The following essay was delivered at the American Academy of Religion Conference in Washington DC,
November 2006. In it, I make a case for teaching difficult figures or topics, such as Søren Kierkegaard’s
work, through the teaching of academic writing—and vice-versa. While this essay was not part of my
application material for the Excellence in Teaching Writing Award, I include it here as an articulation of
the ways in which I have found writing instruction and to be an invaluable dimension of more disciplinespecific teaching and learning.
Teaching Writing through Kierkegaard (and vice-versa)
Jason A. Mahn
Duke University Writing Program
Unlike most of the others on this panel, I was not asked to talk about teaching Kierkegaard
because I have done so over a long career, or because my own work with Kierkegaard is well
known. I am here—I think—because, despite my share of pedagogical failures, I have become
reflective about teaching Kierkegaard by having done so in a unique setting, namely, through the
Duke University Writing Program, where I teach Academic Writing seminars to first-year
undergraduates. Academic Writing (WR 20) is the only course required of all Duke students.
Unlike upper-level “writing in the disciplines” courses that are housed in various departments,
Duke’s introduction to academic writing does not use writing to help students learn about a
discipline or figure, but rather uses the discipline or figure to teach academic writing. So whereas
UWP course topics range from conservation biology to queer studies, the primary goal of each is
to get students to become persuasive and nuanced writers by embedding them in the conventions
and practices of academic scholarship, including drafting, peer-consultation, re-thinking, and
rewriting. This is our goal even when student knowledge of coral reefs or of “heteronormativity”
or of Søren Kierkegaard takes back seat to the “topic” of academic writing.
It would seem that WR 20’s focus away from figures and topics and toward practices and
conventions would provide a poor forum for helping students patiently sift through Kierkegaard’s
convoluted authorship. This would seem especially true for the course I taught last semester
(Spring 2006): “Writing with Kierkegaard through Contemporary Conundrums.” As the title
indicates, I didn’t primarily ask my students to learn about Kierkegaard or even to write about
him, but rather to employ Kierkegaard’s work—to write “with” him—in the effort to think
through other contemporary social and cultural predicaments. Surely this effort doubly-displaces
Kierkegaard’s work and leads to misunderstandings and misappropriations. And admittedly, it
often did. I want to make the case, however, that the effort to use Kierkegaard in order to grapple
with contemporary issues and in the effort to teach writing might lead students to engage
Kierkegaard’s writing better than would a more direct approach. If I were to state my claim in
the too-strong terms of Johannes de Silentio, I would say that, having resigned myself to give up
teaching Kierkegaard for the task of teaching writing, I have found that “sacrifice” to be
returned—perhaps more abundantly than if it were never made. Certainly not “miraculously,”
but at least unexpectedly, teaching writing through Kierkegaard enables undergraduate students
also to come to terms with Kierkegaard in demonstrable and striking ways.
Before turning to two student projects that help me make this case, allow me to list well-known
aspects of Kierkegaard’s work that suggest why writing with him might be an appropriate way to
study him. First, the indirection of this approach parallels the indirection of Kierkegaard’s
authorship. Kierkegaard was concerned that the instructor of any essential truth—a truth which
one might live—not get in the way of its reception and exhibition. Often in my WR 20 courses,
my teaching persona is as an advanced co-writer and a careful respondent of student texts, rather
than as a Kierkegaard expert. This classroom role allows me to redirect many questions about
what Kierkegaard “means” back onto the student-writer’s use of him. Of course, I also highlight
reoccurring Kierkegaardian themes and teach his biography and historical context, but almost
always as tools that students can use in their appropriation of his texts. In this way I join
Kierkegaard in a kind of indirect communication—even if my methods arise from pedagogical
rather than theological or existential concerns.
Second, the opportunity to guide students in their writing with Kierkegaard helpfully presents
Kierkegaard first and foremost as a writer. There are, of course, a number of debates concerning
whether Kierkegaard is primarily a proto-existentialist, a philosopher, a theologian, a religious
thinker, a religious poet, a deconstructionist, and so forth. But it seems to me that the least
ideological and most materially constitutive description of Kierkegaard is as a writer—one whose
theology, philosophy, or other “ideas” are inextricable from the rhetorical shape of the written
page. My students have trouble with this. They want me and others readers of their work to
avoid looking too closely at what is written—to instead get the main idea or point “out of it”—
just as they want to know what Kierkegaard “really thinks” after reading, for example, an unusual
sermon from a Jutland Pastor who is writing to a moral volitionist who is writing to an aesthetic
lyricist. Asking such students to read in order to write invites them to treat texts as texts—as
artifacts whose opaque tropes, figures, and stories generate interpretation rather than obscure it.
Third, teaching the art of writing by employing a body of work helps to dramatize Kierkegaard’s
distinction between objective knowledge (knowledge that can be absorbed through disinterested
inculcation) and subjective thinking (the appropriation, or “redoubling,” of a human capability
through commitment and practice). Such a distinction corresponds to that of Paulo Freire
between the “banking system of education,” where the professor deposits and the student retains a
sum of knowledge, and education as consciousness raising—or what Kierkegaard simply calls
awakening. I take it that for Kierkegaard this division is one of precedence and
comprehensiveness rather than of mutual exclusion; while subjective awakening requires
objective knowledge, disinterested inculcation gets along well without subjective appropriation
and, in fact, can do better without it. The priority of subjective employment over objective
knowledge materializes in my academic writing class already in the course description. Here, I
begin by describing the goals and practices of academic writing, proceed to explain how the most
interesting contemporary conundrums invite not knock-down solutions but to be “thought
through” by employing new perspectives and careful academic prose. It is only then that I
introduce Kierkegaard’s writings as a fruitful means toward this end. At the end of the first class
session, after we read through the syllabus, one student bravely asked: “So, what is this course
about?” Her question reveals the prevalence of the assumption that objective knowledge is more
determinative for education than are the practices of understanding and appropriation. My
protracted response—that the course is “about” any number of contemporary issues that you
chose to address, that its objective is to write more persuasively, and that the primary tools for
addressing issues and practicing writing are the writings of Søren Kierkegaard—testifies to both
the need and the difficulty of positioning objective knowledge within the more expansive aims of
“subjective thinking.”
Finally, and most comprehensively, is the simple distinction Kierkegaard makes between what is
said and how it is said. This distinction encompasses many aspects of a course on teaching
writing through Kierkegaard, but applies most directly to the student authorship of and responses
to written texts. As I also mention in the course description, in almost every session of WR 20
students bring their own written projects to class to be read and commented on by their peers and
professor. Many of these student texts serve as windows into Kierkegaard’s texts, and we end up
discussing the Kierkegaardian passages and conceptual moves that the student has employed in
his or her project. But these textual windows are not transparent. Far from introducing
Kierkegaard’s subject matter as efficiently as possible (perhaps as typical “seminar starters” are
meant to do), students compose projects that employ Kierkegaardian moves for new purposes,
making all routes back to Kierkegaard rather circuitous. Our comments, too, concern how the
student author is making use of Kierkegaard’s writings: where and why she is coming to terms
with Kierkegaard, forwarding him, countering him, or taking his approach.1 We also question
when and how the writer is incorporating the actual words of Kierkegaard, for what purposes
according to her own project. All this suggests that the academic writing course always already
grapples with what Kierkegaard thinks (or better, writes) in terms of how the student is rethinking and re-writing his work. While this method risks reducing Kierkegaard’s writings to
“tools” that can be extracted from their context and then readily employed (or, worse, beaten into
conceptual swords that can be wielded to cut apart other problems and texts), I actually think
those projects that creatively employ Kierkegaard within a very different project attend most
closely to the “what” and the “how” of Kierkegaard’s work. In other words, in knowing what to
do with an idea, students circuitously but attentively grapple with the original attitude, mood and
implications of Kierkegaard’s text; they better grasp the attendant context of his work; and they
strive to understand not only what Kierkegaard means, but also how he means it and why it is
important.
In order to support these claims, I want to draw your attention to the use of Kierkegaard in two
first-year student texts. I especially want to point to those places where, although the students are
writing about a Hollywood film and a contemporary debate about religion and science, they
demonstrate remarkable engagement with the rhetorical force of Kierkegaard’s texts.
The first project was written by Tommy Harward2 in response to the assignment that I have
included on page 3 of the handout. Having worked through selections of Either/Or (from the
Hong anthology) and then having watched the film American Beauty, I asked students to
“forward” words and ideas from Either/Or to make an interesting claim about the film’s portrayal
of the ethical and aesthetic life-views. Like most of the student writing, Harward’s project
(reproduced on pages 4 and 5) connects the midlife crisis of the film’s protagonist, named Lester,
with the adoption of Kierkegaard’s aesthetic lifestyle, and connects the morality of Colonel Frank
Fitts, Lester’s foil, with Judge William’s ethics. More important than this comparison are the
grounds Harward gives for making it. On the bottom of his first page, the author claims:
The esthetic lifestyle according to “A” is far more than a simple recognition and
appreciation of beauty. It requires a very specific methodology that advocates
recollection as the requirement for true beauty: “When an individual has perfected
himself […] in the art of recollecting in this way, he is then able to play shuttlecock with
all existence” (57). Indeed, all of Lester’s esthetic indulgences come forward as
recollections. He partakes of the typical nostalgias of the American mythology. He buys
himself a muscle car, works at a burger joint, plays old Dylan records, and is always with
a cold beer in hand. These eccentricities are simply recollections of what American
culture holds to be beautiful. They’re universal goods, taking on an almost divine
personality. The quick judgment is that Lester, as seen through “A’s” method, has
achieved a truly beautiful life in a uniquely American style.
In order to write this text, Harward has grappled with a difficult and pivotal component of
Kierkegaard’s aesthete, namely, the idea that controlled recollection issues in ironic detachment
from all plans and commitments. He has also “read” American Beauty as playing upon a similar,
1
These moves are described in detail by Joseph Harris in Rewriting: How to do Things with Texts (Logan,
UT: Utah State University Press, 2006), a book which students in my WR 20 courses read, and the “moves”
of which they explicitly practice.
2
Both Tommy Harward and Madeline McKeever, now sophomores at Duke University, gave me
permission to use their writings and names in this presentation. I thank them for this, and for exhibiting
such noteworthy moves in their work for WR20.
but “uniquely American,” nostalgia for the lost Golden Age. His text ascertains a distinctive
dimension of Kierkegaard aesthetic lifestyle by reading American popular culture in light of it.
On the second page of his project, Harward pushes harder against Kierkegaard’s text when he
aligns the “discipline” of Colonel Fitts with the “self possession” of Kierkegaard’s Judge
William. According to Harward, both characters have won for themselves
the quality of being in charge, of knowing what the situation is at all times. Furthermore,
it is, “in a certain sense absolute, for it is between choosing and not choosing” (76). In the
light of the absolute, the ethical becomes a simple issue of choice, with ultimate faith that
everything can be resolved with sheer will. Judge William urges “A” to use his will for
personal reform. Likewise, Col. Fitts rather bluntly reprimands his son, Ricky, for his
weakness. Ricky’s problems all arise from his lack of willpower. If he, like the Colonel,
could fully use his strength of will, he could overcome all temptation from drugs and
pleasure to become an upright, ethical man. Sounds good, right?
This passage sets up Harward’s final account of how such self-reliance on individual volition
easily reverses itself into fits of passion, illustrated by the way the Colonel’s “ethical house of
cards collapses” in an act of murder at the end of the film. Some Kierkegaardians who want to
sanction Judge William as representative of Kierkegaard’s ethics will claim that Harward tooclosely connects the self-reflective Judge and the repressed Colonel, that Harward is compelled to
caricature “the ethical” lifeview when he takes it out of context in order to interpret a hypocritical
and reproachful figure. Certainly the project risks this. But by having to read Fitts in light of
William (and probably vice-versa), Harward notices a weak spot in moral rhetoric that would
otherwise be overlooked—especially by those imbued in a mythology of self-reliance and
freedom, which might also be “uniquely American.” I might add that he calls into question the
very characteristics of Judge William’s ethics that leading Kierkegaardians also critique, and does
so convincingly. Harward’s final suggestion that Either/Or amounts to a “neither/nor” when
ethics and aesthetic are left to themselves even anticipates the third perspective of the Jutland
Pastor’s sermon, which Harward had not yet read at the time of this project.
In her final project for the course, Maddie McKeever employed the conceptual terrain and
rhetorical movements of Johannes de Silentio’s Fear and Trembling to propose unique ways of
understanding the relationship between religion and science. Entitled “Inextricably Distinct: The
Symbiosis of Science and Religion,” McKeever’s project works to theorize the relation between
religion and science in a way that is more complex and paradoxical than either “integration” or
“independence,” two categories that McKeever borrows from the work of Ian Barbour. She first
aligns science, with its repeatable observations and general laws, with de Silentio’s depiction of
universal ethics, and aligns religion, which “varies from person to person and from moment to
moment” (8), with de Silentio’s description of Abraham’s faith. Her first suggestion is that
Kierkegaard’s text helps to distinguish the “unique and irreconcilable functions of science and
religion” (8).
So far, the connection McKeever makes merely allows her to side with Barbour’s “independence”
model over his “integration” model. I don’t want to slight this correlation—it exemplifies a
faithful reading of Fear and Trembling and the ability to find correlates within a different
rhetorical context. But she does not yet demonstrate more than a grasp on conceptual
distinctions. Happily, this preliminary move serves only to get McKeever’s project off the
ground. She notes that the division between de Silentio’s “ethics” and “faith” is hermeneutical
rather than phenomenological, and that science and religion today likewise “offer differing
interpretations for the same circumstance” (9). McKeever then admits that “while designating
science and religion as ‘universal’ and ‘particular’ implied that each derives its value from a
unique purpose, [this division] does not adequately explain how their integration diminishes that
value rather than creating an aggregate of equal or greater significance” (9). In a self-critical
move, McKeever here questions why the separation between two interpretive schemes does not
invite synthesis—as two perspectives are ostensibly better than one. To respond, McKeever turns
to Kierkegaard’s text to question why Abraham’s faith actively “resisted universal
comprehension” (10). According to her reading of de Silentio:
Abraham could not disclose his duty to anyone else because the absurdity of his faith
excluded it from universal understanding. Yet it is obvious that de Silentio does not
consider this lack of universal understanding a shortcoming as he heralds Abraham’s
embodiment of faith: “Abraham, great with that power whose strength is powerlessness,
great in that wisdom whose secret is folly, great in that hope whose outward form is
insanity, great in that love which is hatred of self.” De Silentio’s praise reveals that the
particular nature of religion allows for an acceptance of paradox and an acknowledgment
that human comprehension need not be universal to be significant.
I find this passage—and its use of de Silentio’s passage—remarkable. McKeever suggests that
religious knowledge is qualitatively distinct from universal knowledge, that its particularity
cannot be considered part of more comprehensive whole, and that even the paradoxical praise of
de Silentio exemplifies a form of knowing, one that is closer to wisdom, hope and love than it is
to “universal truth.”
The last two pages of McKeever’s project utilize de Silentio’s language of “suspension” and
“temptation” to suggest that the relation between science and religion, like that between universal
ethics and faith, is best characterized by active reciprocal resistance, allowing for “conflict and
dialogue between them to persist, [which] actually makes both disciplines more valuable than
either would be in isolation” (11). What makes faith remarkable, McKeever suggests, is not only
the particular characteristics of religious knowledge, but the way this particular knowledge
actively “resist[s] resorting to the universal as an easy escape” (11). Science and religion—like
faith and ethics—are not insular, self-justifying enterprises, but ones which gain their strength by
resisting easy refuge in the other. McKeever ends with a cultural critique. The popular
movement to amalgamate science and religion into new age metaphysics or spirituality, as
represented by the film What the Bleep Do We Know?, “takes advantage of modern society’s
desire for mediation and essentially tells its viewers what they want to hear—that conflict does
have a clean, clear cut resolution. Ironically, while challenging its viewers to become more
intellectually active, the movie encourages the view of science and religion that is actually less
difficult to accept.” The more difficult path, according to McKeever’s project, is neither
integration nor isolation but a kind of independence that depends on the “temptation” of
alternative frameworks.
I would expect most first-year Duke students to be able to understand Kierkegaard’s distinctions
between ethics and religiousness, the universal and the particular, the knight of resignation and
the knight of faith. McKeever has done much more. In needing to think through the relationship
between religion and science in a way that complicates common distinctions between
independence and integration, McKeever reads Kierkegaard’s texts not simply for conceptual
distinctions or for Kierkegaard’s alleged preference for faith over ethics. She rather unearths the
mood of de Silentio’s text, tracing its confrontation with the tendency of cultured Christianity to
justify faith by making it universally understandable and ethically innocuous. In the end, she
forwards not a concept or a position but a resistance to the temptation for easy answers and the
desire—with Kierkegaard—not to make religion less difficult than it is.
While I cannot claim that teaching writing through Kierkegaard is the only way student might be
led into the thick rhetorical complexities of Kierkegaard’s writings, I do think that writing with
Kierkegaard is for students an interesting, difficult, and rewarding venture.