Don Juan According to Kierkegaard
Originally published in Acéphale, no. 1 (1936). From Tableaux vivants: Essais critiques 1936–1983 (Gallimard, 2001). Translated by $eraph.
—–
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche both have their origins in music — universal raw material, necessary form of destiny.
In each of them the musical feeling is the very feeling of life: unspeakable, irreducible, ungraspable. In both it is pure and blind eroticism, lived experience not yet touched by reflection — though reflection will touch it, inevitably.
Nietzsche described how in the musical and tragic sensibility of pre-Socratic Greece, the imperative authority of the immediate is progressively undermined by the justifying explanation of dialectical sophistry. He notes that it is impossible for language — “symbol of appearances” — to “ever manifest externally the intimate essence of music, which symbolizes the primordial antagonism and pain at the heart of the Primordial-One.” This definition, still very Schopenhauerian, nonetheless contains the intimate conflict of his philosophy: the conflict between language as generator of morality and negator of life, and music as the exalting and affirming form of suffering. Before him, Kierkegaard — for whom music expresses only the immediate in its immediacy — observes that language has taken reflection into itself: “This is why it cannot express the immediate. Reflection kills the immediate; this is why it is impossible to express the musical in language.” This similarity of reaction in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche at their respective starting points allows us to consider the experience of the first under the categories of the second.
At first glance, Kierkegaard seems to take the Apollonian contemplative stance before the Dionysian spectacle that leads him to see in Don Juan the incarnation of the Dionysian phenomenon of erotic immediacy. This attitude of consciousness contemplating the dance of its own suffering — which Nietzsche had discovered this side of Christianity in Greek tragedy — Kierkegaard finds beyond Christianity in a myth born from Christian consciousness.
“Christianity introduced sensuality into the world: since sensuality is what must be negated, it is, as a positive reality, particularly brought into evidence by the position of the contrary that excludes it. Now, as a principle, force, system in itself, sensuality was only posited by Christianity. It is in this sense that Christianity introduced sensuality into the world. To understand this thesis exactly, one must grasp it identically with its antithesis: Christianity expelled and excluded sensuality from the world. As a principle, force, system in itself, sensuality was posited for the first time by Christianity; I could add a definition proper to clarify what I am advancing: it is only through Christianity that sensuality became the correlate of spirit. This is quite natural: Christianity being spirit, the positive spirit that introduced sensuality into the world. But if sensuality is considered under the determination of spirit, its importance obviously resides in the fact of finding itself excluded, of being determined as a principle, as a power: for that which spirit — itself a principle — must exclude must be an element that asserts itself as a principle, even in the very moment of its exclusion!…”
Before Christianity, sensuality was not spiritually determined. How then? “Sensuality, psychically determined, found its most perfect expression among the Greeks. Now, determined psychically, sensuality is not antithesis, exclusion, but unity and harmony.” The Greeks did not know sensuality as a principle. Sensuality was then merged into beautiful individuality, and the soul that constituted beautiful individuality was inconceivable without sensuality. Consequently, the erotic belonged to the soul and could not form a principle. Love arose in the individual only in a momentary way. One might object that Eros was indeed this principle — but Eros represented psychic love. Moreover, Eros, god of love, was not himself a loving god. He dispensed love to mortals as to other divinities, and if it happened to him to feel love — which was rare — one must see in this a submission to a power that would have been excluded from the universe had Eros himself rejected it. Eros, dispenser of love, does not himself possess the power he symbolizes, because he transmits it to the entire universe, while the mortals each animated by it bring it back to him. However, Christianity introduced into the world the idea of incarnation or representation: an individual figure, in representing or incarnating a principle, concentrates the force in which everyone participates by contemplating that figure. From then on, Christian consciousness was equally able to conceive of figures that incarnated the principles and forces it excludes. It is thus that at the time of the Renaissance it gave birth to the figures of sensual genius and intellectual genius — both excluded from the world. Kierkegaard in his time could not know the significance of the Dionysian mysteries. All the more was he driven by his nature to seek the Dionysian element in the world of Christian sensibility, to sense it and find it — here — in the exalting work of Mozart.
If the conflict of individuation determined the Dionysian experience of antique sensibility, it could motivate a Dionysian tension in Christian sensibility. But while the antique soul represented Dionysos in tragedy under the mask of a hero struggling “enmeshed in the nets of individual will,” “suffering the pains of individuation,” and saw deliverance only in the death of the hero brought about by “his will to be himself the unique essence of the universe” — Christian consciousness, by positing the immediate as the principle it excludes, posits itself as the irreversible individuation of the immortal soul. It is then the spectator of the non-individuated form of existence that it strives to deny inwardly, as if to combat the worst of all temptations. But to negate the immediate (the non-individuated), to transcend the sacrilegious desire to be oneself the unique essence of the universe, it must constantly provide itself the spectacle of legendary heroes who incarnate the criminal refusal to individuate before God. Christian consciousness thus achieves this miracle of making Dionysos present in his inhuman, monstrous, and divine form: what the antique soul had only sensed, what it had seen only as a mask, Christian consciousness — by grace of the incarnation — sees bare: Dionysos was to reveal himself supremely only before the Crucified.
At the moment God dies, Nietzsche experiences the resurrection of Dionysos, god of de-individuation. The death of the God of individuation will demand the birth of the Overman: for if God dies, the individual self does not only lose its Judge — it loses its Redeemer and its eternal Witness. But if it loses its eternal Witness, it loses its eternal identity as well. The self dies with God. And the vertigo of eternal recurrence seizes Nietzsche: irreducible and fortuitous product of the blind universe, his individual will marrying the necessary movement of the universe, he glimpses, senses, and remembers the innumerable identities already worn as so many masks of the monster Dionysos. But when the entire series has been worn, one face must necessarily reappear bare: that of the “murderer of God.” The face of the “murderer of God” can only be a face of flesh and blood, once formed by the assassinated Creator: that of Friedrich Nietzsche — paradoxical face of a will that, within conscious irresponsibility, tended to establish responsibility with regard to necessity.
If he predicted the return of a tragic age in the Dionysian sense, his prediction was nonetheless made from the depths of his intimate experience of the death of God — that is, from the depths of a Christian experience. It is therefore legitimate to confront with his interpretation of antique tragedy (rupture of individuation) that which Kierkegaard gave of modern tragedy (inevitable individuation) in relation to the antique. In the ancient world, Kierkegaard observes, the individual was integrated into substantial determinations such as the State, the Family, Destiny. These substantial determinations constitute the fateful element of Greek tragedy; they make it what it is. The end of the hero is not only a consequence of his acts — it is also suffering, whereas in modern tragedy it is not so much suffering as the individual action of the hero. Modern tragedy shows us how the hero, subjectively reflected, makes of his life his action through individual decision. Modern tragedy, based on character and situation, exhausts in the rejoinder all the immediate and consequently has neither the epic foreground nor the epic background of Greek tragedy. In the latter, guilt forms an intermediary element between acting and suffering — this is where the tragic collision resides. Modern (that is, Christian) times seem to have elaborated an erroneous conception of the tragic: all the fateful element, all substantial determinations, have been translated into conscious subjectivity and responsible individuality. From then on — because our categories are Christian — the consciously guilty tragic hero becomes an evil being, and evil becomes the essential content of tragedy. Formerly the individual was considered in terms of his ancestral past, his family, his community; he participated in the destiny of the race. Today we witness the isolation of the individual; and just as the comic, characteristic of the modern Christian world, expresses isolation within that world, so too evil for evil’s own sake — so too sin.
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche form the Janus head of modern consciousness: Nietzsche seeks to identify extreme consciousness with extreme necessity, with *fatum*; Kierkegaard knows only the nostalgia for *fatum* as nostalgia for the immediate. For him, there is no longer any existence subject to substantial determinations — there is only an existence within sin, in ignorance or full consciousness of sin: this is the inevitable, inescapable position, the position before God.
But existence within sin is the birth of the individual self — with its anguish, its joys and its sorrows — the birth of the self under God’s inquisitive, terrible, and loving gaze.
“The self, synthesis of the finite and the infinite, is first posited; then, in order to become, it projects itself onto the screen of imagination and that which reveals to it the infinite of the possible. The self contains as much possibility as necessity, for it is indeed itself, but it must become itself. It is necessity, since it is itself, and possibility since it must become itself.
“If the possible overturns necessity and the self thus launches itself and is lost in the possible, without attachment recalling it to necessity, we have the despair of the possible. This self then becomes an abstraction in the possible, exhausts itself struggling within it without however changing place, for its true place is necessity: to become oneself is indeed a movement on the spot. Becoming is a departure, but becoming oneself is a movement on the spot!”
Such appears the problem in Kierkegaard at the moment when, aspiring to escape from an intellectually dissolute life in which he had strongly felt the attraction of the proteanism of the German Romantics, it seemed to him that his projected union with Régine Olsen was only a false way out. He then begins his examination of conscience: this is the moment of *Either/Or*, whose first steps take their departure from erotic immediacy and musical erotics. There is a deep affinity, on the one hand, between Kierkegaard’s nostalgia for the immediate and the essence of music, and on the other between Don Juan — incarnation of erotic immediacy — and music, its most adequate means of expression.
“Sensual genius is entirely force, storm, impatience, passion; it is something essentially lyrical: yet it consists not in a single moment but in a succession of moments… hence its epic character: it is too overflowing to be expressible in the word; it moves constantly in the immediate… The perfected unity of this idea and its adequate form we find in Mozart’s Don Juan, and precisely because the idea of genius is so infinitely abstract, because the medium is so abstract, it is hardly probable that Mozart can ever have a competitor in the future… This idea of Don Juan is all the more musical in that music is not expressed there as accompaniment, but as the revelation of its most intimate essence. That is why Mozart, through his Don Juan, elevated himself above all the immortals.”
Kierkegaard’s initial state of soul is a musical state by its very nature, which his Christian consciousness will progressively objectify: he apprehends there the loss of innocence, of that state where the soul is in immediate union with its nature and whose profound mystery is that it is at the same time anxiety. Now, if the Kierkegaardian self has known this anxiety — generator of sin through its various phases, from anxiety before nothingness, before the possibility of being able, to anxiety before evil and before good, forms of reflected anxiety — it could contemplate the figure of Mozart’s Don Juan as the miraculous personification of substantial anxiety.
“…As the eye at the first glimmer senses the conflagration, so the ear in the agonizing sounds of the violins senses the passionate ardor,” he says of the Overture to Don Juan. “There is something like anxiety in that flash: something engendered in anxiety within the deepest darkness — such is the life of Don Juan. It is not a subjectively reflected anxiety in him; it is a substantial anxiety. It is not despair that the Overture expresses, as is ordinarily said without knowing what one is saying: the life of Don Juan is not made of despair either, but of the omnipotence of sensuality engendered in anxiety; Don Juan himself is this anxiety and this anxiety is precisely his demonic joy of living. Having brought him forth in this way, Mozart unfolds his life in the dancing sounds of the violins, in which he bounds lightly and furtively across the abyss. Like a stone thrown upon water so that it only skims the surface, making a few light leaps, but vanishing beneath the wave as soon as it ceases to bound — thus he dances over the abyss and exults during the brief respite granted him!”
The Kierkegaardian self, grappling with its own necessity in the face of the infinite possible, knows in an ecstatic state the incarnation of its infinite possibilities: Don Juan — infernal and superb vision, insane dream of a consciousness seeking to elude its necessity — a defiance of God in the despair of being unable to escape the condition of its immortal individuality. Even in his aesthetic observations on the error of certain interpretations of Don Juan that have individualized the hero, given him biographical reality, subjected him to contingencies, Kierkegaard exalts the essentially musical and hence pre-individual nature of Don Juan.
He is “by his very essence neither idea (that is to say, force, life) nor individual: he undulates between the two. Now, this undulation is the very life of music. When the sea is raging, foaming waves form all manner of figures resembling animate beings: it seems then that these are these beings who raise the waves, whereas the movement of the waves produces them. Likewise Don Juan is a form that becomes apparent without ever condensing into a defined figure, an individual who ceaselessly forms without ever completing himself, and of whose story we perceive nothing other than what the rumor of the waves tells us.”
Mozart’s Don Juan belongs to the stages anterior to all self-awareness — this is the source of his formidable power of fascination: Don Juan is the supreme form of the metamorphoses of erotic immediacy as Mozart revealed them to Kierkegaard.
“In the first stage, desire (Cherubino) does not find its object: it possesses it without having desired, and consequently cannot exercise itself as desire. In the second stage (represented by Papageno), the object appears as multiple: but in seeking its object in the multiple, desire has no object in the deep sense — it is not yet determined as desire. It is in the third stage, in Don Juan, that desire shows itself absolutely determined as desire: it is, intensively and extensively, the immediate union of the two preceding stages. The first stage desired the One ideally; the second the particular under the category of the multiple; the third confounds them. Desire has found in the particular its absolute object; it desires it absolutely… Now, one must not forget that it is not a question of the desire of an individual, but of desire as a principle…”
This is not the reflective seducer of the category of the interesting — Don Juan of Molière, Lovelace, Valmont, Johannes of Kierkegaard — types who, though accomplished seducers, do not necessarily seek to vary or increase the list of their victims, but who are more curious about the personality of the one they propose to circumvent. To bring Don Juan back into this category — the category of the interesting — is to misunderstand his mythic nature. If one puts him in the school of ruse and stratagem, one lends him “reflection, and this casts so harsh a light on his person that he immediately steps out of the obscurity where he was perceptible only musically.” His enjoyment then becomes entirely intellectual; it finds its satisfactions on the ethical plane; he no longer enjoys anything but his own cunning — and immediate enjoyment is done with, the songs fall silent. Now, Mozart’s Don Juan is a seducer insofar as his sensuality — and nothing but his sensuality — is the object of his desire. Don Juan desires and his desire has the effect of seducing. He enjoys satisfying desire, and if in seeking a new object after having enjoyed he deceives, it is not because he premeditated the imposture: he has no time to play the role of seducer, and it is much rather through their own sensuality that his victims are deceived. “…But in desiring in each woman all of femininity, he exercises this sensuously idealizing power by which he beautifies, ripens, and vanquishes his prey.” The infidelity of Mozart’s Don Juan therefore does not belong to the strategy of moral seducers: it is inherent to desire itself, and while psychic love — subject to the dialectical reflection of doubt and anxiety — survives in time, sensual love, unfaithful by essence, fades in time, dies and is reborn in a succession of moments, to find in music its most essential revelation.
“Like the lightning from the dark cloud, he bursts forth from the unfathomable seriousness of life, faster than the thunderbolt, in wilder zigzags, but all the more sure of reaching his mark: hear him rush into the eternal changing flux of phenomena, storming the solid ramparts of life — the light sounds of the violins, the pearly laughter of joy, the jubilations of pleasure, the blissful feasts of enjoyment: he surpasses himself, always wilder, always more fleeting — hear the passion in the rage of unleashed voluptuousness, the loving murmur, the tempting whisper, the seductive whirlwind, the silence of the instant!”
Dionysos: was this not for Nietzsche the original polymorphism of the self called to be reborn into the world? And thus Don Juan for Kierkegaard: did he not celebrate in Mozart’s hero the struggle of his soul’s polymorphism with the hostile consciousness whose menacing accents we hear from the opening of the Overture? Did he not describe it from the height of the very consciousness that demanded the death of blind polymorphism? Don Juan was for him the elementary and formless force that, fortuitously arrested in its movement and on the point of individualizing itself upon contact with the encountered object, falls back into its original formlessness to resume its infinite rhythm: he is thus, like Dionysos, the expression of the infinite melody in which Nietzsche’s soul wished to dissolve at the supreme degree of will — he is the infinite melody of the possible that Kierkegaard’s soul heard with an anguished nostalgia shot through with guilt, with nostalgia nonetheless: did not the joyous resonance of Mozart’s hero offer him the gilded spectacle of a provisional irresponsibility?
“…Cast back onto the most precipitous position of life, pursued by the resentment of the entire world, this victorious Don Juan has no other refuge but a small, remote room. Seated at the extreme end of life’s seesaw, lacking the company of joy he whips within himself all his pleasure in living. And the music roars all the more furiously as it resounds in the abyss over which Don Juan moves!”
Kierkegaard had himself known this precipitous position: as he resolved toward individuation — toward the “movement on the spot” that is “becoming oneself” — he cut himself off by that decision from all aesthetic and poetic possibilities of life. Now it turned out that his union with Régine Olsen could never have shed the character of the interesting, having been contracted in the midst of intellectual frivolities. To possess Régine in and according to the eternal, he had to renounce her in time and break: a maneuver that could not be effected without irony. Kierkegaard took the mask of infidelity, and the temporal element that is music — the most immediate expression of infidelity faithful to itself — would once again become his own. It is then that, emerging from a passion “happy, unhappy, comic, tragic,” Kierkegaard appears in the scandalous attitude of a Don Juan of Faith. By refusing to commit himself to the existing world and to consecrate his love there through the Christian institution of marriage, the self — having attained the position “before God” — had converted infidelity faithful to itself into fidelity to the eternal: adrift on the ocean of his own eternity, does the Kierkegaardian self feel then, like Don Juan singing the “Champagne aria,” an “inner vitality such that the most diverse enjoyments of reality are weak by comparison with that which he draws from within himself”?
In any case, in Repetition, the self restored to itself strikes up a hymn of thanksgiving as if the sacrificed possible were restored to it in its eternity:
“I am myself again… my bark is afloat… in a moment I shall be again where the violent desire of my soul used to dwell, where ideas roar with the fury of the elements, where thoughts are unleashed in tumult like the peoples in the age of migrations, where at other times there reigns a calm as deep as that of the Pacific Ocean — a calm such that one hears oneself speak, provided there is movement in the depths of the soul: there, finally, where one stakes one’s life at every instant, to lose and regain it at every instant… I belong to the idea. I follow it when it beckons me and when it gives me a rendezvous day and night: no one waits for me at lunch, no one for dinner. At the call of the idea, I leave everything, or rather I have nothing to leave… Once more the cup of intoxication is held out to me: I breathe its fragrance: already I hear, as if in music, its effervescence; but first a libation for the one who delivered a soul lying in the solitude of despair: glory to the magnanimity of woman! Long live the flight of thought, long live the danger of death in the service of the idea, long live the peril of struggle, long live the solemn exultation of triumph, long live the dance in the whirlwind of the infinite, long live the wave that sweeps me into the abyss, long live the wave that sweeps me to the stars!!”
