Translator’S Introduction
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
The name Kierkegaard is mostly associated with works by which the Danish author was best known in his lifetime, first and foremost Either/ Or but also other such oddly memorable titles as Fear and Trembling, The Concept of Dread, Philosophical Fragments, Concluding Unscientific Postscript and The Sickness unto Death. What we easily forget is that these and other works appeared under pseudonyms. Why Kierkegaard resorted to pseudonymity is the subject of much speculation, but he himself provided one quite plausible explanation. In a short work, The Point of View for My Activity as an Author, published after his death, he says in effect that the pseudonymity was designed to let the works express views of life without the reader being led to think they might be the actual views of the author. His own task as a writer Kierkegaard took to be that of promoting in individual readers a sense, first, of a need for such life-views and, second, of the ways in which certain prevalent life-views, the kind he called ‘aesthetic’, were inadequate to the individual’s true needs. The task, as he saw it, was to begin with the inadequate views and convey somehow the ways in which they were deficient. More generally, his project was aimed at the cultivation in the reader of what one pseudonymous author in particular, Johannes Climacus, calls ‘inwardness’ (Inderlighed). This is not, as the English word suggests, a self-centred absorption in the states of one’s own mind or soul, but an engagement by the whole person in life’s tasks.
It need come as no surprise, then, to those who know Kierkegaard only through his pseudonyms, to find how sharp an eye the poet-philosopher of inwardness has for the ways in which people fail to engage themselves in this way. More surprising, perhaps, is the skill with which, in A Literary Review, he relates such failure on the part of the individual to features of society and cultural life at large. The work includes one of the most startling pieces of cultural analysis to be found anywhere.
A Literary Review was published in Copenhagen on 30 March 1846. Kierkegaard had begun writing it while waiting for proofs of the work with which he intended to mark the end of his pseudonymous authorship, the aptly named Concluding Unscientific Postscript. That authorship, of a series of works starting with Either/Or, had occupied him for four intensive years during which he also wrote a series of signed works described as ‘edifying’ and ‘Christian’ discourses. The sequence of events which turned Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (the surname an earlier spelling of the Danish for ‘graveyard’, Kirkegård) to full-time authorship began in 1837 when he met Regine Olsen, daughter of a Copenhagen dignitary. Regine was then fourteen years old. Their later engagement and his breaking it off were to provide the focus of much of his writing. The following year Kierkegaard’s father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, died, aged eighty-one (Søren was then twenty-five). The death led Kierkegaard, after ten years as a student, finally to complete his university exams and face the future.
Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen on 5 May 1813. His father’s family had worked the land of their local pastor in East Jutland, in a feudal arrangement that gave the family its name. Kierkegaard’s father himself had been released from formal vassalage at the age of twenty-one, at a time when he had already moved to Copenhagen to work in an uncle’s hosiery business. He later became a wealthy wholesaler of imported goods, and Søren inherited a fair fortune when his father died. Søren was the youngest of seven children whose mother was their father’s second wife, and who had formerly been maid to the first. A brother and a sister died before he was nine. His two surviving sisters, a brother and his mother were all dead by the time he was twenty-one, and Søren, now alone with his father and his eldest brother, himself became convinced he would not live to be more than thirty-three. He was educated at the prestigious Borgerdydskole (School of Civic Virtue), where he gained a reputation for a quick tongue and a sharp wit, and then at the University of Copenhagen, where he enrolled in 1830. His chosen subject was theology, but he also studied liberal arts and science, excelling in the latter, and spent in all ten years as a student, his father, until his death, footing the not inconsiderable bills.
Just one month after Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard died, Kierkegaard published his first book, From the Papers of One Still Living, though the title derives not from his father’s death but from that of his teacher and mentor, Paul Martin Møller (1794–1838). A little over two years later, on 10 September 1840, he became engaged to Regine and began work on his doctoral dissertation. He also underwent the necessary practical training for a career in the State Church and gave his first sermon. However, almost immediately after his successful defence of his dissertation (‘On the Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates’) on 29 September 1841, Kierkegaard broke off his engagement to Regine, and by November the break was final and he was on his way to Berlin on the first of four visits he would make to that city. These, apart from a day trip to Sweden, were the only journeys he made outside Denmark. Ostensibly for the purpose of attending Friedrich Schelling’s widely advertised lectures Kierkegaard also devoted much of his time on this first Berlin visit to writing a large part of what was to become Either/Or.
The reasons for his break with Regine are much disputed. The crux, however, seems to have been Kierkegaard’s sense of his inability to express or – to use a term from Either/Or – ‘reveal’ himself in terms of civic virtue, or ‘ethics’, in a sense that gives a central place to civic responsibility and the maintenance of traditional institutions such as marriage. Although the parts of Either/Or that he was writing in Berlin were a defence of marriage (‘Or’), the case for it was posed in opposition to a diversely represented ‘aesthetic’ view of life (‘Either’). The reader is thereby faced with a choice in which the real author’s preference, if any, can play no part, concealed as the author’s true identity is under a barrage of pseudonyms.
The two-volume Either/Or, also edited by a pseudonym, ‘Victor Eremita’, was published in February 1843, to be followed in October by two slimmer volumes, Repetition by ‘Constantin Constantius’ and Fear and Trembling by ‘Johannes de silentio’. The first of these hints at a religious view of life, which the latter then illustrates in a rather startling way with the story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac, his son, indicating that faith has nothing to do either with reason or with ‘ethics’ in the sense just mentioned. All three works deal with the problem of entering society in the way such an ethics prescribes, what the pseudonymous authors call ‘realizing the universal [or general]’. This same theme was to be pursued in the substantial Stages on Life’s Way edited by Hilarius Bogbinder, published in April 1845. But already in June 1844 there had appeared two pseudonymous books introducing new topics, Philosophical Fragments by Johannes Climacus and The Concept of Dread (or Anxiety) by Vigilius Haufniensis. The former sought, in subtle and spare language, to suggest an alternative way of grasping essential truth to that proposed by philosophy, a theme to be resumed and reworked in the much larger Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments, and published under the same pseudonym early in 1846. The Concept of Dread examined the psychological background to the experience of sin, at the same time implying a radical critique of contemporary theology.
The manuscript of Concluding Unscientific Postscript was delivered to the printer at the end of December 1845 and published on 27 February 1846. Ten days later, on 9 March, Kierkegaard wrote a lengthy ‘Report’. It includes the following remark:
Concluding Postscript is out; responsibility for the pseudonyms acknowledged; one of these days the printing of the Literary Review will begin. Everything is in order; all I have to do now is keep calm and say nothing, relying on The Corsair to support the whole enterprise negatively, just as I want it.1
We shall return to The Corsair, a radical and somewhat scurrilous weekly, in a moment. Kierkegaard adds:
My idea is now to qualify for the priesthood. For several months I have prayed to God to help me further, for it has long been clear to me that I ought not to continue as an author, which is something I want to be totally or not at all. That’s also why I haven’t begun anything new while doing the proof-reading, except for the little review of Two Ages which is, once more, concluding.2
The not so little review translated here, a signed work published three weeks later, seems to have been intended as the first of a revived genre in Kierkegaard’s authorship. Though in fact no further examples appeared (the only previous one was his first publication, From the Papers of One Still Living, ostensibly a review of Hans Christian Andersen’s Only a Fiddler (Kun en Spillemand)), the review format now appealed to him for a special reason not unconnected with his thoughts about abandoning a writer’s career:
To now I have served by helping the pseudonyms become authors. What if I decided from now to do what little writing I can indulge in in the form of criticism, putting what I had to say in reviews which developed my thoughts out of some book or other? So they could also be found in the book. Then at least I’d avoid being an author.3
Having his own thoughts look as though they emerged from the work of another author would relieve him of the inconvenience of inventing new pseudonyms for them. As the opening quotation above mentions, Kierkegaard had already declared (in an unpaginated final section of Postscript) that his was the pen behind the pseudonyms. Of course everyone in the closely knit world of Copenhagen letters knew this, but according to the manners of the time they would not say so publicly until the real author owned up.
The declaration added to Postscript was partly forced upon Kierkegaard by certain events involving The Corsair, events which caused him to delay delivering its final text until the very last moment.
I was momentarily in two minds as to whether, in consideration of the circumstances (the Corsair nonsense and town gossip), to leave out the acknowledgement of my authorship and just indicate that the whole thing was older than all this babble by giving the dates in the printed material. But, no! I owe it to the truth to ignore this kind of thing and do everything as decided, leaving the outcome to God’s will and accepting everything from his hand as a good and perfect gift, scorning to act from prudence, putting my hopes in his giving me a firm and wise spirit.4
Although the Corsair affair began under cover of pseudonymity, it quickly became personal. Under the pseudonym Frater Taciturnus (from Stages on Life’s Way), Kierkegaard had provoked the periodical to attack him (under that pseudonym) by disclosing the identity of one of its anonymous authors. The author in question, Peder Ludvig Møller (1814–65), a writer, poet and literary critic with academic ambitions, wished his connection with The Corsair to remain a secret for fear of spoiling his prospects for a professorship in aesthetics at the University. Earlier Møller had criticized the work of Frater Taciturnus. Knowing of the connection, Kierkegaard made it public in a newspaper article published on 27 December (‘An Itinerant Aesthetician’s Activity and How He Nevertheless Came to Pay for the Banquet’), in a breach of etiquette that was also a morally mischievous act.
In its 2 January issue The Corsair responded in kind. It attacked Kierkegaard, not as Frater Taciturnus but in person, with accompanying caricatures of his crabwise gait, stoop, thin legs and apparently uneven trouser legs, and cane or umbrella in hand. The Corsair’s coverage in the months that followed made Kierkegaard a household name and fair game for the mockery of the town’s youth. The streets in which he was already a well known figure became places of constant harassment.
Yet, as both the first and the last passages quoted above indicate, this is something Kierkegaard seemed actually to want, and after all it was he who provoked the response. Although he may not have expected such a direct reaction, it seems clear that it was in this way that he thought his enterprise could be ‘supported negatively’, as the first quotation has it. Some explanation of this strange idea will be found in the later pages of this translation with their talk of the ‘unrecognizables’ and of ‘suffering action’, pages which he was very likely penning while the Corsair affair was upon him.
Drafts for the Review had already been written shortly after the novel reviewed first appeared. The novel itself, Two Ages (To Tidsaldre), had been published in October 1845 and was the latest from the hand of Thomasine Gyllembourg, an energetic and talented writer who made her literary debut at the exceptionally late age of fifty-three.
Before the turn of the century Thomasine Christine Buntzen, daughter of a bourgeois Copenhagen family, had married the radical poet P. A. Heiberg, twenty years her senior. He was exiled in 1799 for political activities, and on forming her attachment to the man who became her second husband, Carl Frederick Ehrensvärd, Count Gyllembourg, a wealthy Swede who was also a political exile, Thomasine divorced Heiberg. Out of resentment Heiberg made his nine-year-old son, Johan Ludvig, a ward of court, though later relented. After her second husband died in 1815, Thomasine moved in with her son who was already establishing a name for himself as a writer. These two, later joined by the leading lady of the Danish stage, the half-German actress Johanne Luise Pätges, whom Johan Ludvig Heiberg married in 1831 when he was approaching forty, enriched Danish cultural life with a much sought-after salon whose welcome the young Søren at one time eagerly solicited. Madame Gyllembourg herself was able, with her own talent and the help of her entrepreneurially as well as artistically gifted son, to establish a reputation as both a significant writer and a pioneer of modern Danish prose fiction, writing under the signature ‘The author of A Story of Everyday Life’ (in exactly the same way that her contemporary, Walter Scott, signed his works, the so-called Waverley Novels, ‘The author of Waverley’).
Originally, A Story of Everyday Life was a feuilleton in the manner of Balzac, published serially in Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post (Copenhagen’s Flying Post, referred to usually just as Flyveposten), her son’s literary journal. At one time badly needing to fill space in that paper, Heiberg had asked his mother for help. She provided it, on 12 January 1827, in the form of a fictitious letter to the editor which caused a considerable stir not least among those curious to know who the writer was. She wrote more, the letters then taking on the form of instalments in a developing story later published, in 1834, in collection, as The Family Polonius.
Two Ages, which was to be Madame Gyllembourg’s last work, tells the story of a family whose fortunes span the immediate post-revolutionary age, the age of honour, loyalty and passion, and the advent of a rational and reflective modernity, the present age, an age of calculation and prudent choices. Given her own connections and Denmark’s place in Napoleonic politics – when her serviceable merchant fleet came under the eyes of both Britain and France, Denmark had sided with the latter – the author’s familiarity with both ages enabled her to portray them in miniature in the local setting of Copenhagen. The age of revolution is reflected in the youth and love story of Claudine, who falls for a young Frenchman, Charles Lusard, a member of the French legation newly installed in Copenhagen. Claudine’s loyalty to the memory of Lusard, who has left to join the army, is rewarded after many vicissitudes by a reunion when she discovers that he has been living in an inherited estate in Jutland in the firm belief that she, Claudine, was married and living in Germany. The focus of the story reflecting the later age, ‘the present age’, is the return to Copenhagen in 1844, after a long period abroad in both Europe and America, of their now fifty-year-old son, also called Charles. What he finds, as Kierkegaard puts it in his résumé in the Review, is a Copenhagen without legations or any other intimations of ‘world-historical denouments’ in the offing, but a life
undisturbed by the energetic passion whose form is in its very energy – yes, even in its vehemence – and isn’t hiding the power of a secret and forbidden passion. On the contrary, everything is manifestly nondescript, and thus trivial, formless, knowing, coquettish, and openly so. Here there is no great revelation and no deep secret, but superficiality all the more. (p. 24)
This Lusard, living alone with his recollections, seeks a worthy heir, someone close whom he can make happy, and the story ends in a form of ‘repetition’ in which another faithful woman is eventually reunited with her lover.
Repetition, as his introduction shows, is a leitmotif for Kierkegaard’s own interest in the work. Preceded, typically, by a preface saying that his review is written only for those with the time and patience to read a little book – though even they needn’t bother, and those ‘whose critical and aesthetic education comes from reading newspapers’ are excused altogether – Kierkegaard’s Introduction reminds ‘the author of A Story of Everyday Life’ of an earlier reference to ‘his’ work (‘his’ in order to respect the formality and ignorance as to the author’s identity) in his own first publication, From the Papers of One Still Living. The Review is thus given the appearance of being the fulfilment of a promise Kierkegaard had earlier made to himself to return to this author at a later date. At the end of a lengthy appreciation, he hopes the author will find him
unchanged or, if possible, changed in the repetition: a little more clarity in presentation, a slightly lighter and more flowing style, in recognition of the difficulty of the task a little less hurried, a little more inwardness in the discernment: in other words, changed in the repetition. (p. 20)
Incidentally, the anonymous author’s son, Johan Ludvig Heiberg, had found Kierkegaard’s manuscript of the earlier treatment of his mother’s work stylistically deficient and, whether for that reason or not, had not given it room in his journal. Moreover, Heiberg had made uncomprehending remarks about one of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous publications, precisely Repetition, not grasping that ‘repetition’ meant a kind of inner revision of the motivation with which one approaches the same life-situations. Not one quick to forget a personal injury, Kierkegaard was without doubt addressing Heiberg here as much as the latter’s mother, and putting him straight on the subject of repetition. Also, in praising Madame Gyllembourg (though never by name) for even-handedness in her treatment of the two ages, and allowing his résumé to conclude with Lusard’s ‘Amen’ to a declaration of faith in human progress, Kierkegaard is preparing the way for a far more pessimistic account of the present age, a view more in keeping with the gist of his pseudonymous works to which his own Postscript, the work he was still completing when Madame Gyllembourg’s book appeared, had just been added.
For reasons explained in the Review, neither of the reunions that end each part of the novel (or each age) is a ‘repetition’ in the proper sense introduced in his pseudonymous book of that name. Nor is the reunion that ends the second part properly a repetition of the one that ends the first. Instead of being the product of a resolute will to risk everything, it is formed in the light merely of recollection. The second Lusard, after his long travels now no longer young, having ‘let the time of love pass by, having turned off at the point where a person’s future really begins, has beautifully installed himself in remembrance and chosen the past, wanting only to secure a memory for himself in making one member of his family happy’ (p. 24).
What Kierkegaard especially prizes in the novel is the author’s ability to portray the ties of family life as a medium in which the larger currents of the life of the times are reflected. The author herself puts it very neatly in her Preface:
The subject I have wanted to treat is not the great events that so violently shook the close of the previous century and still agitate our present day, not the reflected image in our fatherland of that raging storm, nor the cold misty air it left behind, but only what I would call the domestic reflection [Reflex] of it, the effect it has had in family life, in the personal relations, in the ideas and views of individuals, an influence that has consciously or unconsciously touched everyone.5
In the last recognizably reviewing part of A Literary Review, the section called ‘An Aesthetic Reading of the Novel and its Details’ giving portraits of the leading figures from each age, Kierkegaard points out that the author does not intend these to be mere personifications of the age. Rather they are persons whose fates bear the character of the age, and are largely determined by the broad outlooks distinguishing the two ages. Rather than in the psychology of the parties involved, these outlooks are reflected in the stories themselves, their settings and outcomes.
In the long final section entitled ‘The Results of Observing the Two Ages’, Kierkegaard offers an extended analysis of the present age, preceded by a much shorter account of the age of revolution. Towards the end there is an apocalyptic crescendo in which the reader is told that a movement is afoot, called ‘levelling’, which, driven by the abstract notion of ‘the public’, in turn the creation of the press, will end inexorably in a state of culture where individuals lose their identities and will, for the first time as single selves, confront the choice between nothing and God.
For the author of Postscript, a work commonly regarded as devastatingly critical of Hegel, the language of this final section may sound surprisingly Hegelian. There is talk of an Idea. For Hegel, the Speculative Idea was an ideal of unified understanding which can be seen to be working itself out in history. But this way of talking was prevalent at the time even among those who rejected Hegel and his ‘speculative’ idealism. As many did in his time, Kierkegaard uses ‘Idea’ to refer to the sort of goals that motivated the revolutionary age. Chief among these are freedom and equality. The reader of the Review will find in what Kierkegaard has to say about ‘levelling’ a radical revision of the ways in which equality was generally understood, namely in terms of what, for Kierkegaard, are merely external factors. Typically, Kierkegaard believes that ideals of any kind are centred in the individual and not in a developing cultural environment. Any Idea, then (but let us just say ‘idea’), should have the form of an ‘inner drive’ that ‘propels the individual on’. These expressions come towards the end of a passage concerning what it really means to act from principle. As usually understood, to act from principle means to apply some rule that one has inherited, learned, internalized or in some way subscribes to. But in what Kierkegaard takes to be its proper sense, a ‘principle’ is what ‘comes first’, and that for him is ‘the substantial, the idea in the unopened form of feeling and enthusiasm’ (p. 90).
A formless society, such as the one Kierkegaard in his résumé of Two Ages describes the later Lusard as finding on his return from his travels, is one in which the ‘passionate’ distinction between form and content has been ‘annulled’. Loss of form does not mean shapelessness or chaos or madness; it means loss of enthusiasm. For Kierkegaard form is a visible feature of the individual’s life due to the sincerity and focus that belong to enthusiastic activity on behalf of an ideal. The less the pursuit of ideals originates in individual enthusiasm, the less essential becomes the truth of the ideal thus fulfilled. In a common manner of speaking, we might say that acting ‘ideally’ in that way would be ‘merely’ a matter of form, a formalism, while in its proper sense form, for Kierkegaard, is a matter of the individual’s wholehearted engagements. Essential meaning and content, whatever might seem their ‘inadequate limitation’, must be due to a ‘self-deepening’ (p. 90).
There can be sheer enthusiasm; it is the idea in its substantial but, as Kierkegaard says here, unopened form. In the age of revolution the idea unfolded, but it did not open fully. It was only a kind of opening, a partial revelation as well as a revolution, but still only half-way – indeed, an expression of human immaturity. Kierkegaard refers here to the ‘reactionary immediacy’ (p. 57) reflected in the domestic life portrayed in Part One of Two Ages, the part devoted to the age of revolution. Rather than being self-determined, the actions of the persons involved are reactions to events, and they lack constancy for that very reason. Substituting a favourite astrophysical analogy for the botanical one, Kierkegaard says that ‘the harmony of the spheres’ is the unity of every planet relating to itself and to the whole. Take one of these relations away and you get chaos. But in the human case the idea is an additional factor to take into account: ‘Remove the relation to oneself, and we have the mass’s tumultuous relating to an idea; but remove this too [i.e. the relating to the idea], and we have rawness [Raahed]’ (p. 55).
At the bottom of the scale, then, we encounter raw and unformed behaviour, the behaviour of the mob. Because it lacks a centre of gravity, or indeed any internal structure at all, the mob is at the mercy of suggestion and governed by primitively holistic psychological reactions. But a group or crowd can also be inspired by a revolutionary ideal. It then acquires a structure even though its members are still not separated out singly as enthusing individually for the ideals inspiring the revolution. There is indeed passion, in contrast to a cold formalism, but it is due to the mutual encouragement of numbers and can result in the violence of a Reign of Terror. What is needed is the individual’s own relation to the idea.
The remainder of the Review focuses on this relationship of the individual to an ideal, in order to arrive at an account of an age that, even if it does not comprehensively contradict Lusard’s ‘Amen’, at least leads us to suppose that, if its ideals are to be achieved, something far deeper than the resources provided by the author of Two Ages will be required.
Typical of an age such as the one that Lusard meets on his return to Copenhagen is a ‘crippling and disheartened, tactless, levelling reciprocity’ (pp. 55–6). Kierkegaard takes ‘levelling’ to be the nemesis of his age, a catastrophe blocking off what appears to be the only viable path to human completion. But if carried to extremes, it is also able – and here we have a hint of what Kierkegaard’s ‘negative’ enterprise might concern itself with – to produce a crisis that reawakens individuals to other possibilities. The metaphor of levelling has many applications. Most historical examples are, in a very literal way, down to earth: agrarian agitators tearing down hedges enclosing common ground, or park palings as well as hedges in the case of Crown lands. These physical levellings were, of course, in the service of a political ideal that can be called levelling, but in a more abstract way. In his first reference to levelling in the Review, Kierkegaard speaks of it in what seems to be an even more abstract sense. He describes it as a ‘quiet, mathematically abstract affair’, one that ‘avoids all fuss [Ophœvelse]’ (pp. 74–5). This in itself suggests that Kierkegaard is not talking politics.
Kierkegaard’s criticism of Two Ages, tactfully elicited more in what he is able to extrapolate from the novel in his own terms – those of the pseudonymous authorship – than in what he says directly against it, is that its ‘totality’, the life-view that defines the frame of the novel’s main characters’ responses, is not ethical but aesthetic. He notes the aesthetic limitations of the viewpoints of the characters, the women in particular. Claudine, whose story provides the main thread of Part One, faced with the disappearance of her loved one to the wars and with looking after herself and her child, sees her own situation in an openly romantic light, constant in her love for Lusard but with a fixed picture of herself and Lusard that allows no inward development. The corresponding figure in Part Two, Mariane, with no illusions and made to work as a servant, develops a ‘quiet inwardness’ in the face of the humiliations to which she is subjected. But in so far as it fails to reveal itself in the visible forms required of ethics, even quiet inwardness is still an aesthetic state. If ethics is to find its place in the world, Mariane’s tenuous foothold on the ‘singling out’ that the proper unfolding of the idea requires would need encouragement in the age at large. But it is precisely this further development that the levelling process prevents. It is a process of spiritual stultification, and were it not for the fact, as Kierkegaard sees it, that it has reached a point where its own momentum will carry it to its logical conclusion, levelling might even look like a deliberate attempt to escape the spiritual discomfort of being a singled-out individual, a self with no identity in group-membership terms, whether of a nation, an estate, an association or whatever other form of collectivity.
Shunning the singled-out state even receives ideological support in what Kierkegaard refers to here as ‘the idolized positive principle of sociality’.
[This] in our time is the consuming, demoralizing principle, which in the thraldom of reflection transforms even virtues into vitia splendida.6 And to what can this be due other than to a disregard for the singling out of the religious individual before God in the responsibility of eternity? When terror begins here, one seeks comfort in company, and reflection then captures the individual for life. And those who didn’t even notice this crisis beginning fall without further ado under the relation of reflection. (p. 76)
So levelling is not deliberate in any literal sense. No one actually chooses this stultifying path and, as if on an escalator going down instead of up, everyone is in any case to some extent on it. What is entirely negative about levelling is, in brief, that it is set on eradicating the unique locus of human fulfilment, the human will, the only place where the ideal can arise in the way it must, in the form of sustained concern on the part of the individual. In a reflective age the proper flowering of the idea in the individual has been brought to a stop by an externalizing of its goals. The way in which politicians aim to introduce equality is one in which, as Kierkegaard says in a passage deleted from the final draft of the Review, ‘the dialectic turns away from inwardness and wants to render equality in the negative; so that those who are not essentially individuals constitute an equality in external association’. Levelling, he adds, is ‘the faked anticipation of eternal life, which people have done away with as a “beyond” and now want to realize here in abstracto’.7
The criticism clearly embraces not just politics but the whole of culture, that is to say, the ways people interrelate at all levels. In the Review Kierkegaard identifies the psychological attitude corresponding to levelling as ‘envy’. In an entry in his journals he calls it a ‘self-establishing envy’ in which, in order to advance in one’s own esteem, ‘one wants to drag down the great’. But so deeply embedded is this envy in the collective consciousness, or so far in the background, that nobody sees it for what it is. Superiority in others is treated as hubris on their part, but the very fact of admitting their superiority betrays an underlying envy or resentment.8
We note that Kierkegaard says ‘one’ wants to drag down the great. The use of the term ‘one’ (Man, as in the German from which Heidegger coins the notion of das Man) implies an anonymity. It is not you or me that wants to drag a superior person down, but rather, you or I do it because one wants to do so. If you were to look for someone responsible for levelling, worse than there being no one at home when you knocked on the door there would be no door to knock on. What has levelled (in the transitive sense) in such a case is ‘the public’ (p. 84). Kierkegaard says the public is levelling’s ‘spirit’, a ‘monstrous abstraction, an all-encompassing something that is nothing, a mirage … [a] phantom’ (p. 80). More particularly it is a phantom brought about by the press. Although the remarks about ‘one’ wanting to drag down the great bear the heading, ‘The Corsair’s Standpoint’, these words about an abstraction are addressed not to The Corsair, which with its radical stance could hardly claim to represent Copenhagen’s journalistic establishment in any case, but to journalism in general and the liberal press in particular.
Still, in Kierkegaard’s eyes, that periodical was certainly an instrument of the levelling he writes about in the Review and whose spirit was the public. Moreover, an allegory that he uses to illustrate the sinister side of levelling, with its seat in the anonymous public, anticipates his own fate at the hands of The Corsair so closely that it may have been inserted at the last moment when those events had actually begun to unroll, making the streets of Copenhagen uninhabitable for him. We must recall, however, that Kierkegaard regarded this not as fate but as something he had brought upon himself deliberately.
Kierkegaard’s long subsection on ‘the present age’ returns in conclusion to those features of Copenhagen life in 1844 noted by Lusard on his return: triviality, formlessness, a ‘know-it-all’ attitude, flirtatiousness and superficiality. Enlarging on this list, Kierkegaard asks: What is it to chat? What is formlessness? What is flirtatiousness? What is superficiality? What is it to reason? In each case the answer is some variation on the theme that the ‘passionate’ distinction between inner and outer, between the intensive and extensive, has been done away with. The features in question all represent a ‘suspension of the principle of contradiction’, the consequence of which is to place the existing individual in ‘contradiction with himself’.
As hinted earlier, towards the end of the long ‘Results’ section of the Review, analysing the two ages, Kierkegaard assigns a role to ‘the unrecognizables [de Ukjendelige]’ (p. 96). These are people who have grasped that the ‘meaning’ of levelling is its ability to expose individuals to a fundamental choice: nihilism or service on behalf of God. The task of the unrecognizables, quite unlike that of the recognizable leaders and role models of the past, will be to help others towards this insight. They must do so without imposing themselves on those others as authorities on the subject, since that would detract from the fundamental nature of the choice in those in whose service they work. It would also imply that they themselves were somehow absolved from choosing.
Having brought his account of the present age to its apocalyptic conclusion, Kierkegaard signs off in his usual manner with a playful disclaimer. He hasn’t tried, he says, any more than the author of Two Ages, to judge or compare the merits of the ages portrayed – all he has done is describe them. This is a little disingenuous, since he has approached the events described in the book from another and higher point of view. That in itself, quite apart from being a kind of judgement on Two Ages, implies a radical corrective to the optimism shown in its author’s ‘even-handed’ treatment of the respective merits of the two ages it portrays.
Kierkegaard ends, however, by being even-handed himself, with a Hegelian twist that to a Hegelian would nevertheless appear quite unHegelian. He asks the reader to balance the advantages of the present age’s ‘extensity’ against the ‘intensity’ it is increasingly losing, and offers, in the name of Socrates, a third alternative: first, the spontaneity of an immediate inspiration (as in the age of revolution); second, the growth of understanding and ingenuity in the service of prudence (a proper use of reflection, the present age’s typical mode); and third, the highest and most intensive inspiration of a Socrates who sees very well what the prudent thing to do is and then does not do it (p. 99).
The suggestion is, in any obvious sense, outrageous as a rule for the maintenance of life, but perhaps less so as a proposal about how to grasp the character of life as seen from some point of view beyond purely utilitarian considerations. Did Kierkegaard see himself as writing in the ‘cause’ of such a proposal, or perhaps just from the point of view of such a perspective? Did he really think such a proposal might be able, through the medium of politics, to affect the very manner of life’s maintenance, the sociopolitical structure, replacing its inherent utilitarianism for instance? Or was the Socratic image merely a fanciful projection of his own ‘outsider’s’ position vis-à-vis the circles on which he hoped his writings would have some impact?
All this remains unclear. The same is true of how far the apocalyptic vision of a purely levelled world was for him a genuine fear. If it was, did he regard his remarks in ‘Results’ as prophecy? If so, were he alive today would he see his prognosis realized in our present age? If yes, should we regard him as truly a prophet? What in fact would confirm such fears, genuine or not? Marxism, modern nihilism, drug addiction, fashion, spectator sports, the Internet?
Kierkegaard, we recall, it having long been clear to him that he ‘ought not to continue as an author’, had decided not to begin on anything new while reading the proofs of Postscript ‘except for the little review of Two Ages which is, once more, concluding’. But by the beginning of the next year he was dismissing plans to give up writing as a lapse of nerve. Also, it might look as if The Corsair had forced him to stop. In 1847 he published Edifying Discourses in a Different Spirit (probably misleadingly rendered as ‘in Different Spirits’) and the substantial Works of Love, regarded by some as his greatest work. In the spring of 1848 there followed Christian Discourses, and in 1849 The Lilies of the Field and the Birds of the Air and Three Discourses at Communion on Fridays. There then followed two works by a new pseudonym, Anti-Climacus: The Sickness unto Death and Practice in Christianity.
These two form the coping-stones of the life-view presupposed by and aimed at in the earlier pseudonymous writings. They are natural partners of the religious discourses among which they appeared (and more of which were to follow). They exploit the ambitious spiritual level of the discourses in order to throw light on the developing religious point of view of the earlier pseudonyms. In all Kierkegaard’s later writings one detects a new stringency. The Corsair affair enforced a polarization between him and his society. His own suffering for truth was set off against the complacency of a bourgeois public and its religious leaders. Thus, in a way, the social and political criticism that emerged in the Review, which might have been Kierkegaard’s final work, was a seed that developed in the atmosphere created by the feud with The Corsair to become a general condemnation of the age in which he lived, culminating in a vitriolic attack on the State Church, which he saw as the root and bastion of spiritual complacency. The remainder of his inheritance went into financing the final assault through his own broadsheet, The Instant. This went through nine issues before Kierkegaard fell ill, collapsed in the street, and died in hospital six weeks later, on 13 November 1855. He was forty-two years old.
NOTES
1. Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, vols. I–XI:3, ed. P. A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr and E. Torsting, 1909–48; suppl. vols. XII–XIII, ed. N. Thulstrup, 1969–70 (Gyldendal, Copenhagen), vol. VII: 1 A 97 and 98, 9 March 1846 (Papers and Journals: A Selection, trans. Alastair Hannay (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1998), pp. 213–17).
2. Søren Kierkegaard, Papirer, vol. VII: 1 A 4, 7 February 1846, Hannay (trans.), Papers and Journals, p. 204.
3. Søren Kierkegaard, Papirer, vol. VII: 1 A 9, 9 February 1846, Hannay (trans.), Papers and Journals, p. 204.
4. Søren Kierkegaard, Papirer, vol. VII: 1 A 3, from 1846, Hannay (trans.), Papers and Journals, p. 203.
5. To Tidsaldre (Two Ages) (J. L. Heiberg, Copenhagen, 1845), p. v.
6. ‘Glittering vices.’
7. Søren Kierkegaard, Papirer, vol. VII: 1 B 135, from 1846, Hannay (trans.), Papers and Journals, p. 251.
8. Søren Kierkegaard, Papirer, vol. VII: 1 B 43, from 1846, Papers and Journals.