom he had indeed become guilty of something, and if that teacher gives him the condition and the truth, then he is, of course, a reconciler who takes away the wrath that lay over the incurred guilt. A teacher such as that, the learner will never be able to forget. (PF 17)

To further emphasize the absurdity of such a god-like teacher, Climacus points out that when the learned hear about this teacher they will “no doubt first submit sophistic questions to him, invite him to colloquia or put him through an examination, and after that guarantee him a tenured position and a living” (PF 57). To this I can only add, QED.

(3) If merely human education occurred in a non-Socratic way what hilarious consequences would follow for the student?

The student who needs to be saved by the divine intervention of a god-like teacher must be understood as horribly damaged, in a fallen condition—more like an animal than a person. This may seem less hilarious than the ecstatic description of teachers reimagined as gods, but it is really just as absurd. In every way that teachers are elevated to the heavens in the previous reductio proof, students are abased and desecrated in this one, and again there is no limit to the hyperbole employed to make this point. (Suitable background music for Climacus’ account of a student’s wretched condition would be “Confutatis Maledictis” from Mozart’s Requiem, or some other accompaniment appropriate for the damned).

The teacher, then, is the god himself, who, acting as the occasion, prompts the learner to be reminded that he is untruth and is that through his own fault. But this state—to be untruth and to be that through one’s own fault—what can we call it? Let us call it sin. (PF 15)

When the learner is untruth…and he now receives the condition and the truth…he becomes a person of a different quality or, as we can also call it, a new person.…Let us call this change conversion.…Inasmuch as he was in untruth through his own fault, this conversion cannot take place without its being assimilated into his consciousness or without his becoming aware that it was through his own fault, and with this consciousness he takes leave of his former state. But how does one take leave without feeling sorrowful? Yet this sorrow is, of course, over his having been so long in the former state. Let us call such sorrow repentance.…Let us call this transition rebirth, by which he enters the world a second time just as at birth.…Just as the person who by Socratic midwifery gave birth to himself and in so doing forgot everything else in the world and in a more profound sense owed no human being anything, so also the one who is born again owes no human being anything, but owes the divine teacher everything. (PF 18–19)

How to be a terrible teacher and an unhappy student: Philosophical Fragments as a guide to educational failure

The picture that emerges from all three of these reductio ad absurdum proofs is one of a truly ridiculous religion: A religion of pedagogy that desperately believes in a supernatural solution to a purely human problem. But while these proofs are highly entertaining, they are also opportunities to learn some valuable lessons about why teaching and learning so often fail. Here is what we can learn from these proofs—and from the principles of Socratic teaching and/or learning that these proofs defend—about how to be terrible teachers and miserable students.

First, we are too pious about education. We want education to be a miraculous intervention involving supernatural powers instead of the mundane and human, all too human enterprise that it actually is. Trying to teach or learn in a non-Socratic way is like hiring God to teach a few sections of introduction to philosophy (preferably on an adjunct basis, since the budget is always tight): it may seem like an excellent solution to your staffing problems (best adjunct ever! And we do not even need to pay for benefits!), but it brings with it a whole host of impossible mysteries and unthinkable paradoxes that will make education impossible to understand (and therefore—most terrifyingly—impossible to assess!) since God exists on a different plane entirely from merely mortal students and thus completely beyond our understanding. As soon as we impose a transcendent, supernatural paradigm on merely human education we effectively make education impossible—we place it beyond our own reach. This conclusion seems so obvious that it is hard to imagine how we could ever make such a bizarre mistake, but the reductio ad absurdum proofs in Philosophical Fragments clarify how quickly, easily, and often we do make this mistake, and thus how we unknowingly transform education into a religion, as soon as we attempt to teach and/or learn in a non-Socratic fashion.

Our excessive piety concerning education can also be understood as a misplaced passion for paradoxes. Climacus has much to say in Philosophical Fragments about paradox, but only when he turns to his second theory of education: how education is transformed when God becomes the teacher. In the second theory of education, paradox is unavoidable and must be embraced; but if we are looking for paradox in the context of merely human education we are looking for it in all the wrong places. This is most likely due to the fact that we love paradoxes more than we care to admit in polite society.

The story we like to tell about paradoxes is that we consider them to be embarrassing and somewhat indecent. We speak of paradoxes as if they were rare and unintended consequences that occasionally surprise us when we are in search of clear and distinct truths. Certainly we never actively look for paradoxes, we insist; the very idea seems perverse. But in the second theory of education in Philosophical Fragments Climacus argues that we do not really believe this story. The truth about paradox is exactly the opposite, we love paradoxes more than anything else and we actively seek them out. Our passion for paradox is itself paradoxical, since it amounts to the (impossible) desire to think an unthinkable thought, but we love even that paradox. We are, in short, paradoxical creatures who love their paradoxes, and secretly we are not at all embarrassed about this; actually we are quite proud, and boast to ourselves along the following lines.

One must not think ill of the paradox, for the paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker without the paradox is like the lover without passion: a mediocre fellow. But 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 paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think. (PF 37)

This argument about our passion for paradox reverses a tradition that is at least as old as Aristotle, who claimed in the first line of the first book of the Metaphysics that all people by nature desire to know.¹⁸ According to Philosophical Fragments this is false: What we really desire is not to know—to find an unthinkable thought that signals the limits of the understanding and the impossibility of knowledge.

Climacus argues that everything about religion is paradoxical. These well-known arguments are presented at great length in Philosophical Fragments,¹⁹ and then at even greater length in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments. These arguments have attracted much of the attention in these books; but behind them there is a crumby theory of merely human education in which there are no paradoxes, only simple human truths. One of the things we should learn from this crumby theory is that in the realm of purely human education our passion for paradox is misplaced and leads to absurd consequences. We expect miracles in merely human education when none are required, and we long for paradoxes that simply are not there. Thus we conflate education with religion, and succeed—very admirably—in making ourselves terrible teachers and miserable students.

In addition to our misplaced passion for paradox, Climacus’ arguments about Socratic teaching clarify how other misplaced passions render merely human teaching and/or learning nearly impossible for us. For example, we desperately love authority. We want the world to be fully stocked with authorities who can tell us what to do at all times, and we also want to be among the ranks of authorities ourselves. Thus we cling to the illusion of authority even when that is the exact opposite of what good teaching requires. We also have far too much love for spectacular, world-historical, momentous events, and not enough appreciation for accidental, vanishing, merely occasional instants. So we cling to an impossible ideal of spectacular presence and never practice the skills required to transform the present into a vanishing instant, and to make ourselves disappear as well. We have no passion at all for the arts and skills that are truly required for effective teaching: the art of midwifery; the art of vanishing; the art of allowing students to create their own truths. Effective teaching does not require famous, authoritative, god-like teachers; it requires teachers who are wise enough to know that they have no authority, who have practiced and perfected the art of disappearing, and who have the insight to understand that the moment of teaching and learning is also accidental and vanishing and that the student learns only insofar as she creates her own truth. These are not shadowy paradoxes, they are just simple human truths; but instead of embracing these truths we retreat into the realm of paradox, we conflate education with religion, we confuse ourselves with exalted gods and fallen sinners, and we content ourselves to wait patiently for the series of miracles that our absurd conception of merely human education seems to require.

Therefore it is clear that we are generally satisfied to remain uneducated about the true nature of education, and Philosophical Fragments suggests that this should be understood as willful ignorance because the true nature of merely human education is not a great mystery. To emphasize this fact there is a recurring dialogue in the book between the author and an unnamed antagonist who reappears from time to time to point out to the author that he is effectively just a plagiarist because he is only repeating ideas that everyone already knows. Here are just a few excerpts from their delightful conversation.

But perhaps someone will say, “This is the most ludicrous of all projects, or, rather, you are the most ludicrous of all project-cranks, for even if someone comes up with a foolish scheme, there is always at least the truth that he is the one who came up with the scheme. But you, on the other hand, are behaving like a vagabond who charges a fee for showing an area that everyone can see. You are like the man who in the afternoon exhibited for a fee a ram that in the forenoon everyone could see free of charge, grazing in the open pasture.” (PF 21)

Now if someone were to say, “What you are composing is the shabbiest plagiarism ever to appear, since it is nothing more or less than what any child knows,” then I presumably must hear with shame that I am a liar. But why the shabbiest? After all, every poet who steals, steals from another poet, and thus we are all equally shabby; indeed, my stealing is perhaps less harmful since it is more easily discovered.…And was this perhaps why you called my plagiarism the shabbiest ever, because I did not steal from any one person, but robbed the human race and, although I am just a single human being—indeed, even a shabby thief—arrogantly pretended to be the whole human race? (PF 35)

But someone may be saying, “You really are boring, for now we have the same story all over again; all the phrases you put in the mouth of the paradox do not belong to you at all” (PF 53).

Stop a moment. If you go on talking this way, I cannot get a word in edgewise. You talk as if you were defending a doctoral dissertation—indeed, you talk like a book and, what is unfortunate for you, like a very specific book. Once again, wittingly or unwittingly, you have introduced words that do not belong to you and that you have not put in the mouth of the one speaking, but they are familiar to everyone, except that you use the singular instead of the plural. (PF 68)

But someone may be saying, “How very curious! I have read your discussion to the end, and really not without some interest, and I have been pleased to find no slogans, no invisible writing. But how you do twist and turn. Just as Saft always ends up in the pantry, you always mix in some little phrase that is not your own, and that disturbs because of the recollection it prompts” (PF 105).

In this dialogue Climacus never denies the accusation that he is a plagiarist, that he is not saying anything new; he agrees completely with that assessment, and he is glad that his unnamed antagonist has figured this out. This conversation reappears from time to time in Philosophical Fragments to remind us that the theory of Socratic teaching and/or learning outlined there is something that we already know, though for some reason we insist on making education far more complicated than it is, even to the point that we can only make sense of it using supernatural, paradoxical, miraculous concepts borrowed from religion. But rather than acknowledge what we already know about the nature of merely human education, we continue to worship thoughtlessly at the altar of mystery, paradox, and the spectacular, and we continue to make merely human education into a thoroughly unpleasant and unsuccessful enterprise for both teachers and students.

Applying the theory of merely human education in Philosophical Fragments to Kierkegaard’s authorship as a whole, or, why ‘Søren Kierkegaard’ is the most interesting pseudonym of them all!

In addition to explaining how to be a terrible teacher and an unhappy student, the crumby theory of merely human education in Philosophical Fragments also provides some excellent clues concerning how to understand Kierkegaard’s bizarre and complicated authorship as a whole (in case anyone is interested). So many debates about Kierkegaard’s authorship have focused on indirect communication in his writing without ever considering the theory of merely human education in Philosophical Fragments. This is a mistake simply because a theory of education is always more basic than a theory of communication; the question “Can the truth be learned and/or taught?” is more fundamental than the question “How should the truth be communicated?” Consequently we can use the theory of merely human education presented in Philosophical Fragments to disentangle some of the classic conundra of indirect communication.²⁰

Indirect communication gets a lot of attention because some of its best-known elements resonate purely on the level of spectacle: the 28 (at least) pseudonyms that Kierkegaard employed in various texts (many of them with silly and highly memorable names such as Hilarious Bookbinder or Nicolaus Notabene); the jokes directed at Hegel and other extremely serious speculative philosophers; the prefaces to books in which the author informs the reader that the book is a waste of time; the book reviews that Kierkegaard wrote for his own books; and so on. These same spectacular elements are also the focus of attention whenever indirect communication is belittled or dismissed as childish or pointless, as often happens. Finally, it is very common for those texts in Kierkegaard’s authorship which seem to be direct communications, such as his journals and papers, to be assigned greater authority precisely because they seem to promise an answer key for the indirectly communicated texts—so a hierarchy emerges wherein the texts signed “Søren Kierkegaard” are put in charge of the texts signed by pseudonyms.²¹

All of these conflicts and misunderstandings are eliminated by recognizing that Kierkegaard’s system of indirect communication should be understood as one of the consequences of his theory of education. Recognizing this, the debate about which texts should be read as indirect communications and which texts are direct communications simply vanishes, like the vanishing, accidental moment of Socratic teaching and/or learning. The theory of merely human education in Philosophical Fragments clarifies the application and the value of indirect communication, including the very interesting question of what to make of the texts that are signed “Søren Kierkegaard.” Understanding Kierkegaard’s theory of merely human education leads one to read all of his work as pseudonymous and indirectly communicated regardless of who signed the text, because that is the only way merely human teaching and/or learning is possible.²² To attempt to reduce this marvelously messy authorship to a single, simple idea, or a single authoritative voice, is antithetical to these pedagogical principles. Once the theory of merely human education in Philosophical Fragments is understood “Søren Kierkegaard” becomes perhaps the most interesting pseudonym of them all, because this pseudonym was the most successful in making life more difficult.²³

Footnotes

Notes

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