The Jewel on a Frozen Lake: Kierkegaard on the Meaning of Action

Abstract

The paper "The Jewel on a Frozen Lake: Kierkegaard on the Meaning of Action" by Jasna Koteska analyzes the paradox in Søren Kierkegaard’s interpretation of the meaning of action in his famous 1846 tract “Two Ages: A Literary Review”. As is well-known, to describe the two ages Kierkegaard used a parable of a precious jewel on a frozen lake covered with thin ice. If the age is revolutionary, Kierkegaard writes, the whole community celebrates the courage of a person who will sacrifice his life for the common goal. And vice versa, if the age is reflective, people consider the hero’s action as unreasonable and meaningless, they ridicule his courage and strength, and reduce the hero’s sacrifice to a simple display of skills. The paradox occurs when Kierkegaard describes the revolutionary vigor. Otherwise known for his masterful literary style, Kierkegaard enigmatically avoided the playful, urgent and swift descriptions, which would correspond to the momentum needed for revolutionary action and instead chose repetitive and dull sentences. E.g.: “The age of revolution is essentially passionate and therefore essentially has culture”; “The tension and resilience of the inner being are the measure of essential culture”; “The age of revolution is essentially passionate” and so on. (Kierkegaard, S., Two Ages, H.V. Hong, E.V. Hong, Princeton UP, 1978, 61-62).

The obvious question is why Kierkegaard, who was aware that repetition brings reduction of jouissance, chose to interpret the revolutionary age through repetition, and with the same melancholy and mourning with which he described the present age? Was it because he considered every revolution as essentially a repetitive event? Or, because he believed that each self-sacrifice (the hero on thin ice) is always already a senseless gesture, which cannot get an approval of the community? Or, more radically, what if there is no age which can be called a revolutionary age? What if there is nothing exclusive in history, and each epoch is just a set of practical decisions about what kind of life one wants to commit oneself to? The paper argues that Kierkegaard developed a notion that both pleasure of the aesthetical and the ethical existence - “the life of a poet” and “the life of a judge” are incomplete, the only resolution of human’s destiny must come about in the form of a religious choice. Due to the radical antagonism of human situation, humans are incapable of bypassing the abyss between the finite and the infinite, therefore the action is always conducted without a full meaning, without a rational knowledge of the consequences of that action and with a leap of faith; therefore the true action can come only in the form of a conduct of the single individual directed towards the highest good as it is understood in Kierkegaard.