Kierkegaard on the value of Art: An Indirect Method of Communication

Abstract

Questions about the value of art are nothing new. Lovers of art have been asked to explain its importance since the time of Plato’s Republic. We encounter one common line of defence in Kierkegaard’s writings. Like many 19 century thinkers, including the leading figures of the Idealist and Romantic movements (Speight 2015; Zuckert 2010), Kierkegaard embraced a ‘cognitivist’ picture of the arts. He located art’s value in its ability to teach or educate—to provide us with cognitive benefits. Kierkegaard’s version of cognitivism has a predictable existentialist twist. He is not as interested as Hegel or Schelling in whether art can express general truths about the spirit of the age. Nor is he as concerned as Kant with whether art manages to provide us with concrete representations of abstract ideas. Kierkegaard focuses his attention on art’s ability to teach us about ourselves. Works of art matter to him because they can help us with the project of discovering who we are as individuals. Despite cognitivism’s popularity, it also received pushback in Kierkegaard’s day. Some critics complained that what art accomplishes does not exactly amount to teaching. Others conceded that art might manage to teach in some sense, but they objected that it does not do so as well as philosophy or the sciences. The lessons communicated through art, they claimed, are never as clearcut or well-supported by reasons. The goal of this chapter is to explain how Kierkegaard turns these objections on their heads. I will argue that he does so by making two moves. First, he maintains that works of art do not teach ‘directly’ by telling us truths and offering us evidence. Instead, art educates in an ‘indirect’ fashion by helping us make our own discoveries. Second, the fact that art does not teach in a straightforward manner is not a defect. On the contrary, it is precisely because art teaches indirectly that it teaches better than philosophy and the sciences.