What Did Kierkegaard Want?
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Unfortunately, my life is far too subjunctive; would to God I had some indicative power. —Journals, 1837 I sit and listen to the sounds in my inner being, the happy intimations of music, the deep, earnestness of the organ. —Journals, 1843 He did not belong to reality, and yet he had much to do with it. —Diary of the Seducer, 1843 What an impression Kierkegaard makes when you first read him! Especially, I must add, if that first time happens to occur in adolescence. How electrifying, at that time of life, to encounter the statement “Subjectivity is truth.” Perhaps you had suspected that all along. But to have it indited there in black and white in the middle of a 576-page book of philosophy called Concluding Unscientific Postscript is something else again. (Actually, the book is called Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments: A Mimic-Pathetic-Dialectic Composition, An Existential Contribution, a deliberately parodic title that somehow makes the proposition that “Subjectivity is truth” even more impressive.) In one way or another, the explosive idea that “subjectivity is truth” is the guiding theme in Kierkegaard’s thought. In an early journal entry—written in 1835, eleven years before the Concluding Unscientific Postscript was published—the twenty-two-year-old Kierkegaard decided that What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. . . . [T]he crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, and to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die. Of what use would it be to me to discover a so-called objective truth, to work through the philosophical systems so that I could, if asked, make critical judgments about them, could point out the fallacies in each system; of what use would it be to me to be able to develop a theory of the state, . . . and constructing a world I did not live in but merely held up for others to see; of what use would it be to me to be able to formulate the meaning of Christianity . . . if it had no deeper meaning for me and for my life? “Interpretive knowledge,” he concludes, is all well and good but “it must come alive in me and this is what I now recognize as the most important of all.” This is potent stuff. Education is (or used to be) about getting beyond a private point of view and looking at things dispassionately, disinterestedly, objectively. And here comes a certified Great Thinker to tell you that what really counts is not dispassionateness but, on the contrary, passion. What our mediocre, bourgeois society needs, Kierkegaard says again and again, is more passion. In
The Present Age (1846), he wrote that Before taking the step he deliberates so long and so carefully that he literally chokes with thought. It is even questionable whether he ought to be called a suicide, since it is really thought which takes his life. He does not die with deliberation but from deliberation. Of course, that statement, like the statement “Subjectivity is truth”—like, indeed, many of Kierkegaard’s most piquant observations—was delivered not by S. Kierkegaard himself, but by a pseudonym. Kierkegaard deployed a variety of pseudonyms as part of his program of “indirect communication.” Seeking not so much to impart knowledge as to dispel illusion, Kierkegaard saw himself as a sort of spiritual therapist. His aim, he said, was to “deceive people into the truth,” a goal that could be reached not directly, through argument, but indirectly, through the semi-fictional discourse of his pseudonyms. Kierkegaard eventually acknowledged the authorship of his pseudonymous works, but early on he took considerable pains to cover his tracks. He dealt with his printer through a third party. And although he was working practically around the clock in the mid-1840s, he would drop into the theater every night for five or ten minutes at intermission to foster his reputation as an idler-about-town, too frivolous to write books. Part of the fun in reading Kierkegaard is seeing how his various personae play off and criticize one another. But the fact that something is said by one of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms rather than in propria persona does not mean we can discount it. Kierkegaard used pseudonyms not only to dissimulate about the essentials of his thought but also to express them. Most of the really radical statements uttered by Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms— “subjectivity is truth,” for example—represent ideas that Kierkegaard himself endorsed. Kierkegaard was very astute on the subject of boredom. He understood “the curious fact that those who do not bore themselves usually bore others, while those who bore themselves entertain others.” He also understood that boredom could be far more than a passing mood of nameless dissatisfaction. In Kierkegaard’s view, boredom is essentially a spiritual malaise, endemic wherever a purely naturalistic conception of man holds sway. Hence he defines boredom as “the daemonic side of pantheism.” It is the dark side of a life devoted to amusement and pleasure. What happens when amusement palls and pleasure fails to please? Boredom yawns before one, a paralyzing abyss. (Compare Tolstoy’s definition of boredom as “the desire for desires.”) It is part of Kierkegaard’s task to show that boredom can only be defeated by moving beyond what he calls the “aesthetic” conception of life, a mode of life unleavened by moral or religious engagement. Hegel, Kierkegaard wrote, was like a man who had built a palace (the great Hegelian System) but lived in the guard house (ordinary life with its slings and arrows). Kierkegaard expended a lot of ink, especially in his journals but also in some published works, explaining what he had attempted to accomplish as a writer.
(The Point of View for My Work as an Author, written in 1848 but published posthumously, is devoted to nothing else.) In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, the pseudonymous Johannes Climacus (drawing heavily on one of Kierkegaard’s own journal entries) recalls how he resolved to become an author one Sunday while strolling in the Fredericksberg Gardens in Copenhagen:
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I sat and smoked my cigar until I lapsed into thought. . . . “You are going on,” I said to myself, “to become an old man, without being anything and without really undertaking to do anything. . . . [W]herever you look about you . . . you see the many benefactors of the age who know how to benefit mankind by making life easier and easier, some by railways, others by omnibuses and steamboats, others by the telegraph, others by easily apprehended compendiums and short recitals of everything worth knowing, and finally the true benefactors of the age who make spiritual existence in virtue of thought easier and easier, yet more and more significant. And what are you doing?” . . . [S]uddenly this thought flashed through my mind: “You must do something, but inasmuch as with your limited capacities it will be impossible to make anything easier than it has become, you must . . . undertake to make something harder.” This notion pleased me immensely. . . . I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere.
That sudden reversal, that ambition “to create difficulties everywhere,” is vintage Kierkegaard. It also shows the extent to which Kierkegaard modelled his activities on one of his culture heroes, Socrates. (Not for nothing was Kierkegaard’s M.A. thesis called The Concept of Irony: With Constant Reference to Socrates.) In The Apology, Socrates described himself as the gadfly of Athens. His task was to sting the consciences of his interlocutors, persuading them that their chief concern ought to be not for their bodies or possessions “but for the highest welfare of their souls.” Like Socrates, Kierkegaard set about using humor, learning, satire, homiletics—the full arsenal of his rhetoric—to sting the consciences of his fellow denizens of Copenhagen. Just as Socrates gave up reading the scientific works of Anaxagoras because they told him nothing about the fundamental ethical reality of man, so Kierkegaard repudiated the rationalism of his culture, insisting that “the real subject is not the cognitive subject . . . [but] the ethically existing subject.” In this sense, as the philosopher William Barrett has noted, Kierkegaard's motivation was essentially religious, not philosophical. “He never aimed at being a philosopher and all his philosophy was indeed incidental to his main purpose, to show what it means to be a Christian.” In Irrational Man (1958), his book about existentialism, Barrett began a sympathetic essay on Kierkegaard with this passage from the Journals: “It was intelligence and nothing else that had to be opposed. Presumably that is why I, who had the job, was armed with an immense intelligence.” Using intelligence to battle overweening intelligence: that was how Kierkegaard understood his task. From one point of view this represented a mortification of the intellect. Kierkegaard clearly placed himself in the (heterodox) tradition of credo quia absurdum: “I believe because it is absurd.” Is this excessively hard on reason? I think it is. But if Kierkegaard was right that “paradox” is “the source of the thinker's passion” and the supreme paradox “is the attempt to discover something thought cannot think” (two large ifs, admittedly), then his entire campaign can be understood as a vindication of the intellect in its highest vocation--in Kierkegaard's eyes, to serve the dictates of a faith not only beyond but also hostile to reason. Given Kierkegaard’s emphasis on decision, passion, and the individual, it is not surprising that his own formative decisions— the determining passions of his life, his contests to salvage individuality—should have stamped themselves so thoroughly on his work. To an unusual extent, Kierkegaard’s biography is implicated in his teaching. It’s a story that has been told many times. The first biography in English (1938) was by the indefatigable Walter Lowrie, the pious gent who was smitten by Kierkegaard, translated or helped translate many of his works, and introduced him to an English-speaking audience. Since then Kierkegaard has developed from a cottage industry into a huge academic enterprise. More biographies, translations galore, studies beyond number. In a review of a selection from Kierkegaard’s journals in 1966, John Updike wondered whether “the United States needs still more translations of
Kierkegaard.” But this was avant le déluge. Within a few years, Princeton had published English translations of most of his works. Then Howard and Edna Hong came along and proceeded to retranslate everything into
academese, replete with notes—hundreds, in some cases thousands of them—scholarly commentaries and page references to the Danish edition. The seven fat volumes of Kierkegaard’s Journals are impressive and useful. But Kierkegaard’s
Edifying Discourses became the barbarous Upbuilding Discourses (just in case anyone missed the hint of “edifice” in “edification”), a book on “Experimental Psychology” became a book about “Experimenting Psychology,” etc. Curiously, the title Philosophical Fragments was retained, even though Smuler means “scraps” or “crumbs,” not “fragments.” How Kierkegaard would have savored it all! “And when I am dead,” he wrote in 1854, “how busy all the assistant professors will be stripping me and mine, what competition to say the same thing, if possible, in more beautiful language.” Whatever Kierkegaard did, it allowed him the luxury of guilt. Even “a whole life devoted to God,” he wrote in his journal in 1839, would “hardly suffice to atone for my youthful excesses.” Kierkegaard was no easier on his father than on himself. In what is perhaps the last journal entry he made, in September 1855, he wrote that he came into the world through a “crime” and “against God’s will” and that his punishment was to have lived “bereft of all lust for life.” Isn’t this carrying things a little too far? Yes. But Kierkegaard carried everything too far. In part, one suspects, it was for effect. In an early journal entry, he wrote about having been at a friend’s where he was the life and soul of the party: “Everyone laughed and admired me—but I left, yes, that dash should be as long as the radii of the earth’s orbit—and I wanted to shoot myself.” As W. H. Auden noted in the first of his two essays on Kierkegaard, “occasionally . . . [he] carried on like a spiritual prima donna.” The real question is whether Kierkegaard ever climbed off stage, out of the limelight. In 1837, when he was twenty-four, Kierkegaard met and soon fell in love with Regine Olsen, then fourteen. They were engaged in 1840. The very next day, Kierkegaard wrote in his journal in 1849, he saw that he had made a dreadful mistake. He tortured himself, and
Regine, too, presumably, for over a year. Then he definitively broke the engagement, sending back her ring with this letter: Kierkegaard must have thought well of this note. He not only inscribed a copy in his journal but also published it verbatim in his book
Stages on Life’s Way (1845). In a letter to a friend, Kierkegaard wrote that “I do not turn her into poetry . . . I call myself to account.” One wonders. Those are not mutually incompatible activities. Indeed, given Kierkegaard’s insatiable appetite for self-scrutiny, not to say melodrama, one might say that he could find no more effective way of turning Regine into “poetry,” into an occasion for reflection, than by “calling himself to account.” I suspect she was right when she charged (as Kierkegaard reports): “So you have been playing a dreadful game with me.”
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As Hannay comments, “far from escaping the thought of marriage, marriage was now something he could think rather than endure.” And think it he did. Over the next several years, Kierkegaard proceeded to devote hundreds if not thousands of pages to showing how marriage is (as he put in the second volume of
Either/Or) “the most profound form of the revelation of life.” He regularly declared that “If I had had faith I would have stayed with
Regine,” and then enumerated all the reasons it was impossible. Kierkegaard later said it was due to
Regine, melancholy, and his money that he became a writer. That is probably true. Before the break with
Regine, he had written only an academic thesis and a few pamphlets (including, in 1838, a critical essay about his slightly older contemporary, Hans Christian Andersen).
Regine—the idea of Regine—made Kierkegaard into Kierkegaard. But where did that leave
Regine?
Primarily, it left her as a figment of Kierkegaard’s imagination. She was elevated from being a woman to the post of inaccessible muse. In
Repetition (1843), Kierkegaard portrayed a young man who thinks he is in love, but really is only in love with the idea of being in love. The girl is merely “the occasion that awakened the poetic in him.” So it was with Kierkegaard himself. Just as Abraham had to sacrifice Isaac because of God’s commandment, so he, Søren Aabye
Kierkegaard, had to give up Regine—because of his “melancholy,” because he was an exceptional, God-touched individual, maybe because he had visited a prostitute when he was twenty. Fortunately,
Regine, after a bad patch, recovered herself, got engaged to someone with more red corpuscles than
Kierkegaard, and was happily married. It seems pretty clear that Kierkegaard never really forgave her for that “betrayal.” The whole secret lies in arbitrariness. People usually think it is easy to be arbitrary, but it requires much study to succeed in being arbitrary so as not to lose oneself in it, but so as to derive satisfaction from it. One does not enjoy the immediate but something quite different which he arbitrarily imports into it. You go to see the middle of a play, you read the third part of a book. . . . By this means you insure yourself a very different kind of enjoyment from that which the author has been so kind as to plan for you. You enjoy something entirely accidental; you consider the whole of existence from this standpoint; let its reality be stranded thereon. . . . You transform something accidental into the absolute. Kierkegaard was always going on about the “really existing individual.” But his self-obsession, his addiction to the aesthetic mode of existence, prevented him from practicing what he preached. He lacked, as he noted in an early journal entry, “indicative power.” From one point of view, the spectacle Kierkegaard presents is tragic; his really was a blighted, supremely unhappy life. From another perspective, the spectacle he presents is comic in precisely the sense that he says Hegel’s philosophy is comic: the disproportion between theory and reality is absolute. Kierkegaard was wont to see the chief difference between himself and Socrates as the difference between the pagan and the Christian worlds. There is that. But there is also the difference that Socrates set about his task with unfailing good humor while Kierkegaard was a model of anguish. Socrates spent his final hours in prison telling his friends to buck up. Kierkegaard wrote books with titles like
The Concept of Dread and The Sickness Unto Death and spent his last months hectoring bishops in the established church of Denmark, telling them and their congregations that they were inadequate Christians. It is significant that there are about twice as many pages devoted to “suffering” in the English translation of Kierkegaard’s Journals than to any other subject. Like the original Melancholy Dane, Kierkegaard accepted his task, but gloomily: “The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite/ That ever I was born to set it right.” Like Pascal, Nietzsche, and Simone Weil, Kierkegaard is one of those writers whom it is very difficult to estimate justly. When one reads them for the first time, one is bowled over by their originality . . . and by the sharpness of their insights. . . . But with successive readings one’s doubts grow, one begins to react against their overemphasis on one aspect of the truth at the expense of all the others, and one’s first enthusiasm may all too easily turn to an equally exaggerated aversion. Of all such writers, one might say that one cannot imagine them as children. The more we read them, the more we become aware that something has gone badly wrong with their affective life; . . . it is not only impossible to imagine one of them as a happy husband or wife, it is impossible to imagine their having a single intimate friend to whom they could open their hearts. There is, Auden went on to observe, something of the Manichee about
Kierkegaard: not intellectually but in feeling, in sensibility. “Though he would never have . . . asserted that matter was created by an Evil Spirit, one does not feel in his writings the sense that, whatever sorrows and sufferings a man may have to endure, it is nevertheless a miraculous blessing to be alive.” God made the world and saw that it was good: that is an element of orthodox teaching that is conspicuously downplayed in Kierkegaard’s thought. Indeed, by the end of his life, in his attack upon what he contemptuously called “Christendom,” Kierkegaard veered perilously close to world-denying religious fanaticism. “To love God,” he wrote in 1854, “is impossible without hating what is human.” A gentler—one might say “more Christian”—form of Christianity teaches that by loving what is human one does honor to God.
Notes: Kierkegaard: A Biography, by Alastair Hannay; Cambridge UP. From The New Criterion ------------------------------- Back to EFPLFP Philosophy Pages
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