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1. Kierkegaard's Life
Kierkegaard led a somewhat uneventful life. He rarely left
his hometown of Copenhagen, and travelled abroad only three
times -- to Berlin. His prime recreational activities were
attending the theatre, walking the streets of Copenhagen to chat
with ordinary people, and taking brief carriage jaunts into the
surrounding countryside. He was educated at a prestigious boys'
school (Borgedydskolen), then attended Copenhagen
University where he studied philosophy and theology. His
teachers at the university included F.C. Sibbern, Poul Martin
Møller, and H.L. Martensen.
Sibbern and Møller were both philosophers who also wrote
fiction. The latter in particular had a great influence on
Kierkegaard's philosophico-literary development. Martensen also
had a profound effect on Kierkegaard, but largely in a negative
manner. Martensen was a champion of Hegelianism, and when he
became Bishop Primate of the Danish People's Church, Kierkegaard
published a vitriolic attack on Martensen's theological views.
Kierkegaard's brother Peter, on the other hand, was an adherent
of Martensen and himself became a bishop in the church.
Another very important figure in Kierkegaard's life was J.L.
Heiberg, the doyen of Copenhagen's literati. Heiberg, more than
any other person, was responsible for introducing Hegelianism
into Denmark. Kierkegaard spent a good deal of energy trying to
break into the Heiberg literary circle, but desisted once he had
found his own voice in The Concept of Irony.
Kierkegaard's first major publication, From the Papers of
One Still Living, is largely an attempt to articulate a
Heibergian aesthetics - which is a modified version of Hegel's
aesthetics. In From the Papers of One Still Living,
which is a critical review of Hans Christian Andersen's novel Only
A Fiddler, Kierkegaard attacks Andersen for lacking
life-development (Livs-Udvikling) and a life-view (Livs-Anskuelse)
both of which Kierkegaard deemed necessary for someone to be a
genuine novelist (Romandigter).
Kierkegaard's life is more relevant to his work than is the
case for many writers. Much of the thrust of his critique of
Hegelianism is that its system of thought is abstracted from the
everyday lives of its proponents. This existential critique
consists in demonstrating how the life and work of a philosopher
contradict one another. Kierkegaard derived this form of
critique from the Greek notion of judging philosophers by their
lives rather than simply by their intellectual artefacts. The
Christian ideal, according to Kierkegaard, is even more exacting
since the totality of an individual's existence is the artefact
on the basis of which s/he is judged by God for h/er eternal
validity. Of course a writer's work is an important part of h/er
existence, but for the purpose of judgement we should focus on
the whole life not just on one part.
In a less abstract manner, an understanding of Kierkegaard's
biography is important for an understanding of his writing
because his life was the source of many of the preoccupations
and repetitions within his oeuvre. Because of his
existentialist orientation, most of his interventions in
contemporary theory do double duty as means of working through
events from his own life. In particular Kierkegaard's relations
to his mother, his father, and his fiancée Regine Olsen pervade
his work.
Kierkegaard's relation to his mother is the least frequently
commented upon since it is invisible in his work. His mother
does not rate a direct mention in his published works, or in his
diaries -- not even on the day she died. However, for a writer
who places so much emphasis on indirect communication, and on
the semiotics of invisibility, we should regard this absence as
significant. Johannes Climacus in Concluding Unscientific
Postscript remarks, "... how deceptive then, that an
omnipresent being should be recognisable precisely by being
invisible." Kierkegaard's mother, who was not well educated,
is represented in his writings by the mother-tongue (Danish).
Kierkegaard was deeply enamoured of the Danish language and
worked throughout his writings to assert the strengths of his
mother-tongue over the invasive, imperialistic influences of
Latin and German. With respect to the former, Kierkegaard had to
petition the king to be allowed to write his philosophy
dissertation On the Concept of Irony with constant reference
to Socrates in Danish. Even though permission was granted
he was still required to defend his dissertation publicly in
Latin. Latin had been the pan-European language of science and
scholarship. In Denmark, in Kierkegaard's time, German language
and culture were at least as dominant as Latin in the production
of knowledge. In defiance of this, Kierkegaard revelled in his
mother-tongue and created some of the most beautifully poetic
prose in the Danish language -- including a paeon to his
mother-tongue in Stages On Life's Way. In Repetition
Constantin Constantius congratulates the Danish language on
providing the word for an important new philosophical concept,
viz. Gjentagelse (repetition), to replace the foreign
word "mediation". In general, the Danish language is
Kierkegaard's umbilical attachment to the mother whereas Latin
and German represent the law of the father, especially when
employed in systematic scholarship (Videnskab).
The influence of Kierkegaard's father on his work has been
frequently noted. Not only did Kierkegaard inherit his father's
melancholy, his sense of guilt and anxiety, and his pietistic
emphasis on the dour aspects of Christian faith, but he also
inherited his talents for philosophical argument and creative
imagination. In addition Kierkegaard inherited enough of his
father's wealth to allow him to pursue his life as a freelance
writer. The themes of sacrificial father/son relationships, of
inherited sin, of the burden of history, and of the centrality
of the "individual, human existence relationship, the old
text, well known, handed down from the fathers" (Postscript)
are repeated many times in Kierkegaard's oeuvre. The father's
sense of guilt was so great (for having cursed God? for having
impregnated Kierkegaard's mother out of wedlock?) that he
thought God would punish him by taking the lives of all seven of
his children before they reached the age of 34 (the age of Jesus
Christ at his crucifixion). This was born out for all but two of
the children, Søren and his older brother Peter, both of whom
were astonished to survive beyond that age. This may explain the
sense of urgency that drove Kierkegaard to write so prolifically
in the years leading up to his 34th birthday.
Kierkegaard's (broken) engagement to Regine Olsen has also
been the focus of much scholarly attention. The theme of a young
woman being the occasion for a young man to become "poeticized"
recurs in Kierkegaard's writings, as does the theme of the
sacrifice of worldly happiness for a higher (religious) purpose.
Kierkegaard's infatuation with Regine, and the sublimated
libidinal energy it lent to his poetic production, were crucial
for setting his life course. The breaking of the engagement
allowed Kierkegaard to devote himself monastically to his
religious purpose, as well as to establish his outsider status (outside
the norm of married bourgeois life). It also freed him from
close personal entanglements with women, thereby leading him to
objectify them as ideal creatures, and to reproduce the
patriarchal values of his church and father.
2. Kierkegaard's Rhetoric
Kierkegaard's central problematic was how to become a
Christian in Christendom. The task was most difficult for
the well-educated, since prevailing educational and cultural
institutions tended to produce stereotyped members of "the
crowd" rather than to allow individuals to discover their
own unique identities. This problem was compounded by the fact
that Denmark had recently and very rapidly been transformed from
a feudal society into a capitalist society. Universal elementary
education, large-scale migration from rural areas into cities,
and greatly increased social mobility meant that the social
structure changed from a rigidly hierarchical one to a
relatively "horizontal" one. In this context it became
increasingly difficult to "become who you are" for two
reasons: (i) social identities were unusually fluid; and (ii)
there was a proliferation of normalizing institutions which
produced pseudo-individuals.
Given this problematic in this social context Kierkegaard
perceived a need to invent a form of communication which would
not produce stereotyped identities. On the contrary, he needed a
form of rhetoric which would force people back onto their own
resources, to take responsibility for their own existential
choices, and to become who they are beyond their socially
imposed identities. In this undertaking Kierkegaard was inspired
by the figure of Socrates, whose incessant irony undermined all
knowledge claims that were taken for granted or unreflectively
inherited from traditional culture. In his dissertation On
the Concept of Irony with constant reference to Socrates
Kierkegaard argued that the historical Socrates used his irony
in order to facilitate the birth of subjectivity in his
interlocutors. Because they were constantly forced to abandon
their pat answers to Socrates' annoying questions, they had to
begin to think for themselves and to take individual
responsibility for their claims about knowledge and value.
Kierkegaard sought to provide a similar service for his own
contemporaries. He used irony, parody, satire, humor, and
deconstructive techniques in order to make conventionally
accepted forms of knowledge and value untenable. He was a gadfly
-- constantly irritating his contemporaries with discomforting
thoughts. He was also a midwife -- assisting at the birth of
individual subjectivity by forcing his contemporaries to think
for themselves. His art of communication became "the art of
taking away" since he thought his audience
suffered from too much knowledge rather than too little.
Hegelianism promised to make absolute knowledge available by
virtue of a science of logic. Anyone with the capacity to follow
the dialectical progression of the purportedly transparent
concepts of Hegel's logic would have access to the mind of God (which
for Hegel was equivalent to the logical structure of the
universe). Kierkegaard thought this to be the hubristic attempt
to build a new tower of Babel, or a scala paradisi -- a
dialectical ladder by which humans can climb with ease up to
heaven. Kierkegaard's strategy was to invert this dialectic by
seeking to make everything more difficult. Instead of seeing
scientific knowledge as the means of human redemption, he
regarded it as the greatest obstacle to redemption. Instead of
seeking to give people more knowledge he sought to take away
what passed for knowledge. Instead of seeking to make God and
Christian faith perfectly intelligible he sought to emphasize
the absolute transcendence by God of all human categories.
Instead of setting himself up as a religious authority,
Kierkegaard used a vast array of textual devices to undermine
his authority as an author and to place responsibility for the
existential significance to be derived from his texts squarely
on the reader.
Kierkegaard distanced himself from his texts by a variety of
devices which served to problematize the authorial voice for the
reader. He used pseudonyms in many of his works (both overtly
aesthetic ones and overtly religious ones). He partitioned the
texts into prefaces, forewords, interludes, postscripts,
appendices. He assigned the "authorship" of parts of
texts to different pseudonyms, and invented further pseudonyms
to be the editors or compilers of these pseudonymous writings.
Sometimes Kierkegaard appended his name as author, sometimes as
the person responsible for publication, sometimes not at all.
Sometimes Kierkegaard would publish more than one book on the
same day. These simultaneous books embodied strikingly
contrasting perspectives. He also published whole series
of works simultaneously, viz. the pseudonymous works on the one
hand and on the other hand the Edifying Discourses
published under his own name.
All of this play with narrative point of view, with
contrasting works, and with contrasting internal partitions
within individual works leaves the reader very disoriented. In
combination with the incessant play of irony and Kierkegaard's
predilection for paradox and semantic opacity, the text becomes
a polished surface for the reader in which the prime meaning to
be discerned is the reader's own reflection. Christian faith,
for Kierkegaard, is not a matter of learning dogma by rote. It
is a matter of the individual repeatedly renewing h/er
passionate subjective relationship to an object which can never
be known, but only believed in. This belief is offensive to
reason, since it only exists in the face of the absurd (the
paradox of the eternal, immortal, infinite God being incarnated
in time as a finite mortal).
Kierkegaard's "method of indirect communication"
was designed to sever the reliance of the reader on the
authority of the author and on the received wisdom of the
community. The reader was to be forced to take individual
responsibility for knowing who s/he is and for knowing where s/he
stands on the existential, ethical and religious issues raised
in the texts.
Kierkegaard's "inverted Christian dialectic" was
designed not to make the word of God easier to assimilate, but
to establish more clearly the absolute distance that separates
human beings from God. This was in order to emphasize that human
beings are absolutely reliant on God's grace for salvation.
3. Kierkegaard's Aesthetics
Kierkegaard presents his pseudonymous authorship as a
dialectical progression of existential stages. The first is the
aesthetic, which gives way to the ethical, which gives way to
the religious. The aesthetic stage of existence is characterized
by the following: immersion in sensuous experience; valorization
of possibility over actuality; egotism; fragmentation of the
subject of experience; nihilistic wielding of irony and
scepticism; and flight from boredom.
The figure of the aesthete in the first volume of Either-Or
is an ironic portrayal of German romanticism, but it also draws
on medieval characters as diverse as Don Juan, Ahasverus (the
wandering Jew), and Faust. It finds its most sophisticated form
in the author of "The Seducer's Diary", the final
section of Either-Or. Johannes the seducer is a reflective
aesthete, who gains sensuous delight not so much from the
act of seduction but from engineering the possibility of
seduction. His real aim is the manipulation of people and
situations in ways which generate interesting reflections in his
own voyeuristic mind. The aesthetic perspective transforms
quotidian dullness into a richly poetic world by whatever means
it can. Sometimes the reflective aesthete will inject interest
into a book by reading only the last third, or into a
conversation by provoking a bore into an apoplectic fit so that
he can see a bead of sweat form between the bore's eyes and run
down his nose. That is, the aesthete uses artifice,
arbitrariness, irony, and wilful imagination to recreate the
world in his own image. The prime motivation for the aesthete is
the transformation of the boring into the interesting.
This type of aestheticism is criticized from the point of
view of ethics. It is seen to be emptily self-serving and
escapist. It is a despairing means of avoiding commitment and
responsibility. It fails to acknowledge one's social debt and
communal existence. And it is self-deceiving insofar as it
substitutes fantasies for actual states of affairs.
But Kierkegaard did not want to abandon aesthetics altogether
in favor of the ethical and the religious. A key concept in the
Hegelian dialectic, which Kierkegaard's pseudonymous authorship
parodies, is Aufhebung (sublation). In Hegel's
dialectic, when contradictory positions are reconciled in a
higher unity (synthesis) they are both annulled and preserved (aufgehoben).
Similarly with Kierkegaard's pseudo-dialectic: the aesthetic and
the ethical are both annulled and preserved in their synthesis
in the religious stage. As far as the aesthetic stage of
existence is concerned what is preserved in the higher religious
stage is the sense of infinite possibility made available
through the imagination. But this no longer excludes what is
actual. Nor is it employed for egotistic ends. Aesthetic irony
is transformed into religious humor, and the aesthetic transfiguration
of the actual world into the ideal is transformed into the
religious transubstantiation of the finite world into
an actual reconciliation with the infinite.
But the dialectic of the pseudonymous authorship never quite
reaches the truly religious. We stop short at the representation
of the religious by a self-confessed humorist (Johannes Climacus)
in a medium which, according to Climacus's own account,
necessarily alienates the reader from true (Christian) faith.
For faith is a matter of lived experience, of constant striving
within an individual's existence. According to Climacus's
metaphysics, the world is divided dualistically into the actual
and the ideal. Language (and all other media of representation)
belong to the realm of the ideal. No matter how eloquent or
evocative language is it can never be the actual.
Therefore, any representation of faith is always suspended in
the realm of ideality and can never be actual faith.
So the whole dialectic of the pseudonymous authorship is
recuperated by the aesthetic by virtue of its medium of
representation. In fact Johannes Climacus acknowledges this
implicitly when at the end of Concluding Unscientific
Postscript he revokes everything he has said, with
the important rider that to say something then to revoke it is
not the same as never having said it in the first place. His
presentation of religious faith in an aesthetic medium at least
provides an opportunity for his readers to make their own leap
of faith, by appropriating with inward passion the paradoxical
religion of Christianity into their own lives.
As a poet of the religious Kierkegaard was always preoccupied
with aesthetics. In fact, contrary to popular misconceptions of
Kierkegaard which represent him as becoming increasingly hostile
to poetry, he referred increasingly to himself as a poet in his
later years (all but one of over ninety references to himself as
a poet in his journals date from after 1847). Kierkegaard never
claimed to write with religious authority, as an apostle. His
works represent both less religiously enlightened and more
religiously enlightened positions than he thought he had
attained in his own existence. Such representations were only
possible in an aesthetic medium of imagined possibilities like
poetry.
4. Kierkegaard's Ethics
Like the terms "aesthetic" and
"religious", the term "ethics" in
Kierkegaard's work has more than one meaning. It is used to
denote both: (i) a limited existential sphere, or stage, which
is superseded by the higher stage of the religious life; and
(ii) an aspect of life which is retained even within the
religious life. In the first sense "ethics" is
synonymous with the Hegelian notion of Sittlichkeit, or
customary mores. In this sense "ethics" represents
"the universal", or more accurately the prevailing
social norms. The social norms are seen to be the highest court
of appeal for judging human affairs -- nothing outranks them for
this sort of ethicist. Even human sacrifice is justified in
terms of how it serves the community, so that when Agamemnon
sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia he is regarded as a tragic
hero since the sacrifice is required for the success of the
Greek expedition to Troy (Fear and Trembling).
Kierkegaard, however, does recognize duties to a power higher
than social norms. Much of Fear and Trembling turns on
the notion that Abraham's would-be sacrifice of his son Isaac is
not for the sake of social norms, but is the result of a
"teleological suspension of the ethical". That is,
Abraham recognizes a duty to something higher than both his
social duty not to kill an innocent person and his personal
commitment to his beloved son, viz. his duty to obey God's
commands.
But in order to arrive at a position of religious faith,
which might entail a "teleological suspension of the
ethical", the individual must first embrace the ethical (in
the first sense). In order to raise oneself beyond the merely
aesthetic life, which is a life of drifting in imagination,
possibility and sensation, one needs to make a commitment. That
is, the aesthete needs to choose the ethical, which entails a
commitment to communication and decision procedures.
The ethical position advocated by Judge Wilhelm in
"Equilibrium Between the Aesthetic and the Ethical in the
Composition of Personality" (Either-Or II) is a
peculiar mix of cognitivism and noncognitivism. The metaethics
or normative ethics are cognitivist, laying down various
necessary conditions for ethically correct action. These
conditions include: the necessity of choosing seriously and
inwardly; commitment to the belief that predications of good and
evil of our actions have a truth-value; the necessity of
choosing what one is actually doing, rather than just responding
to a situation; actions are to be in accordance with rules; and
these rules are universally applicable to moral agents.
The choice of metaethics, however, is noncognitive. There is
no adequate proof of the truth of metaethics. The choice of
normative ethics is motivated, but in a noncognitive way. The
Judge seeks to motivate the choice of his normative ethics
through the avoidance of despair. Here despair (Fortvivlelse)
is to let one's life depend on conditions outside one's control
(and later, more radically, despair is the very possibility of
despair in this first sense). For Judge Wilhelm, the choice of
normative ethics is a noncognitive choice of cognitivism, and
thereby an acceptance of the applicability of the conceptual
distinction between good and evil.
From Kierkegaard's religious perspective, however, the
conceptual distinction between good and evil is ultimately
dependent not on social norms but on God. Therefore it is
possible, as Johannes de Silentio argues was the case for
Abraham (the father of faith), that God demand a suspension of
the ethical (in the sense of the socially prescribed norms).
This is still ethical in the second sense, since ultimately
God's definition of the distinction between good and evil
outranks any human society's definition. The requirement of
communicability and clear decision procedures can also be
suspended by God's fiat. This renders cases such as Abraham's
extremely problematic, since we have no recourse to public
reason to decide whether he is legitimately obeying God's
command or whether he is a deluded would-be murderer. Since
public reason cannot decide the issue for us, we must decide for
ourselves as a matter of religious faith.
5. Kierkegaard's Religion
Kierkegaard styled himself above all as a religious poet. The
religion to which he sought to relate his readers is
Christianity. The type of Christianity that underlies his
writings is a very serious strain of Lutheran pietism informed
by the dour values of sin, guilt, suffering, and individual
responsibility. Kierkegaard was immersed in these values in the
family home through his father, whose own childhood was lived in
the shadow of the severe Indre Mission (Inner Mission)
-- a pietistic cult from Jutland. Kierkegaard's father
subsequently became a member of the Moravian Brethren
congregation in Copenhagen.
For Kierkegaard Christian faith is not a matter of
regurgitating church dogma. It is a matter of individual
subjective passion, which cannot be mediated by the clergy or by
human artefacts. Faith is the most important task to be achieved
by a human being, because only on the basis of faith does an
individual have a chance to become a true self. This self is the
life-work which God judges for eternity.
The individual is thereby subject to an enormous burden of
responsibility, for upon h/er existential choices hangs h/er
eternal salvation or damnation. Anxiety or dread (Angest)
is the presentiment of this terrible responsibility when the
individual stands at the threshold of momentous existential
choice. Anxiety is a two-sided emotion: on one side is the dread
burden of choosing for eternity; on the other side is the
exhilaration of freedom in choosing oneself. Choice occurs in
the instant (Øjeblikket), which is the point at which
time and eternity intersect -- for the individual creates
through temporal choice a self which will be judged for
eternity.
But the choice of faith is not made once and for all. It is
essential that faith be constantly renewed by means of repeated
avowals of faith. One's very selfhood depends upon this
repetition, for according to Anti-Climacus, the self "is a
relation which relates itself to itself" (The Sickness
Unto Death). But unless this self acknowledges a
"power which constituted it," it falls into a despair
which undoes its selfhood. Therefore, in order to maintain
itself as a relation which relates itself to itself, the self
must constantly renew its faith in "the power which posited
it." There is no mediation between the individual
self and God by priest or by logical system (contra
Catholicism and Hegelianism respectively). There is only the
individual's own repetition of faith. This repetition
of faith is the way the self relates itself to itself and to the
power which constituted it, i.e. the repetition of faith is
the self.
Christian dogma, according to Kierkegaard, embodies paradoxes
which are offensive to reason. The central paradox is the
assertion that the eternal, infinite, transcendent God
simultaneously became incarnated as a temporal, finite, human
being (Jesus). There are two possible attitudes we can adopt to
this assertion, viz. we can have faith, or we can take offense.
What we cannot do, according to Kierkegaard, is believe by
virtue of reason. If we choose faith we must suspend our reason
in order to believe in something higher than reason. In fact we
must believe by virtue of the absurd.
Much of Kierkegaard's authorship explores the notion of the
absurd: Job gets everything back again by virtue of the absurd (Repetition);
Abraham gets a reprieve from having to sacrifice Isaac, by
virtue of the absurd (Fear and Trembling); Kierkegaard
hoped to get Regine back again after breaking off their
engagement, by virtue of the absurd (Journals);
Climacus hopes to deceive readers into the truth of Christianity
by virtue of an absurd representation of Christianity's
ineffability; the Christian God is represented as absolutely
transcendent of human categories yet is absurdly presented as a
personal God with the human capacities to love, judge, forgive,
teach, etc. Kierkegaard's notion of the absurd subsequently
became an important category for twentieth century
existentialists, though usually devoid of its religious
associations.
According to Johannes Climacus, faith is a miracle, a gift
from God whereby eternal truth enters time in the instant. This
Christian conception of the relation between (eternal) truth and
time is distinct from the Socratic notion that (eternal) truth
is always already within us -- it just needs to be recovered by
means of recollection (anamnesis). The condition for
realizing (eternal) truth for the Christian is a gift (Gave)
from God, but its realization is a task (Opgave) which
must be repeatedly performed by the individual believer. Whereas
Socratic recollection is a recuperation of the past, Christian
repetition is a "recollection forwards" -- so that the
eternal (future) truth is captured in time.
Crucial to the miracle of Christian faith is the realization
that over against God we are always in the wrong. That is, we
must realize that we are always in sin. This is the condition
for faith, and must be given by God. The idea of sin cannot
evolve from purely human origins. Rather, it must have been
introduced into the world from a transcendent source. Once we
understand that we are in sin, we can understand that there is
some being over against which we are always in the wrong. On
this basis we can have faith that, by virtue of the absurd, we
can ultimately be atoned with this being.
6. Kierkegaard's Politics
Kierkegaard is sometimes regarded as an apolitical thinker,
but in fact he intervened stridently in church politics,
cultural politics, and in the turbulent social changes of his
time. His earliest published essay, for example, was a polemic
against women's liberation. It is a reactionary apologetic for
the prevailing patriarchal values, and was motivated largely by
Kierkegaard's desire to ingratiate himself with factions within
Copenhagen's intellectual circles. This latter desire gradually
left him, but his relation to women remained highly
questionable.
One of Kierkegaard's main interventions in cultural politics
was his sustained attack on Hegelianism. Hegel's philosophy had
been introduced into Denmark with religious zeal by J.L.
Heiberg, and was taken up enthusiastically within the theology
faculty of Copenhagen University and by Copenhagen's literati.
Kierkegaard, too, was induced to make a serious study of Hegel's
work. While Kierkegaard greatly admired Hegel, he had grave
reservations about Hegelianism and its bombastic promises. Hegel
would have been the greatest thinker who ever lived, said
Kierkegaard, if only he had regarded his system as a
thought-experiment. Instead he took himself seriously to have
reached the truth, and so rendered himself comical.
Kierkegaard's tactic in undermining Hegelianism was to
produce an elaborate parody of Hegel's entire system. The
pseudonymous authorship, from Either-Or to Concluding
Unscientific Postscript, presents an inverted Hegelian
dialectic which is designed to lead readers away from knowledge
rather than towards it. This authorship simultaneously snipes at
German romanticism and contemporary Danish literati (with J.L.
Heiberg receiving much acerbic comment).
This intriguing pseudonymous authorship received little
popular attention, aimed as it was at the literary elite. So it
had little immediate effect as discursive action. Kierkegaard
sought to remedy this by provoking an attack on himself in the
popular satirical review The Corsair. Kierkegaard
succeeded in having himself mercilessly lampooned in this
publication, largely on personal grounds rather than in terms of
the substance of his writings. The suffering incurred by these
attacks sparked Kierkegaard into another highly productive phase
of authorship, but this time his focus was the creation of
positive Christian discourses rather than satire or parody.
Eventually Kierkegaard became more and more worried about the
direction taken by the Danish People's Church, especially after
the death of the Bishop Primate J.P. Mynster. He realized he
could no longer indulge himself in the painstakingly erudite and
poetically meticulous writing he had practised hitherto. He had
to intervene decisively in a popular medium, so he published his
own pamphlet under the title The Instant. This
addressed church politics directly and increasingly shrilly.
There were two main foci of Kierkegaard's concern in church
politics. One was the influence of Hegel, largely through the
teachings of H.L. Martensen; the other was the popularity of
N.F.S. Grundtvig, a theologian, educator and poet who composed
most of the pieces in the Danish hymn book. Grundtvig's theology
was diametrically opposed to Kierkegaard's in tone. Grundtvig
emphasized the light, joyous, celebratory and communal aspects
of Christianity, whereas Kierkegaard emphasized seriousness,
suffering, sin, guilt, and individual isolation. Kierkegaard's
intervention failed miserably with respect to the Danish
People's Church, which became predominantly Grundtvigian. His
intervention with respect to Hegelianism also failed, with
Martensen succeeding Mynster as Bishop Primate. Hegelianism in
the church went on to die of natural causes.
Kierkegaard also provided critical commentary on social
change. He was an untiring champion of "the single
individual" as opposed to "the crowd". He feared
that the opportunity of achieving geniune selfhood was
diminished by the social production of stereotypes. He lived in
an age when mass society was emerging from a highly stratified
feudal order and was contemptuous of the mediocrity the new
social order generated. One symptom of the change was that mass
society substitutes detached reflection for engaged passionate
commitment. Yet the latter is crucial for Christian faith and
for authentic selfhood according to Kierkegaard.
Kierkegaard's real value as a social and political thinker
was not realized until after his death. His pamphleteering
achieved little immediate impact, but his substantial
philosophical, literary, psychological and theological writings
have had a lasting effect. Much of Heidegger's very influential
work, Being And Time, is indebted to Kierkegaard's
writings (though this goes unacknowledged by Heidegger).
Kierkegaard's social realism, his deep psychological and
philosophical analyses of contemporary problems, and his concern
to address "the present age" were taken up by fellow
Scandinavians Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg. Ibsen and
Strindberg, together with Friedrich Nietzsche, became central
icons of the modernism movement in Berlin in the 1890s. The
Danish literary critic Georg Brandes was instrumental in
conjoining these intellectual figures: he had given the first
university lectures on Kierkegaard and on Nietzsche; he had
promoted Kierkegaard's work to Nietzsche and to Strindberg; and
he had put Strindberg in correspondence with Nietzsche. Taking
his cue from Brandes, the Swedish literary critic Ola Hansson
subsequently promoted this conjunction of writers in Berlin
itself. Berlin modernism self-consciously sought to use art as a
means of political and social change. It continued Kierkegaard's
concern to use discursive action for social transformation.
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Syftet med denna sida är att ni alla skall kunna
få en bild om vem jag är. Kanske kan jag locka er till något, eller
få er lite mer intresserade av någonting. Jag hoppas på det och tror
på det. Jag har även för avsikt, att berätta om det viktigaste i
mitt liv, nämligen min tro.
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Copyright © Mikael Jönsson
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