CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 1
a ‘marvellous armchair’: S. Kierkegaard, Letters and Documents, ed. and trans. Henrik Rosenmeier (Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 152 – letter from S. Kierkegaard to A. F. Krieger, May 1843.
railways straight through Christendom: the first Prussian railway opened in 1838, from Berlin to Potsdam. The Berlin–Stettin line, which Kierkegaard travelled on in 1843, opened in the early 1840s; the first Danish railway opened in 1844. In 1850 Kierkegaard wrote in his journal: ‘The railroad mania is altogether an attempt a la Babel. It is also connected with the end of a cultural era, it is the final dash. Unfortunately, something new began at almost the same moment: 1848. Railroads are related to the idea of intensification of centralization.’ Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 7: Journals NB15–NB20, ed. and trans. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, Bruce H. Kirmmse, David D. Possen, Joel D. S. Rasmussen, Vanessa Rumble and K. Brian Söderquist (Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 112.
Søren Kierkegaard will be back in Copenhagen: on the details of Kierkegaard’s journey home – by train, stagecoach and steamship – see Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 2: Journals EE–KK, ed. and trans. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce H. Kirmmse, George Pattison, Vanessa Rumble and K. Brian Söderquist (Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 491.
‘He who explains the riddle of Abraham’: ibid, pp. 154–5: JJ 87 (1843).
‘In the morning I go out for a while’: S. Kierkegaard, Letters and Documents, ed. and trans. Henrik Rosenmeier (Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 154 – letter to Emil Boesen, 25 May 1843.
‘Then suddenly a thought stirs’: Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks 2, pp. 158–9: JJ 99 (1843).
‘If I had had faith, I would have stayed with Regine’: ibid, p. 164: JJ 115 (17 May 1843).
the high medieval ramparts: see Niels Thulstrup, The Copenhagen of Kierkegaard, ed. Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, trans. Ruth Mach-Zagal (Reitzel, 1986), pp. 24–6. Kierkegaard’s favourite philosophy teacher, Poul Møller, wrote a poem about the ramparts, which begins:
The hedge of spring is verdant,
The cloak is cast away,
Maidens sun themselves upon the ramparts.
The air is so lovely,
Their sighs of longing
Known by their silk dresses.
Socrates devoted himself to the question: for Kierkegaard’s clearest exposition of Socrates’s devotion to ‘the problem of what it is to be a human being’, see Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 10: Journals NB31–NB36, ed. and trans. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, Bruce H. Kirmmse, David D. Possen, Joel D. S. Rasmussen and Vanessa Rumble (Princeton University Press, 2018), p. 371: NB35 2 (December 1854).
Imagine a cave, says Socrates: my reading of Plato’s cave is indebted to Jonathan Lear: see ‘Allegory and Myth in Plato’s Republic’ and ‘The Psychic Efficacy of Plato’s Cave’, in Jonathan Lear, Wisdom Won from Illness: Essays in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (Harvard University Press, 2017), pp. 206–43.
‘While I live, I shall never give up philosophy’: Plato, Apology, 29d–31a.
Any ironic utterance calls itself into question: as Kierkegaard put it in his dissertation, ‘the quality that pervades all irony [is] that the phenomenon is not the essence but the opposite of the essence’: in other words, the surface meaning is the opposite of the true meaning. See S. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 247.
‘surveys everything and rises infinitely above’: Friedrich von Schlegel, Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (University of Minnesota Press, 1971), p. 148. On Kierkegaard’s response to Romantic irony, see Joel Rasmussen’s excellent Between Irony and Witness: Kierkegaard’s Poetics of Faith, Hope and Love (T&T Clark, 2005).
‘no genuinely human life is possible without irony’: The Concept of Irony, p. 326.
‘a living, restless thing’: cited by Roland Bainton in Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1951), p. 331, and by S. Kierkegaard in For Self-Examination / Judge For Yourself!, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 17–18. In his lectures on Romans (1515–16) Luther emphasized that faith is a continuous inward movement. Commenting on Romans 12:2, for example, Luther notes that Paul ‘is addressing those who have begun to be Christians, whose life is not at rest [in quiescere] but in movement [in moveri] from good to better’; that the different phases of spiritual growth in a human being are ‘always in motion’; that the Christian must always ‘press on’ in prayer, so that praying is ‘a continuous violent action of the spirit,’ like ‘a ship going against the stream’. Commenting on Romans 4:7, he argues that when ‘people are confident that they are already justified, they come to ruin by their own sense of security’.