Stop Teaching Kierkegaard in (Most of) your Undergraduate Classes

Introduction

This is a hard post for me to write because, as anyone who knows me also knows, I love Kierkegaard. A large amount of my research focuses on Kierkegaard; I wish that everybody could immerse themselves in his work. And yet, I will not teach Kierkegaard (nor a few other thinkers) to nearly any of my undergraduate students. These thinkers are loosely gathered under the umbrella of philosophers who employ the “therapeutic method” of philosophical discourse. I believe that teaching small fragments of their work in undergraduate courses can lead to a deeply erroneous understanding of the text, as well as the idea that many of these philosophers are not worth engaging with. Here’s why:

Kierkegaard in the Classroom

At the end of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, in a section titled “On His Mission”, Kierkegaard (writing under the pseudonym “Johannes Climacus”) wrote, “[S]uddenly this thought flashed through my mind: ‘You must do something. But inasmuch as with your limited capacities it would be impossible to make anything easier than it has become, you must, with the same humanitarian enthusiasm as the others, undertake to make something harder.’” Though this was written while in character, we see similar sentiments throughout his non-pseudonymous work, including the famous line from his journals, “The task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted.” Kierkegaard is not shy about letting his readers know that understanding his writings is no easy task. The difficulty lies not only in the hundreds of hidden references to forgotten Anglo-Saxon fairytales and obscure 19^th century Danish operas, but also in his rigorously systematic method of his first authorship (his pseudonymous works), a series of books designed to be read in the order in which they were published.

The dangers of teaching small bits of Kierkegaard first struck me as a first-year graduate student working as a teaching assistant for Philosophy 101. The class had just read a selection from Fear and Trembling, during the unit on Existentialism, when a student in the class expressed confusion about why we were spending any time at all reading Kierkegaard. The pages that had been assigned struck this student as obviously absurd — the ravings of a mad man. Similarly, one of my colleagues recently described her experience of reading a small selection of Kierkegaard as an undergraduate, which left her believing Kierkegaard must be a covert atheist giving purposefully ridiculous arguments for Christianity.

A Unique Method

I was initially indignant — how could my student not recognize the genius of my favorite Existentialist? How could the fear of failing to obtain infinite passion not keep him awake at night? But the answer, I came to think, was that the student was right: the idea of leaping from the ethical realm to the realm of faith, by acting in virtue of a paradoxical hope, is absurd. And if all you’ve read of Kierkegaard is twenty-five pages about the teleological suspension of the ethical, then you haven’t given him the chance to first convince you that this life of “faith” is simply the least absurd of the set of all possible kinds of lives. And that, in my estimation, does Kierkegaard a grave disservice.

Such a disservice is not uniquely dealt to the work of Kierkegaard. I believe it largely applies to the class of all philosophers employing what is called the “therapeutic method” of philosophical communication — a moniker gleaned from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, but also employed by the likes of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and (arguably) Plato, as well as philosophical literary figures like Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Weil. I’m sure there are many others. Put (overly) simply, this method generally amounts to a combination of 1) a systematic series of writings intended to be read as a whole, and 2) a method of indirect, or even strategically misleading, argumentation.

When some fragment of a work by one of these philosophers is taught in intro or survey philosophy classes, a unique situation arises where the students receive, not just a slightly inaccurate presentation (if it were only this, then the presentation would be laudable), but actually an egregiously incorrect idea of what these thinkers are up to – often an idea that makes them seem idiotic and not worth engaging with. And this is no fault of the instructor, but simply a fact about the amount of contextualization that is possible in the week or two spent on one of these thinkers.

Conclusion

The high likelihood of this outcome of teaching Kierkegaard or others like him seems, to me, not often worth the gamble. Not only do we risk (with a high degree of certainty) doing the individual philosophers a disservice, but often we make it harder for the students to grasp the value of the course they are spending so much time and money on — it makes it harder for them to believe in the value of philosophy as a rigorous and worthwhile discipline. Of course, this does not mean that teaching Kierkegaard or other therapeutic thinkers to undergraduates is never good or appropriate; classes in Existentialism, classes that involve Platonic dialogues, and classes that wrestle with the Philosophical Investigations must, after all, go on. But they must go on in a way that takes the time to alert students to the difficulty of these texts, and to explain the method of writing employed. To this end, I exercise extreme caution when assigning these thinkers so that, if and when my students read them, they come away from the experience feeling both challenged and admiring.

Megan Fritts

Megan Fritts, Philosophy PhD Candidate and Instructor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, works primarily in the philosophy of action and value theory, as well as 19^thcentury European philosophy. She is the author of“Kierkegaard and Binswanger on Faith’s Relation to Love”, and co-editor ofThe Hurricane Notebook: Three Dialogues on the Human Condition (Wisdom/Works, Forthcoming).