CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 3
‘There is a difference of opinion among the learned as to which seat in a stagecoach is the most comfortable’: S. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling / Repetition, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 150–51.
Simeon Stylites, the celebrity recluse: on the title page of the manuscript of Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard wrote ‘Simon Stylites, Solo Dancer and Private Individual’, but crossed this out and replaced it with the pseudonym ‘Johannes de silentio’.
‘My goodness, what a thick book’: Corsaren [The Corsiar], 10 March 1843. The Corsair was published weekly in Copenhagen between 1840 and 1846.
Johan Ludvig Heiberg: for a summary of Kierkegaard’s relationship to J. L. Heiberg, see Jon Stewart, ‘Johan Ludvig Heiberg: Kierkegaard’s Criticism of Hegel’s Danish Apologist’, in Kierkegaard and His Danish Contemporaries, Tome I: Philosophy, Politics and Social Theory, ed. Jon Stewart (Ashgate, 2009), pp. 35–76.
‘I shall never forget to employ the passion of irony’: S. Kierkegaard, Letters and Documents, ed. and trans. Henrik Rosenmeier (Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 155 – letter to Emil Boesen, 25 May 1843.
‘With Hegel on my table and in my thoughts’: this autobiographical account was first published in an 1840 article entitled ‘Johan Ludvig Heiberg’, by Christian Molbech, in Dansk poetisk Anthologie, edited by Molbech. See Jon Stewart (ed.), Johan Ludvig Heiberg: Philosopher, Littérateur, Dramaturge, and Political Thinker (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2008), pp. 222–3.
He followed Martensen’s influential courses on theology and the history of philosophy: see George Pattison, ‘How Kierkegaard Became “Kierkegaard”: The Importance of the Year 1838’, Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, 64 (2008), pp. 741–61. We do not know for sure how conscientiously Kierkegaard attended Martensen’s lectures on philosophy and theology in 1837–8 and 1838–9, for although he owned notes taken from these lectures, the notes may have been copied or borrowed from another student.
‘Dear Peter, Schelling talks the most insufferable nonsense’: Letters and Documents, p. 141 – letter to P. C. Kierkegaard, February 1842.
‘What philosophers say about actuality’: S. Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part I, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 32.
De omnibus dubitandum est: Kierkegaard took this Latin phrase as the title of a semi-fictional treatise attacking Martensen, and the phrase also featured in his satirical play The Battle of the Old and New Soap-Cellars, which he wrote five years earlier. Johannes Climacus, or De Omnibus Dubitandum Est was begun in 1842 but left unfinished in 1843. The phrase ‘de omnibus dubitandum est’ appears in Scenes 2 and 3 of The Battle of the Old and New Soap-Cellars. This play’s character Herr von Springgaassen, ‘a philosopher’, is a caricature of Martensen; his name has been translated as ‘Jumping Jack’, and one of Kierkegaard’s journal entries from 1837 describes Martensen as ‘leap-frogging’ over his philosophical predecessors: see Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 1, Journals AA–DD, ed. and trans. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce H. Kirmmse, George Pattison, Vanessa Rumble and K. Brian Söderquist (Princeton University Press, 207) p. 189, and Pattison, ‘How Kierkegaard Became “Kierkegaard”’, p. 760.
‘I did not come with lofty words or human wisdom’: 1 Corinthians 2:1–5.
Fear and Trembling will respond to Immanuel Kant’s reading of Genesis 22: the extent of Kierkegaard’s reading of Kant is debated by scholars; the most forceful case in favour of his serious engagement with Kant’s works, and particularly The Conflict of the Faculties, is made by Ronald M. Green in Kierkegaard and Kant: The Hidden Debt (State University of New York Press, 1992), and summarized in Green’s essay ‘Kant: A Debt Both Obscure and Enormous’, in Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome I: Philosophy, ed. Jon Stewart (Ashgate, 2007), pp. 179–210.
the ethical critique of religious dogmatism: see Dominic Erdozain, The Soul of Doubt: The Religious Roots of Unbelief from Luther to Marx (Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 69–172.
Without God, human beings will be left alone in a world with no divine order, no cosmic justice: at the end of the nineteenth century Friedrich Nietzsche announced the ‘death of God’, declaring himself the prophet of a new nihilistic age – but Kierkegaard saw it coming four decades earlier.
‘If there were no eternal consciousness in a human being’: S. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, ed. C. Stephen Evans and Sylvia Walsh, trans. Sylvia Walsh (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 12.