Introduction
Introduction
I 13
Chapter I The Historical Situation . .
127
Chapter I I The So-Called Fact of Revelation 160
Chapter I I I Adler Does Not Himself Believe He Has Had a Revelation
I
Documents concerning his deposition
170
2 Adler's four last books
190
Supplement. Recapitulation
23 I
IX
KIERKEGA A R D
Chapter IV Psychological View of Adler as a Phenomenon or as a Satire upon the Hegelian Philosophy and upon the Present Age
I
Psychological exposition
234
2 The catastrophe in Magister Adler's
life
239
3 Magister Adler's advantage . .
243
4 The fundamental fimlt in Magister
Adler
250
5 Magister Adler as an epigram upon
Christendom of our day
264
Postscript . .
275
Appendix
Translator's Notes to Fear and Trembling
283
S.K . 's Prefaces to The Book on Adler
292
x
I N T R O D U C T I O N
It is difficult to write about Smen Kierkegaard ( 18 I 3-55). He has written about himself with a mixture of immediacy and indirection, of confessional urgency and ironizing distance so vivid, so diverse as to beggar commentary from outside.
Famously, Kierkegaard's pseudonyms, the dramatis personae he alleges to be the begetters of some of his exemplary works (while assuming that the reader will detect the figure beneath the mask), enact a system of self-mirroring. But the aim is in no straightforward sense autobiographical. Sharp-edged as are the assumed guises of S.K., they also achieve effects of dispersal, of dissemination. (At key points, current deconstructive notions of 'dissemination' and of the 'abolition of the author' go back to Kierkegaard.) Kierkegaard purposes to remain elusive also to himself, to be opaque and in motion as he traverses successive 'stages on life's way'. Pseudonyms, the division of the self into contradictory voices (the 'dialectic'), the brusque pendulum swing between prayer and sophistry, gravity and play, keep open (in Kierkegaard's memorable phrase) 'the wounds of possibility'. They prevent the frozen certitudes of the dogmatic, the inertia of the canonic. If music, notably that of Mozart, was to S0ren Kierkegaard a touchstone of the pulse of meaning, the reason is clear: he sought in his reflexes of argument and sensibility, in his prose, to translate out of music its capacities for counterpoint, for plurality of simultaneous moods and movements, for selfsubversion. Like no other major thinker, perhaps, Kierkegaard is polyphonic.
We must, in consequence, respond with a provisional, questioning lightness matching his own to even those fundamental aids to understanding to be found in his writings. The Kierkegaardian 'triad' is well known. It proceeds from an aesthetic stance to one of ethics; from ethics to religion. The aesthetic modulates into the ethical; from the ethical a 'leap of faith', the quantum jump 'into absurdity' (which twentiethcentury existentialism took from Kierkegaard), conveys a Xl
K I E RKEGAARD
chosen or aillicted few into the transcendent adventure of God. Kierkegaard often insists on the tripartite construct of his life and labours. The early Either/Or dramatizes the conflictual temptations of the aesthetic and the ethical conditions of spirit.
The leap across the abyss of mundanity and of reason - ethics is still a worldly, a calculable strategy - which makes accessible the religious sphere, is carefully prepared for and plotted in successive meditations and pseudonymous tracts. Yet Kierkegaard lays traps both for himself and for us. In such texts as the Edifjing Discourses, as the enigmatic but probably decisive treatise on Repetition, as the teasing reflections on Kierkegaard's own 'authorship', the inwoven triplicity of voices and points of view is manifest. There is, from the outset, a moralistic malaise in the paradoxes and avowals of the aesthete, of the romantic dandy and seducer. Kierkegaard's ethical 'scenarios' and self-scrutiny are charged with poetic, rhetorical display and the disinterested exuberance in stylistic experiment of a literary master. The 'transgression' into sacrificial, uncompromising faith, the tormented acceptance of the demands of the absolute in 'imitation of Christ' is latent throughout Kierkegaard. As I read and re-read this exsensive, kaleidoscopic body of work, the 'decision for God' in the image of Jesus seems to me discernible, like the flash of a distant lighthouse, as early as Kierkegaard's doctoral dissertation on Socratic irony, with its subtle but unmistakable critique of even the loftiest of pre-Christian souls. The three strands are interwoven almost to the very end. The 'credal' totality prevails only near that very end, in those polemic indictments of the imperfection of the established church which so clearly spell out Kierkegaard's own imminent death.
Furthermore, an external factor obtrudes. I n mid-October 1843, Kierkegaard, at one simultaneous stroke, published three books: Fear and Trembling, signed Johannes de Silentio; The Repetition, under the name of Constantine Constantius; and Three Edifjing Discourses by Soren Kierkegaard . In one sense, we are confronted by a single 'speech-act'. In another, these three texts qualify, scrutinize and even ironize each other. But all three arise immediately from a crisis at once intimate and strangely public (Copenhagen was a small city Xll
I N T RO D UCTIO N
addicted to censorious gossip). They enact Kierkegaard's torment and analytic apologia in respect of his broken engagement to Regine Olsen. The drama of self-alleged infidelity and philosophic licentiousness had already been played out, all too transparently, in Either/Or. Now two occurrences precipitated Kierkegaard's anguish: Regine had nodded to him in church, suggesting forgiveness and a true understanding of her
'betrayer's' motives (the root incompatibility of the philosophic and the married state). Then he learnt of her betrothal to another. The psychological effect was both ruinous and liberating. Wild energies of argumentative, allegoric selfdramatization and social satire erupted in Kierkegaard. His henceforth aloneness turned to strategy. He took his stance at the frontiers of his community and of his own psyche. Each of the three treatises published in that mirabilis month bore on Regine Olsen's conventional retreat from what might have been a solitude, a symbolic apartness concordant with S.K.'s.
Allusions to intimate episodes and storms of sensibility arc encased in the psychological, metaphysical and theological motions of argument even where these appear to be most abstract and general. Kierkegaard, in manoeuvres of rhetoric not always attractive, strips himself naked while advocating uttermost reticence and the burial of the heart. The very pennames advertise: 'the constant onc' and the 'apostle of silence', itself a reference to a fairy-talc by the brothers Grimm in which a lover turns to stone rather than betray his secret despair.
As a rule, I find current modes of 'psycho-biography'
fatuous. The fibres which relate a man to his work arc, where anyone of Kierkegaard's dimensions and refinement go, of a tautness and complication which rebuke our indiscretions. But in the case of Fear and Trembling (and the two masterpieces which closely accompany it), the private domain compels notice were it only because Nietzsche, indirectly, and Wittgenstein, in plain awareness, were attentive to Kierkegaard's precedent when they conducted their own spiky lives and when they failed at or rejected certain 'normal' human rela tions (such as marriage).
Regine Olsen's is not the only biographical presence in Fear XllI
KIERKEG A A R D
and Trembling. The black persona of Kierkegaard's dead father looms. The vacant, sombre heath invoked at the outset of chapter one is not that of biblical Canaan, but of Jutland. It was there that S0ren's father, in starved and despairing childhood, had cursed God. This distant malediction became a life-long obsession. It was revealed by the father to his son.
In moods of 'Lamarckian Calvinism', Kierkegaard persuaded himself that he had inherited this scar of anathema and was, ineluctably, an object of God's retribution. Again, a certain willed cultivation of terror and of a psycho-doctrinal tragic drama is palpable. But the ensuing Angst was none the less graphic, nor the trembling any less feverish. In the double shadow of his 'infidelity' and pariahdom on the one hand, and of the sin inherited from his father's blasphemy on the other, Kierkegaard was able, as has been rto other imaginer or exegete, to make his own Genesis 22.
The sub-title is exactly challenging. 'A dialectical lyric'.
The tensed interplay between philosophic propositions and poetic-dramatic means of expression dates back to the pre
Socratics and, supremely, to Plato's dialogues. It is instrumental in Wittgenstein's Tractatus, itself heir to the rhetorical genius of Lichtenberg and of Nietzsche. A great philosophy is always 'stylish': this is to say that its impact on the listener or reader, the force of coherence which it generates, its music of persuasion, are necessarily cognate with its performative means (those of language). S0ren Kierkegaard was a craftsman of prose of the very first order. We can locate his tonality, the darting, intensely personalized dynamics of his presentations, within the more general context of European romanticism. He comes after Rousseau, after the early Goethe no less than does, say, Carlyle. It was in Schiller, in Novalis, that Kierkegaard could find full justification for the co-existence, in the same work, of philosophic and poetic components, of technical meditation and fictive-dramatic genres. Kierkegaard's fascination with the theatre and the ambiguous authenticity of the actor's trade never ceased. He writes incomparably of Mozart. His critical reviews of contemporary drama or novels are maliciously informed. He observed a rival in Hans Christian Andersen. Only towards the end are his XIV
I N T RO D UCTIO N
philosophical and theological books, essays, sermons, unmarked by quotations from, by analogies with, literary examples. Fear and Trembling draws, among others, on Plato, Euripides, Shakespeare, Cervantes and Goethe as well as on the brothers Grimm and Andersen. Don Quixote is the subtext to the Bible.
Hence the concept of a 'dialectical lyric', of a narration of thought. The logical contradictions posited, the psychological and philosophic-religious endeavours to resolve them - the
'dialectic' in the Platonic sense, as this sense is taken up and modified by Hegel- are set out in what appears, at moments, to be an arbitrary, fictive manner. But the play of possibilities and of voices has its own severe logic, as do the successions of myths and of seeming digressions in a Platonic dialogue. Fear and Trembling is, above all, a fable of insight.
*
In a technique which antIcIpates the semiotic games of U mberto Eco and of today's deconstructionists, S.K. sketches a set of variants on the parable of Abraham and Isaac. Each variation on the given theme of the scriptural narration raises further psychological, moral and credal dilemmas. Immanuel Kant had opined that God, so far as we can attach to that concept and presence within us any intelligible meaning, could not order a father to slaughter his own beloved, miraculously conceived son. For Kant, the commandment heard by Abraham is daemonic. It stems from the voice of absolute evil.
Abraham is the victim of infernal deceit. A degree of culpability attaches to his confusion. (How could he possibly have taken this to be a message from God ?). Kierkegaard's reading is rigorously antithetical to Kant's. Only the true God can demand of Abraham the sacrifice of Isaac. I t is in the (sickening) unreason, in the incomprehensible enormity of precisely such an injunction that the believer will recognize God's authentic summons. It is the profound error of Kant and of Hegel to seek to identify the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God who ordains the hideous death of His Son on the cross, with categories of human understanding and xv
K IE RKEGAARD
reasoned ethics. In intimate echo to Pascal, S0ren Kierkegaard would have us discriminate unflinchingly between the dieu des philosophes and the living God, into whose hands it is indeed 'terrible to fall'.
There follows the harsh yet exultant eulogy of Abraham.
Kierkegaard spirals characteristically around one pivot, probing now from one angle of incidence, now from another. No aesthetic of tragic heroism, no rational morality, however high they are pitched, will bring us in reach of Abraham's journey to Mount Moriah. When men of war or guardians of civic virtue such as J ephthah and Brutus sacrifice their children to the Lord of Hosts or to the laws of the state, they do so with intelligible, albeit mistaken or fanatical, motivations. The barbaric sacrifice of Iphigenia ensures the departure to Troy of the Greek fleet. Creon the despot sacrifices his son so as to ensure the salvation ofThebes from murderous and blaspheming foes. Such exemplary acts and the devastating consequences which they have on their agents are the very stuff of heroic chronicles, sagas and tragic dramas. (S.K. had toyed with the project of composing his own version of Antigone.) But they throw no genuine light on the matter of Abraham and Isaac.
Nor does ethics. I t is here that Kierkegaard's analysis is most arduous. Ethically considered, Abraham's acquiescence in God's commandment or indeed that of any man enjoined to carry out human sacrifice, is indefensible. Obedience may arise from fear of supernatural retribution, from superstition, from atavistic usages (the history of blood-offerings is immemorial and has its unsettling survival into periods which we associate with mature civilization). None of these categories is moral. Where morality is at its most elevated, in a Socrates, in a Kant, inhumanity and irrational absurdity have no place.
Confronted with God's demand, the response of the ethical must be one of counter-challenge. How can God justify the order to slay Isaac? Is such a behest not prima facie a trap, a means of testing human courage and compassion (i.e. God waits for man's refusal)? Should divine coercion be so imperious as to make any such refusal finally impossible, morality and reason have a further resource. There are those who have XVI
INTRODUCTION
chosen suicide rather than injustice, self-destruction rather than manifest criminality.
Kierkegaard is acutely cognizant of these arguments. He dwells with loving irony on their dialectical strengths. They are, he rules, wholly irrelevant to the Akedah, to the overwhelming enigma and interpretation of Abraham's obedience.
The sole pertinent rubric is that of absolute faith, of a faith which transgresses against and thus transcends all conceivable claims of intellectual accountability and of ethical criteria.
Abraham's readiness to sacrifice Isaac, his son, to enact God's prescription unquestioningly, lies beyond good and evil. From any point of view other than that of total faith, of total trust in the Almighty, Abraham's conduct is appalling. There can be no intellectual or ethical excuse for it. If we are to grasp Genesis 22, we must apprehend 'enormity' (a term whose etymology points, precisely, towards transgression, towards a sphere of meaning outside any reasoned legality). The cardinal notion is that of the absurd. Fixing on this crux, S.K. looks back to certain legacies of mystical illumination, of selfabolition in God, and forward to modern 'surrealism' and existentialism. Abraham's actions are radiantly absurd. He becomes the 'Knight of Faith' riding forth like Don Quixote as God's champion in the face of humanist revulsion and ridicule. He dwells in paradox. His quantum leap of and into blinding faith isolates him completely. The heroic and the ethical can be generalized. They belong to arguable systems of values and representations. Faith is radically singular. The encounter with God as experienced by Abraham is, eternally, that of an individual, of a private being in the grip of infinity.
Only to a 'Knight of Faith', in his unbearable solitude and silence, is the living God simultaneously unfathomable and so close as to eradicate, to burn away, the limits of the self. No synagogue, no ecclesia can house Abraham as he strides, in mute torment, towards his appointment with the Everlasting.
*
Do such appointments come to pass in modern times ? This question is, theologically envisaged, vexatious. Judaism, in its orthodox vein, holds Elijah to have been the last mortal man XVll
K I ERKEGAARD
sanctified by a direct meeting with God. In non-mystical Christianity, the divine epiphany does disclose itself, miraculously, to certain men, women or children; but does so via the figure of the Son or of the Blessed Virgin. Islam, if I interpret its position correctly, does not look to any face-to-face encounter with Allah after the time of the Prophet. In December 1842, in Copenhagen, Adolph Peter Adler, clergyman and Magister in theology (Kierkegaard had attended his academic viva in June 1840), experienced a direct visitation and revelation from Christ. The Son of God had bidden Adler to burn all the manuscripts of his Hegelian writings and had dictated to him, in complete immediacy, the true doctrine concerning the origins of evil. On 12 June 1846, Magister Adler published simultaneously no less than four books. One consisted of sacred verse; the other three set out Adler's revealed insights as granted to him by Jesus. S.K. seems to have been among the very first buyers of these four titles.
The result was The Book on Adler. Whereas Fear and Trembling is among the best-known and influential works in nineteenthand twentieth-century philosophic theology and literature, the treatise on Adler has remained almost unknown to the general reader. This obscurity inheres in its genesis. Kierkegaard began composition in the summer of 1846, immediately after perusing the Magister's revelations. The polemicist in Kierkegaard aimed at rapid publication. Dissatisfied with his first version, S.K. withdrew the manuscript in 1847, completing a third and more or less definitive version late that same year. Again, he chose not to publish. Having extracted from The Book on Adler two major essays on the relations between
'genius' and the apostolic and on the dilemma of whether or not a Christian has a right to solicit martyrdom, to offer his life for his faith, S.K. left the book itself among his Papierer (the diaries, the fragments, the voluminous notes). It appeared after his death.
Why this withholding ? Plainly, Kierkegaard found himself in an exceedingly awkward personal situation in regard to Adler. They were acquainted. Adler had called on S.K., informing him that he, Kierkegaard, was in some sense the John the Baptist to the Magister whom the Lord had chosen as XV1l1
IN TRODUCTION
His special messenger. Kierkegaard pondered the probability that Adler (whom the ecclesiastical authorities had suspended from his ministry in 1844) was quite simply mentally deranged. Why, moreover, draw further public attention (and derision) to a wretched business soon forgot? But substantive as they may have been, these inhibitions do not touch on the heart of the problem. Adler's conviction that mundane, rationalistic, officious Christianity in Denmark must be electrified into authentic crisis, was exactly Kierkegaard's. The Magister's readiness to suffer ridicule and ostracism on behalf of his 'absurd', existentially enforced certitudes, must have struck a deep, unsettling chord in S.K. himself. As we will see, Adler's claims, however suspect and, indeed, pathological, embroiled Kierkegaard in psychological-theological dilemmas which even his acutest dialectical means failed to unravel convincingly. The Adler 'case' might well prove trivial and wholly ephemeral. The issues which it raised would not go away. Thus there is a perspective in which the wretched Adler defeated his grand inquisitor.
As so often in Kierkegaard's speculations and dialogues, the
'third presence' is that of Hegel. S.K.'s ironies sparkle: the Magister no doubt committed his Hegelian lucubrations to the fire, but he remains arch-Hegelian in his confusions. I ncapable of discriminating between subjective phenomena and objective truths, Adler, like so many of Hegel's uncritical adepts, makes naive use of the Hegelian concept of synthesis between the self and the external world. As it were, he
'hallucinates reality'.
But S.K. is after bigger game. The crux of the Adler affair is that of 'calling', in the very strongest sense of the term. How does a human being know that he/she is being summoned by God? How can human sensibility and intellect differentiate between an ecstatic, deeply felt intimation of divine solicitation, whose actual sources are those of personal need or emotion, and the authentic voice of God? The enigma is not one of possible psychic disorder (as it may have been in Magister Adler's instance); nor is it one of calculated selfdeception or public falsehood (as in the case of innumerable gurus and market-place mystics). What, asks Kierkegaard, XIX
K I ERK EGAARD
could be the conceivable criteria by which to determine the roots and verity of God's summons to any individual human person? Even visible excellence of moral conduct, even sacrificial suffering, such as is endured by martyrs, provides no prorif for the spiritual validity of a vocation from God. As T.S. Eliot has it in his meditation on the possibly opportunistic martyrdom of Becket, 'doing the right thing for the wrong reason'
may, especially in respect of the religious, be 'the subtlest form of treason'.
Nothing is more fascinating to note than S0ren Kierkegaard's almost despairing attempts to clarify, to unravel a conundrum whose intricacies, whose scandalous implications, seem to ebb from his ardent grasp. The focus is not, of course, poor Adler: it becomes Kierkegaard himself and his most deep-buried anguish and hopes.
The dialectical motions of proposal and qualification, of imaginative thrust and self-deconstruction, are of a complexity, indeed ofa fragility, which make any outline crass. Neither intellectual lucidity and analytic rigour (,genius') nor ethical, sacrificial engagement, necessarily lead towards the 'hand-tohand' encounter with God. Here the image burning between the lines is that of J acob wrestling with the Stranger. It may well be that genius and reasoned morality of even the loftiest order - say in Kant - inhibit the mystery of a veritable calling.
There is, and S.K. touches at this point on an elusive paradox, a self-sufficiency in moral excellence, a harmonic finitude at the heart of goodness, which in some manner excludes or renders marginal the dread, the devastating nearness of God.
Only the Apostle is called. He alone embodies, literally, the act of possession by God and is authorized to enunciate, to translate into mortal speech, the message which he has - there is no other way of putting it - become. Does this election glorify the Apostle? On the contrary, argues Kierkegaard. The authenticating mark of the apostolic is an existential humility of the most radical kind. The true Apostle is humbled beyond all other humilities known to man. Hence the rebellious terror, the surge of refusal, with which Old Testament prophets respond to the charge which God puts upon them. An Apostle is, at any given moment be it in a street in nineteenth-xx
INTRODUCTION
century Copenhagen - in a synchronic correspondence with the humilitas of Jesus, of the mocked, scourged, spat-upon and done to death Jesus of the Passion. (Adler's evident satisfaction in consequence of his 'visions', the vanity in his resolve to make them public, disqualify him at once from any claim to being an instrument of God's purpose.) Only the man or woman contemporaneous with, 'synchronized with', the suffering Christ and compelled to speak, to exemplify the meaning of that suffering, can be held to reveal God, to be - McLuhan knew his Kierkegaard - the medium made message.
Yet, at once, perplexities bristle. Whence, then, the power and the glory of the apostolic, its imperative hold on human acquiescence and imitation? How, moreover, can we reconcile Kierkegaard's insistence on the kerygmatic obligations of the apostolic, on the necessity of the declared revelation, with an emphasis on secrecy, on an ultimate inwardness? Kierkegaard grapples subtly, tenaciously, with these formidable questions.
He sets himself nakedly at stake. Once again, the logic of contradiction, of the paradox (so Hegelian in essence, whatever S.K.'s protestations), is instrumental. Where it attains the requisite pitch of lived intensity, where it is fully analogous to that of Jesus, humility is total powerlessness, a finality of impotence. But it is precisely this impotence which constitutes, exactly in the sense of Jesus' revaluation of values, a greater power, very nearly an omnipotence of the absurd. Kierkegaard's thesis remains opaque. It helps, I suggest, to remember the 'powerless force' of such literary personae as Don Quixote or of Prince Muishkin, Dostoevsky's 'holy idiot'.
Something of this sort is in Kierkegaard's mind when he wrestles with the contrarieties of the apostolic. Nor does he resolve the irreconcilable demands for silence, for humble selfeffacement in the carrier of God's calling with the ministry entailed by that very calling. No thinker, no writer, is more illuminating than Kierkegaard on the motif of moralmetaphysical discretion, on the sacrament of secrecy which makes efficacious the love, the suffering of an Antigone or a Cordelia. S.K. is a celebrant of inward withdrawal, of absolute silence. He is, at the same time, a publicist of rare vehemence, one who bears witness loudly, self-revealingly, in public places.
XXI
K I ERKEGAAR D
The satiric journal, The Corsaire, had lampooned him cruelly.
Kierkegaard had been made an object of open derision in his native city. This condition was the very demonstration of the burden borne by a witness Ca martyr', in Greek, signifies
'witness'). To shuffle off this burden, to leave God's discourse unproclaimed, would be nothing less than apostasy. In the pseudonym, 'Petrus minor', under which Kierkegaard planned to issue The Book on Adler, these unresolved contradictions are inherent.
*
From any systematic point of view - philosophical systems being S.K.'s bugbear - the demolition of Adler is flawed. We have seen that Kierkegaard hammers out neither a clear delineation of the nature of the apostolic in a modern context, nor can he harmonize the antithetical demands on the chosen spirit of self-concealment and of public witness. But even in direct reference to Adler's pretences, Kierkegaard's indictment remains, finally, dogmatic. The Magister's account of divine encounter, the 'revelations' he alleges, are indeed shown to be wholly implausible and even risible. The inference of deranged vanity and mental confusion lies to hand.
But nothing in S.K.'s pitiless diagnosis elucidates any formal and substantively definitive criteria whereby we may discriminate between hysterical or hallucinatory illusion and a 'Godexperience' in any verifiable sense. The leap into the absurd, the abolitions of pragmatic causality and oflogic which would characterize such an experience, remain, by Kierkegaard's own criteria of 'necessary impossibility', issues of trust. Ineluctably, the possibility that Adolph Peter Adler has received direct communication from Christ (however garbled, however unworthy his modulation of the message into his own words and person) survives Kierkegaard's negation. How could it be otherwise if, in S.K.'s own phrase, those 'wounds of possibility are to be kept open'?
It is precisely these flaws, these knots in the argument, which generate the fascination of our text. The mercurial finesse ofKierkegaard's psychological probing, its adumbration (literal 'foreshadowing') of Freudian theories of the subcons-XXII
INTRO D UCT ION
cious, where Freud, however, flinches from any serious analysis of religious convictions, make of The Book on Adler one of the dark jewels in the history of philosophic psychology. As an examiner of the lives of the mind, of the associative pulses of the imagination at those points at which the anarchic yet somehow ordered energies of the unspoken are brought to bear on rational proposals, Kierkegaard has only two peers.
His inquisition into Adler stands beside those descents into the deeps of the human psyche performed by Dostoevsky and by Nietzsche. In these three cases, we are dealing with dramatists of the abstract, with analysts of surpassing penetration, capable of circumscribing frontier zones of unreason, of ecstatic and mystical flashes, even of madness. Modern psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic knowingness has sometimes deepened, but often flattened, the geology of consciousness explored by The Possessed, by Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals and by The Book on Adler. But here already lies the essence of our psychological modernity.
There is as well a direct link. Throughout his tracking of Adler, S.K. is spiralling around himself. The Magister threatens to be his faithful though parodistic shadow. In short, he turns out to be Kierkegaard's double. The Doppelganger theme obsesses western interest from E.T.A. Hoffmann, Poe and Gogol all the way to Kafka. It enacts an urgent intimation as to the schizophrenic potential in the ego, as to the dangers of self�splitting inherent in a certain vivacity of thought and of fantastication. Dostoevsky's novel, The Double, marks only one among numerous invocations of this theme in his fictions.
Nietzsche and his Zarathustra circle around each other in a complex figure of rival mirrorings. On almost every page of the Adler book, we observe Kierkegaard labouring, sometimes with satiric confidence, but more often in barely muffled Angst, to shake off the intimacy of his scandalous familiar, of the
'house-demon' who is also his twin. A particular terror emanates from these pages.
May this edition introduce the English-language reader to an imperfect masterpiece, all but lost.
George Steiner
XXllJ
S E L E C T
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
B IOGRAPHY
All Kierkegaard's work is of course autobiographical, and all commentary on it is therefore in a certain sense biographical, but the autobiography is usually oblique. For the facts readers may consult WaIter Lowrie's Kierkegaard, Oxford University Press, 1938. Patrick Gardiner's volume on Kierkegaard in the OUP Past Masters series also provides a brief biographical sketch.
JOURNALS
Selections from the Journals are easily available in paperback editions, including one edited and translated by Alexander Dru, Oxford University Press, 1938, reprinted and amended in Fontana Books, 1958.
WORKS
Most of Kierkegaard's major works have been translated at least twice. The complete writings are currently being published by Princeton in new translations. Texts especially relevant to this volume are The Sickness Unto Death, The Concept cif Dread and Crisis in the Life oJ an Actress.
C R I T I C ISM
Among many commentators on Kierkegaard the following are all of interest:
ADORNO, T. w., Kierkegaard: Construction cif the Aesthetic, tr. R. Hullot
Kentor, University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
BRANDT, FR., Spren Kierkegaard, tr. A. R. Born, Det danske Selskab, Copenhagen, 1963.
MALANTSCHUK, G., Kierkegaard's Thought, tr. H. V. and E. H. Hong, Princeton University Press, 1974.
PATTISON, G., Kierkegaard, Macmillan, 1992.
STACK, G. ]., Kierkegaard's Existential Ethics, University of Alabama Press, 1974.
THOMPSON, ]., Kierkegaard, GoIIancz, 1974.
xxv
C H R O i\" OL O G Y
LIFE
CONTEXT
Birth or Smen Kicrkcgaarcl, thc
:\Iadamc de StaC'i: J)e
youngest or SCWIl , to l\lichacl
LllIemagne translatcd into
Pedersen and Anc S(1rensdallcr.
English.
Michacl's i>un ily had workecl the
Shcllcy: Queen
land or their local priest in
The brothers GriIllIll: Ai'nder
Jutland ill Cl feudal
IInd Hau.I/Ilarchm (IHI� '5).
which gave thcm their n allle
(Gnl\'cyarcl). Released hum this
at ht' age of
moved to
Copellhagcn where hL' worked
ill his uncle's hosiery business
ano l ater bec<1lne a \vcalthy
wholesaler or imported goods. In
he married Kirstint' R"yen
who died, childless, two years
later.
HoflilliUln : Ph(lIIl((sie.l/ticke.
The I,'xrurlirill.
(lehiensehLigcr: Hr/ge.
Rvskilde-riilll.
A. \\'. Schlcgel : I,nlllres 011
Dralllal;c Art and IJtrrature.
H o fhnalln : The Dellil'r Pfix;r.
(;octhc: Ilaiian]oumry
IB'7).
H egci: 1,(),P,ir.
Co\cridge: (;hristabel ami Ailbla
Ahan.
Constant: A dolphe.
(;rundtvig:
jmzediknlO.
H eibcrg: Christmas
and
Jesting.
Coieridge: RiograjJhia I,ileraria.
Keats: Poems.
F. Schlcgcl: I,fctures 011 Ihe
Ifislorv 0/ Lilemlurr.
XXVI
HISTORICAL EV ENTS
Fredcrik VI declares the kinp;dom of Denlllark bankrupt. The nation's bank, the Kur a ntbank, is replaced by the R ip;shank; all paper Illoney is called i n a n d exchange d felr n e w money one-tenth t h e value.
Opening of first university in Oslo.
Denmark concludes new treaty wit h France.
\Var of L iberat ion bep;ins; Kapoicon defeated at Leipzig.
Introduction of school ref(lrmS in Denmark which fe)r the
compulsory education of every child from seven to f')urteen. All ied 1')f(TS
invade .Jutland and compel
Danes to conclude peace at Kiel. Congress
of Vicnna: dClllocratic cOllstitut ion establishes [\onvay tin der
Danish con trol) as a Iree and
state under Kinp; of Sweden.
First Treaty of Paris. Abdication of :\apoleon 1,)lIowinp; invasion of Paris by English,
and Prussian troops.
Corn Laws hit
exports badly. Treaty of Vien n a restores pre
:'\Japoleon i c s tatus quo in Europe, but secures illdcpcllckncc and n eutrality of twenty-two Swiss cantons. Baltle 01·
Formation of Germ an
CClIlICckration.
Agricultural riots in Enp;land. Diet of (;erman Confederat ion Illeets in H abeas Corpus Act suspended in England. \Vartburg demonstrations i n t:lvollr of
uni ty.
Rip;sbank replaced by the :\alionalbank which is p;ran ted an independen t status. Agricul tural crisis i l l DeIlmark hich lasts f()f roughly tell years.
XXVII
AUTIIOR' S LIFE
LITERARY CONTEXT
1818 cont.
Shelley: The Revolt Qf Islam.
Keats: f,'ndymion.
181<)
Schopenhauer: The H,Jrld as
�rill alld Repm·entatioll.
Byron: Don }uan (to IB24).
The
Brethren (to 18�1).
H egel: Philosvpkv
Right.
Shelley:
{fnhound.
Lamartinl': .lIMitations.
Keats: H)'Perioll, IJlmia, Odes.
H oflillann: 'Princess Bramb i l l a'.
S.K. enrols in Copen hagen's
Shcl lcy: A Ddence of'Poetry.
B orgcrdydskole (School 0(' Civic
Kleist: The I'rince o/Homhlllg.
Virtue).
IBn
Goethc: �ic'ilhpflll ,lfeisin's
'helVe/s.
H e i nc: Poons.
B irth of Rcgine Olsen.
Stcndhal: Racine alld ShakeS/Hare.
B l ichcr: The }oulIlal
Parish
Clerk.
Pushkin bcgin s \vork 011 El:S!,f�J�y
Onegin (to I B:>o).
1\I"ller: The Advflltures of' a /)allish Undf1graduate.
Sibbcrn: The Posthumous I,dtm'
H c iberg: 'On the l\lusical
as a drarnatic genre'.
Hiilderl ilI: Poems.
Hcihcrg-
literary journal,
the Fivillg A'/ail, which publ ishes,
<lr110ng others, H ailS Christ ian
AlIdcrselI alId Christian
\VilIther as wel l as S.K. himself.
Bl icher: The Rohher's Den.
Grun d tvig: C'hristelige praedikenC1'
(3 vols. to IB30).
XXVIII
C H RONOL()(;Y
I1I STORICAL EVEl\TS
Congress or Aix-Ia-C hapelle.
Acccssion of Bernadottc. f')J'[lll'r Napoleonic J\[arshal, to Swedish thro!le as Charles Xl\,.
Pctcrioo l\lassacrc in England. Gcrnl<l1l COll kdcratioll is persuaded of a cOllspiracy to overthrow establ ished order in Central Europe, and a series or repressive measures
the Carlsbad Decrces
is adopted by the Federal
Diet.
Federal Diet accepts 'Final Act of' \'ienna' whieh destroys all but three of the l iberal constitutions gran ted in German states. Death of George [[I i n England. Dan ish
H an s C h ristian Orsted produces
experimelltal evidence of the relationship between electricity and The
gates o f ' Copen hagen ('('asc to b e closed each n i g h t . I\'ob i l i ty abol ished in I\'orway. I\'ethedancls government meat and corn hit
Belgian peasan try. (;reek \Var of Independence.
Open ing o f Royal Art Cal lery in Copcnhagcn . Greek \Var or Liberation against the Turks.
Frederick \\, i l l iam I l[ establishes pnwincial Diets in Prussia.
\VOrtetnberg {()recd to ac('ep t Carlsbad Decrecs by Austria; Decrees made perrnane n t .
Grundtvig's /tj'erkfJlS Gi('ntfl([de, a protest against 'rational isrn' in the C hurch, provokes
ill DCll rnark. Deccmbrist revult ill Russia. Begi n ning o f great Czech cl/ltlll'al re\'ival, inspired b y C;erman t h i n kers, n otably H e rder, up to 184B.
Russo-Swedish amicable set tlement of Finmark fi·ontiers.
Election riots i n Paris. Liberal ization oj'the Brit ish Corn Laws gives Denrnark access to all
foreig-n Inarket once rnorc.
XXIX
KIERKECAARD
DATE
AUTHOR'S LI F E
LITERARY CO:\TEXT
r82B
S . K . confirmed b y Pastor (later
Heiberg:
Bishop).J. P. Mynster.
Ingellla n n : The Childhood ql
Blichcr: The Hosier.
Andersc n : A
and
I.ove 1111 SI Ni(hola.l (.'fllm:h Tineer.
Balzac: I.es Chol1all.l.
S. K. graduates from tire
Andcrsen: Poems.
Borgerdydskole, and bd()rc
Stendhal: Scarlet alld Rillck.
e n tering u n iversity he enrols i n
Comte: Cour.l de
tbe Royal Lik Guards b u t is
j!oIitive (to riLp).
discharged as physically unfil.
H ertz: I.ellers ola (;hoI/.
Andcrsen : Shadmi' l'i(ll1re.l
a
]ourney 10 the liar;:. "10ulllaill.l
and Sa:t'()/�y.
(;oclhe: Poelry alld Ti'lllh.
Uoethe c0l11pictcs sc('ono part
or NLUst.
Gru ncltvig: Aill'dens mytllOlogi.
Lt'II<lu : POfl1l5.
Takes Iri s exam inations (April).
Dallish GlosI'm).
Andersell: Collated Poems.
Balzac: l,'ugellie Gralldel.
1\1011('[': The D(lII(illg Girl.
rB:H
S.K. makes h is
debut
with a piece i n the Firillg POIt
entitled 'Also a
or
\\'Olnan's Superior Capacity'.
Death or his mother.
S.K. spen ds a sumIller holiday
Andersen : The Improvislllore.
at G i llcleje in northern Sj,elland. Loennrot: ft'alevala.
vVri tes i n his journal or needing
Caut icr: Mademoiselle de
an idea to 'l ive <tnd die' for.
J1a11pin.
Unt i l 18:lB Ire l ives
l ik ora
Balzac: I,e !'he Goriol.
111;111 abollt town
the above
lrorn his journal testifies to a
deepening despair and lack or
direction.
S.K. publ ishes two additional
Hertz: The
Hallk.
art icles in the Flyillg Pusl. Begins
Alldcrsc n : UT
to attend Poul
lectures
Coieridgc: Table 'Talk.
Oil the general concepts of
Gogo l : The (;overnmelll Inspector.
metaphysics.
Eckermanll publishes h is
'Cotlversatiolls
Co('t\t(".
xxx
C H RO:,(OLOC;Y
EVENT S
Russia declares \-var OIl Turkey.
Catholic Emancipation Act passed in England.
Revolut ions i n France and Belgiu lll . Abdication of C h arles X of France.
Revol ts ill Saxony, Hesse and Brullswick. Representat ive clenlocracy demanded in Sweden.
Start of (;cnnCln I\at iollaiist ic I110\'Cnlcn t ill Schleswig and H oistei n : Fredcrik V I agrees to consultatiVl" assembl ies in H olstein, Sch lcs\\'ig, and the islands vvhich w i l l illcl ude of the un iversit ies and the
clergy. Pol ish Declaration or Independence. Belgian Independence frolll the l\"etherlands recogn izcd by
powers in
or �+ Art icles.
Svviss cantons forrn two separate groups.
ice between Dutch and Belgians. Swiss Federal Diet meets to amend 1815 Federal
C ustOIllS Unioll establ ished in Gennany. Abo l i t i o n of in Bri tain.
F irst Liberal newspapcr appears in Denmark hlfdrd{/lIdet (T he Fatherland).
Elect ions held
councils in
Schleswig, .Ju tland and the islands.
Art icles or BadcII; SOII1C S\viss
assert rights agai nst ROll1;:UI Catholic C h urch . ,[,olpuddle l'lartyrs i n England.
Pope Gregory XVI rejects c0l11prom ise with Prussia over rn ixecl 111arriages.
Establishment of Ecclesiastical Commissioners in Chur c h of England.
Lou is :\'apolcon Ltils
stir up Bonapart ist rising in Strasbourg.
XXXl
KIERKECAARD
DATE
AUTHOR' S LIF E
LITERARY CONTEXT
IB:17
S. K. meets Reginc Olsen f(lr the
Carlyle: The French Revolutioll.
first time wh ile visiting the
H ertz: Svell l�)'rillg\ llouse.
Rmdams in Frederiksberg. In
Andersen:
a Fiddler.
September he begins teaching
Balzac: I.es Illusions perdues.
Latin at the BorgerdydskoJc and
Dickens: l'iekwick
Tll0\TS to his own apart mellt 011
The Artist among the
klvstr;rde.
Rebels.
S.K.'s father dies (9 August).
OliveI' TU'ist.
S. K.'s first book, From the
I\liirike: Poems.
of One Still Uving, is publ ished i n
H ugo: RI,v Bias.
September.
H auch: A Polish Family.
Stendhal: I-a Chartreuse de I'arm e.
Dickens:
.lVicklehy.
S.K. conlplctcs h is cxarnination for Foundation of The Corsair, Cl the tbeological degree, tours
l i beral periodical, which nms
Jutland where he visi ts his
t i l l 1B4(i.
ral home, and on 10 September
Andersen: Picture Book without
becomes engaged to Rcgine Olsen. Pictures and The j1ulatio.
In "lovember he enters the pastoral
A Hero (!/ Our
sem i n ary for practical lraining in
Time.
the m i n istry.
Preaches Cl sernlon in Holmen's
Heiberg: '1\ Soul
ch urch. Dekmls and publ ishes h is Death'.
dissertat ion f"r the I\IA degree,
A dm11 Homo (to IB41).
The COllcept
IrVl�V. I n October he Feucrbach: The
0/
breaks his engagclnent to Rcgillc
C'hrislianiry.
and f1e('s to Berl in.
D ickens: The Old
Sho/!.
Attends Sche l l ing's lectures in
Andcrsen: A Poet's Bazaar.
Berl i n but returns to Copenhagen Gogol: Dead Souls.
in
Wri tes I,'ithrr/Or.
H ebbel: Poems.
Hither/Or published in February.
H ertz: hi'ng Rnce Dau<�hter.
S. K. makes a short visi t to
Dickens: A Christmas Carol.
Berl i n in ;'day. TU'o HdijjJin.g
:'.1 ill: ,�vslem
Discollm.r
hilir HdiiVing
Discol1rses (Deccmber). Fear alld
Tremblillg, Repetitioll and Three
HdijYill.� Discourses (( ktober) .
Three Fdijj;ing DiscO/mPl',
DUll1as: The Three
Phi/o,rophical Fragments, The
H e i ne: Poems.
COllcept of Dread and Prefaces
Hcbbel: ,\;far/a
(.June). In October S.K. moves
back to the family home at
�.
XXXll
EYENTS
Seven l iberal prolCssors d ismissed at Cn i\'ersi ty of Giitt ingen (including the brothers Grimm). Dan ish
agree to the in troduction of regularly
elected tOWI1 councils (extended to counties and parishes ill IB4 1).
Archbishops of Cologne and POSCIl expel led for opposition to Prussian rel igious pol ic ies. Chartist nlO\Tll1cnt f(HlIldecl i n England. Queell Victoria cornes to the throlle.
Fou n dation of Anti-Cam-Law League in Britain. Austrian and French troops wi thdraw frol11 Bologna and Ancona respectively.
Death of Frederik VI {(l l lowed by Christian V II I u nt i l Ig4B, Revisio n i n const itution of t h e Swiss cantons leads to Cathul ic--Protcstant stri fe. Arrncd rising of Parisian art isans against 1l1ollarchy and rule.
Abdication of \Vil l iam I of H o l l and, Louis Napoleon filils to stir up rising i n Boulogne.
\\'ith the opelling of Kehlet's Cale, cales gradually become a recognized part of Copenhagen l i l(,.
S\viss cantons suppress
ITIonastcries; latter protected by Federal Pact of IBIS.
Chartist riots in Birmingham. French occupy Tahiti.
Formation of Sonderb und i n Switzerland.
:'\ichnias I of Russia lormally recognizes Leopold I as King nf Belgium.
First railway i n Denmark. First Folk H igh School i n Vienn a. Swiss demands restorat ion of monasteries in Aargau; latter demand expu lsion of .Jesu i ts from Swi tzerland.
XXXltl
KIERKECAARD
AUTHOR'S LI FE
LIT ERARY COl\TEXT
Three Discourses Oil bna.�ined
Engds: Coudililm lifthe
Occasions alld Slages Oil
\' �tlIV
Clas.1 iu Fuglfwd.
(Apri l). S.K. spends two weeks ill (;oldschrnidt: A Jew.
Berl in during
ay.
Andersen decorated by King
of Prtlssia at Potscianl. First
VOiUlllC' of Anciersell
publ ished i n
I\larx: Theses on Feuerhoch.
Dumas: [-Cl Tulipe noirP.
The Corsair, a satirical journal,
Tales.
attacks S.K. in January alter
Balzac: Cousine Helle.
had criticized i ts editor I()r
Dostoevsky: Poor rr)lk.
sparing hinl from abuse.
C,mclnding
l'oslscrij)1
(February) is
by A
!,ileraev Revim' (:\Iarch). In l\1ay
S.K. once again visits Berl in.
Edij)illp, DisuJwJes in f--ariolls '�IJI'rits Anclcrscn 1l1eets Charles
(1\Iarch) and Works'ijLove
D ickens in England.
(Septcmlrt:r). Regin c marries
Heine: 1111a Troll.
Friedrich Schlegel (November).
S.K. selis the family house
(December).
S.K. leases all apartnH'llt. H as
(;oldsciImidt, previously
certain spiritual and psychoedi tor of The Corsair, begins a logical experiences I()liowed by
new .iournal: Norlh alld SOl/lh.
talks with his doctor. Chri.llian
Andersen: The TiIJU Harone.I.IPs.
Dis(ollrses (April). 'The Crisis and
"-Iarx: COII/munis/
a Crisis in an Actress's Lili" (July). I\li li: Polilical Completes Tire I'oilll
ViewIor Mv
fiork as an flulhor which remains
unpubl ished unt i l alter h is death.
The rilies
Field alld lhe Birds
Ihe Air and
illillor Rthico
Religious 'Treatises
The
SickllPs.I Unlo f)eal"
and Time
Discourses at (,'OlJllllllllioll Of}
(l\'ovemlrn).
S.K.
to a IlC\V
Turgcncv: A "lol/lh ill Ihe
(April). 'Training in Chrisrlaniry
(September) , A ll Fdifving
Dickens: David COpjJerjield.
\\"ordsworth: Prelude.
S. K. publ ishes, in Falher/and, 'An
Anclersen: !u Su·eden.
Open Leller' (.January).
Fontane: Poems.
outside the city walls (April). Tiro Schopcnhaucr: p(lrf'�!!,(l and l)is(()ursfj a/ (;ommull/oII Oil
j)aralljwme!la,
XXXIV
c: H R 0 N 0 L
C; y
HISTORICAL EVENTS
Fai l u re of potato crop in BelgiUlTI and Holland; liun inc. :'\Jofwegian rel igious dissenters granted freec\0f11 of worship.
Danish
f(mll Society or Friends afier the King refuses out or hand a petition requesting that cOllscription, l i m i ted to agricul tural workers, should he \vinenco to include others. Repeal of Corn Laws ill Engl and Illcans that conditiol1s for Danish CCOllOlllY
i l l Holland leads to riots. Un ited Prussian D iet Inccts i n Berl i n hut Lu secure cOllsti t u t ional guvernment.
Outbreak or the Dano Prussian Three Years \Var. Death or C h rist ian VI I I l()l lowed by rule or Frcderik VII u n t i l liHi3. IIolstci n in revolt agai nst
))cllll1ark. Danish radicals dcrnanci cOllstitutioll . Revol utioIls throughollt Europe. Swiss Federal Diet approves ncw constitu tion .
F i rst constitution of Denmark wh ich guaran tees rel igious fi'eedom
or spcech and the general l i berty or the individual. Legislative powcr is to go to a Kip;sdag elcctcd by popula r vote. The King is no lonp;er "bsolute rnollarch.
London protocol drawll up by lloll-(;cflnan powers the
i ndivisih i l i ty oj'the Danish Il1onarchy. Begin n i ng of railway-b u i l d i ng era ill Scandinavia. Foundation of Copenhagcll �lusic Society.
I ncnrne t ax,
i ntroduced i n
as a tcrnporary IlH'aSUIT, is Illa.dc
perman c n t by F i n ance �lin ister Spon ncck. Rel igious fi"Ceclom granted to JC\\.'s ill �()rway.
xxx\'
KIERKE (; A A RD
DAT E
AUT H OR ' S LI FE
LIT ERARY C OI\TEXT
1 85 I coni.
and On
H ink as an
Comte: ,�vsterll e de poll!ique
illllhor (Au?;ust). /<in Self
/)()Iilive (to 1 115'\.),
Fxalllillll!ilJll (September).
I B52
l\\OVl'S back inside the city walls.
. (,olstoy: Childhood.
Completes }lIdgejiJr
Turgenev: A S/lorl.mlall j.
which is not published , i l l
Skflches.
Dumas: La Dame allx Call1/tias.
1 85:j
Ceases to write in h i s journal.
H auch: Roher! rill!on.
D ickens: Bleak HOllse.
B ishop l\lynstcr dies in January.
Gcorge Eliot translates
H ans .:\I artenst'n is named
Feuerbach's The Essence of
Bishop in Apri l . S.K. writes an
ianily.
art icle attackin?; the establ ished
Kel ler: ])er .�rrille Ileinrich.
Ch ureh (December).
From January throui(h to
Winther: The Fb��h!
the Slag.
S.K. attacks the Church ill
Andersen : The
Tale
various articles publ ished in
rife.
Ni!her/and. Bei(ins publishing his
Gcorgc Eliot begins work Oil
own broadside, Th" 11I.llall!,
an Eni(l ish translat ion of
which runs lilr nine issues (l\I ay).
Spinoza's Fthics.