The Gift of a Penny as “Counter-Experience” in Kierkegaard’s Discourses: Humility, Detachment, and the Hidden Significance of Things

Abstract

This essay assesses the relevance of Søren Kierkegaard’s non-pseudonymous, edifying writings for considering themes of desire, detachment, and humility within the religious context of Christian spiritual formation. Building on the argument of recent scholars who identify in Kierkegaard’s writings an account of a fundamental desire for God “implanted” in the human being, I explore the influence of this vision on Kierkegaard’s depiction of desire and detachment in his “Discourses on the Lilies and the Birds”. I then turn to how this relates to the perspective of humility that emerges from Kierkegaard’s reflections on the biblical story of “the widow’s mite”. In each case, these edifying writings aim to stir the reader into a process of interrogating faulty self-perceptions based on arbitrary measures of value. I read this mode of communication as able to initiate a “counter-experience”, provoking the reader to reorient her horizon of prior self-valuations so she might come to recognize the hidden significance of things and, ultimately, achieve a more accurate sense of oneself in relation to the authentic source of the self’s desire. Insofar as this reorientation of the self informs the practice of detachment or the development of humility, people might experience this same process in diverse ways. In this respect, the relevance of Kierkegaard’s edifying writings for reflecting on Christian spirituality is not that they provide a thoroughgoing account of detachment or humility that should replace the insights of various spiritual traditions. Rather, I argue that his discourses—when read alongside these traditions—offer a supplemental resource for reflecting on how our positionalities, dispositions, and proximate contexts will inform the divergent ways we might experience the practice of detachment or the manifestation of humility in each new life circumstance.