Preface
Preface
‘A love affair is always an instructive theme regarding what it means to exist,’ wrote Søren Kierkegaard, after his only love affair had ended in a broken engagement. Kierkegaard did philosophy by looking at life from the inside, and more than any other philosopher he brought his own life into his work. His romantic crisis yielded insights into human freedom and identity that earned him an enduring reputation as the ‘father of existentialism’. He created a new philosophical style, rooted in the inward drama of being human. Although he was a difficult person – and perhaps dangerous as an exemplar – he was inspirational in his willingness to bear witness to the human condition. He became an expert on love and suffering, humour and anxiety, despair and courage; he made these affairs of the heart the subject matter of his philosophy, and his writing has reached the hearts of generations of readers.
When the Swedish writer Fredrika Bremer visited Copenhagen in 1849 to chronicle Denmark’s cultural life, Kierkegaard had for several years been a celebrity in his home town. Bremer did not meet him – he refused her requests for an interview – though she heard plenty of gossip about his restless habits: ‘During the daytime one sees him walking in the midst of the crowd, up and down the busiest streets of Copenhagen for hours at a time. At night his lonely dwelling is said to glow with light.’ Perhaps unsurprisingly, she perceived him as an ‘inaccessible’ figure, whose gaze was ‘fixed uninterruptedly on a single point’. ‘He places his microscope over this point,’ wrote Bremer, ‘carefully investigating the tiniest atoms, the most fleeting motions, the innermost alterations. And it is about this that he speaks and writes endless folios. For him, everything is to be found at this point. But this point is – the human heart.’ She noted that his works were especially admired by female readers: ‘The philosophy of the heart must be important to them.’ It has proved to be important to men, too, as we see from a glance at successive generations of Kierkegaard’s readers, among them some of the most influential thinkers and artists of the last century.
Of course, Kierkegaard was not the first to strive to make sense of being human. He grappled with Europe’s awesome intellectual tradition, absorbing ancient Greek metaphysics, the Old and New Testaments, the Church Fathers and medieval monastics, Luther and Lutheran pietism, the serially path-breaking philosophies of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schelling and Hegel, and Romantic literature. During three fertile, tumultuous decades of the nineteenth century he channelled these currents of thought into his own existence, and felt their tensions and paradoxes move through him. And at the same time his heart was pierced, filled, stretched and bruised by a series of intense loves, each one of them – perhaps excepting the first – deeply ambivalent: his mother Anne, his father Michael Pedersen, his fiancée Regine; his city, his literary work, his God.
We will soon meet Kierkegaard as he returns to Copenhagen from Berlin in May 1843, travelling by train, stagecoach and steamship. We will see at once that he is a writer – now, in his thirtieth year, embarking on the authorship that made him famous. He wrote with extraordinary fluidity, transposing his soul into his beloved Danish language, and even in translation we can feel the rhythm of his prose, the poetry of his thinking. What Kierkegaard later called his ‘activity as an author’ filled up most of his life, and consumed his energies and his money. To say that he was a writer is not just to point out that he produced great books at an astonishing rate and filled numerous journals and notebooks. Writing became the fabric of Kierkegaard’s existence, the most vibrant love of his life – for all his other loves flowed into it, and it swelled like the ocean that crashed restlessly against his native land. This was a compelling, consuming love: as a young man he found it difficult to start writing, but once he began he could hardly stop. He was preoccupied with questions of authorship and authority, perpetually torn between the joys of writing and the agonies of publication, fascinated by literary genre, fastidious about typography and bookbinding.
He wrote as both a philosopher and a spiritual seeker. In the parable of the cave in Plato’s Republic, a solitary figure escapes the ordinary, deluded world in pursuit of truth, then returns to share his knowledge with the uncomprehending crowds – and this archetype of the philosopher defines Kierkegaard’s relation to his nineteenth-century world. Likewise, in the Old Testament story of Abraham’s arduous journey up and down Mount Moriah, Kierkegaard discerned the religious movements – the deep longing for God, the anxious struggle to understand his vocation, the search for an authentic spiritual path – that shaped his own inner life. His religion repeatedly defied convention, though his beliefs were not unorthodox.
This book travels alongside Kierkegaard as he pursues the ‘question of existence’ that both animated and troubled him, held him back and propelled him forwards: how to be a human being in the world? He criticized the abstractions of modern philosophy, insisting that we must work out who we are, and how to live, right in the middle of life itself, with an open future ahead of us. Just as we cannot step off the train while it is moving, so we cannot step away from life to reflect on its meaning. Similarly, this biography does not consider Kierkegaard’s life from a remote, knowing perspective, but joins him on his journey and confronts its uncertainties with him.
When I first talked to my editor about my plan to write this book, he suggested that I was envisaging a Kierkegaardian biography of Kierkegaard. He was right, and his remark has guided and perplexed me through these pages. Often I wasn’t sure how to go about it; looking back, I see that it meant following the blurry, fluid lines between Kierkegaard’s life and writing, and allowing philosophical and spiritual questions to animate the events, decisions and encounters that constitute the facts of a life. The book takes its shape from the Kierkegaardian question about how to be a human being in the world. At the beginning of , ‘Return Journey’, we meet Kierkegaard in the middle of writing Fear and Trembling, where he gives a hopeful – and rather beautiful – answer to this question. In , ‘Life Understood Backwards’, we find him in 1848, five years later, looking back at his life and his authorship, and answering his question of existence differently. Kierkegaard was always hyper-conscious of his mortality, but his expectation of imminent death shifted in those five years: in 1843 it was the ultimate writing deadline, giving urgency to his work as he raced to bring his books out into the world, but by 1848 he saw dying as a deed that would fulfil his authorship. In , ‘Life Lived Forwards’, we follow Kierkegaard into the battle with the world that will end, one way or another, with his death.
Kierkegaard is not an easy travelling companion, though he was by many accounts charming, funny and compassionate as well as endlessly interesting. ‘This evening I had a conversation with Magister Søren Kierkegaard,’ an acquaintance wrote in his diary on 1 September 1843, ‘and despite the fact that he is not exactly the person with whom one finds tranquillity, it just so happened – as often happens – that his words made clear to me precisely what I have recently been thinking about.’ Kierkegaard’s parents gave him a name that means ‘severe’, and he became more and more true to this name as he grew older. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, written in his thirty-third year, Kierkegaard argued that to become religious a person must ‘grasp the secret of suffering as the form of the highest life, higher than all good fortune … For this is the severity of the religious, that it begins by making everything more severe.’ A few pages later, however, he described a religious person enjoying an excursion to Copenhagen’s Deer Park – ‘because the humblest expression of the God-relationship is to admit one’s humanity, and because it is human to enjoy oneself’. Real joy, he argued, always lies on the far side of suffering.
It is certainly true that the joy of being human never came easily to Kierkegaard. At the beginning of the 1840s he was a wealthy, gifted, sociable young man, loved passionately by a beautiful, intelligent woman – yet he made life exceptionally difficult for himself. This deep and mysterious fact of Kierkegaard’s psychology was inseparable from his philosophical stance towards the world. He was perhaps the first great philosopher to attend to the experience of living in a recognizably modern world of newspapers, trains, window-shopping, amusement parks, and great stores of knowledge and information. Although life was becoming materially easier and more comfortable for affluent people like himself, it also provoked new anxieties about who to be and how to appear. Exposed to public view not only in his published works but on the streets of Copenhagen, through the windows of the fashionable cafés on Strøget, and in the pages of his city’s newspapers, Kierkegaard felt other people’s eyes upon him – and he agonized about what they saw.
In Concluding Unscientific Postscript he described a philosopher in his early thirties – a figure very much like himself – sitting outside the café in Frederiksberg Gardens, smoking a cigar and reflecting on his place in the world: ‘You are getting on, I said to myself, and becoming an old man without being anything … Wherever you look about you on the other hand, in literature or in life, you see the names and figures of the celebrities, the prized and acclaimed making their appearances or being talked about, the many benefactors of the age who know how to make life more and more easy, some with railways, others with omnibuses and steamships, others with the telegraph, others through easily grasped surveys and brief reports on everything worth knowing.’
Spiritual life was also being made easier, he mused, by philosophers whose systems explained Christian faith and demonstrated its truth, its reasonableness, and its moral value to society. ‘And what are you doing?’ he asked himself. ‘Here my soliloquy was interrupted, for my cigar was finished and a new one had to be lit. So I smoked again, and then suddenly this thought flashed through my mind: You must do something, but since with your limited abilities it will be impossible to make anything easier than it has become, you must, with the same humanitarian enthusiasm as the others, take it upon yourself to make something more difficult. This notion pleased me immensely, and at the same time it flattered me to think that I would be loved and esteemed for this effort by the whole community.’
These light-hearted words are heavy with irony: by the time Kierkegaard wrote them, he was deeply disappointed by his peers’ reluctance to appreciate his work. His commitment to accentuate and deepen the difficulty of being human resulted in an endlessly elusive, ambiguous series of writings, stubbornly resistant to summary and paraphrase, since so much is compressed between their lines. Within many of these texts, different narrative voices perform conflicts between life-views, with no clear resolution; they exhibit errors and misunderstandings as often as they elucidate truths. One can grapple for decades – as I have done – with their literary and philosophical complexities, and still not get to the bottom of them. For Kierkegaard, the work of philosophy was not a swift trade in ready-to-wear ideas, but the production of deep spiritual effects that he hoped would penetrate his readers’ hearts, and change them. Many of his contemporaries were unsettled by this, or simply baffled; though they glimpsed his genius, it was easier to mock his personal flaws and idiosyncrasies than to understand his books.
Of course, Kierkegaard’s hopes for recognition and anxieties about his public image were grounded in a sense of being exposed, seen and judged that is intrinsic to the experience of being human in the world. And we can hardly help judging other people: we weigh them up as soon as we meet them, and continually adjust our measurements as they reveal themselves. While living in uncomfortably close proximity to Kierkegaard, I have sometimes found myself disliking him – a painful feeling, similar to the pain of finding fault with a loved one. His books give his readers high expectations; his lyrical religious discourses describe exquisite ideals, like how a pure human heart reflects God’s goodness as truly as a calm, still sea reflects the heavens. Yet in his journals he rehearsed his petty fixations, his jealousy of his rivals’ success, his bitter fury at those who slighted him, his debilitating pride. He often felt sorry for himself, justified himself, blamed others for his disappointments.
Does this make him a hypocrite who preached something he did not practise or experience? On the contrary: Kierkegaard’s remarkable ability to invoke the goodness, purity and peace for which he longed was inseparable from the storms that raged and twisted in his soul – connected by precisely this longing for what he knew he lacked. His philosophy is well known for its paradoxes, and Kierkegaard’s restless desire for rest, peace, stillness, was a paradox – and a truth – that he lived daily. And like every human being, his life was a mixture of elements both petty and profound, which could exert equally powerful claims upon him; he struggled to synthesize them, though they frequently collided in flashes of comic or tragic absurdity. As a ‘poet of the religious’ he laboured with immense effort to keep spiritual ideals free from the compromises and corruptions that creep in, as he knew first-hand, whenever anyone tries to live up to them.
Reflecting on my disapproving reactions to Kierkegaard’s all too human thoughts and feelings has led me to reflect also upon the fact that a biographer might be expected to evaluate her subject’s life – to assess its success, its authenticity, its goodness. As a Kierkegaardian biographer I want to resist the urge to impose or invite these judgements. This is not because Kierkegaard was particularly non-judgemental, although he was rarely moralizing or self-righteous. It is not even because as a disciple of Socrates he valued self-knowledge more highly than any other kind of philosophy, and encouraged his readers to turn their judgements on themselves. Rather, it is because he understood that there is a freedom to be found in letting go of familiar, worldly ways of measuring a human life.
Kierkegaard had no wife to talk to at the end of the day, and instead he wrote out his anger and self-pity in lucid, finely detailed prose. This was unusual, but his feelings were not: when we read his journals we recognize his ignoble sentiments because we already know them intimately. In his philosophy Kierkegaard interrogated the human habit of judging, so deeply rooted in our private thinking and collective culture that it is very nearly inevitable, and he called this ‘the ethical sphere’, or simply ‘the world’, because (like Plato’s cave) it surrounds and encloses us. But though the judgements of others are as difficult to avoid as our own, Kierkegaard believed that none of these human judgements is absolute or final. It is always possible, he suggested, to occupy a different place – for each individual belongs to a sphere of infinite depth, which he called ‘inwardness’, ‘the God-relationship’, ‘eternity’, ‘the religious sphere’, or simply ‘silence’. His writing opens up this sphere, right at the heart of life, and beckons the reader into it.