Kierkegaard on the Dancers of Faith and of Infinity1 PRE-PUBLICATION DRAFT: DO NOT CITE Alexander Jech University of Notre Dame Fear and Trembling’s primary task is to illuminate the nature and difficulty of faith, and “knighthood” is the most important image Kierkegaard gives Johannes de Silentio to use in clarifying the precise place where what is humanly reasonable leaves off and faith begins. Johannes utilizes these in distinguishing two types of integrated identity, the knight of faith and the knight of resignation, but at an important juncture in the argument he exchanges the image of knighthood for that of dance, saying that both types of knight are dancers, but only the knight of faith can dance perfectly. What is the purpose of switching images here? The juxtaposition of knights and dancers may seem so jarring as to obscure Silentio’s reasons for uniting them—so jarring that it ought to provoke discussion. Yet, as a matter of fact, neither this sudden juxtaposition, nor the image of the dancers itself, has received sustained and detailed attention in the existing literature. In most parts of that literature, even in book-length monographs on Fear and Trembling, the dancers have not even received glancing attention.2 Perhaps this neglect is 1 I would like to thank Karl Ameriks and Megan Fritts for their helpful comments upon an earlier draft of this paper. Among such books, Edward F. Mooney’s Knights of Faith and Resignation: Reading Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (New York: SUNY Press, 1991) is amongst the most complete treatments of Fear and Trembling as a whole, yet there is no discussion of the dancers, or the various images of dancing used throughout the text. “The leap” is mentioned merely in terms of the “catchphrase” “leap of faith” (p. 7), which is then described (p. 147, n17) as “an invention of commentators”—which is quite true. But even if “[the] closest Kierkegaard comes to this phrase is a passing Postscript reference to ‘the leap’ over ‘Lessing’s ditch’” it is worth noting that Fear and Trembling does describe the knight of faith as leaping, which establishes his likeness to the knight of resignation along with his unlikeness to the “wallflowers.” Similarly, the Routledge Guidebook to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (New York: Routledge, 2003; 2nd edition, 2015), a good reference to the existing literature, contains no references to the dancers at all. Clare Carlisle’s Fear and Trembling: A Reader’s Guide (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010) is a rare exception in that it mentions the main passage concerning the dancers, and connects the image with its three most important associations (the dancer, like Abraham, makes what is difficult seem easy (p. 67); the dancer, like both knights, leaps toward infinitude, but only a supernaturally 2 1 because everyone more or less understands classical dance sufficiently well to grasp Silentio’s meaning suddenly introducing this new image. Or, it might be that most readers know so little about classical dance, and view it as so obviously unimportant, as to require no mention or thought at all. This second reason—which I fear is the true one—is, unfortunately, quite mistaken. The image of the dancers sheds significant light on Silentio’s argument, and its meaning will be far from obvious to a reader unfamiliar with classical ballet’s mechanics, its ideals, and its thematic preoccupations. In this article I therefore aim to make the connection clear and answer three questions: (1) What do knighthood and dance have in common? (2) What analogical power does dance add to the power of knighthood? (3) How do the two knight-dancers illuminate the difference between faith and resignation? Question 1 will be addressed in Sections I and II of this paper, respectively addressing knighthood and dance, so as to clarify each image separately and so discover their common ground. The greatest difficulty in understanding Silentio’s use of dance has been contemporary philosopher’s relative ignorance of dance and classical ballet in particular, a general knowledge of which Kierkegaard assumes his reader to possess. Section II will therefore introduce the type of knowledge Kierkegaard’s audience might possess, so that the analogical affinity of the two images becomes apparent. Sections III and IV will then take up Questions 2 and 3 to see how this image clarifies the broad outline of Silentio’s argument in important ways. endowed dancer could land perfectly in finitude like the knight of faith (pp. 86–87); and the leap illustrates the character of the passion-driven movement of existence (p. 90)). These descriptions, however, are quite brief, and for the most part the images are taken to be self-explanatory. Her earlier Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Becoming: Movements and Positions (New York: SUNY Press, 2005) mentions the last point (p. 107), but otherwise neglects the image of dancer, even though the language of “movements and positions” is drawn from the language of dance. David J. Gouwens’s Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) mentions the leap, but only to describe it as a “discrete act of willing” (p. 101) with no reference at all to the dancers used to illustrate the leap in both Fear and Trembling and Concept of Anxiety. One recent, significant exception is Sheridan Hough’s Kierkegaard’s Dancing Tax Collector: Faith, Finitude, and Silence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), which will be discussed later. 2 I. The Knightly Ideal 1. Silentio’s primary analogy is knighthood, which he uses to describe both those who rest in resignation and those who in addition make the miraculous movement of faith. The knights are frequently discussed in the literature, though—in common with the dancers— there is very little said about the metaphor itself, what set of properties it invokes, or how Kierkegaard’s use of the image compares with other uses to which it had been put in the 19th century. Nor is it common to find sustained discussion of how the “knighthood” images in Fear and Trembling compares with the use of that ideal in Either/Or, either to its use in Part I or in Part II. A short review will therefore help us to get our footing before we turn to dance. The knightly ideal was in regular use during the 19th century, represented—just for example—in fiction by writers as different as Sir Walter Scott and George MacDonald, in poetry by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Pushkin, and Tennyson, in painting by the Pre-Raphaelite movement—Dante Gabriel Rosetti, John William Waterhouse, Edward Leighton, and William Morris—and in opera by Richard Wagner. The knightly ideal, and this yearning for “romance and religion,” was a response to the industrialization of Europe. In Morris’s words, it was an attempt to Forget six counties overhung with smoke, Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke, Forget the spreading of the hideous town. 3 They wished to escape from the cramped, utilitarian world of industrializing Europe, and the knight provided an idealized image of an individual (in historian Norman Cantor’s words) who was unconcerned with “finite rewards”4 and instead lived for vigorously pursued ideals. 3 Terri Hardin, The Pre-Raphaelites, London: Tiger Books International 1996, p. 8–9. 4 Norman Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages, New York: Harper Collins Publishers 1993, p. 543. 3 This knightly ideal may seem more poetic than historical. In fact, such poeticizing began in the Middle Ages themselves. Knighthood was early on seen through “a prism of imagination, idealism, and ideology”5 that blurred the “line between romance and reality.”6 Knighthood was aspirational, not just descriptive, owing much to poets. The ideal meant to unite and integrate a set of competing features and demands placed upon knights. Knights generally belonged to an “open class,” overlapping with but not identical with the aristocracy proper, so that membership was primarily defined by the warrior “métier” or vocation, and by the ability to supply, and utilize, arms, armor, and warhorse,7 but the class was in continual contact with the aristocracy, whose refinement it strove to imitate.8 At the same time, it was subjected—perhaps in part by the Church’s attempts to clarify the line between combatants and non-combatants and to define “just war”—to a code of conduct that demanded (for example) that a knight shed blood only on the battlefield, maintain his honor, obey his lord and the church, keep the “truce of God,” be gentle toward women, and to practice mercy and charity.9 In the hands of the poets, these competing demands are unified in the demand that a knight should have some lady to whom he would be completely devoted, whom he might not—perhaps could not—marry but who could continually stand as an “ideal” symbolizing “all virtue and beauty and in whose name he performs valorous and other worthy deeds”10 to Tony Hunt, “The Emergence of the Knight in France and England 1000–1200,” in Knighthood in Medieval Literature, ed. by W. H. Jackson, Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer 1981, p. 1. 5 6 The Civilization of the Middle Ages, p. 349; David Edge and John Miles Paddock, Arms and Armor of the Medieval Knight, New York: Crescent Books 1988, pp. 98, 137. 7 “The Emergence of the Knight in France and England 1000–1200,” p. 3. 8 The Civilization of the Middle Ages, p. 349. For examples of these codes, see Romance and Legend of Chivalry, p. 25; “The Emergence of the Knight in France and England 1000–1200,” p. 5; and Arms and Armor of the Medieval Knight, p. 12. 9 10 Although such love was more talked about than practiced, it may indeed have been associated with a softening of mores in the warrior class’s treatment of women, who seem to have been shown more respect than they had been previously; see The Civilization of the Middle Ages, p. 349. 4 “show himself worthy of her affections.”11 This ideal love would provide the power of integrating all the other demands placed upon the knight, and give him a wholeness independent of how his worldly interests fared. But if the loftiest ideals of knighthood called knights to be “gentle mannered, truthful, faithful, courteous to women, pure, brave and fearless, unsparing of self, filled with deep religious feeling, bowing before God and womankind, but haughty in the presence of all others,”12 actual knights were frequently quite other than this. Chivalry was increasingly irrelevant to actual practices of warfare, gradually becoming more associated with knights’ conduct and exhibitions of prowess in the tourney, war that is not war,13 and with the paradoxes of courtly love, love without marriage or sometimes even consummation.14 It was as if knighthood were really a front of some kind—but if chivalry is “founded in a world of illusion” can it explain more than “the posturings” of individuals in the real world?15 In summary, knighthood seems to represent an individual who is defined by combat, by love, and by an ideal that defines the knight’s conduct and relationships within each of these spheres. There is, however, a significant question whether that ideal is a front of some kind, or an illusion. In Either / Or, the image of the knight is used frequently, and seems to represent the idea of an integrated identity in which an individual understands himself in terms of an ideal and a quest, and in which combat is understood as the vigorous effort of the individual to carry off the quest. The knight, however, is given both an “aesthetic” and an “ethical” interpretation. Within the aesthetic interpretation, the ideal is understood as an illusion or a front of some kind, which is adopted for the sake of making possible the quest, 11 Romance and Legend of Chivalry, p. 20. 12 Bradford B. Broughton, Dictionary of Medieval Knighthood and Chivalry, New York: Greenwood Press 1986, p. 108. 13 The Civilization of the Middle Ages, p. 537. 14 The Civilization of the Middle Ages, p. 349. 15 Maurice Keen, Chivalry, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1984, p. 3. 5 whereas within the ethical interpretation, the quest is understood as something adopted for the sake of the ideal, which the true substance of the idea. 2. Knighthood Aesthetically Understood. Knighthood is developed throughout Either / Or Part I, allowing the idea to gradually be unveiled by A, Kierkegaard’s aesthetic pseudonym. The main idea is that knighthood is an unconscious anticipation of sensuous eroticism and that, when shed of illusions, its sensuous relation to the feminine points toward the seducer as its fully self-aware fulfillment. The initial characterization occurs in A’s treatment of the Don Giovanni opera, the long article titled The Immediate Erotic Stages, or the Musical-Erotic. A says that the poetic image of “the knight” belongs to the middle ages, in which the idea of “representation” rules and “the great dialectic of life is continually exemplified in representative individuals.”16 The knight is therefore among the “powerful, primitive ideas that emerge from the folk consciousness with autochthonic originality” not the work of some particular poet.17 Under this idea, every individual is “both more than and less than an individual”; in each individual an aspect of life has been defined as the totality, is therefore always paired with another individual who represents another particular, totalized aspect of life, such as “knight and scholastic, clergyman and layman,” who “makes up for the other’s disproportionate magnitude in actual life.” Their combination balances the relative disproportion of each, but the individuals themselves are unconscious of their partial manifestation of a larger idea that is split between them. 16 SKS 2, 93 / EO1, 87–88. 17 SKS 2, 93 / EO1, 87–88. 6 How these different representative individuals are divided up depends upon what aspect of the representatives we focus on. The knight-scholastic dichotomy seems to depend on focusing on the knight in relation to civic function. But if we focus on the knight in relation to women, as A suggests, then the knight pairs off with Don Juan. A claims that the Greek world possessed the idea of “beautiful individualities” but not “femininity” and therefore lacked both the chivalrous knight and the lecherous Don Juan, as both are defined by their relation to the feminine and are held in suspicion by more rigorous forms of spirit.18 But in this comparison, knighthood seems unstable and bound to dissolve. Chivalry is a “contentious, mistaken anticipation of the erotic” or “still only a relative contrast to spirit” because it is unaware of what it wants. Chivalry, though involved in the sensuous, is “moderately conciliatory” to spirit, but once spirit is more rigorously defined, its position is rendered untenable only the seducer remains.19 The knight’s aim is defined by the sensuous. But his activity is defined by the quest, and A uses the example of Papageno the bird-catcher from Mozart’s The Magic Flute, to illustrate the idea. Papageno wanders seeking adventures hoping to find a woman to love. A compares him to a knight because in his sensuality he aims at “discovery”: he goes on a quest for something he desires but does not yet know or understand, and he lies between the “dreaming” page in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, even less aware of what he desires, and the “desiring” Don Juan of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, who fully knows the sensuous.20 We might think that the questing knight actually wishes to find just one lady and then commit himself to her. This, however, is not what A thinks. In Silhouettes and The Seducer’s Diary the idea of the knight is utilized twice more, and it becomes clear that it is not what lies 18 SKS 2, 93 / EO1, 88. 19 SKS 2, 94 / EO1, 89. 20 SKS 2, 86 / EO1, 81. 7 at the end of the quest that the knight desires, but the quest itself. In Silhouettes, A likens the members of the so-called Symparanecromenoi or the Fellowship of the Dead to “knightserrant” who do not aim for amorous adventures but have a special eye for women who have known “grief” and have an eye for “secret sorrow” and “quest only for sorrow” which they “follow … fearlessly, unwaveringly, until it discloses itself.” They “equip” themselves and “practice fighting daily” to prepare for this fight.21 Their “knighthood” is defined by their trial of themselves in adventures of sympathetic suffering, which is also their “delight and diversion.”22 “The sympathetic knight of grief rejoices over having found what he sought, for we seek not the present but the past, not joy, for it is always present, but sorrow, for its nature is to pass by.”23 Such a “knight” of course is not really sympathetic; what he enjoys is sympathetically entering into a woman’s seduction and betrayal, which makes his relation to her guilty. The Symparanecromenoi, however, are not really like knights themselves. They are more like the troubadours or the reading public who enjoyed reading of knight’s adventures, since they enjoy seduction at second-hand. Thus at the end of Silhouettes, it is Don Juan whom A describes as rushing by him, initially mistaking him for a knight, with his step “light and yet so vigorous, so royal and yet so fugitive.”24 This connection of knight and seducer is developed in The Seducer’s Diary. Johannes the seducer knows knighthood is veiled sensuality and can therefore deploy the illusion at will. He knows that women sense the truth about chivalry’s uneasy alliance of spirit and sensuality, so that a girl is always armed against the assault of one who discloses “the knight in him.”25 Thus he describes himself as creating 21 SKS 2, 171 / EO1, 173. 22 SKS 2, 173 / EO1, 176. 23 SKS 2, 172 / EO1, 175. 24 SKS 2, 190 / EO1, 194. 25 SKS 2, 429 / EO1, 441. 8 a contradictory impression with a young girl as “a nice man who came like a knight to the assistance of a young girl, and I can also press your hand in no less than a gentle manner.”26 Yet the knight can also be welcomed. Johannes creates this situation by adopting a variety of other guises; “when the ironist and the ridiculer have duped her long enough, I follow the instructions in an old verse: the knight spreads out his cape so red and bids the beautiful maiden sit on it.”27 Ironist and ridiculer put Cordelia at ease because they do not evince sensuous attraction, but this continual aridity makes her welcome the knight’s veiled attraction. Since knight and seducer are on the same quest, the seducer can easily step into the role of the knight, fully conscious that the quest is its own end, chivalry an illusion to be deployed at the opportune moment. 3. Knighthood Ethically Understood. In Either / Or Part II, Kierkegaard has another pseudonym, Judge Wilhelm, write to A, enjoining him to take on the responsibilities of the ethical. Wilhelm also utilizes the image of the knight at several points, but his conception of knighthood reverses A’s conception of the quest. He will acknowledge (in Stages on Life’s Way) that in love’s first moment “it is utterly impossible to determine whether it is a knight or a seducer who is speaking,”28 but he argues that allying the knight and Don Juan misunderstands the relation between spirit and the sensuous in Christianity.29 In the knight, the next moment is “resolution” to be faithful to the eternity implicit in the first love. “Over the centuries,” he says, “have not knights and adventurers experienced incredible toils and 26 SKS 2, 309 / EO1, 319. 27 SKS 2, 352 / EO1, 363. 28 SKS 6, 94 / SLW, 103. 29 SKS 3, 56 / EO2, 49. 9 trouble in order finally to find quiet peace in a happy marriage?”30 The quest is not end, but means. Love is marked by “knightly faithfulness” that is grounded in the first love’s “eternity,” which “posits itself backward into all eternity and forward into all eternity.”31 From the resolution he makes over the first love’s “infinite” well of power and energy, the knight takes his stance and engages with life.32 Chivalry does not prefigure the aesthete’s erotic, but the faithfulness fulfilled in marriage. As an anticipation, knightly love presents genuine but sometimes defective or less complete forms of what, in marital love, appears fully in possession of its own. The knight’s chivalry shows respect for woman and her freedom, but the Christian wedding ceremony, which repeats scriptural injunction that a man shall leave his father and mother to cleave to his wife, contains an implicit “recognition of the woman’s significance” that “no knight’s chivalry could exceed.”33 Knightly love has an “incredible need for incredible deeds.”34 The knight wishes to express the “enormous power” of the first love and therefore seeks adventures to prove his love, and a knight who has first received his sword will be disappointed placed in a sandy desert with “not even a twig on which to use it.”35 However, such trials as tested the knight’s constancy did not truly display his love’s eternity because they were entirely in an “external medium.”36 Rather, it is “the essential nature of the first love to become ‘historical,’” to gain a history in the individual’s inner life, and “the condition for that is precisely marriage. The knight’s romantic love, on the contrary, is unhistorical, 30 SKS 3, 26 / EO2, 17. 31 SKS 3, 50 / EO2, 43. 32 SKS 3, 46 / EO2, 39. 33 SKS 3, 95 / EO2, 93. 34 SKS 3, 119 / EO2, 118. 35 SKS 3, 53 / EO2, 46. 36 SKS 3, 36 / EO2, 28. 10 even though one could fill folios with the knight’s exploits.”37 The knight sends his beloved the banners he wins in battle, but his love itself does not have a history.38 There is an inner history of the development of the passion and the personality through the trials and temptations love has faced and overcome within the individual’s own heart. In the face of this ideal, a total union of hearts, Don Juan has his “romantic bower” and the knight “his nocturnal sky and stars,” but marriage “has its heaven even higher.”39 Thus, the knight’s quest is both meant to end in marriage but also to anticipate the structure of marriage itself, which is the truer and more genuine quest to fully integrate love across one’s entire life. Thought the knight has the right to say that “the person who does not defy the whole world to save his beloved does not know knightly love,”40 his right does not exceed that of the married man who has overcome the greater inner trials. The knight’s victory is beautiful but not as beautiful as a victory in which his love itself is glorified.41 The knight’s deeds lack inherent meaning, which is why a poet will even “curtail the number” of a knight’s deeds for the sake of achieving “poetic intensity”42 before the final moment when he wins his love (something Silentio does with Abraham himself, in focusing on the final test of Abraham’s faith, not the many moments leading up to the instant when he truly possessed, that is, received Isaac). For the knight, “eternity comes afterward,” after the quest, he does not have his “eternity in time.”43 Those who would prefer to remain knights-errant rather than marry are 37 SKS 3, 54 / EO2, 47. 38 SKS 3, 99 / EO2, 97–8. 39 SKS 3, 64 / EO2, 59. 40 SKS 3, 119 / EO2, 119. 41 SKS 3, 119 / EO2, 119. 42 SKS 3, 133 / EO2, 134. 43 SKS 3, 137 / EO2, 138. 11 like “that Spanish knight,” Don Quixote, profaning the idea of the knight.44 One who tarries is no genuine knight, for the mark of the knight is belief in the “eternity of the first love.”45 Thus the Judge returns to the image of knighthood in The Balance between the Aesthetic and the Ethical in the Development of the Personality, in the decisive passage when he describes the momentous “moment of choice” in which an individual embarks on ethical selfformation. During this “choice” to become a self, to become himself, “the I chooses itself, or more correctly, receives itself” and this is “the moment” when “the personality receives the accolade of knighthood that ennobles it for an eternity” as an integrated consciousness. This knighthood anyone, the richest or the poorest, can enter into; “the greatest is not to be this or that but to be oneself, and every human being can do this if he so wills it.”46 The knight’s chivalry and quest are the incipient ethical coming into existence, and the knight symbolizes the integration of the personality, even if this integration is in some respects merely anticipated, for any ideal self is partially anticipated and realized only through a life-long quest. 4. For both A and Wilhelm, the knight possesses a kind of heroic vigor and willingness to engage in a strenuous way of life, free from the boring, mercenary desire for material comforts or wealth. Instead the knight is defined by an ideal and a quest. This pattern of devotion and honor, which functions as the ultimate standard for the knight’s life, each pseudonym interprets differently. Aesthetically understood, the ideal is an illusion that makes possible a quest, which is its own reward; ethically understood, the ideal is the real substance, 44 SKS 3, 139 / EO2, 141. 45 SKS 3, 143 / EO2, 145. 46 SKS 3, 172 / EO2, 177. 12 and the quest is an anticipation or prefigurement of the real quest, to embody the ideal across one’s entire life. In Fear and Trembling, Silentio needs an analogue that captures the fact that both infinite resignation and faith require “passionate concentration,” freedom from finite concerns, strenuousness, and a willingness for one’s life to be shaped completely by a passion whose fulfillment is perhaps not even likely. Silentio shares the “ethical” viewpoint with Wilhelm, but whereas Wilhelm’s ethical stance is confident and self-assure, Silentio’s is more fully aware of the suffering that marks human life. Thus he also uses knighthood to represent an eternal, integrating identity, but he is not disturbed that the knight does not always get his wish. Actuality is governed by a “law of indifference” that does not guarantee bread to those who work.47 Even the most deserving frequently do not obtain their heart’s desire, as passion’s “relation to actuality” is crossed. Silentio’s ethical therefore centers on the tragic hero and the knight who does not win his lady, allowing him, unlike A or Wilhelm, to make the religious aspect of the knight the most crucial. II. The Balletic Ideal 1. Just as the image of the knight was well-known to Kierkegaard’s readers, it was not unreasonable for him to assume their familiarity with ballet. Copenhagen during Kierkegaard’s own lifetime was a leading light in the development of romantic ballet, largely through the efforts of August Bournonville, a star of the Paris Opera who returned to build a legacy in his home country as dancer, choreographer, and ballet master for the Royal Danish Ballet. In Denmark, through Bournonville’s efforts specifically, dancers shed the associations they held in France with courtesans, helping to make dance a respectable form of 47 SKS 4, 123 / FT, 27. 13 entertainment. Many readers would know something of dance, and Kierkegaard himself was walking acquaintances with Bournonville, the self-declared “Ballet-Poet.” Kierkegaard admired his abilities as a dancer, but not as a poet.48 Bournonville admired Kierkegaard’s understanding of irony, but later on viewed his attack on Bishop Mynster as “vile.”49 When we discuss how Kierkegaard uses balletic images we should keep these talks with Bournonville in mind, as well as the greater social importance of dancing in his milieu, and not limit what we think Kierkegaard would know to what we think he must have been able to observe in watching ballet as a casual observer. Kierkegaard, as a member of the upper middle class, would have been expected to understand as a matter of course, which would have included such concepts as positions, movements, and rhythmical unity, all of which are invoked in Fear and Trembling. In addition, he lived in one of classical ballet’s greatest centers, and had easy access to the thoughts of the man most responsible for that fact, an exemplary dancer and choreographer, and would therefore have learned something of a dancer’s own view of dance, of its peculiarities, its practices, and difficulties, and this is reflected in his deployment of balletic terms and his understanding of key problems. We would assume too much if we were to say that Kierkegaard could have used these means to acquire a complete and detailed knowledge of ballet, but it’s an error in the other direction to limit Kierkegaard’s knowledge to what could be obtained from casual observation. In what follows, I will sketch out a miniature picture of ballet’s history, mechanics, and aesthetics; perhaps Kierkegaard did not know everything that I have sketched, or knew it in a more general form than I will provide in the miniature, but from this See Anne Margrete Fiskvik, ““Let No One Invite Me, for I Do Not Dance”: Kierkegaard’s Attitudes toward Dance,” in Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Arts, ed. by Eric Ziolkowski, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press 2018, p. 153. 48 For Bournonville’s indebtedness to Kierkegaard on the topic of irony, see Knud Arne Jürgensen, The Bournonville Tradition, vols. 1–2, London: Dance Books 1997, vol. 1, pp. 66–7; for Bournonville’s reaction to Kierkegaard’s attack on Mynster, see Nathaniel Kramer, “August Bournonville: Kierkegaard’s Leap of Faith and the ’Noble Art of Terpsichore’,” in Kierkegaard and his Danish Contemporaries, Tome III, Literature, Drama, and Aesthetics, ed. by Jon Stewert, Burlington, VT: Ashgate 2009, p.74. 49 14 more complete picture we will be in a position to see which ideas and concepts he likely was familiar enough with to draw upon to illustrate the nature of faith, and what it is that the knight of faith can do that no other can. Now, what was dance like in Kierkegaard’s time? In the Romantic period, ballet had entered its period of maturity. The best ballets of the period remain in the repertories of contemporary companies; Bournonville’s 1836 version of La Sylphide is one of the earliest surviving ballets. Dance was a highly professional and successful enterprise, largely committed to the hallmarks of Romanticism, performing stories including elements of the supernatural, the diabolical, and the exotic, danced with precision and stamina.50 Tchaikovsky had not yet made his mark on it; musically speaking, the art form was unsophisticated, and Kierkegaard has no remarks about its musical dimension. In terms of performance, ballet was a “polished and refined art, presided over by strict dancing masters who drilled dancers to develop technical prowess.” These dancers, male and female, aimed “to present an illusion of lightness and ease” even in the midst of “complicated, technical feats.”51 The dancers’ abilities were harnessed into the telling of danced stories, generally love stories, ending happily or tragically. The merman seducer utilized by Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling’s Problema 3 was also the theme of Bournonville’s Napoli, performed in 1842. Dancers were expected to act as well as dance, to the extent that they should believably embody the passions embodied in the music to which they were dancing in “the force and vivacity” of their gestures and in “the lively and animated expression” of their features.52 Anne Middelboe Christensen, “Deadly Sylphs and Decent Mermaids: The Women in the Danish Romantic World of August Bournonville,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ballet, ed. by Marion Kant, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007, p. 126. 50 51 Kimerer L. LeMothe, Between Dancing and Writing: The Practice of Religious Studies, New York: Fordham University Press 2004, p. 91. 52 Jean-Georges Noverre, Letters on Dancing and Ballets, Nottingham: Russell Press 2004, p. 60. 15 Ballet attempts to embody “total defiance of gravity”53 and its most notable achievements in this regard are pointe dancing and the distinctive ballet leaps. Pointe dancing suggests lightness and affinity with the air, and in the leap a dancer seems to declare independence from earthly existence, to assert that he or she belongs to the air as much or more as to the earth, fulfilling dancers’ aspiration “to elevate themselves above the material world and toward God.”54 Such elevation, the aesthetic of “lightness and ease,” is a crucial aspect of Silentio’s use of dance as an image for resignation and faith. The point shoe was in fact a recent development in Kierkegaard’s time, associated with the success of La Sylphide, the first ballet in which they were extensively utilized in the now-accustomed manner, by ballerina Marie Taglione, and rapidly adopted everywhere. It effected a “radical revolution” that elevated the ballerinas, the female dancers, to preeminence.55 Perhaps in Copenhagen alone the men held on as equals for so long as Bournonville was ballet master, due to the emphasis his choreography placed on the leaps at which the male danseurs exceled.56 2. What does the image of the dancer have in common with that of the knight? First, the dancer shares a “strenuous” view of effort that disdains suffering for the sake of doing things properly. Just as the code of chivalry—an idealized description of conduct—describes a pattern of actions and responses that the knight is to follow regardless of outcome, the ballet dancer is subjected to an idealized system of geometrically defined movements. These movements are defined by the human body—they are intended to be the most perfect and 53 Agnes De Mille, Dance to the Piper, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company 1952, p. 48. 54 Apollo’s Angels, p. xxii. 55 Cf. Jennifer Homans, Apollo’s Angels, New York: Random House 2010, pp. 142–3. 56 ““Let No One Invite Me, for I Do Not Dance”: Kierkegaard’s Attitudes toward Dance,” p. 168. 16 natural movements possible—and yet are so difficult to achieve that ballet “never becomes easy—it becomes possible.”57 Professional dancers must practice constantly, and the movements they make stand at the limit of what is humanly possible. Though dancers are frequently in pain, they treat it as if it were simply irrelevant to what they are doing or even learn to take “a certain satisfaction” in it.58 From the start, then, knight and dancer share a commitment to a strenuous and difficult mode of life. Like the knight, dancers enjoy having something to overcome; unlike the knight, their overcoming is focused inward (though not so inward as the inward overcoming of Wilhelm’s “married man”). While dancers are sometimes compared to athletes, this comparison misses what is essential to dance: an athlete is permitted to show effort, while the dancer is supposed to also make everything look easy. Kierkegaard calls this “the beautiful rule that one never must detect on a dancer that he is panting.”59 This rule is in keeping with aristocracy’s own preference for hiding effort, but belongs to dance as such. The image of the dancer therefore intensifies the strenuousness Silentio attributes to the movements; and this intensification will be crucial to drawing out the difference between resignation and faith. Some prominent proponents of romantic ballet considered dance “essentially pagan, materialistic, and sensual” and romantic ballet to be “simply the art of displaying elegant and correctly proportioned shapes in various positions favorable to the development of lines.”60 But this is not the only way of seeing the matter. Classical dance was once of the pastime of 57 Dance to the Piper, p. 48. 58 Dance to the Piper, p. 48. 59 SKS 23, 140 / WL, 457. Théophile Gautier, “Le Dieu et la Bayadère,” in The Romantic Ballet, ed. by C. W. Beaumont, New York: Dance Horizons 1947, p. 23; originally published in 1837. This attitude seems belied by the genius of his own Giselle. 60 17 kings and given essential developments in the French Court, but the Italian and later French dancing masters whose work established the foundations of classical dance were NeoPlatonists. For them, “all things are related to number, both in the outer world of nature and in the inner world of man’s soul,” and this viewpoint found “its most perfect artistic expressions” in dance.61 They followed Plato in thinking “music has an intimate relation to morals”62 and that proper training in music was an essential part of “perfecting a man, both in mind and in body.”63 Being imbued with “musical discipline”64 helped someone become morally fit because “the true music of man lies within, in the harmonies of a virtuous character” and “true harmony of soul.”65 This harmony was discerned by the intellect and inscribed in the body by practice in dancing, harmonizing soul and body by subjecting both to the divine music. They hoped the training they gave their pupils’ bodies would complement the training philosophy gave their minds and souls.66 A form of dancing that made the body follow harmonious patterns would help human beings to break “earthly ties” and grow closer to God, “the great Ballet-master.”67 In classical dance these geometrically defined movements are rigorously implemented. This idealism is what makes it “classical” and, likewise, merciless.68 The balletic ideal of an “almost supernatural dancer” whose every movement is perfect and made without any apparent effort or exertion is a demanding standard for merely natural dancers.69 61 Frances Yates, The French Academies in the Sixteenth Century, London: The Warburg Institute 1947, p. 249. 62 The French Academies in the Sixteenth Century, p. 23. 63 The French Academies in the Sixteenth Century, pp. 24; p. 37. 64 The French Academies in the Sixteenth Century, p. 25. 65 The French Academies in the Sixteenth Century, p. 86. 66 Apollo’s Angels, p. 5. 67 Apollo’s Angels, p. 6. 68 Apollo’s Angels, p. xxii 69 ““Let No One Invite Me, for I Do Not Dance”: Kierkegaard’s Attitudes toward Dance,” p. 159. 18 Another point of similarity emerges if we pursue this a bit further. During the Romantic period, ballet married an “aristocratic past” with an “airy spirituality,” led by its suddenly elevated ballerinas.70 But what is this “spirituality” it idealizes? Ballet could fulfill the ideal of providing a system of perfect human movements without having any further ideal to which it was devoted or to which it called attention. Dance has no purpose outside itself, nothing to produce and nothing to provide to human life but itself, and if pain is regarded as almost irrelevant, then the dancer might seem to be the master of human movement as such. The “five positions” of ballet are defined in terms of those postures of the body from which dancers’ potential for movement is maximized; different positions make different types of movement possible and more convenient.71 If there is not overriding purpose to movement beyond its being chosen for its own sake, almost anything is possible for the dancer. Much modern dance presses outward in this way. As virtuosity takes over, the difference between a dancer and acrobat becomes more and more difficult to make out, something Kierkegaard has Silentio exploit elsewhere in the image of the rope dancer, a very different kind of dancer who occupied both roles.72 Abstractly understood, the knight too seems capable of similar expansion; apart from some ideal, he is equally capable of being hero or villain, a possibility disturbingly vibrant in a painting like the Pre-Raphaelite Frank Dicksee’s “Chivalry,” in which it is ambiguous whether the knight is rescuing the maiden from the dragon or coming to abduct her himself. The ideal of love rectifies this aspect of the image by providing the knight a humanizing interest that transforms his bloodthirsty exploits into heroism. Similarly, ballet did not favor pure displays, it favored the story-ballet, and there was a simple rule that governed the type of stories it could successfully tell—in the words of the 70 Apollo’s Angels, p. 142. 71 Agrippina Vaganova, Basic Principles of Classical Ballet, New York: Dover Publications 1946, p. 17. 72 SKS 4, 131 / FT, 37. 19 most important of the Enlightenment ballet masters and choreographers, Jean-Goerges Noverre, “A well-composed ballet is a living picture of the passions.”73 It tells stories by embodying passion in movement. In particular, it limits itself to those “feelings common to humanity,”74 which can be understood without words by an audience who sees its own experience of passion presented, and clarified, on the stage, without being hidden by a deceptive mask of words. Ballet was a vehicle for exploring and communicating passion and love, stripped of accidental qualities and presented in the most vivid and essential dress, passion lived out in action. The story-ballet’s plot is supplied by the vicissitudes of love, and as there are no speeches or witty dialogue, what you find is “nothing but the plot and again the plot,”75 the love story itself. Poverty, comfort, and riches are all customarily regarded as unimportant or irrelevant to these stories. The dancers tell stories which invite us to judge their characters solely in terms of their awakening to love, their efforts in pursuit of love, and their struggles to remain faithful to love. “Love’s eternity” seems almost to be the presupposition of the action, and the presupposition of such stories seems to be: love’s “relation to actuality” is inherently in question and never easily answered. What is left to the dancer is the task of embodiment, and this is the second way in which the ideal of dance goes beyond the ideal of knighthood and adds an important, new element. The “identity” that the dancer is meant to embody is not separate from the activity; the dance and the identity are one and the same, an “absorption and temporal focus” as Sheridan Hough puts it in which we find a powerful analogue of Kierkegaardian self-hood as active self-relation and faithful engagement with the world on its basis.76 The dancer—at 73 Letters on Dancing and Ballets, p. 16. 74 Letters on Dancing and Ballets, p. 77. 75 Théophile Gautier, “La Gipsy,” in The Romantic Ballet, p. 29. 76 Sheridan Hough, Kierkegaard’s Dancing Tax Collector, p. 134. 20 least the dancer who is given the role of a true lover; for the dancer who is assigned the role of betrayal or failure will have a different task—is meant, in every moment, to make each expression, gesture, and movement express the meaning of their assigned passion in the given situation. It is of course the norm that ballet dancers do not authentically experience the passion that they portray, and here lies an important disanalogy between faith and dance. The dancer of faith strives to embody the ideal of the passion by which he himself, not some character, is defined. The dancer of faith will then always strive to keep his actions, words, and gestures coherent with his or her defining, and impossible, passion. His absorbing focus is on always embodying that ideal in his life and doing so in such a way as to hide the pain and difficulty of so doing. Thus, knighthood and dance both exemplify a freedom whose point is given by love, but dance provides a superior picture of what it means to embody an ideal at every moment. For the dancer continually reaffirms the passion as his or her identity by making his or her activity embody what the passion seems to call for as perfectly as possible, in situations in which the realization of love’s hopes is uncertain. Thus, romantic ballet is well-suited for discussing exactly what Silentio has in mind: his argument begins with the assumption of passionate concentration whose the relation to actuality has been thrown into question. III. Leaps and Positions One of the draft title pages for Fear and Trembling includes the title “Solo Dancer and Private Individual” for the author—then imagined as “Simon Stylita,” after a 5th century monk who lived atop a pillar in the desert—and has “Movements and Positions” written in the margin as an alternative title, initially situating the whole work terms in the context of 21 dance.77 Since these comments were removed from the published edition in favor of remarks emphasizing a poetic rather than balletic identity for the author, they can be no more than suggestive. Nonetheless, they show that during the process of writing Kierkegaard was giving serious thought to the power of his dancing metaphors and their ability to clarity the work as a whole. Let us turn to the central such metaphor and examine how it functions. 1. Silentio introduces the dancers in the following, succinct illustration: [The knight of faith] constantly makes the movement of infinity, but he does it with such precision and proficiency that he constantly gets finitude out of it and at no second does one suspect anything else. It is supposed to be the most difficult task for a dancer to leap into a particular posture in such a way that there is no second when he grasps at the position but assumes it in the leap itself. Perhaps no dancer can do it—but that knight does. The majority of people live absorbed in worldly sorrow and joy; they are wallflowers who do not join in the dance. The knights of infinity are dancers and have elevation. They make the upward movement and drop down again, and this too is not an unhappy pastime nor unlovely to behold. But every time they drop down they cannot assume the posture at once; they hesitate an instant, and this hesitation shows that they are really strangers in the world. This is more or less conspicuous in proportion to their artistry, but even the most skillful of these knights still cannot hide this hesitation. One does not need to see them in the air but only at the instant they touch and have made contact with the ground to recognize them. But to be able to land in such a way that it looks as if one were simultaneously standing and walking, to transform the leap of life into a gait, absolutely to express the sublime in the pedestrian—that only the knight of faith can do—and that is the only miracle.78 The key description of the knight of faith as a dancer is these two sentences: It is supposed to be the most difficult task for a dancer to leap into a particular posture in such a way that there is no second when he grasps at the position but assumes it in the leap itself. Perhaps no dancer can do it—but that knight does. The description uses two technical terms from dance: “leap” and “position.” Readers have not generally thought much about these terms, or whether Kierkegaard might have understood their significance for dancers; to extent that it has been considered, many seem to have thought that Kierkegaard did not have a particularly sophisticated knowledge of the subject.79 77 SKS K4, 79 / JP 5, 231. 78 SKS 4, 135–6 / FT, 41. 79 See Henning Fenger, Kierkegaard: Myths and Their Origins, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1980, pp. 81–8. 22 His social milieu, general interest in the arts, and his talks with Bournonville, however, all suggest he might know enough of ballet’s mechanics, aesthetics, and preoccupations to use these metaphors with relatively more precision than has been granted. Let us discuss these terms, and then the use that Silentio derives from them. The “five positions” of classical ballet are conceived of as postures in which a dancer’s energy and dynamic potential is made ready and available for a particular range of movements: toes out, heels together; toes out, heels a foot and a half apart; toes out, one heel behind but touching the heel in front; toes out, one heel one foot behind the other heel; toes out, one foot behind the other, heel to toe, toe to heel. According to Vaganova, “There are five of them because, for turned-out legs, a sixth cannot be found, from which it would be easy and convenient to move.”80 “Turn-out” refers to dancers’ ability to turn his or her feet and leg out from the hip joints to a 90-degree position.81 Turn-out is essential for maximizing a dancer’s freedom of movement in every direction (for reasons both obvious and nonobvious) and even if the reason for desiring maximum freedom of movement is itself aesthetic, or if there are aesthetic reasons to prefer the lines produced by turned out legs, this maximum freedom is the immediate purpose of turn-out.82 The five positions are the ways of organizing the body, postures that make it ready to utilize that freedom of movement. 80 Basic Principles of Classical Ballet, p. 17. 81 Gail Grant, Technical Manual and Dictionary of Classical Ballet, New York: Dover Publications 1982, p. 122. Vaganova is insistent on this point: “People who know nothing about classical ballet tell all sorts of false and nonsensical things about turn-out… [Turn-out] is an anatomical necessity for every theatrical dance, which embraces the entire volume of movements conceivable for the legs, and which cannot be accomplished without a turn-out.” She proceeds to describe how this is accomplished in precise anatomical detail, concluding that turn-out “enlarges the field of action of the leg to the proportions of the obtuse cone which the leg describes in the grand rond de jambe. This is the importance of training the legs of a classical dancer in strict en dehors. It is not an aesthetic conception but a professional necessity” (Basic Principles of Classical Ballet, p. 24). Yet she does not discuss the aesthetic reasons for ballet’s preferring turnout as a general principle, which according to Homans was favored because it suggested “ease of being, elegance, and grace” (Apollo’s Angels, p. 26). 82 23 Silentio’s comment on education, likening it to learning to dance, shows his understanding of the significance of the positions and how he analogizes them. But in our age people are less concerned about making pure movements. If someone who wanted to learn to dance were to say: For centuries, one generation after the other has learned the positions, and it is high time that I take advantage of this and promptly begin with quadrilles—people would probably laugh a little at him, but in the world of spirit this is very plausible.83 In this passage, a dancer in general, not a ballet dancer in particular, is envisioned. However, positions serve the same function: only by being trained to the positions so that they become second nature does the dancer become capable of performing the movements properly, making them “pure” as Silentio puts it. The dancer’s grace depends upon freedom of movement. If the dancer has to move a leg first this way and then that, or if the dancer lacks flexibility and cannot complete the movement, so that the leg is only partially in position or, due to poor starting position, an arm has to be placed awkwardly to keep balance, then the dancer will struggle to embody the dance or the ideal. Someone who wants to leap into complex dances without beginning with training their body to attain its freedom of movement will be incapable of succeeding, and history makes no difference here, for every individual must attain this freedom, this training of the body, for him- or herself. Likewise, in the realm of spirit, there are “positions” that make different movements possible. In Either / Or, Kierkegaard has already had Judge Wilhelm speak of love’s “graceful dance positions” whose motions emerge in time with “orchestra director’s baton.”84 For Silentio, spirit’s “positions” with respect to love are defined more precisely as positions that organize an individual’s internal energies in various ways; what links the three movements mentioned in Fear and Trembling is that each of them—forgetting the whole thing, resignation, and faith—require the individual to be fully unified in the movement, and 83 SKS 4, 140 / FT, 46. 84 SKS 3, 143 / EO2, 145. 24 thus require a very particular type of internal “position” in which someone’s energies are unified and made available for the movement. The story of the lad and the princess provides an example of how demanding it is to make a pure movement of resignation: the lad must have passionate concentration, organized into a single wish, along with the single judgment that the wish is impossible, before the movement is possible.85 Whether an individual can perform the movement is not guaranteed by how many other people have made such movements in the past: each individual must undergo this internal disciplining for him- or herself to become capable of making the movement of resignation. Impure versions of the movements, in which the individual’s energies are not fully unified, are always inferior movements whose weakness will lead to collapse later.86 2. What about leaps? Leaps are a particular kind of movement, and ballet sometimes distinguishes between a jump and a leap; a jump rises straight up whereas a leap, besides elevating the dancer, also moves horizontally across the stage. Ballet includes a particular class of leap distinctive to itself, exemplified by the grand jeté: “among all dance techniques only classic ballet has perfected leaps with that special slow-motion grace, that soaring rise and floating descent which looks weightless.”87 Such leaps are technically difficult, among the most difficult movements a dancer must make, and Bournonville’s fame rested on his leaps.88 The ability to leap is essential for a dancer, but it is one thing to leap, and another to do so while following the “beautiful rule” of effortlessness; it is this that Silentio highlights 85 SKS 4, 137–8 / FT, 42–3. 86 SKS 4, 140 / FT, 45. 87 Edwin Denby, “Flight of the Dancer,” in Looking at the Dance, New York: Horizon Press 1968, p. 23. 88 ““Let No One Invite Me, for I Do Not Dance”: Kierkegaard’s Attitudes toward Dance,” p. 163. 25 as the supreme test of the ballet dancer, to perform what is most difficult with grace. David Levin has noted how astutely Kierkegaard describes the ballet dancer’s leap in Fear and Trembling and this likeness can be seen in how his description converges with that midcentury dance-critic Edwin Denby.89 According to Denby, the dancer must be “serenely calm” while leaping, “as if she were at a genteel tea-party, a tea-part where everyone naturally sat down on the air.”90 The dancer who is mid-leap should “be completely still” and “not be thinking either of how she got up or how she is going to get down.”91 But Denby identifies another feature of the leap as the most difficult to master: “the most obvious test for the dancer comes in the descent from the air, in the recovery from the leap,” managing the descent “so evenly that you don’t notice the transition from the air to the ground.”92 It is here, on the descent, that Silentio also focuses: leaps are essential to achieving elevation, but also the most difficult of the dancer’s tasks; since ballet’s aesthetic demands perfect grace and the appearance of effortlessness, it is in the leap that the dancer encounters the ultimate difficulty: to perform the most difficult task while still obeying the “beautiful rule” of grace. Silentio defines this difficulty precisely: what the dancer must do is immediately transition from leaping to the proper position for standing and, hence, walking. The dancer who is about to leap typically begins in fifth position, a posture of strength and stability, and then moves into the leap; as the dancer returns to the ground, he again returns to fifth position to regain stability and either return to earthbound action or to leap once again. The dancer must devote substantial effort to the landing itself, that is, to absorbing and responding to the impact of gravity drawing the body back into contact with the floor. The dancer must 89 David Levin, “Philosophers and the Dance,” Ballet Review, vol. 6, 1977, p. 77. 90 “Flight of the Dancer,” p. 24. 91 “Flight of the Dancer,” p. 26. 92 “Flight of the Dancer,” p. 25. 26 simultaneously manage this impact—and the greater the leap, the greater the impact—while transitioning from the leap to fifth position. Denby says this “divine moment” when the dancer seems to “[alight] like a feather” is “only a fraction of a second long” but crucial to perfecting the illusion of weightlessness.93 Silentio admits that it may be impossible to do this while following the beautiful rule, the balletic ideal, of never showing effort. Denby, slightly more optimistically, says that “[the] ‘correct’ soaring leap is a technical trick any ballet dancer can learn in ten or fifteen years if he or she happens to be a genius.”94 Without it, the dancer loses the illusion of being something “supernatural.”95 There is, it seems, always a moment in which the dancer “grasps” at the position, a kind of stutter in the dancer’s movement in which the dancer is neither leaping nor standing but attempting to stand. When this happens, Denby says “[the] slight jolt when they land breaks the smooth flow and attracts more attention than the stillness of the climax in the air.”96 This grasping at the position shows the dancer’s effort, and so violates the beautiful rule. “The leap,” of course, is a well-known Kierkegaardian category, but it is frequently treated primarily in relation to Lessing and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. We then read this backwards into works like Fear and Trembling and The Concept of Anxiety when Silentio or Haufniensis speak of “the leap of life” or the “leap” and sin, or positing the self, as a leap.97 As Nathaniel Kramer has pointed out, this is a mistake: “such an exclusively philosophical conception of the leap runs contrary to what Kierkegaard seems to have 93 “Flight of the Dancer,” p. 26. 94 “Flight of the Dancer,” p. 27. 95 “Flight of the Dancer,” p. 28. 96 “Flight of the Dancer,” p. 27. 97 E.g., SKS 4, 337 / CA, 30. 27 intended by faith in the first place.”98 “The leap” envisioned in Fear and Trembling and Concept of Anxiety is a response to ballet, and in particular, to Bournonville’s spectacular leaps on the stage.99 It is only later in his authorship that the image converges with Lessing’s “leap” over the “ugly, broad ditch.”100 Whereas the later image concerns faith alone, and for Haufniensis the comparison of mimical and demonic is central, here leaping is characteristic of both resignation and faith—resignation’s knight and the knight of faith are both dancers and both leap. “The position” is the concentration of energies into one wish and one judgment that makes “the leap,” the movement of infinity, possible. To grasp at landing betrays the illusion of lightness. The dancer’s heaviness cannot be hidden in the decisive moment of impact with the earth. Such moments, like the lie Abraham tells Isaac in the first variation of the Attunement, the broken heart he displays in the second variation, the irresolution displayed by the Hamlet-like Abraham of the third variation, or the trembling of his arm in the fourth variation, reveal that the dancer is not the spiritual being he imitates. What differentiates the real Abraham from the Abraham of the variations is precisely the paradox of faith. His heaviness ought to betray him—and yet he lands as gently as a feather. 3. The overall arc of the analogy is now clear: the movement of resignation is the movement whereby an individual breaks the ties of finitude to acquire an “eternal consciousness” or an identity with “eternal validity.”101 But the position required for this leap See Nathaniel Kramer, “August Bournonville: Kierkegaard’s Leap of Faith and the ’Noble Art of Terpsichore’,” in Kierkegaard and his Danish Contemporaries, Burlington, VT: Ashgate 2009, p.74. 98 Journal entry from 1843: “It’s a merit of Bournonville’s portrayal of Mephistopheles, that leap with which he always appears and jumps into a plastic pose. This leap is a moment that should be noted in understanding the demonic. For the demonic is the sudden.” (SKS 18.172–3, JJ:104 / JP 1, 732). 99 100 SKS 7, 97 / CUP1 98; quoted from Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2009, p. 83. 101 SKS 4, 138, 140, 164 / FT 46, 48, 72. 28 is the very concentration of energies organized by having one wish and one judgment that cross each other: one wish for the princess, one judgment that it is impossible to have her. The crossing of these judgments makes the leap possible. The very power that carries the dancer into the air is also the heaviness that makes colliding with the ground awkward. That the analogy produces this difficulty seems correct. The difficulty corresponds to Silentio’s understanding of the human condition, in which the tragic hero is the highest comprehensible form of human life, and both more aesthetic forms of existence and more optimistic ethical existences appear as, at best, naïve misunderstandings: failures to dance, failures to leap, failures to acquire the sole position from which dancing is possible: neither the “frogs in the swamp of life, nor the young girl who never stops believing, nor the one who forgets leap and so acquire the “eternal” identity the knight has. IV. Knights of Faith and Resignation 1. What, however, does this illuminate about faith and resignation? Constantine Constantius, the pseudonymous, aesthetic author of Repetition, mentions that one of his acquaintances “went through life as a dancer and deceived everyone.”102 His acquaintance was melancholy, but he went through life so gracefully that his secret sorrow was almost undetectable. When he says this man was a “dancer” Constantius seems to indicate that the man performed the tasks that made up his life with grace, seeming to be wholly immersed and happy in them, to have achieved that union of the aesthetic and the ethical that Judge Wilhelm recommends.103 The truth, however, was that just as the dancer is betrayed by his heaviness, so too this man’s melancholy and sorrow (Tungsind, a heavy mind) was the weight 102 SKS 4, 17 / FT, 139. 103 E.g., he argues marriage preserves romantic love in a “higher concentricity” (SKS 3, 37 / EO2, 29). 29 that made him too heavy (Tung) to be the graceful individual he pretended to be. For the graceful individual, there is no gap between his ideal he strives for and himself; he embodies it every moment, with never a hint of grasping, no awkwardness of necessity hampering his gait; when such graceful individuals leap it is as if “[the force which raises them into the air is greater than the one which draws them to the ground,” as with Kleist’s marionettes; whereas the best a human dancer can do is to make “the moment of rest” when a dancer comes back to the ground “as inconspicuous as possible.”104 The dancer of faith embodies paradox in his ability to leap in virtue of a power that ought to make landing difficult, and lands with a carefree ease that shouldn’t be possible for a being of weight. Let us turn back to Fear and Trembling. There, we find that the knight of infinity is defined by his sorrow, in which he finds peace and rest.105 His sorrow in existence is due to the fact that he has “one wish” but this wish’s “relation to actuality” is that it cannot be fulfilled “in finitude” or “in time.” That is, it is impossible, except in an eternal or spiritual sense.106 Silentio is aware that knighthood involves an apparently impossible demand of integration. Silentio then translates his picture into dance, with its impossible demand of grace, and he associates the dancer’s leap with the movement of resignation: it is by severing ties to finite and temporal conditions that the knight becomes free from them and, being freed, acquires an “eternal” identity. Just as the dancer seems weightless, a being of the air, so the knight of infinity seems to be. Like Constantius’ acquaintance, whenever he strikes the ground—whenever he must interact with finitude—his heaviness betrays him. He cannot immediately reorganize his energies from the spiritual expression he has given them to the form required to engage with finite objects. The internal state of resignation—the leap—is Heinrich von Kleist, “On the Marionette Theater,” in Hand to Mouth, and Other Essays, trans. and ed. by Idris Parry, Manchester: Carcanet Press 1981, p. 16. 104 105 SKS 4, 140, 143 / FT 45, 49. 106 SKS 4, 138 / FT, 44. 30 not a suitable position to make movement in temporality “easy and convenient.” Although the knight is made graceful by his relation to eternity, the knight’s heaviness, his Tungsind, is inevitably revealed in his finite interactions by “a glance, an air, a gesture, a sadness, a smile that betrayed the infinite in its heterogeneity with the finite.”107 The knight of infinity prefers spiritual existence to temporal existence, since it is in the former that the knight is reconciled and obtains peace and rest with existence. He becomes that stranger to finitude who sits down to tea-parties in the air. The knight would perhaps prefer a way to leap up without leaping down. People do speak of the best dancers’ ability to create the illusion of slowing down and hovering or floating in the air at the peak of their leaps, but there is a dancer who actually does do this—the rope dancer, to whom Silentio compares himself.108 Rope dancers would leap and remain in the air on the rope they had tied between two trees or other suitable anchors. Yet whereas a ballet dancer inherits the aristocratic ethos and courtly associations, a rope dancer invokes a very different set of associations. Rope dancers were an itinerant class of popular entertainers who were agile and skilled, but they were vocationally “homeless,” as they usually lacked membership in an official theater or performance company. They instead wandered from city to city and would perform in whatever open areas they found. So long as they could tie a rope between two 107 SKS 4, 133 / FT, 39. Liniedandser is mistakenly rendered “tightrope walker” in the Hongs’ and several other translations, which masks the connection with other dancing metaphors used by Silentio and introduces the wrong set of associations, those associated with the circus, rather than market performers. For more information, see especially Anne Margrete Fiskvik, “Where Highbrow Taste Met Itinerant Dance in Eighteenth Century Scandinavia: The Dance Entrepreneur Martin Nürenbach,” in Sjuttonhundratal: Nordic Yearbook for Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 13, 2016, 83–107. 108 The image is also utilized by Nietzsche in the Prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Zarathustra’s first attempt to preach the Overman occurs in a marketplace where a rope-dancer is also attempting to perform, and there is a certain amount of dramatic interaction between them, concluding with Zarathustra taking away the dead ropedancer’s body and burying it in the hollow of a tree. (See Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005, pp. 11–21.) Several of Nietzsche’s translators—Kaufmann, Holingdale, and Pippin—similarly mistranslate Seiltänzer as “tightrope walker” rather than “rope dancer,” thus similarly obscuring Nietzsche’s thematic use of dance and dancing throughout Zarathustra. 31 trees or poles, they could perform. Their dancing was not, like the ballet dancers, highly choreographed, elegant and beautiful, but rather consisted more of acrobatic stunts and bravura displays performed in a “comic or grotesque style” with the intent of thrilling the audience.109 Silentio, whose soul “admires greatness,” presumably does not consider himself to be providing vulgar entertainment in the town square, yet it is apparent that an infinitely resigned individual resembles such dancers in important respects. Having resigned, he is “a stranger and a foreigner” in finite existence.110 Through the movement of infinity, he possesses extreme flexibility and a capacity for engaging with existence in ways that would astonish the typical person. And the tightrope dancer does what the knight of infinity also longs to do: he leaps up and remains elevated for as long as possible before returning to the ground; and when he returns to the ground, he does not do so to come home, but only to move on again. Unlike the knight of faith, resignation’s knight needs “time to collect himself in finitude and its joy” and this need for preparation—this need to adopt a position in which his energies are organized so as to engage with finitude—shows exactly that he is a stranger.111 2. But what type of position is required for engaging with finitude? Positions are defined by what types of they make it easy and convenient to perform. “Awkward positions” lead to “slipshod movements,” whereas the correct positions lead to “pure movements.”112 The 109 ““Let No One Invite Me, for I Do Not Dance”: Kierkegaard’s Attitudes toward Dance,” pp. 160–161. 110 SKS 4, 144 / FT, 50. 111 SKS 4, 130 / FT 37. 112 SKS 4, 140 / FT, 45. 32 position of infinity is passionate concentration focused into a single wish and combined with the judgment that the wish is impossible. For someone in this position, finite affairs can never acquire decisive significance. No good thing—monetary success, good food, the company of friends, a political victory—can be enjoyed in a simple, wholehearted way, since the soul has been concentrated into one wish, which is impossible. No matter how many such finite joys are fulfilled, the one decisive wish is impossible, and therefore the soul cannot be dragged into pure enjoyment. There is always something held back, as the individual’s core identity is in fact simply uninvolved in the activity. The resigned individual participates in such joys the way an adult partakes in a child’s birthday party. Likewise, no finite suffering can fully occupy the resigned individual: no financial reversal, political loss, physical harm, or loneliness can touch that core which is defined by the one impossible wish. The one thing the person wished for was already resigned; any further losses do not affect the fulfillment of that wish, into which the individual’s whole soul had been concentrated. Since this leap gave the knight an “eternal” identity, this identity does not waver when finite changes occur, and so not only do these finite joys and sufferings fail to deeply impact the resigned individual, there is also no prospect that one of them will cause him to become open to being so affected.113 The position from which finitude could be enjoyed would, therefore, be very unlike the position required for resignation’s leap. It would be marked by the momentary, by lack of concentration, and by hope in finitude. Such a position would have to consist in a kind of openness to a multiplicity of such objects combined with a determined expectation that the joys will be found and the sufferings avoided. The individual will try to enjoy each thing in its turn as it appears and weep over the sufferings as they appear. If Silentio identifies knighthood with leaping, with its concentrated commitment to movement in a single 113 SKS 4, 139 / FT, 45. 33 direction, then the position for enjoying finitude seems to be walking, which is always open to movement in a new direction and proceeds only a bit this way, and bit that way, without commitment that the next moment will be in the same direction. This position, in which energies lack concentration but move this way and that and receive no decisive interpretation, corresponds to Silentio’s description of the tax-collector whose apparently “mercenary soul” “enjoys everything he sees” and despite “not having four beans” nonetheless “firmly believes that his wife has that delectable dish” he desires ready for him. “He enjoys and takes part in everything” and thereby seems to have no concentration upon a single object whose absence pains him in his soul; each moment, he devotes himself entirely to what happens to appear before him.114 3. It is of course possible to adopt such a position of engagement without it characterizing an individual’s deepest identity, but this is just like the adult who joins the children’s game. The enjoyment is not the same, and the inner sorrow of the one sharply contrasts with the simple joy of the others. Precisely in others’ joy, his heaviness, his heterogeneity, appears most sharply—though one should also compare his sympathy with their sorrows to an adult’s sympathy with a child’s sorrows over a broken toy or loss of desert: the knight knows sorrow, and will never join in such sorrows the way the others do, unless another were to suffer the loss of actuality in the way that he has. But then we have stepped outside of the sufferings of finitude. So when the knight must join finitude, when he must reorganize his energies to engage in momentary pursuits, he hesitates and adopts the position only with an awkwardness that he hides with whatever art of which he is capable. 114 SKS 4, 134 / FT, 39–40. 34 Thus, the knight of faith’s gracefulness in adopting the position is extremely surprising. It is difficult for a dancer to land and adopt the position for walking simultaneously because he must also manage the task of absorbing the impact of his weight upon the ground. Landing the wrong way, as if he were really weightless, would only cause him to fall, perhaps even to injure himself. For a knight—someone with concentrated passion and a single wish combined with the judgment of its impossibility—to engage with the world as if it would give him everything he needs expresses the same kind of absurd faith such a dancer would show if he actually assumed a standing or walking position while in the air. For adopting such a position—expecting the beloved even when this was judged impossible—is paradoxical, simultaneously opening the individual to pain and sealing him off from it, and requiring an incomprehensible, perhaps even impossible, organization of internal energies. For how could a person simultaneously leap with the strength of resignation’s position and expect to land holding the beloved’s hand? It is the sorrow that both empowers the leap and constitutes the heaviness that makes landing awkward. If this were not striking enough, Silentio goes further in order to emphasize the absurdity of what the knight of faith accomplishes. A leaping dancer typically lands in a position of stability, fifth position, the same position from which he leaps. But to be able to land in such a way that it looks as if one were simultaneously standing and walking, to transform the leap of life into a gait, absolutely to express the sublime in the pedestrian—that only the knight of faith can do—and that is the only miracle.115 The knight leaps, and now, even before he lands, he is already coming down as if he were strolling along, holding the beloved’s hand—if one saw a dancer do this successfully, leaping and walking simultaneously as if he were the weightless being he only pretends to be, one would say with Silentio that faith’s movement is “a work of art,” “the finest and most 115 SKS 4, 136 / FT, 41. 35 remarkable of all,” a “miraculous” performance “I cannot perform but by which I can only be amazed.”116 V. Conclusion Silentio’s transition from the metaphor of knights to the metaphor of dancers appears as if an off-hand remark with little significance for illuminating the central philosophical problems of the work. This appearance is mistaken. Silentio’s use of the dancing metaphors manifests a relatively precise grasp of classical dance in terms of its mechanics, ideals, and thematic preoccupations. Moreover, careful attention to his use of the metaphor, its invocations of positions, leaps, and rope dancers, illuminates the book’s central problem and expands the reader’s understanding of the Kierkegaardian “leap” and its significance in his thought. The paradoxical dancer of faith, who leaps by virtue of his weight but lands as gently as the carefree, provides an important, additional perspective on the nature of faith. As Kramer says, the image of the dancer allows Kierkegaard to successfully shift discussion from a cognitive conception of faith to one of “embodied experience” and to challenge “the abstraction produced by writing and language” with an art form that operates “outside language.”117 Even in a late writing, he retains the image of the dancer as an image of embodied faith, and contrasts this with the collector of propositions and conclusions: “What we call a teacher in Christianity … no more resembles what the New Testament understands by a teacher of Christianity than a chest of drawers resembles a dancer.”118 The knight of faith is more like a dancer than like a scholar or contemplator. The New Testament scholar who affirms the propositions but does not live them is like a person who knows the 116 SKS 4, 131 / FT, 36. 117 “August Bournonville: Kierkegaard’s Leap of Faith and the ’Noble Art of Terpsichore’,” p. 80. 118 SKS 14, 190 / TM, 53. 36 choreography of a dance, but does not dance; and as Hough says, choreography “is merely the plan, not in any sense actual dancing”—indeed, understood as a set of propositions, it may not even be proper choreography if it does not live in the muscle-memory of a dancer.119 Kierkegaard refuses to provide definitions of “existential concepts” out of a concern that they will falsify what they describe, and the dancer image helps to make clear why he does so. 120 Like a dancer, a knight of faith embodies an ideal in his actions, and his life consists in embodying this truth “subjectively” in the medium of existence, in the action of a life of faithful engagement with the world. 119 Kierkegaard’s Dancing Tax Collector, p. 136. 120 SKS 4, 447 / CA, 147. 37