Authors: Stephen Backhouse
Martensen frowns and returns to his writing desk, where perhaps he has begun to sketch his memoirs. “
We may regard it
as felicitous that he died when he did,” he writes, “or the whole thing might have ended up by being extremely annoying.”
Kierkegaardians are well aware there are a handful of fault lines in the schools of interpretation. Some of the key questions include whether his pseudonyms are reliable sources of biographical information; whether Kierkegaard's claim of a Christian direction to his work is credible; and whether he ever fully abandoned “indirect communication,” even when writing under his own name. To those questions I answer No, Yes, and No and have written this biography as such. I am well aware of the larger academic discussion around these questions, but this is not the place for such a conversation. For those interested in the arguments I would refer them to my other published books and articles on Kierkegaard. These publications also contain the fullest indication of secondary sources I have drawn from over the years. A quick note on sources: translations of Kierkegaard are an ongoing project. For the sake of standardisation and ease of access, unless otherwise indicated, all primary quotes are from the complete and currently academic standard
Kierkegaard's Writings
published by Princeton University Press with Howard and Edna Hong as series editors and translators. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Kierkegaard's letters and journals are taken from the English translation,
Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers
(eds. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, seven volumes). Following the Hong's convention, this JP material is cross-referenced against the Danish language
Søren Kierkegaards Papirer
(eds. P. A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr and E. Torsting, N. Thulstrup, thirteen volumes). Regarding the views and comments of Kierkegaard's contemporaries: unless otherwise indicated, this material
is largely drawn from
Encounters with Kierkegaard
, translator Bruce Kirmmse's peerless compendium of extant eyewitness letters and memoirs. Apart from quoting Kierkegaard's contemporaries, I have avoided excessive footnoting of secondary authors, all of whom appear in any case in the bibliography.
As well as a student of Kierkegaard, I am a social and political theologian. For this reason I am drawn to those places where Kierkegaard's theology abuts against social and political factors. Fortunately for me, Kierkegaard's oft-stated aim to “reintroduce Christianity into Christendom” provides plenty of those places. “Christendom,” after all, is nothing if not a theological, social, and political phenomenon. For those who think there is an easy separation between “politics” and “religion,” I can only suggest this says more about their anaemic understanding of both church
and
state than it does about the reality of these phenomena. The earliest Christians at least did not think their new citizenship, kingdom, or Lord was operating in an apolitical vacuum, and neither did Kierkegaard, who once wrote, “
The religious
is the transfigured rendition of what a politician, provided he actually loves being a human being and loves humankind, has thought in his most blissful moment.” To my knowledge, Kierkegaard did not talk about Christianity as an “alternative politics.” Yet his strategy of drawing single individuals out of their crowds in order that they might be reformed in Christ's image and in relation to each other suggests he would have appreciated this way of speaking about a movement that has massive implications for nationhood and neighbourhood while at the same time resists easy co-option by the partisan politics of the left or of the right.
The conflict about Christianity
will no longer be doctrinal conflict (this is the conflict between orthodoxy and heterodoxy). The conflict (occasioned also by the social and communistic movements) will be about Christianity as an existence. The problem will become that of loving the “neighbour”; attention will be directed to Christ's
life, and Christianity will also become essentially accentuated in the direction of conformity to his life. The world has gradually consumed those masses of illusions and insulating walls with which we have protected ourselves so that the question remained simply one of Christianity as doctrine. The rebellion in the world shouts: We want to see action!
From the Papers of One Still Living
September 7, 1838
Søren Kierkegaard
This, Søren's first major published piece, is a critical review not only of Hans Christian Andersen's novel
Only a Fiddler
but of Andersen himself. The work contains a number of themes and ideas that are to become standard for Kierkegaard: an attempt to connect the subject matter with Hegel and with an overarching view of the mood of the historical age; an obsession with art, poetry, and genius; a focus on the individual person as having a value that transcends any group or circumstance to which that person belongs; an emphasis on “authenticity.” Following the pattern for much of what will follow in Kierkegaard's authorship, the piece is obscure and complicated. Also, it was not a hit with the public. In his autobiography, Andersen commented that only two people read it straight throughâthe one who wrote it and the one about whom it was written!
In this short book, Andersen is held up against Kierkegaard's philosophy of art and of the individual and is found wanting. An authentic individual is not simply a passive product of his experiences. His choices, his commitment, and his integrity are essential to his personhood. Andersen's novel tells us its hero is a genius who has been reduced to wretchedness as a result of his circumstances. Nonsense, snorts Kierkegaard, “Genius is not a rush candle that goes out in a puff of air” (88). Andersen's hero (and thus Andersen himself) is charged with being a coward, succumbing to self-pity and weakness all in the name of art and poetry. For Kierkegaard, Andersen is an incomplete person who has produced an unfinished work of art.
Unsurprisingly, the review rankled. Andersen, though young, was already a celebrated author at the time and expected more reverence from an upstart nobody like Søren. The two men moved in similar social and literary circles, and Kierkegaard had broken etiquette with his contentious and highly personal critique. Reared in a family that revelled in the cut-and-thrust of argument for argument's sake, “the Fork” had struck again. By way of revenge, Andersen caricatured Søren as a repetitive, nonsensical parrot in
The Shoes of Fortune
, and wrote a play that quoted extensive passages from Søren's review to comic effect. This was the first time Søren's barbed wit brought literary revenge upon his head. It would not be the last.
Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates
September 16, 1841
Søren Kierkegaard
The Concept of Irony
is the published version of Søren's master's dissertation, which is equivalent to today's doctorate. Apart from its content, the dissertation itself was notable for the fact that Søren sought permission to write in Danish, rather than Latin as was usually required. Søren claimed that as his study included a discussion of European “Romanticism,” to write in a language that knew nothing of this cultural movement would be “as unreasonable as asking someone to use squares to describe a circle” (JP 2308).
In the book, Søren enlists Socrates in his critique of the Romantic literature and mind-set that had gripped the imagination of the people of his day. Romanticism is the name given to the cluster of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century artists, writers, thinkers, and politicians who, in a reaction against the soulless rationalism of the Enlightenment, emphasised natural emotion, intuition, and subjectivity. To be ironic is
to pretend ignorance, or to adopt a stance opposite from what you know to be the truth for the sake of that truth.
The book is set in two, unequal, parts. The long first part deals with Socrates and argues his life and thought is primarily understood through the lens of irony. This argument is traced through the key Socratic dialogues and is also shown to be the key to explaining Socrates' actions in his own decadent Greek culture. In the face of the Sophists who treated “truth” as a matter of rhetoric and mutual agreement, Socrates pretended to be foolish in order to show the “wise” they had no wisdom at all. In
Irony
, Socrates represents a position of “infinite negativity”: always demolishing but not able to build. In his longing for a universal Truth, Socrates rejected all the temporary “truths” of his society. This might be “negative,” but at least it does not topple one lesser god only to put another one up in its place.
The second part of
Irony
is much shorter. Here, the concept of “irony” is seen to have taken root in a corrupt form in the literature and mind-set of Romanticism. Søren likes the Romantic displeasure at smug bourgeois life, custom-bound and habitual. The Romantics, he says, breathe fresh air into this spiritless, monotonous existence. Yet the Romantics are portrayed as using their irony for petty, adolescent mockery. They have no conception of Socrates' infinite, absolute negativity, which undermines all assumptions about human ability to produce something True. The Romantics rightly accuse modernity of trapping people in a slavery of social customs, materialism, and shallow religiosity. Yet the Romantics also condemn people to a slavish devotion to their own subjective passions and immature whims. Irony, argues Kierkegaard, is a necessary moment on the way to exposing a lie. But it fails when it becomes the new lie under which people live.
Intellectually, the book suggests a significant future development in Kierkegaard's thought.
Irony
criticises Socrates for not having a vision of the role of the stateâhe sees only individuals and not commonality. Here, the young Kierkegaard sides with Hegel: a position he would later
forthrightly reject: “What a Hegelian fool I was!” (JP 4281). Ironically (!) the focus on the individual, and the Socratic method for drawing individuals from their common crowds, would become the hallmark of Kierkegaard's mature life and work. Personally, Kierkegaard had a vested interest in irony. The book was written during the period leading up to Søren's break up with Regine, with all the elaborate schemes distancing Søren's public actions from his real feelings that accompanied that period. The pseudonymous nature of most of Kierkegaard's authorship is also deeply ironic, as are many of the stances Kierkegaard took under his own name. Significantly, at the end of his life Søren would employ Socratic irony by claiming not to be a Christian, thus exposing the Christianity of Christendom as no Christianity at all.
Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
February 20, 1843
Multiple pseudonymous authors compiled and edited by Victor Eremita
“It may at times have occurred to you, dear reader, to doubt somewhat the accuracy of that familiar philosophical thesis that the outer is the inner and the inner is the outer” (3).
Kierkegaard considered his authorship proper to have begun with
Either/Or
. It is the first work in a series of pseudonymous and non-pseudonymous books intended to introduce the reader to the various stages of life as expressed by different characters in Christendom.
The book opens with a shaggy-dog tale of how the editor, Victor Eremita (which means “triumphant hermit”), acquired an old writing desk only to find a series of loose papers stuffed into a secret compartment.
Either/Or
purports to be Victor's publication of those papers. Most of the material is attributed to two further pseudonyms. “A,” a young man living a hedonistic life of pleasure, and “B,” an old man who turns
out to be a judge called William. The Judge extols the ethical life to “A,” especially as it is found in marriage. The book is peppered with other essays and pieces, most notably the shocking “Seducer's Diary,” which details the seduction and then abandonment of a young woman, and a concluding sermon reminding all the characters in the book “in relation to God we are always in the wrong” (350).
Like all of Kierkegaard's books, this one is concerned with the state of our existence and with how to become an authentic person. He identifies three stages of existenceâthe aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious.
Either/Or
is mostly concerned with the first two, with hints of the religious breaking through. The aesthete lives for experience and lives by appearance. His life finds its highest meaning in drama, music, and sensuous love.
Either/Or
contains the stories of “A,” the Seducer, and various operatic figures such as Don Juan. Here, the aesthetic life comes across as appealing and articulate, but also one filled with boredom, selfishness, and callous treatment of others. The second half of the book is given over to the Judge, whose longwinded prose is intentionally supposed to remind the reader of a dull lecture, albeit one that contains much wisdom. The Judge is an “ethical” man, which means he has chosen a life of responsibility for others. The Judge is happier than “A” because his choices are more meaningful and thus more important to him. The ethical person is involved with other people, while the aesthete is confined mostly to his own imagination. Furthermore, the aesthete flits from one temporary experience to the next while the ethical man lives according to eternal principles. In this way, becoming an authentic person is seen to happen only when the individual chooses to live according to a duty external to himself rather than according to some whim of self-satisfaction or human invention.
Except Judge William too is still less than a person. The
Either/Or
of the title is not the choice of
either
aesthetic existence
or
ethical existence. It is a choice between the aesthetic and the ethical on one side, and the religious on the other. “Before God we are always in the wrong”
is a reminder that all stages of life rely on adherence to the systems and inventions of man. The ethical Judge might be using the language of “eternity,” but in reality he is conforming to the relative moral habits of his culture no less than the aesthete who lives only for sensation. The two stages are necessary for an authentic life, but they need to be brought under a third.
Either/Or
is also a comment on Hegel, who famously proposed that all opposition and contradiction is an illusion. For Hegel, one thesis creates its antithesis, which together in turn becomes a synthesis. That synthesis itself produces an antithesis, and so on and so on. The history of the world is the history of the Big Idea (God) unfolding in this way. Significantly, it is in mankind's highest developed culture that Hegel thinks the Mind of God is best expressed. Instead of seeing either God or man, Hegel sees both/and. It is the idea that human nations and civilisations can generate eternal Truth that Kierkegaard begins to undermine in
Either/Or
.
Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses:
Two Upbuilding Discourses
May 16, 1843
Three Upbuilding Discourses
October 16, 1843
Four Upbuilding Discourses
December 6, 1843
Two Upbuilding Discourses
March 5, 1844
Three Upbuilding Discourses
June 8, 1844
Four Upbuilding Discourses
August 31, 1844
Søren Kierkegaard
When it comes to faith, what is needed is “a different kind of talk” (9).
Søren published these short, theological pieces under his own name. Eventually, he would reissue the eighteen disparate discourses under one title. However, the original publications were designed more or less to accompany the pseudonymous output, with some discourses arriving the same day as other texts. The sequence began four months after the publication of
Either/Or
. Compared to the rapturous reception of Victor Eremita and friends, the religious reflections were not a publishing success. “With my left hand I passed
Either/Or
out into the world, with my right hand
Two Upbuilding Discourses
; but they all or almost all took the left hand with their right” (POV 36).
While it is significant Søren used his own name for these texts, as a “different kind of talk” they are not conventionally straightforward Christian devotional texts. As with everything Kierkegaard wrote, he had “the Single Individual” in mind, intending the reader to follow the thought experiments and exercises as part of their spiritual formation into authentic Christianity and true personhood. “Upbuilding” refers to the building up of the self and is sometimes translated as “edifying.” “Discourses” alerts readers to the idea that these pieces are less (or perhaps more) than sermons. The
Discourses
are overtly Christian in a way the pseudonymous texts are not, though they studiously avoid claiming the authority of an apostle or the role of a clergyman ordained by God to preach his Word.
The themes vary widely, but most of the discourses adopt a scriptural
verse or biblical character upon which to reflect. A sample of section headings serve as an indication of the whole: “Love Will Hide a Multitude of Sins” (1843); “The Lord Gave, and the Lord Took Away; Blessed Be the Name of the Lord” (1843); “Every Good Gift and Every Perfect Gift Is From Above” (1843); “Think about Your Creator in the Days of Your Youth” (1844); “He Must Increase; I Must Decrease” (1844); “The Thorn in the Flesh” (1844).
Many of the essays contain a similar inscription: “To the late Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, formerly a clothing merchant here in the city, my father, these discourses are dedicated.” Other personal elements are present in these writings. Regine's presence can often be detected, for example in the Second Discourse, entitled “Every Good and Perfect Gift Is from Above.” Søren suggests the person who attempts to find their ultimate meaning in a universe that runs along the strict principles of Reward and Punishment will be doomed to frustration. All of God's gifts are perfect, even (perhaps especially) the ones that appear to thwart our desires. Even tragedy needs to be received with thanksgiving for the reason that God can use evil for good. Kierkegaard's description of personal tragedy being redeemed by God is especially poignant in light of the fact that at this time he too was living in the pain of broken love. The
Discourses
are an attempt to articulate how it is a truly religious person can bless the name of the Lord when he gives
and
when he takes away.