“I Am Regarded as aKind of Englishman, aHalf-Mad Eccentric”
Extravagance in the Service of the Idea
“Then an apartment at the corner of Tornebuskegade became vacant, an apartment I had been infatuated with ever since the place was built.” The new house which had set Kierkegaard’s heart aflutter was at the corner of Tornebuskegade [Danish: “Thornbush Street”] and Rosenborggade [Danish: “Rose Castle Street”] and belonged to J. J. Gram, owner of a tannery firm. It was built in the late classical-revival style, four stories high, with four windows facing the street. It had become available for occupancy in the summer of 1847.
Kierkegaard had agreed to Easter Day 1848 as the day he would vacate the apartment in “the southern half of the second story” of the old family home on Nytorv. At this time Kierkegaard had plans of stopping writing (“ever so softly to work my way into the idea of halting the productivity”), using some of the 2,200 rixdollars he had received from the sale of his father’s house on a two-year trip abroad, and then seeking a position as a pastor. “But then the thought occurred to me: You want to travel abroad, but why? To break off your productivity and get some recreation. But don’t you know from experience that you are never as productive as when you are abroad, in the enormous isolation in which you live there, so that you will return home after a two-year stay with an enormous pile of manuscripts?” So instead he invested some of the money in royal bonds and in shares in a fire insurance firm, and at the end of January 1848 he signed a lease for the splendid apartment with its four windows facing Rosenborggade and no fewer than six fronting on Tornebuskegade. He moved into the place in mid-April and was responsible for a rent of 295 rixdollars a year.
Several months later, philosophy professor Rasmus Nielsen, who came to town from his vacation place in Tårbæk, attempted in vain to call on Kierkegaard in his new apartment and instead ended up sending the new occupant a letter containing a first-class description of the house—and its resident: “The angular corner named in the address makes an excellent impression. This address is really a very fitting description (you see that clearly if you stand in the right place with your back to the Reformed Church). But on closer inspection, it is an even more definite misdescription, inasmuch as no person, of course, no matter how thin he tries to make himself, can enter directly through a corner—one must look along each of the sides in order to find an entrance. What an advantage for you, and what a difficulty for the person who would enter! If the prospective entrant thinks he will find you in Rosengaarden [Danish: ‘The Rose Court,’ a nearby street erroneously cited by Nielsen] you are sitting concealed in the shadows of Tornebuske. And when he then seeks you among the thorns, yes, then you have moved to the sunny side, to live among the myrtles and roses.”
The philosophy professor, who here took great pains to imitate Kierkegaard’s style, apparently knew that in more ways than one, Kierkegaard was a difficult person to pin down, and between the lines Nielsen implied that he suspected Kierkegaard of having concealed himself at the opposite end of the great angular apartment. Kierkegaard’s reply made it clear that Nielsen’s suspicions were perhaps not wholly unfounded: The letter was oddly apologetic and also informed Nielsen in no uncertain terms that visits prearranged in writing were far preferable to those that were unannounced.
Although Kierkegaard could hardly complain about lack of space, there of course also had to be room for servants. And there were more than a few. From the 1850 census it can be seen that Frederik Christian Strube, a thirty-nine-year-old journeyman carpenter from Iceland, his wife, and their two daughters, plus Kierkegaard’s personal servant Anders Christensen Westergaard, age thirty-one, lived in the apartment, which thus came to resemble a sort of collective. Indeed, after only half a year the apartment proved to be unsuitable, and they had to move to an even larger apartment next door. If, one day, Rasmus Nielsen had managed to slip inside that apartment he would have observed the following: Three of its five windows illuminated the so-called salle [French-Danish: “grand room, parlor”], and the remaining two an adjacent room. The plastered ceilings were adorned with cornices. The walls had wainscoting below, above which they were divided into panels covered with linen to which oilpainted wallpaper had been glued. The inner edges of these panels were set off by strips of gilded molding. Each room was supplied with a columnar woodstove. The dining room, which had a four-chambered woodstove, had windows facing the courtyard at an angle. The best parlors and the dining room were connected by a hallway with two built-in closets, and from there the apartment extended along the side of the house, first to a two-windowed room (probably a bedroom), then to a room with a double window, and finally to a kitchen with a chimney, a cookstove, a serving table, cupboards, an iron sink, shelves, and racks for dishes. Off the kitchen, there was a simple chamber for the servant, with rough plastered walls, and beyond this lay a pantry. The apartment’s “retreat” (in plain English, the privy) was located near the back stairs, next to the bedrooms. The lease agreement, which survives, states that the apartment also had cellars for firewood and provisions. The annual rent for this larger apartment was higher—four hundred rixdollars—but rent was far from the only expense; there was also the cost of food and provisions, and it is plain that there were many mouths to feed.
Kierkegaard himself had very particular tastes. His preferred dishes were duck, either curried or salted; goose, also salted, served as ordinary roast goose; breast of goose with spinach or French beans; squab; and salmon. From Kierkegaard’s account book with Madame Andersen, who provided food from April 6, 1847, until April 21, 1848, we see that in November 1847 Kierkegaard dined on roast duck four times, salmon twice, salted lamb four times, plus more ordinary dishes. He often had bouillon both for lunch and dinner; for example, during August 1847 he had bouillon on twenty-nine of the month’s thirty-one days, and on twenty-two of those days he had bouillon at two meals. Apart from expenses for beer, wine, coffee, and lesser meals, his expenses for food during the period from May 1847 to the end of March 1848 came to 269 rixdollars, 4 marks, and 6 shillings. It was not without reason that Israel Levin, who dined with him for various periods, was of the opinion that “his way of life cost him astounding sums.”
Others in the neighborhood lived very differently. At the corner of Aabenraa and Rosenborggade, directly across from Kierkegaard’s dwelling, lay “the Castle of Rags,” which housed a hopeless jumble of poor people, alms recipients, and other miserable wretches, officially sixty-three in all. Scattered around town there were another ten or so of these flophouses, whose mere names reveal the depths of their hideousness: “Hell,” “the Pit,” “the Thundercloud,” “Danny Damned’s House,” “the Lice Club,” “the Latrine,” “Verminous,” “the Hovel,” “the Slave Port,” and “the Scavenger’s House.” For a couple of shillings one could spend the night at one of these places, perhaps on the stairs or in the attic, where ropes were stretched out so that one could lean on them and sleep standing up, as best one could. After it burned down in March 1850, the Castle of Rags became famous all over the country when Adolph von der Recke wrote the broadsheet ballad “The Burning of the Castle of Rags,” with the chorus “Julia, Julia, jump, jump.” A month later the genius who lived across the street from this establishment moved out of his five-and-a-half-room apartment.
“I almost never paid visits, and at home one rule was followed absolutely: unconditionally never to receive anyone excepting the poor who desired assistance,” Kierkegaard writes in The Point of View for My Work as an Author, which he began writing in his new apartment at the beginning of the summer of 1848. For someone living across the street from the Castle of Rags there were plenty of people in need of assistance, and from a household account book for the period from January 2, 1847, to April 28, 1848, carefully kept by his servant Anders, we see that in 1847 alone, he made 271 donations of alms, amounting to 31 rixdollars, 2 marks, and 4 shillings. There seems to have been a regular little flock of alms seekers, to whom Anders paid three different rates: 1 mark, 8 shillings, and 4 shillings. The organ grinder came every Thursday and received the top rate, 1 mark. The poor woman also generally received 1 mark. The lame man had to be satisfied with 8 shillings, while the old man had to put up with half that amount. In addition to these regular customers there were a number of people who came only once, usually on Saturdays. There are no surviving accounts of this sort from later periods, but it is likely that a couple of the inhabitants of the house on the other side of the street occasionally smoothed out their rags and paid the well-to-do gentleman across the way an imploring visit.
There is no documentary evidence of Kierkegaard having carried out any charitable activity on a larger scale, and Peter Christian Zahle was probably correct in stating: “If he made charitable donations, he did so secretly.” After a fire in 1849, a sorely tried man who was left with a wife and five small children sent Kierkegaard a note begging for assistance, but it is not known how the latter responded. On the other hand, it is known that when Magnus Eiriksson applied for assistance he was turned down, indeed quite quickly. And “university student H. who ended as a madman” also received rather brisk treatment when he sent Kierkegaard a “treatise of philosophical content,” taking the occasion also to ask for economic assistance. “Honored Mr. H.!” the student read two hours later, “when you read these lines I will be on my way to Stettin. S. K.” But there are also documents that have been overlooked, revealing charity that was hidden—until now. Among Peter Christian’s papers is a letter of November 23, 1855, in which John Belfour Rainals, a former military man, movingly discourses on Peter Christian’s “noble, blessed brother, whose great, hidden charity I have reason to praise highly.”
In the context of Kierkegaard’s overall economic situation, these alms were peanuts, so if Hans Brøchner’s theory that Kierkegaard gave away the greater part of his fortune as charity is true, then Kierkegaard would scarcely have had time to do anything else but go around handing out shillings. By comparison, charity did not make nearly as great an impact on Kierkegaard’s budget as the carriage tours for which he was famous, even in his lifetime. Receipted monthly bills from Lassen, the hired coachman from Lille Helliggejststræde, show that in 1850 Kierkegaard spent 132 rixdollars on carriage rides alone.
“Copenhagen Is a Very Filthy Town”
Naturally, the carriage tours were taken for the sake of the inspiration that came from diversion, but they were also taken because Kierkegaard needed to escape from the close air of Copenhagen, not least from Rosenborggade, whose poetic name formed a glaring contrast to the sweetish-sour smell of tanner Gram’s newly skinned hides, an odor that bathed the walls of the house. All summer long the open gutters ran with the slimy effluvium of the tannery, and the stench hung in the streets and burned one’s nostrils. Nor was it long before Kierkegaard’s eccentricities put in an appearance: “And the tanner where I live has tormented me with the stench all summer long. Many, many times I have really had to make a mental effort to keep from getting sick from impatience.” If Kierkegaard had hoped to distance himself from the stench by moving from number 9 Rosenborggade to number 7, he was sadly disappointed. Rosenborggade, after all, was the street on which the city’s tanneries were located!
Kierkegaard’s reaction was strong, but not unduly so, and he was far from being the only person who felt thus. “Copenhagen is a very filthy town,” wrote Dr. Hornemann in 1847, “everyone who enters the city gates from the countryside is immediately struck by the bad air.” The city’s boundaries were the same as those marked out under Christian IV two centuries earlier, and in the meanwhile the city’s population had sextupled. Landlords had a field day. Even the smallest lots had buildings on them; new stories were added on to old houses; and cellars, storerooms, woodsheds, indeed, even chicken coops were converted into housing. The Ministry of Health and the city physician, Hoppe, were naturally appalled by all this and called for the enforcement of the applicable ordinances, but as the population grew and grew, the law had to be bent, and Copenhageners had to learn to squeeze into less and less space within the ramparts.
Naturally, the newspapers and other documents of the period were filled with descriptions of the intolerable conditions. Thus, in his proposal to enlarge the city, Professor Wilkens asked: “[Is it really from] a desire for sociability that many families have crammed together in a single room, separated by chalk lines, which they teach their children to respect by beating them? Is it a pastoral infatuation with the smell of manure that has driven others to seek shelter under the roofs of latrines?” Readers of the July 12, 1852, issue of Fædrelandet were presented with the following complaint, which causes one to gasp for more than one reason: “In this West Indian heat, when all the rest of us suffer at every hour of the day from the intolerable stench that surrounds Copenhagen on virtually every side—from the south and west stemming from rotten seaweed, among other things; … from the north and east coming from the tanneries, from old, rotting butchers’ wares, from stagnant gutters, fish blood, swamps, match factories, latrine dumps, and all the other storehouses of filth and pestilence that inundate Copenhagen—one would think that the city government would not need to be informed of the ravages of cholera in [the Polish city of] Kalisz in order to be reminded of the necessity of doing something in the face of such extraordinary circumstances.”
Copenhagen was a genuine bacteria bomb, but no one really took the admonition seriously. Animals were permitted inside the city limits, and according to a survey carried out in 1840, there were 2,777 horses, 1,450 cows, 739 pigs, plus countless numbers of chickens living in Copenhagen. On Rosengaarden, the distiller Cadovius in fact erected a stall for twenty cows. He fed them on the nutrient-rich dregs, the by-product of his distilling operation, but since he had no use for the cows’ by-product, he unhesitatingly constructed a conduit leading directly into the gutter of his street. It is not known how many dogs were a part of this menagerie, but most of them had no owners and walked on the wild side, especially when they ventured up onto the city’s ramparts, which were patrolled by a so-called rampart rifleman charged with neutralizing every four-legged proletarian. Also typical of public sanitation (or lack of same) was the city employee, with an annual salary of one hundred rixdollars, who was charged with the removal of carrion from the city’s public grounds, streets, and alleys. The city was strikingly foul and suffered from such a lack of public toilets that in the Dansk Folkeblad, H. N. Clausen, the professor of theology, fumed over the “disfiguring and defilement” one encountered increasingly in every street in Copenhagen. The article made an impression on the Hygiene Commission, which in 1852 tried a sort of experimental arrangement on Slotsholmen, erecting a pair of pissoirs that were so tiny that in daily parlance they were referred to as “urine cases.”
When the tanners up in Rosenborggade washed out their tubs in the gutter—which they did four or five times a day—the stinking water found its way slowly down toward Frederiksborggade, across Kultorvet and along Købmagergade, then across Strøget, and finally meandered across Højbro Plads to splash into the canal that surrounded Slotsholmen. Almost eighty kilometers of gutters, with a total surface area of close to three thousand square meters, ran through the city, but since the slope was far from sufficient, the stinking water rarely made it all the way to the outfall and instead seeped slowly into the ground. Furthermore, under the city’s houses were the notorious cellar sumps, where water would collect after a sudden rainstorm or whenever the water table rose. Cellar sumps had to be pumped out at regular intervals, and it could stink. “In many places,” Dr. Hornemann wrote, “I have found cellars, entryways, and stairways well up in the house, filled with the most disgusting stench from these sumps, especially while the pumping is in progress. I will mention only one of the problems this entails: In almost every case, these cellar sumps are accompanied by the presence of a particular species of slug, often found in large numbers in the lower portions of the building, that deposits on the woodwork, on food, and on whatever else they crawl, the slime they secrete.”
The city’s latrines are a chapter unto themselves, and a rather delicate one. They were constructed in accordance with the old digging-out system; that is, the excrement was dug out and collected in large cellars or depressions in the ground, which had room for quite a number of loads, so that one could get by with emptying them only once or twice a year. The emptying was carried out by so-called nightmen who, as the title implies, were only permitted to empty the latrines at night and in accordance with very specific rules. These rules were continually disobeyed, however, and an 1854 police report tells of nightmen improperly transporting their loads at a gallop! The night soil was transported over the Knippelsbro, through Christianshavn, then out to Amager to the disposal pits that were established there in 1777 and have been in use ever since.
The nightmen earned a good wage, so people often tried to get rid of their night soil in other ways. They could of course simply dump it in the gutter or pitch it into the cellar sump—so much for that pot! If they lived near a canal or a moat, it was almost too obvious what to do. The moat around Rosenborg Castle, which had neither inlet or outlet and was only a stone’s throw from Kierkegaard’s apartment in Rosenborggade, thus gradually became a four-sided disposal pit because all the night soil and waste water from the guards’ barracks ran directly into the moat, as did the runoff from the cow stall that was a part of the commandant’s quarters.
And while all this stuff stank, that was not the worst: It also sank, thereby coming into contact with the city’s drinking water that reached the town through long wooden conduits, usually buried several meters deep. The best water was called “spring water” (despite the fact that it did not spring forth, but like everything else had to be carried up into the house) and came from Emdrup Lake outside the city, while ordinary “pump water” came from lakes within the boundaries of the city. By the time the water reached its destination it had been under way so long that its quality had fallen drastically. As a rule, somewhere or other along the way the wooden conduit would have rotted, and at points the conduits lay close to leaky night soil pits, sometimes running right through them. Not infrequently dead fish were pumped out with the water—or live leeches, toads, and eels. If one of these creatures got stuck in the pump mechanism, one had to send for a “water inspector,” the equivalent of the modern plumber. In the summer the water was always close to lukewarm, and one had to get hold of a filter apparatus and a water cooler in order to render “the famous lukewarm eel soup” (as the water was called) even passably potable.
It is not surprising that people did their best to avoid using the water from these conduits as drinking water, and instead made use of one of the four or five hundred public well-pumps in the city. This water was not very good either, though there were exceptions such as the pump at the corner of Gothersgade and the ramparts, which had the reputation of being something close to a health spa. This prompted an enterprising gentleman to apply to the city government in 1846 for a monopoly on the pump, so that he could deliver the water to the families of Copenhagen “for a very reasonable fee.” And scarcely had the railroad to Roskilde been established before there were proposals to use it to transport drinking water from the famous Maglekilde spring into the capital in great casks, which were to be stored in specially built ice cellars where the water would be bottled to be sold for a shilling apiece at various points around town, such as the Round Tower and (appropriately enough) the great Water Fountain.
In 1842, when the water quality was unusually poor, people complained to the Water Commission, but the commission threw cold water on the concerns of the terrified populace by proclaiming: “The nauseating characteristics of the water serve as a warning against its use.” That same year a typhoid epidemic raged in the neighborhood around Bredgade, but it was not until two years later that the explanation for this localized plague was found: After digging down to the old wooden conduits they discovered a hole as big as man’s fist between the underlying water conduit and the sewer line from the morgue at Frederik’s Hospital, which lay directly above.
Frederik’s Hospital was incidentally one of the relatively few places where one could take a proper bath, but since it was not free of charge it was in reality only the well-to-do who got washed. Dr. Hornemann spoke his mind about “the inclination toward uncleanliness, or at least the lack of care concerning cleanliness, that characterizes a large portion of the inhabitants of the city.” A bathtub in one’s own apartment only made sense if one was prepared to carry the water up the stairs, and most people were of course unwilling to do so. The exception was the inventive Dominico Capozzi, who in 1841 sought a license “to accommodate, through the use of portable bathtubs, those who might desire baths in their homes, with well water, seawater, also cold and hot water, plus sulfur and herbal baths.” The city government gave the idea its blessing, and several years later the city also granted approval to a petition from the hatmaker Feldberg, who had a factory on Kronprinsensgade, to establish a steam bath, making use of the surplus steam generated by the steam plant he used in the production of silk hats. It is not known whether this was the place where Kierkegaard, having finished writing Works of Love in 1847, embarked upon the bath cure he termed “disgusting,” but it is possible.
The poor state of public sanitation bore its share of the blame for the high mortality rate that Professor Fenger investigated and charted statistically shortly before the outbreak of cholera in 1853. His tables demonstrate that the average life expectancy for Copenhageners in the five-year period from 1840 to 1844 was thirty-four for men and thirty-eight for women; in the countryside the average life expectancy was greater than fifty for both sexes, so no one could doubt that Copenhagen was not the place for tender souls, not to mention frail bodies.
Other matters necessitated a more mental sort of mobilization. In 1849 Kierkegaard wrote retrospectively: “When I rented the apartment in Tornebuskegade, my idea was to live there for half a year’s time, quietly reflecting on life, and then to seek a [pastoral] appointment. Then confusion suddenly broke loose. For a couple of months there was a situation in which I might perhaps have been penniless the next day and would literally be in financial straits. That took a severe toll on me.” The Slesvig-Holstein war caused the money markets to fluctuate, and Kierkegaard lost close to seven hundred rixdollars on his royal bonds, an investment that he very ruefully called “the stupidest thing I have done” and viewed as a genuine lesson. The government’s plans to collect an income tax also did their best to depress him. But Kierkegaard got away with nothing more than a scare. His tax bill for the third quarter of 1850 amounted in total to five (I repeat: five) rixdollars, the “pastor, parish clerk, and sexton money” that no one could escape.
At this time the outbreak of war meant that Anders was called up for service—“they took Anders from me,” he wrote unhappily in his journal. “He is in reality my body,” Kierkegaard once said to Hans Brøchner. Anders, who planned someday to become a police officer, was more than just a useful factotum. In September 1847, when he asked his master for a recommendation, he received the following testimonial: “The applicant has been in my service since May 1844. Since that time he has satisfied even my most fastidious demands so completely that I can truthfully and emphatically recommend him in every respect. Sober, moral, always mentally alert, unconditionally dependable, used to keeping quiet, not without a certain degree of intelligence, which enables one to allow him to take care of things a bit on his own. He has been so indispensable to me that I would truly be delighted to keep him in my service. To my way of thinking, that is the highest recommendation I could give anyone.” Kierkegaard’s recommendation says perhaps more about the recommender than about the recommendee, but Kierkegaard thought well of Anders: “Anders, with whom I have been especially happy because …,” he wrote in a journal entry he did not finish and subsequently crossed out—and which, by its fragmentary nature, sets one’s imagination spinning. Thank goodness he came home from the war uninjured. But then Kierkegaard worried that Anders would hear vulgar gossip about his master.
To these difficulties with war, finances and Anders were later added problems with Strube, the Icelandic carpenter, upon whom Kierkegaard otherwise “depended as on no one else, the man I inherited from my father, whom I have known for twenty years, whom I have regarded as one of those healthy, strong, powerful workers.” Alas, how changed, changed utterly! Strube had become “confused, because he has brooded too much.” The brooding went to Strube’s head, and he had become “opinionated” and “vehement.” And one day Kierkegaard came home and discovered to his horror that someone had rooted about in his desk and had been into the mahogany chest containing his private papers. Who it was remained unexplained; perhaps he himself had merely forgotten to close the desk when he had gone out, but Strube remained under suspicion because he was extremely overwrought and wanted “to reform the whole world.” And this was not good, all the more so because it could have ended as “a sensational event upon which the newspapers would seize.” Strube was admitted to Frederik’s Hospital, where the head physician Seligmann Meyer Trier treated him and soon freed him of his worst caprices so that he could return to work. A bit later Kierkegaard wrote to Trier: “Permit me to thank you yet again for my carpenter. He is once more what he has had the honor of being for twenty-five years, a worker with life and spirit, a worker who, although he thinks while doing his work, does not make the mistake of wanting to make thinking into his work.”
The Sickness unto Death
We are yet again provided with a striking reminder of the distance between Kierkegaard’s life and his writings, because it was right there—in the all-too-expensive apartment, with the threat of war hanging in the air, and with the stench from the tannery assaulting his nostrils—that according to his own testimony, he wrote “some of the best things I have ever written.”
As early as February 1848, under the heading “N.B., N.B.,” he had sketched the outline of a new work that was to be called Thoughts that Heal Radically: Christian Healing. This spiritual medical book was to be in two parts, consisting of The Sickness unto Death and Radical Cure, but during the ensuing months the plan was reshuffled, and on May 13, 1848, he produced a “report” on his work in progress: “This book has a difficulty. It is too dialectical and rigorous to permit the proper use of the rhetorical, the arousing, the soul-stirring. The title itself seems to indicate that it is supposed to be discourses; the title is lyrical.” Kierkegaard added that perhaps the book ought not be published at all but that in any case it had provided him with an “excellent schematic” that could help him chart his course in the future, when he had to write edifying discourses. Then, in the margin, he set forth some of the typical characteristics of the sickness unto death: “No. 1. Its hiddenness. Not only that the person who has it … would wish to hide it. No, the frightful thing is that it is so hidden that a person can have it without knowing it. No. 2, its universality. For every other sickness is limited in one way or another, by climate, age group, et cetera. No. 3, its persistence, through all ages—into eternity. No. 4, where does it have its abode? In the self. The despairing ignorance of having a self; while knowing one has a self, in despair not to want to be oneself, or in despair to want to be oneself.”
These are the first brush strokes in Kierkegaard’s depiction of the topography of despair as a fundamental human condition, in a manner similar to his treatment of anxiety four years earlier. With his “excellent schematic” he hit upon the opening portion of The Sickness unto Death, which employed dizzyingly dialectical cadences in its definition of a human being as a synthesis: “A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself, or it is the relation’s relating itself to itself in that relation. The self is not the relation; rather, it is that the relation relates itself to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two terms. Considered in this way, a human being is not yet a self.”
This schematic is so concise that it is itself almost enough to bring a person to despair. But at other points The Sickness unto Death is quite tractable, and unlike The Concept of Anxiety, which essentially comes rather close to being unreadable, The Sickness unto Death takes pains not to forget its reader. Similarly, there are places where the book does what it can to remind the reader of its author, not only existentially but also in a material sense. For The Sickness unto Death is in fact a book in which the balance between the individual elements in the self-synthesis is as important as harmony was to the neoclassical house in Rosenborggade where it was written.
Kierkegaard had already demonstrated his knowledge of the details of modern multistory dwellings in The Concept of Anxiety, where he wrote that the customary procedures of a psychological observer provided the psychologist with what he needed, ready at hand, “just as in a well-equipped house one does not need to go down to the street to fetch water, but has it piped upstairs under pressure.” And Anti-Climacus—as the pseudonymous author of this new work styled himself—was also familiar with life in a modern city. This is made clear by his repeated mention of false doors as metaphors for the inaccessible and mysterious regions of the self (“In the deeper sense, the entire question of the self becomes a kind of false door in the background of his soul, behind which there is nothing”). It also emerges from the depiction of a grand prospect of the self as a construction, the self as the house of I: “Imagine a house, consisting of a cellar, a ground floor, and a second floor, occupied and furnished in such a manner that either there is or is supposed to be a difference in social class between the occupants of each floor. And if you would compare what it is to be a human being with such a house, then unfortunately it is both lamentable and ridiculous that most people prefer to live in the cellar of their own house. Every human being is a psycho-physical synthesis intended to be spirit—that is the building—but he prefers to live in the cellar, in the domain of the senses. Moreover, he does not merely prefer to live in the cellar—no, he loves it to such a degree that he is indignant if someone suggests to him that he move into the ‘belle étage’ [the second floor], which is vacant and available for his occupancy, because it is his own house he is living in, after all.”
“To Poetize God into Something a Bit Different”
As a rule, Kierkegaard himself lived on the attractive belle étage, but he was quite familiar with the cellar dweller’s demonic downward inclination, one of the many forms of despair. The Sickness unto Death contains a series of detailed diagnoses of a person’s desire not to want to be himself or herself, to be anything and everything other than oneself, not merely a more successful version of oneself but really—perhaps most preferably—to be no self whatever, an anonymous being, just like “the others,” “a copy,” “a number, part of the multitude.” Anti-Climacus calls this desire “despair,” defining it further as “sin.” He states this formulaically in his book’s second major subdivision: “Sin is: Before God, or with the conception of God, in despair not to want to be oneself, or in despair to want to be oneself.”
In this same section, Anti-Climacus presents us with a “poet existence tending toward the religious,” and he explains that from a Christian point of view such an existence is “sin, the sin of poetizing instead of being, of relating oneself to the good and the true via the imagination instead of being it—that is, striving existentially to be it.” This has been heard before in Kierkegaard’s writings, but Anti-Climacus then adds considerable dramatic depth to his diagnosis: “The poet existence we are concerned with here differs from despair in that it has a conception of God…. Such a poet may have a very profound religious need, and the conception of God is included as part of his despair. He loves God above all things. God is for him his only comfort in his secret torment, and yet he loves the torment, he will not let go of it. He would like so very much to be himself before God, though not with respect to the fixed point at which the self suffers—there, in despair, he does not want to be himself. He hopes that eternity will remove it.”
In his book about Hans Christian Andersen, Kierkegaard wrote that “the author paints himself into the picture, just as landscape painters occasionally enjoy doing,” and here we are confronted with this very sort of self-portraiture. Even though this was certainly not the first time that Kierkegaard had permitted himself such a daring self-portrait in a pseudonymous work—something he had been able to permit himself because the work was pseudonymous, thus at first glance directing the reader’s gaze away from its actual author—in this case he was nonetheless unusually indiscreet. Kierkegaard more than implied that his concept of God might be a sort of defense mechanism that he used to preserve his melancholia and to protect the self-enclosure he loved and did not want to abandon—because if he abandoned it, he would also have to abandon his writing, his art. Anti-Climacus’s confession on behalf of Kierkegaard continues: “And yet he continues to relate himself to God, and this is his only salvation; it would be for him the greatest of horrors to have to be without God—‘it would be enough to despair over.’ And yet he actually does permit himself—though perhaps unconsciously—to poetize God into something a bit different than what God is, a bit more like a fond father who is all too willing to give in to the child’s ‘only’ wish. Like a person, unlucky in love, who became a poet and blissfully praised the joys of love, he became the poet of the religious.”
It was clearly not what Kierkegaard wrote, but rather the fact that he wrote, that induced him to use the term “poet” with reference to himself. The God whom this poet “perhaps unconsciously” poetized for himself was thus a God who gave him permission to cling to the pain—specifically to the pain that has always been the unfathomable wellspring of art. But this poetizing cannot have been entirely unconscious, because the artist is in fact in the act of seeing through his own ploy: “He understands obscurely that what is required is that he let go of this torment,” that he must “humble himself under it in faith and take it upon himself as a part of the self.” This is the humiliating acceptance of the suffering as a part of himself that the poet cannot carry out, and he cannot because he does not want to: “But to take it upon himself in faith—that he cannot do. That is, in the final analysis he does not want to—or, at this point his self terminates in obscurity.”
Perhaps the self-portrait terminates in this sort of obscurity as well, because, as mentioned, in this analysis Kierkegaard distanced himself somewhat from the poet he portrays, and the self-understanding of the portrayer is greater than that of the portrayed. Of course, this does not mean that in 1848 Kierkegaard had outrun all his demons, but by then he had acquired more penetrating insight into demonic cunning and had summed up the dilemma of the religious poet in a psychological formula: “His conflict is really this: Has he really had a call? Is the thorn in the flesh the sign that he is to be used for the extraordinary? Before God, is it entirely in order for him to be the extraordinary one he has become? Or is the thorn in the flesh what he must humbly accept in order to attain the universally human condition?”
Thus far Kierkegaard had chosen to follow the former interpretation, but now he seemed to have doubts about whether he was justified in doing so. As long as he could explain his suffering as a psychosomatic conflict that stemmed from a hereditary taint and from environmental strains, his exploitation of melancholia in the service of his writings was defensible, but the analysis of the religious poet revealed the dubious side of this gambit. For the melancholia could also be understood as despair, that is, as self-imposed suffering.
It is worth noting that when Kierkegaard writes about matters that come close to his own existential problem, he not only becomes a more precise psychologist, he also employs an intensified religious self-interpretation in which God no longer functions as the protector of melancholia: Melancholia is anxiety about the Good; melancholia is unbelief, because melancholia is self-infatuated hatred of oneself; in the final analysis, melancholia is sin, the sin of doubting the forgiveness of sins. Where previously Kierkegaard had used his writings to allay his guilt feelings by producing something beneficial in return—and where previously Kierkegaard not only suffered but also needed the debasement of suffering in order to keep himself productive—now, with The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard had thoroughly illuminated the theologically dubious motives that lay behind the psychology of a poet such as himself. In other words, he now understood that this was poetizing God into something a bit different.
A journal entry from the period of The Sickness unto Death lays out the two positions, the old and the new. First he writes: “I must get a better grip on my melancholia. Until now it has reposed in the profoundest depths, and it has been kept down there with the help of enormous intellectual effort. It is certainly clear that I have benefited others with my work and that God has approved of it and has helped me in every way. I thank him again and again for having done infinitely more for me than I had expected.” Thus Kierkegaard first examined himself from a solely psychological point of view: By means of his writing he had succeeded in keeping the suffering at some remove from his life. To produce was to divert oneself, to lose oneself, to have infinitely much under oneself, and the writings were an impressive act of repression, a diversionary tactic, displacement on a grand scale. God had approved of it by protecting the melancholia. “But now God wants things otherwise,” Kierkegaard’s entry continues, “something is stirring within me that indicates a metamorphosis…. Therefore I must now remain quiet, by no means work too strenuously, indeed, hardly strenuously at all, not begin any new book but try to come to myself and truly think the idea of my melancholia together with God, right here and now. In this way my melancholia may be abolished and Christianity may come closer to me. Until now I have protected myself against my melancholia with intellectual labor that keeps it at bay. Now I must try to … forget it myself, though not through distraction, not by distancing myself from it, but in God, … and in that way I myself must learn to dare forget it in forgiveness.”
Here Kierkegaard indicated his position (or rather he abdicated his defensive position) and came close to living up to the great challenge contained in The Sickness unto Death: becoming transparent to oneself. Melancholia was without doubt a suffering, but it was not merely a psychosomatic abnormality, it was despair, which he must abandon. Kierkegaard had to die away from the dearest thing he possessed. And then he had to believe that his melancholia and his despair had been forgiven.
“The Poetry of Eternity”
“I don’t know if at this moment I could manage to get one of my books to sell out, but surely I could have done so before I began to embitter people.” These lines are the beginning of a lengthy journal entry about the unfortunate lack of fit between a book’s quality and its sales prospects: The better a book is, the fewer readers it will have. And Kierkegaard knew just what was needed: “A couple of flattering words to this person and to that one, just one-half or one-tenth of the other things an author must do to get his books to sell, and they would have sold out.” If it had been J. L. Heiberg, the elegant head of the Royal Theater, who lived out in Christianshavn—if he had published some edifying discourses, they would moved very quickly. The book would have been an exclusive, gilt-edged edition, complete with a silk ribbon so that it could be hung from the Christmas tree in every spiritless bourgeois home: “Then there would have been something in the air all over town, as if things were really astir; the crush of coaches driving out to congratulate the professor would have been so great that for days it would have been impossible … to get across the Knippelsbro [the bridge to Christianshavn]. Professor Heiberg was just the man for that!”
A couple of months after he wrote these lines, which are from early November 1847, Kierkegaard hit on the idea of publishing a work by subscription. “I have ascertained that the subscription arrangement has the following advantages,” he wrote optimistically. For one thing, this sort of an arrangement would help guarantee that even a large book would be read, because it would be sent to the readers in short installments, and for another, it would help create a quiet, intimate relation between author and reader. Kierkegaard therefore decided to circulate the following invitation: “Since I have been pleased to learn that my edifying discourses, which address themselves to the individual, are still read by many individuals, I have considered accommodating these readers of mine, and perhaps gaining additional individuals as readers, by permitting such edifying writings to appear in the future in smaller increments and on a subscription basis…. Therefore, starting July 1 of this year I intend to publish quarterly, under the general title Edifying Reading small volumes of 96 or at most 128 pages…. S. Kierkegaard. January 1848.” As a special attraction, Kierkegaard held forth the prospect he would “round off each little volume in lyrical or dialectical fashion as a small unit in itself, so that it could be viewed and read as an individual book.”
None of this came to anything, but there were echoes of advertising language toward the end of April 1848, when Kierkegaard, at work on the manuscript of The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air, titled it “New Discourses on the Lilies and the Bird.” The text on which Kierkegaard wrote his text was Matthew 6:24–34. This was one of the texts Kierkegaard loved most and had treated quite a number of times before, particularly in the second part of Edifying Discourses in Various Spirits, which appeared March 13, 1847, and in the first part of Christian Discourses, which came out on April 26, 1848. This time, however, something special was to happen: “These discourses will … develop the conflict between poetry and Christianity: how in one sense, Christianity is prose—in comparison to poetry, which is desiring, enchanting, narcotizing, which transforms the reality of life into an oriental dream, as when a young girl might wish to lie on a sofa all day and let herself be entranced—and yet it is indeed the poetry of eternity.” It is clear that the depictions of nature must be imbued with more “poetic hues and splendid coloration” than they had been given earlier, not in order that they become aesthetically superior, but in order that the poetic can go out in style. “For if poetry is truly to fall (and not because of the prattle of a sullen and slow-witted pastor), it must be attired in festive finery.”
It was particularly in the first of these Three Godly Discourses, as the pieces constituting The Lily of the Field are subtitled, that Kierkegaard developed this conflict between poetry and Christianity. “The poet is the child of eternity, but he lacks the seriousness of eternity. So when he thinks of the bird and the lily, he weeps. And as he weeps, he finds consolation in weeping. A wish comes into being, and with it the eloquence of a wish: O, would that I were a bird, the bird I read of in a picture book when I was a child. O, would that I were a flower in the field, the flower that stood in my mother’s garden.” The poet is sentimental. He finds consolation in the past, and he has a burning desire to be back in the days of his immediacy, days that are long gone. “But if, with the Gospel, you said to him, ‘This is serious, this is truly serious, the bird is seriously a teacher’—then the poet would have to laugh.” And he would have to laugh because the words of the Gospel seem to him to be poetry raised to higher power, and thus to be too beautiful to be true, too wonderful to be actual. “But the Gospel dares to command the poet, to say that he must be like the bird. And so serious is the Gospel that the most irresistible invention of the poet cannot make it smile.”
The three discourses—the themes of which are silence, obedience, and joy, respectively—certainly do demonstrate all the poetic splendor and linguistic loveliness that language can muster, on a good day. Everyone can see that the words are clad in “festive finery,” but doubts may linger about the extent to which Kierkegaard has succeeded in getting poetry to “fall.” The tone in the three discourses is of carefree humming, of tranquil rhythm, filled with spirit and gently touched by the eternal; and the eternal links the discourses to one another, expanding into their theme: “What is joy, or what is it to be joyful? It is truly to be present to oneself. But truly to be present to oneself is this today, this to be today, truly to be today. And the more true it is that you are today, the more you are entirely present to yourself in being today, the less the sorrows of tomorrow exist for you. Joy is the present time, with the entire emphasis upon: the present time. Therefore God is blesséd, He who says eternally: Today; He who is eternally and infinitely present to himself in being today. And therefore the lily and the bird are joy, because with their silence and their unconditional obedience they are entirely present to themselves in being today…. Thus, the fact that you came into being, that you exist, that you receive the necessities of existence ‘today’; that you came into being, that you became a human being; that you can see (think of that, you can see!); that you can hear; that you can smell; that you can taste; that you can feel; that the sun shines for you—and for your sake; that when it becomes tired, the moon takes over, and then the stars are lit; that winter comes, and all of nature disguises itself, pretending to be a stranger—and does so in order to please you; that spring comes, and the birds come in great flocks—and do so to bring you joy; that the green leaves bud forth; that the forest grows into such beauty, standing there like a bride—and does so in order to bring you joy; that autumn comes, and the birds depart, not to be coy, oh, no, but so that you do not become bored with them; that the forest conceals its finery so that the next time you will take joy in it.”
This was how Kierkegaard wrote in the books he held out to his readers with his right hand. The hand nearest the heart.
To Publish or Not to Publish
“Nothing exhausts me so terribly as negative decisions,” Kierkegaard complained in the early summer of 1848, when he was just about to publish The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress—but only just about to do so. For, once again, he had experienced “great masses of reflection suddenly gathering into huge snowdrifts in which I could almost perish”—this despite his resolve and despite the time of year! To publish or not to publish, that was the question; and Kierkegaard had no clue of what to do, which was of course absurd: “There is something wrong here, when after consideration, something insignificant in itself can truly take on such terrible reality. It is a sign that reflection has become sick. When this happens, action must be taken in order to save one’s life.”
The “insignificant” something was a piece that Kierkegaard had written quite some time before, in early 1847, when Mrs. Heiberg once again—after a nineteen-year intermission—performed the role of Juliet in Shakespeare’s famous tragedy. By now this revival had itself become history, and in the summer of 1848 Kierkegaard still had The Crisis on his hands. He wanted to publish it, but it seemed to him too aesthetic, and it thus provoked something like a religious crisis in an author’s life. First he listed all the pros: He would like to delight Mrs. Heiberg while at the same time being “a little irritating” to her spouse, J. L. Heiberg, to whom he wanted to speak a couple of home truths. Next there was editor Giødwad, who had so earnestly requested an article for his newspaper. And finally, by publishing The Crisis Kierkegaard might perhaps be able to counteract the notion that he had become “holy” and “serious” because for quite a while he had published nothing but religious writings. “This is a very important pro argument. But the contra speaks. I have now entered into Christianity so decisively, have presented much of it so stringently and earnestly, that there are certainly people who have been influenced by this. These people might almost find it offensive if they heard that I had written about an actress in the popular press. And one indeed does have responsibilities to such people…. Further-more, at the moment I do not have any religious writing ready that could appear at the same time. Therefore it must not be published. My situation is too serious, a little dietary indiscretion could cause irreparable damage.” At the end of the entry Kierkegaard wrote “N.B.” and then removed a page from his journal, which is often an indication of a fairly serious crisis; the surviving fragments of the entry have a tremulous, abbreviated quality: “it to Giødwad—and then I let it be and I became so ill during the afternoon—Alas, I would rather write a folio than publish a page.”
Three journal entries later, however, Kierkegaard had reversed his decision: “No, no, the little article must come out.” Giødwad had asked for it yet again, which could be a “hint from Governance.” And since Kierkegaard had been able to defend “before God” his having written the article, he could certainly also allow himself to publish it, especially if, as a pious fraud, he dated it in its original year of composition.
And that was that. The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress was carried as a serialized article in four issues of Fædrelandet, from July 24 to July 27, 1848, and was signed “Inter et Inter.” Kierkegaard could breathe more easily: “It was a good thing I followed up on my intention, and phooey on me for having needed to be reminded like that, for having got so bloated with the melancholic dropsy of reflection. But in the end I was not allowed to be free of it before I did what I ought to do. I would have had a thousand regrets if I hadn’t done it.” He was now completely convinced that if he had died without having published “that little article,” people would probably have “spread the sort of nonsense—typical of the terribly irresponsible conceptual confusion of our times—to the effect that I was an apostle. Great God, instead of having had a beneficial effect and upholding Christianity, I would have ruined it.” As so often happened, Kierkegaard’s notion of the contemporary interest in his literary housekeeping was a bit out of proportion. Thus, a few journal entries later, when Kierkegaard gives Rasmus Nielsen a drubbing for not having grasped that The Crisis was a reversed indirect communication, we have a clear case of violence against an innocent bystander.
If we read the little article, whose twenty pages had practically killed its author, it might be difficult to see what is so aesthetically alarming. For just as Kierkegaard had earlier used his review of Mrs. Gyllembourg’s work as a vehicle for enunciating his own critique of his times, in The Crisis he similarly made use of Mrs. Heiberg as an occasion to comment on the follies of the age, of which there are always many. Kierkegaard was well satisfied with The Crisis, however, and he explained that if it were ever to be published as a separate volume, “the pseudonym ought to be retained, but the thing dedicated to Professor Heiberg.” And the dedication was to be worded as follows: “Dedicated to Mr. Prof. J. L. Heiberg / Denmark’s aesthetician / by a subaltern aesthetician, the author.”
The dedication remained only an idea, but when Kierkegaard issued On My Work as an Author in 1851 he took the occasion to acknowledge officially his paternity of The Crisis, and he sent a copy of the book to Mrs. Heiberg, accompanied by a letter appointing her as the real reader of The Crisis. Subsequently J. L. Heiberg had the letter published in Kjøbenhavnsposten along with his “Contribution to Knowledge Concerning Kierkegaard’s Views of the Theater.” Heiberg concluded by recommending Kierkegaard’s piece, which he said ought to be read because of, among other reasons, the “contempt with which he dismisses the incompetent theater criticism of those times, with all its aesthetic shallowness and moral odiousness.”
These appreciative words from Kierkegaard’s aesthetic educator and rival would really have warmed his heart, but they missed the boat: By the time they appeared, Kierkegaard had been dead for a month and a half.
The Point of View for My Work as an Author
Kierkegaard’s contemporaries did not understand him; he was convinced of this. But perhaps posterity would understand him. Thus in his journal from 1848 we read, “I can only be understood after my death.” But the same year Kierkegaard would also write that “at some point, it would surely be the right thing to give my times a definite impression, not a reduplicated one, of what I claim to be, what I want, et cetera.”
This fear of being misunderstood might seem surprising in an author who had renounced, both pseudonymously and in his own name, any connection with significant portions of his oeuvre on a number of occasions—but the fear was there all the same. This was apparently one of the reasons that, despite all his personal priorities and profound skepticism regarding the public, Kierkegaard wished to communicate openly. In the early spring of 1847, for example, he had had the idea of “offering a little course of twelve lectures on the dialectic of communication.” These lectures were to be accompanied by twelve similar lectures on “romantic love, friendship, and love.” He started work on this project in mid-May of that year, and it progressed quite nicely. But then he suddenly realized that he was simply not “suited to give lectures,” and he explained this by noting that “I am accustomed to working things out in detail. What is essential for me is the luxuriant richness of my presentation and that every line is saturated with reflection. So if I were to give lectures I would have to prepare them as I do everything else, and therefore I would have to read them aloud from a manuscript. I don’t want to do that. Doing it any other way would not satisfy me. It is quite true that by giving a little course I would support my efforts, gain more acceptance for my ideas, et cetera—for the moment. Never mind. My ideas will surely find acceptance.” Shortly after this he decided to shelve the lectures and to resume his interrupted labors on Works of Love.
Nonetheless, the urge returned. Just under a year later Kierkegaard wanted to offer lectures, and he went so far as to draft yet another little “invitation” to potentially interested subscribers. This invitation deserves to be reproduced in its entirety:
The undersigned intends to offer a short course of lectures on the organizing principle of the entirety of my work as an author in relation to the modern age, illuminated with reference to classical antiquity.
The audience I have in mind would consist principally of theological graduates or at any rate of advanced students. I presuppose in my audience a detailed knowledge of my writings. I wish to ask in advance that everyone for whom this is not the case ignore this invitation. In advance I also wish to say that these lectures will in no way be an enjoyment, but will consist rather of work, and therefore I do not wish to entice anyone. And—as I believe is inevitably the case with every sort of deeper understanding—this work will at times, when regarded from the viewpoint of the moment and of impatience, seem to be simply boring, and in this connection I caution everyone against participating. If I am successfully understood, my listener will have acquired the benefit that his life will have been made significantly more difficult for him than ever before, and therefore I will not urge anyone to accept this invitation.
As soon as ten have signed up I will start, and I do not wish to have more than twenty because I wish to have the sort of relationship with my audience that would make it possible, if it becomes necessary, for the lectures to become colloquia.
The fee is 5 rixdollars; one signs up with me.
There was hardly any great risk that the number of participants would exceed twenty. Who in the world would pay five rixdollars for something that offered no enjoyment, but only work—indeed, work that was actually boring and that even under the best of circumstances would make a person’s life more difficult than ever? And of course the lecture series he imagined remained only a thought. But this did not mean that Kierkegaard had given up plans of making a public statement about his work as an author, and toward the end of August 1848 he wrote in his journal: “Now I can see my way clear to writing a brief and as earnest a presentation as possible of my previous writings, which is necessary before the transition to the next phase. And why do I feel capable of this now? Precisely because I have now come to clarity regarding the straightforward communication of what is decisively Christian.” No sooner said, than done: Parallel with finishing The Sickness unto Death and writing the first sections of Practice in Christianity, he composed The Point of View for My Work as an Author, which was “as good as finished” by the end of November 1848.
The work hovers between autobiography and literary testament, but viewed properly it is neither one nor the other—its genre is rather that of a chameleon. The work is thus, among many other things, a programmatic declaration that presents the reader with the correct reading of Kierkegaard’s works. He therefore tempts the reader: “Make the attempt, then; make the attempt to explain all this authorial activity on the assumption that it is by an aesthetic author.” But as the reader soon learns, this is one of those temptations better resisted. For Kierkegaard has not offered the reader one among many possible readings but the most impossible of all. If, on the other hand, you make “the attempt of supposing that it is by a religious author, you will see that it matches up, point by point, every step of the way.” The author must therefore be either religious or aesthetic. Other possibilities—for example, that the author (and his work) might be ethical—are not mentioned.
As a programmatic declaration, The Point of View insists that it must not be read in the same manner as the earlier texts from Kierkegaard’s hand; it wishes to be the text of these texts, a meta-text. Thus The Point of View seeks to live up to its subtitle: A Direct Communication, Report to History. But brevity is not exactly The Point of View’s strong suit. On the contrary, it has fundamental difficulties in coming to the end. Its “Epilogue” is not even its last word, but serves as a prologue to a subsequent “Conclusion,” which turns out not to be a conclusion because it is succeeded by “Two Notes,” which are themselves preceded by a new “Preface,” after which follows more writing, followed by an additional “Postscript,” the true postscript of which is yet another “Postscript,” that urgently pleads for “just one word more.” Thus it was both symptomatic and parodic when somewhere about halfway through the The Point of View Kierkegaard permitted himself to write, “The whole thing can be stated in a single word.” The whole thing never can.
The actual point of view in The Point of View is simple enough, in a way: “The contents of this little book then are as follows: What I truly am as an author, that I am and was a religious author, that the whole of my work as an author pertains to Christianity, to the question of becoming a Christian…. What I write here is for orientation and for the record; it is not a defense or an apologia.” So Kierkegaard wanted to be objective and matter-of-fact in his presentation of the rather foursquare structure of his canon, but it was not long before the book began to move and pitch dramatically in the direction of the “apologia” he wanted to avoid. “It might seem that a simple assurance by the author himself is more than sufficient in this respect; after all, he is the person who knows best what is what. I do not much believe in assurances of this sort with respect to literary work, however, and I am accustomed to relating to my own [literary work] in a completely objective manner,” he writes with a gesture of authority and emphasis. And then—only two pages later!—Kierkegaard gives assurances for all he is worth: “This is how it was. In the strict sense, Either/Or was written in a monastery, and I can assure you, … I can assure you that for his own sake the author of Either/Or regularly, and with monastic punctiliousness, spent a specified portion of every day reading edifying writings—that he reflected upon his responsibility with fear and much trembling. In this connection he particularly kept in mind—how strange!—‘The Seducer’s Diary.’ ”
A bit less than four years before Kierkegaard had the idea of writing The Point of View, Johannes Climacus had made the following assertion: “It is well-known that the most honest and truthful people very quickly get entangled in contradictions when they are subjected to inquisitorial treatment and to the obsessive ideas of an inquisitor, while because of the fastidiousness required by a bad conscience, the ability to avoid contradicting oneself in one’s lies is the sole preserve of the depraved criminal.” If Climacus had had the opportunity to inspect The Point of View with his expert eye, to examine its unfastidiousness and its self-contradictions, he would hardly have characterized Kierkegaard as a depraved criminal, since that sort of person can speak without self-contradiction, which cannot exactly be said with respect to Kierkegaard. It is rather doubtful, however, that Climacus would cling to his sharp antithesis and therefore categorize Kierkegaard as the most honest and truthful of the men he had encountered in his practice.
As the work progressed, Kierkegaard was compelled to put aside his objective argumentation and finally to insist beseechingly that “the true interpretation can be found by the person who seeks it honestly.” With this statement, the conditions for interpretation have now been put on a moral basis, and the reader is intimidatingly called to account. Now it is the reader’s earnestness that is to guarantee the credibility of the presentation, which in the end makes this earnestness another name for the tacit acceptance of Kierkegaard’s fictions and dubious ploys. Therefore it is not surprising that the work displays a marked confidence in the reader—or, if you will, it is not surprising that the unreflective innocence Johannes the Seducer presupposed in Cordelia is suspiciously similar to the uncritical earnestness Kierkegaard presupposes in his reader. This is evident, for example, in this mildly erotic appeal: “Some day, when my lover appears, he will easily see that when I was regarded as ironic, the irony by no means consisted in what the esteemed, cultivated public thought it consisted…. He will see that the irony consisted precisely in the fact that within this aesthetical author, beneath this appearance of worldliness, a religious author concealed himself…. My lover will see how it matches up, to the letter.”
Who is Kierkegaard’s lover? It is the reader who reads the fiction as a piece of nonfiction and who cannot see that in this work Kierkegaard did not reproduce his own actions but in fact produced them as textual actions that claim to be facts.
And indeed, this is the only way that everything can be made to match up, to the letter.
“What Hasn’t This Pen Been Capable of … ?”
But The Point of View does not consist solely of a more or less unintentional—and, in the final analysis, self-accusatory—apologia for a particular religious interpretation of Kierkegaard’s writings. It also contains lighter, more lyrical passages, including a rather grand ode to laboring with pen and paper and to the mysterious powers that help produce such handiwork. In this connection Kierkegaard wrote that there had “not been the slightest delay in the literary productivity. Everything that was to be used has always been ready at hand at precisely the moment it was to be used. In one sense, the entire production has had an uninterrupted regularity, as if I had done nothing else but copy out every day a specific portion of a printed book.” It had been a “simple task of duty,” and Kierkegaard himself had “lived like a copyist in his office.”
Kierkegaard’s “office” was a metaphor for the absence of inclination, and it is clear that this office was part of the Department of Duty and Punctuality. We are not told what book it was that Kierkegaard copied so diligently, but it ought to be obvious that this was hardly a case of an ordinary copyist’s work or of mere plagiarism. When Kierkegaard copied something, he was doing something other, and something more, than mere copying. But what? And whose writing was it of which his writing was a copy?
Kierkegaard the copyist answers these questions in an extremely original way in the third chapter of The Point of View, which he entitled “The Role of Governance in My Writings.” He did indeed find it “somewhat embarrassing” to have to talk about himself, but the embarrassment was manageable, as is made clear by the following passage, which could rightly be called Kierkegaard’s “confessions,” and which therefore deserves some attention: “What hasn’t this pen been capable of when it was something that required daring, enthusiasm, passion almost to the point of madness! And now, when I must speak of my relation to God, of what is repeated every day in my prayers, which give thanks for the indescribable things he has done for me, so infinitely much more than I could ever have expected; … when I now must speak of this, a poetic impatience awakens in my soul. With more determination than that king who cried ‘my kingdom for a horse,’ and with a blessed determination that he lacked, I would give my all, including my life, in order to find something more blessed for thought to find than for the lover to find the beloved—‘the expression’—and then to die with that expression on my lips. And look, they are offered to me—thoughts as enchanting as those fruits in the fabled garden, such rich, warm, passionate expressions, so soothing to the urge for thankfulness that is within me, so cooling to the heat of longing. And it seems to me that if I had a winged pen—indeed, if I had ten of them—I would not be able to keep up with the rapid pace at which the riches are offered to me. But then when I take up my pen, I am for a moment unable to move it, just as one speaks of being unable to move one’s foot. In this state, not a line about this makes it onto paper. It is as if I heard a voice saying to me: ‘Stupid man! What is he thinking of? Doesn’t he know that obedience is dearer to God than the fat of rams? Perform the whole thing as an obligatory task.’ Then I become completely calm. Then there is time to write every letter with my slower pen, almost meticulously. And if that poetic passion reawakens in me for a moment, then it is as if I heard a voice speaking to me as a teacher speaks to a boy, when he says ‘Now hold the pen properly and write each letter with equal care.’ And then I can do it, then I dare do nothing else. Then I write every word, every line, almost totally unaware of the next word and the next line. And then, when I read it through afterwards, it satisfies me in a very different way. For even if one or another ardent expression has eluded me, what has been produced is something else—not the product of a poetic or intellectual passion, but the passion of the fear of God, and for me it is worship of God.”
The text itself displays what it wishes to demonstrate. It seeks “the expression” that must be enclosed in quotation marks to protect its profound singularity, but it instead discovers “the expressions,” a turbulent upwelling of metaphors that make Kierkegaard’s confessional text into an aesthetic text about the religious. The lines almost begin to hover above the page, as if they had been written with a “winged pen”—indeed, perhaps with ten such pens—that had become flighty and followed a “poetic passion.” Yet this is in fact not the case. On no fewer than two occasions the text heeds a “voice” that chastens Kierkegaard and orders him—like some sort of schoolboy—to hold the headstrong pen “properly” and write each word “with care,” which he then does with his “slower pen.” So “the voice” defines Kierkegaard’s text, just as “Governance” governs it. It is only when he (re)read and (re)wrote his text through this lens that Kierkegaard was able to characterize “the aesthetic productivity” as “a necessary emptying out.” And Kierkegaard then reported, in a fragment of dialogue, how “the religious tolerated this emptying out, but constantly pressed onward, as if it wanted to say, ‘Won’t you be finished with this soon?’ ” The text does not tell us when it was that Kierkegaard answered this inquiry in the affirmative, but the question was apparently put to him repeatedly, and Kierkegaard therefore finally decided “to satisfy the religious by becoming a religious author.”
Kierkegaard’s confessional text is a tasty tidbit for every Freudian epicure, and Kierkegaard serves up his own diagnosis very nicely by describing his “relationship with God” as the only happy “love story” in his unhappy life. In his attempt to mark off the domain of the religious from that of the aesthetic, Kierkegaard had in fact aestheticized his relation to God, but what is no less striking is that he effaced all the ordinary characteristics of the artistic experience and made God into the “muse” on whom he had to call “every day in order to defend myself against the abundance of thoughts.” Kierkegaard explained that “[I could] sit down and continue to write uninterruptedly day and night and yet another day and night, because there is wealth enough. If I did it, I would snap. Oh, the least little dietary indiscretion, and I am in mortal danger.”
It was like a fairy tale, this perseverance in writing for 1,001 nights. Princess Scheherazade put off her execution by telling fairy tales. Kierkegaard put off his erotic desire by writing—and all the while, God, like (yet another) father, kept watch over his son’s ungovernable desire for “emptying” himself and therefore had to request repeatedly that his son’s spermatically spouting pen behave “properly.” (In a footnote to The Point of View, Kierkegaard noted the necessity of reaching a “spermatic point” outside “the System.”)
“But Then, of Course, I Cannot Say ‘I’ ”
Kierkegaard had a terrifying experience while working on The Point of View. He came to realize that he was not the actual author of the writings, but rather a coauthor or a sort of ghostwriter who was writing for someone else and was therefore unable to speak authoritatively concerning their innermost meaning. Unable to make sense of his own experience, it did not occur to him that this sort of co-writing might stem from language itself, which of course always extends beyond the person who writes in it, and which—simply by means of its grammatical rules—can keep a writer within certain channels and perhaps even point him in a quite specific direction. Nor did it occur to Kierkegaard that the writing process itself can activate unconscious forces in the person doing the writing, who can be surprised to see himself treating subjects that are normally kept out of sight by effective repression. Kierkegaard imposed a religious interpretation on his experience and labeled the alien portion of his authorship “the role of Governance.” But even this explanation did not exhaust the matter: “For if I were simply to say that I had had an overview of the dialectical structure of the whole of my work as an author from the very beginning, … that would be denial and dishonesty with respect to God.” And, we might also add, with respect to the reader. Kierkegaard continued: “No. I must truly say that I cannot understand the entire affair, precisely because I can understand the entire affair down to the most insignificant little detail—but what I cannot understand is that I can understand it now, though I most definitely do not dare to say that I understood it so clearly in the beginning. And yet I was of course the person who did it, reflecting every step along the way.”
The idea of “the role of Governance in the works” might at first look like rampant megalomania, but on further inspection and reflection we can see it was close to the opposite of that—it was the experience that one’s autonomy was limited. Kierkegaard was not only the person who did the writing; he was also the person who—and it was precisely here that he could not hit upon the words he needed—was written. For, when he was writing and in what he wrote, he was in fact also writing himself: His writings constitute one, enormous sweeping novel of development, a bildungsroman, in which the writing itself stands in a relationship of deliverance, a maieutic relationship, to its writer.
Kierkegaard’s experience was difficult to express in language—precisely because it concerned the very conditions of language itself. He therefore turned to a moralistic term, namely “upbringing,” which in its passive form, “to be brought up,” takes on a physical or tangible character not too unlike the words “to be written.” “[It is] as categorically definite as can be,” Kierkegaard wrote, “that it is Governance that has brought me up, and this upbringing is reflected in the process of the literary productivity. To this extent, then, what has been said earlier to the effect that the whole of the aesthetic productivity was a deception is in one sense not entirely true, because to call it that is to concede a bit too much to consciousness. On the other hand, it is not entirely untrue, either, because from the very beginning I have been aware that I was being brought up.”
Shifting our attention to Kierkegaard’s journal entries regarding The Point of View, we now see that his reflections on the relation between conscious and unconscious activity in the writing process sometimes doubled the writing subject and sometimes reduced him by half: The “I” of the text was thus not simply identical with the “I” who reread what had been written, who in turn was not the same as the “I” who reflected on the fact that the two “I’s” were not identical. In one of these journal entries Kierkegaard the reader gives his impression of what he had just seen Kierkegaard the writer report concerning the published author of the same name: “The Point of View for My Work as an Author must not be published. No, no!—(1) And this is what is decisive. (Everything else I have thought up about risks to my finances and to finding a job is of no importance): I cannot present myself entirely truthfully. Even in the very first draft (which I wrote without any thought whatever of publication) I was unable to accentuate what was the principal thing for me: that I am a penitent, and that this is what explains me at the deepest level. But then when I took out the manuscript with the thought of publishing it, I had to make some minor changes because, after all, the emphasis had been too strong for it to be published….—(2) I cannot quite say that my work as an author is a sacrifice. It is certainly true that I have been unspeakably unhappy ever since I was a child, but nonetheless, in this connection I must confess that the avenue of escape God provided for me in permitting me to become an author has been rich, rich in enjoyment. So I have surely been sacrificed, but my work as an author is not a sacrifice—it is indeed what I would absolutely most like to continue doing. Thus I cannot be entirely truthful here either, because I cannot talk about my torments and my misery like this in print—and then what is really most prominent becomes the enjoyment.”
Over and over and over again Kierkegaard qualifies what he says with “but” and “after all” and “cannot quite” and “it is certainly true” and “but nonetheless” and, yet again, “but.” These reservations echo throughout the textual monologue, revealing Kierkegaard’s astonishment when he revisited the manuscript. He unearthed the first draft, reread it, and ascertained that “the principal thing”—voluntary penance—had been inadequately depicted. Then he made minor alterations and corrections that did not, however, strengthen “the principal thing,” but rather weakened it. And what caused this weakening of something that was already too weak to begin with? It was this: The private, penitential motivation for Kierkegaard’s works as an author did not accord with those works themselves, which had not been “sacrifice” but on the contrary had been “rich, rich in enjoyment.” When the inner “torment and misery” was exhibited “in print,” the repentant “I” thus became interesting, which caused the religious once again to be displaced by the aesthetic.
And indeed Kierkegaard viewed The Point of View from this twofold point of view. “The book itself is true, and in my opinion it is masterly,” he wrote rather immodestly in a journal entry in which he had one eye on the religious aspect and the other on the aesthetic. And, without batting an eye, he went on to write the following in this same journal entry: “If a little more were added to emphasize the fact that I am a penitent and about my sin and guilt, a little about my inner misery—then it would be true.”
The Point of View left in its wake an extremely marginalized subject, who was disappointed to see “the principal thing” disappear in the midst of the text. A marginalization of this sort can be read—quite literally—in a long, narrow marginal note found together with one of the two scraps of paper on which Kierkegaard had written some notes for the discourse entitled “From on High, He Will Draw All to Himself.” Under the heading “Concerning the Completed Unpublished Work and Myself,” the following is written along one edge of the scrap of paper: “The difficulty with publishing the piece about my writings is and continues to be that I have actually been used without really knowing it myself, or without knowing it fully. And now, for the first time, I understand and can see the whole of it—but then, of course, I cannot say ‘I.’ ”
Here Governance is not included in the process. Kierkegaard had been used and had been so completely written into “the process of the productivity” that when he looked back he was unable to say “I.” When he looked back on his life, what he saw was, in fact, not a life; he saw writing, mountains of writing. And with a paradoxical logic that demonstrates how the absence of authority forced the production of fiction, this same Kierkegaard (who in other circumstances had been unwilling to risk a “bewildering poetic confusion”) considered publishing The Point of View under the name Johannes de silentio! He realized very quickly, however, that “then it would no longer be that book at all, because the point of the book was precisely that it was my personal statement.” But even though there are certain considerations that make it preferable to publish an autobiography under an author’s own name, the idea of pseudonymous publication put in yet another appearance. Kierkegaard thus composed a preface to The Point of View, signed by a certain “A-O,” who concluded his venture in this fragmentary endeavor with the following statement: “I now dare to make this poetic venture. The author himself speaks in the first person, but bear in mind that this author is not Mag. K. but my poetic creation.—I must certainly beg the pardon of Mr. Mag. for venturing right under his nose, so to speak, to understand him poetically or to poetize him. But nothing more than … this apology, because in other respects I have poetically emancipated myself quite entirely from him. Indeed, even if he were to declare that my understanding of him was factually untrue with respect to one detail or another, it would not follow from this that it was poetically untrue. And of course the conclusion could also be reversed: ergo, Mag. K. has not measured up to or realized what would be poetically correct.”
The attempt at a direct report to history has here been replaced by a rhetorical game which is undeniably dialectical, but it is at the same time destructive, because in its mischievous double game, involving the factually untrue and the poetically true, it obliterates every difference between A-O and Mag. K. This curious logic, which leaps lasciviously to an inverted “conclusion,” lets fiction have the final say. And in this sense Kierkegaard is being quite consistent when he concludes The Point of View by “permitting someone else, my poet, to speak.” And this “poet” then goes on to end the book by saying: “The martyrdom suffered by this author can be described quite briefly by saying that he suffered by being a genius in a provincial town. The standard against which he measured abilities, diligence, selflessness, sacrifice, the absoluteness of thought categories, et cetera, was much too far above the average level of his contemporaries; he jacked up the price altogether too much…. He was unable to attribute the dialectical structure he completed—of which the individual component parts are works in themselves—to any human being, and even less would he attribute it to himself. If he had to attribute it to anyone, it would have been to Governance.”
Kierkegaard thus could not authorize “the totality of the works” in his own name, but had to distribute the authorization in many directions, so that The Point of View, which was supposed to have been “a direct communication” and a “report to history,” became anything but direct, and its reporting seems most of all to be about plural and competing points of view. Kierkegaard therefore wrote a greatly abridged version in March 1849, but he could not bring himself to publish that, either. It only appeared two years later, on August 7, 1851, under the title On My Work as an Author, while the original manuscript of The Point of View was consigned to posthumous publication, which was seen to by Peter Christian Kierkegaard in 1859, after which the manuscript apparently disappeared into one of the greedy woodstoves in the bishop’s residence; in any event, it is gone. A reviewer in Dagbladet was not exactly overwhelmed by the trustworthiness of the author of The Point of View: “We are certainly not of the opinion that he is consciously lying, but we believe that he does something that is not uncommon and confuses the a posteriori with the a priori when, at the conclusion of his work as an author, he looks at it retrospectively and discovers that a certain coherence can be seen among the works…. It is our quite definite opinion not merely that it is not entirely true that the aesthetic works were written with religious intent—it is entirely untrue.” Nor was Eline Boisen (to whom Kierkegaard was related by his brother’s first marriage) convinced, and she snorted tersely: “In his autobiography … he wishes to present himself as if all of his endeavors had the intention of surreptitiously confronting people with the Gospel. This cannot be true with respect to the first part of his life, however. He did not honor his father and mother, and therefore things did not go well for him in the land.”
When we consider the amount of work accomplished, 1848 was one of the years of plenty; but when we consider at how much was published, it was among the very leanest of years. Only Christian Discourses and The Crisis managed to wrench themselves free of Kierkegaard’s indecisiveness. At year-end, Kierkegaard had no fewer than four manuscripts that were ready for publication: Two Ethical-Religious Essays, which had been gathering dust since December 1847 and was subsequently included in A Cycle of Ethical-Religious Essays, for which Kierkegaard had written a preface and a postscript in October 1848; The Sickness unto Death, which had been finished in mid-May 1848; The Point of View for My Work as an Author, completed toward the end of November 1848; and Practice in Christianity, completed in December 1848. Taken together, the manuscripts total more than five hundred printed pages.
In the middle of December, Kierkegaard contemplated publishing some of this material in a single volume under the title The Collected Works of Fulfillment, but after a period of torturous reflection he abandoned the idea. He seized on death as a pretext in coming to terms with his own indecisiveness: “My powers—my physical powers, that is—are in decline. My health falters frightfully. I have completed some material that is of truly decisive significance, but I will hardly live long enough to publish it myself.”
In addition to all this material are drafts of the discourses “The Chief Priest” and “The Pharisee and the Tax Collector,” which were ready in early September of 1848, and a theater review, “Mr. Phister as Captain Scipio,” that was signed “Procul” and was in fair copy by December. And on top of all this, he had plans of writing “a pair of discourses” under the common title “Let Not the Heart in Sorrow Sin,” dealing with what are, humanly speaking, “the noblest and most beautiful forms of despair,” namely “unhappy love or grief over the death of someone beloved, [and] sorrow over not having found one’s proper place in the world.” These are all forms of despair that “the poet” loves but that “Christianity” calls sin. And besides all this there was also the essay “Armed Neutrality” plus, lest we forget, Kierkegaard’s journals: He had finished journal NB 4 on May 15 and started on NB 5 that same day; by July 16 it was filled with writing and put aside in favor of NB 6, which was replaced on August 21 by NB 7, which lasted until November 28, when NB 8 was begun—it met Kierkegaard’s needs for the remainder of the year.
All of this remained in Kierkegaard’s writing desks, metal boxes, and little burlap sacks, awaiting better days.
In Charge of His Own Posthumous Reputation
“What does Goethe do in his Aus meinem Leben [German: ‘From My Life,’ autobiographical writings], other than provide a clever defense of blunders?” Kierkegaard noted maliciously in 1844. In the same splenetic vein, he continued: “At no point has he realized the Idea, but he is capable of talking his way out of everything (young women, the idea of love, Christianity, et cetera).” Indeed, as Kierkegaard noted in the margin, Goethe was only “different in degree from a criminal, who also poetizes his way out of responsibility, ‘distancing it from himself via poetizing.’ ”
If Goethe’s autobiography was a “defense of blunders,” the reader is tempted to ask whether Kierkegaard’s The Point of View for My Work as an Author is not in principle open to the same objection. Yet Kierkegaard does not in fact try to “talk his way out of everything.” Indeed, the opposite is the case: There is a great deal about which he does not talk at all (the relationship with Regine, for example, which he refers to coolly as “that fact” and is pressed into a little parenthesis). But silence is also a sort of defense of blunders. Nor does Kierkegaard simply poetize his way out of his own responsibility; sometimes he dwells on it quite demonstratively. But inherent in the very genre of autobiography is the tendency to slip, sooner or later, into the very sort of apologia which it is in principle seeking to avoid. And finally, Kierkegaard is not the “criminal” he accuses Goethe of being, but he certainly leaves as little as possible to chance and makes every conceivable effort to present just the right profile to his future biographer. The more or less declared intention of The Point of View is to control the narrative and mold the chapters in such a way that posterity will not only have to accept the story, but will want to retell it and embroider on it. So it is both symptomatic and troubling that when Kierkegaard founded Kierkegaard research—which is what he did in writing The Point of View—he did so as a sort of fictional documentation or dramatization.
This fictional documentation finds expression, for example, in the second chapter of The Point of View, where Kierkegaard wanted to place in evidence his personal “existential idiosyncrasy, corresponding to the idiosyncratic genre of the writings,” alluding in this connection to the tactics he had to adopt in publishing the Postscript: “I realized at once … that my personal existence had to be reshaped for this situation. I had also conceived a notion of what ought to be done when a little circumstance—which I saw as a nod from Governance—intervened, coming to my assistance in a very convenient fashion and enabling me to act decisively.” The circumstance that had intervened so conveniently was the entry of The Corsair onto the scene and its effect on the people of Copenhagen. Because now “an enormous public, arm-in-arm in bona caritate [Latin: ‘with good nature’] had become ironic, damn it!“ The rampant irony of his times had placed Kierkegaard in an awkward position: He himself could not make use of irony, because it would have been interpreted as merely a “newly invented and extremely titillating form of irony.“ So he had to do just the opposite, making himself into “the object of everyone’s irony.”
Kierkegaard’s presentation of what had been in reality a very complex course of events is so oversimplified that it hovers somewhere between parody and falsification. It appears to ooze fiction from every pore, an impression that is strengthened when Kierkegaard portrays himself as having been in charge of the entire affair: “I had now calculated that the situation would be the dialectically appropriate one in which to reestablish indirect communication. Although I was occupied solely with religious works, I dared to count on these daily doses of mob vulgarity as a form of negative support that would keep the situation sufficiently chilly to prevent the religious communication from being altogether too direct or gaining me adherents too directly…. And even those who had not been warned off by this would be disturbed by the additional circumstance that I had voluntarily exposed myself to all of this, plunged into it, a sort of madness…. Ah yes, and again, ah yes, because viewed dialectically, it was precisely Christian self-denial.” Self-assertion is not denied its due in Kierkegaard’s Christian self-denial, which looks for all the world like a grandiose bit of theatrical self-promotion, what with all the many metaphors of dramatic concealment: “costume,” “finery,” “suit of clothing.”
This tendency is also clear in the journals. As the years passed, the loose autobiographical sketches that had long been a specialty of Kierkegaard’s became so tautly drawn and so frequently repeated that as art, they risked ending as clichés, while as psychology they began to verge on kitsch. These self-portraits lost more and more in detail and depth, while on the other hand the role of self-chronicler itself gained in the sharpness of its contours. Kierkegaard never tired of presenting himself as a marginal figure who, from his exposed position, was capable of seeing many decisive developments that had gone unnoticed by other people. This role was often portrayed as possessing characteristics typical of social classes far beneath Kierkegaard’s own, as, for example, when he described himself as a spy and then went on to associate that role with the notions of guilt and punishment that appeared almost compulsively whenever he wrote about himself: “What I have said to myself and about myself is true: I am like a spy in service of what is highest. The police also employ spies. And for that purpose they do not always use those people who have exactly led the best and most upright of lives. On the contrary, the police exploit the cunning of wily and cunning criminals, compelling them to cooperate because the police know all about their vita ante acta. Ah, God, too, uses sinners in this way. The police, however, do not think about reforming their spies. God does. When, in his mercy, he uses such a person, he also brings that person up and reforms him.”
Kierkegaard’s vita ante acta, his earlier life, his life to date, is a perennial part of his self-presentation and the phrase ostensibly refers—not without a slight prurience—to sinful scenes to which the reader is never granted access. “With him everything was inner emotions. His talk of a prodigal youth, of the sins of youth, et cetera, can only refer to ‘sins in thought,’ ” Israel Levin insisted, supporting his assertion by pointing out that one merely had to look at Kierkegaard’s “entire background to annihilate any thought of debauchery in him.” Levin was far from being a witness to the truth, but he correctly noted the tendency of Kierkegaard, as he got older, to portray his past in a theatrical light as one of uninhibited sensuality—as if he had been a dandified voluptuary who had frequently gone berserk in the brothels of Copenhagen. The portrait is without historical foundation, but it was an important part of Kierkegaard’s attempt to create the dialectical twilight in which he wished posterity to view him. He himself explained these complications in the following complicated fashion: “I admit that I began my work as an author from a position of advantage: I was viewed as something close to a scoundrel, but as an enormously brilliant intellect, that is, a social lion, one of the truly spoilt children of the age…. But this was where the spy lurked, and no one had been on the lookout for him. For a person to begin as a debauched voluptuary, a social lion, and then, many years later, become what people call a saint: That doesn’t catch people’s attention. But for a penitent, a sort of a preacher of repentance, to take the precaution of beginning in the costume of a social lion: People are not exactly used to that.”
We must grant Kierkegaard that “preachers of repentance” very rarely disguise themselves as “social lions,” but we must also point out that it is not utterly irrelevant to mention On the Concept of Irony, where Kierkegaard had emphasized a similar sort of oscillation between monastic isolation and libidinous extroversion as a trait typical of the romantic ironist: “Now he is on the way to the monastery, and along the way visits the Venusberg; now he is on the way to the Venusberg, and along the way he prays at a monastery.”
Thus, when Kierkegaard had to write his autobiography and depict his religious development, he had no trouble with recycling material that he had elsewhere classified as aesthetic.
“My Father Died—Then I Got Another Father in His Place”
These complex self-presentations, in which deception and self-deception struggle with each other exhaustingly and on equal terms, are sometimes accompanied by more straightforward journal entries where, for example, traumatic childhood experiences return, but in transfigured form. The pain had not vanished, but it had diminished just enough for Kierkegaard to take pen in hand—and then inform us that the most decisive details would remain shrouded in silence: “Oh, how frightful it is when I think for even a moment of the dark background of my life, right from the earliest days. The anxiety with which my father filled my soul, his own frightful melancholia, of many things in this connection that I cannot even write down. I acquired such anxiety about Christianity, and yet I felt myself strongly drawn toward it.”
The entry recurs at various places in the journals in a welter of variations, and the reader has to summon up extraordinary goodwill to be able to get beyond thinking about the therapeutic effect that this very act of committing the trauma to writing must have had for Kierkegaard, whose sole confidant was of course his journal. And naturally, the very fact that he worked through his traumatic experiences by writing them down has misled later generations into focusing more on the traumas themselves than on the distance Kierkegaard placed between them and himself, line by line, as time went by. In a journal entry from the early summer of 1848, which Kierkegaard begins quite abruptly, we can sense how that distance is increasing: “But of course, my father’s death was also a frightfully shattering experience for me—how much so I have never spoken of to a single person. The entire first part of my life was generally so enveloped in the darkest melancholia and the most profoundly brooding fog of misery that it is no wonder I was as I was. But all this remains my secret.”
Kierkegaard has confronted his reader with this frank concealment so often that one almost reacts with resignation. He wants to and yet he doesn’t want to; his urge to confess is characterized by a sympathetic antipathy, an eternal nolens volens [Latin: “will one or won’t one”]. But then, indeed, the entry continues: “This might not have made such a profound impression on someone else, but my imagination—especially in its early days, when it did not yet have any tasks to apply itself to.” The sentence ends at this point, but it does not end properly—at the very least, it is missing a verb. Kierkegaard has to be quickly on his way, for he has written himself into the dangerous territory where art and reality, poetry and truth, struggle with one another. A mere ten additional words in that direction, and he would have revealed himself to be a literary freebooter who has had to go a-plundering in his own past because it had been years since there were other subjects anywhere else that possessed the required appeal to his artistic creativity. Kierkegaard omitted those ten words and instead returned to his familiar formula: “Such elemental melancholia, such an enormous dowry of sorrow, and the most profoundly lamentable fate of having been brought up as a child by such a melancholy old man—and then by means of innate virtuosity, to have been able to deceive everyone, as though I were life and merriment itself—and then, that God in heaven has helped me as he has.”
Kierkegaard’s ambivalent attitude toward this melancholy old man, whose misguided solicitude had poisoned his life, is without parallel in world literature—not even Kafka could demonize his way into anything like it—and we virtually wallow in his father’s errors: his repression of his son’s sexuality, which resulted in psychosomatic conflicts; the slave morality produced by an overly strict parent whom the son, thanks to these very humiliations, paradoxically enough worshipped and imagined that he loved, because he was afraid to admit his hatred; the feelings of inadequacy that stemmed from the exaggerated moral and intellectual expectations that the son was supposed to live up to in his father’s stead; the paranoia that was rooted in the father’s continual monitoring of the son’s behavior—and that later emerged in reversed form in the son’s notion of being a spy whose task it was to unmask the others; the irony that stemmed from compulsive artificiality and inhibited aggressiveness—an aggressiveness that in turn was connected via obscure channels to the miserable way Regine was treated and that subsequently found expression in the idea of punishing his times by allowing them to become guilty of the death of a martyr.
It would be an easy matter to lengthen, broaden, and deepen this catalog of upbringing strategies that effectively crippled the child, and there could be a special appendix containing a number of the bone-chilling childhood vignettes captured on the canvas of the journals. We will have to content ourselves with only a couple of them: “Nonetheless, I am indebted to my father for everything, from the very beginning. Melancholy as he was, when he saw me melancholy, his plea to me was ‘Make sure that you really love Jesus Christ.’ ” This is not a very pleasant entry, and what makes it especially sinister is the unreserved approval with which the son quotes the father’s words—and this approval was more the rule than the exception. A couple of journal entries later, Kierkegaard repeats the remark, by now almost a decade old, that his father had let fall when the altogether-too-worldly Søren Aabye had made his dangerous comment about the possibility that a “master thief” could turn his life around and mend his ways: “Everything my father told me was true, ‘There are sins from which a person can be saved only by extraordinary divine help.’ And humanly speaking, I owe everything to my father. In every way he has made me as unhappy as possible, so that my youth was incomparable torment. Because of him, in my inmost thoughts, I came close to being offended by Christianity. Or indeed, I was offended by it, even if I decided out of respect for it never to say a word about this to anyone, and out of love for my father to present Christianity as truthfully as possible—in contrast to the nonsense that is called Christianity in Christendom. And yet my father was the most loving of fathers, and I yearned and continue to yearn profoundly for him, and I have never failed to remember him morning and evening, every day.”
It was a father’s son who wrote these lines, a son who had been wronged, but who himself had also done wrong. And naturally, the question that modern psychology in particular finds it difficult not to ask is whether the adult son could have avoided transferring the characteristics of the earthly father to the heavenly father—could he have avoided projecting? This can never be answered unequivocally, but surprisingly enough Kierkegaard appears at a number of places to destroy every suspicion of such projection. “I have quite literally lived with God as one lives with a father,” he wrote in a journal entry in which projection is unmistakable. But then a few pages later in the same journal comes this radical twist to the story: “My father died—then I got another father in his place: God in heaven—and then I discovered that my first father had really been my stepfather and only in an unreal sense my first father.”
We ought to pay particular attention to the concluding clause. For it is here that Kierkegaard settled accounts with his father: Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard had shown himself to have been a “stepfather” and he therefore had to yield his position to the true father, the heavenly father, God. And this insight was precisely what finally made it possible for the son to do to the hosier something that had previously presented insurmountable difficulties—to forgive him.
Kierkegaard formulated the idea of the substitute, the vicar, at about the same time that his work on The Sickness unto Death caused him to occupy himself once again with the question of the forgiveness of sins. “I really must continually come closer and closer to the doctrine of the forgiveness of sins,” he wrote on one of the great many loose scraps of paper dating from 1848 that deal with this subject, a subject that concerned Kierkegaard in the most intimate way imaginable. An especially reflexive but also quite sober-minded monologue found its way onto paper under the heading “Something about the Forgiveness of Sins”: “The difficulty is, to which immediacy does the person who believes in it [the forgiveness of sins] revert? Or what is the immediacy that comes as a consequence of this faith, and how is that immediacy related to what is otherwise called immediacy? To believe in the forgiveness of sins is a paradox, the absurd, et cetera, et cetera—I am not speaking of this, but of something else. I assume, then, that someone has had the enormous courage of faith truly to believe that God has literally forgotten his sin—a courage that perhaps is not to be found in ten people in an entire generation—this mad courage: to have acquired a mature notion of God and after that to believe that God can quite literally forget. But I assume it. What then? So now everything has been forgotten; it is as if he were a new person. But are there absolutely no traces left behind? In other words, is it possible that a person would then be able to live with the carefree spirit of a youth? Impossible! … How could a person who believes in the forgiveness of his sins possibly become young enough to fall in love in the erotic sense?”
These reflections on the relation between the first and the second immediacy led Kierkegaard straight into his existential center: “Here is the difficulty of my own life. I was raised as a Christian by an old man, extremely strictly. This is why my life is dreadfully confused, and this is why I have been brought into collisions that no one imagines, much less talks about. And now for the first time, now in my thirty-fifth year, assisted, perhaps, by burdensome sufferings, and in bitter repentance, I have learned to die away from the world sufficiently so that there can properly be a question of my finding the whole of my life and my salvation by believing in the forgiveness of sins. But truly, even though I am spiritually as strong as I have ever been, I am now much too old to fall in love with a woman and that sort of thing.”
At first blush the reader might be tempted to believe that Kierkegaard had these reservations about ever again being able to fall in love with a woman because he was a good psychologist who knew himself and his own limitations, or that these reservations stemmed from a flaw in his theology that prevented him from embracing forgiveness totally. The second immediacy, which is at the same time a requirement and a blessing, was for Kierkegaard another immediacy, and therefore the person who takes up a position within that other immediacy must also have become another person: “The person who has truly experienced and continues to experience belief in the forgiveness of his sins has indeed become another person. Everything is forgotten. And yet his situation is not like that of a child who, after having been forgiven, once again becomes essentially the same child. No, he has become an eternity older. For now he has become spirit: the whole of immediacy and its selfishness, its selfish clinging to the world and to itself, has been lost. Now he is old, extremely old, humanly speaking, but eternally speaking he is young.”
It was this rejuvenating eternity that increasingly enveloped Kierkegaard and that he attempted to describe in one journal entry after another, fully aware that it could not be described because the experience of God’s love was completely indescribable. Viewed from without, these journal entries have the peculiarity of being at the same time both radically private and yet totally open, but only a cynic would doubt their emotional authenticity: “It is wonderful how God’s love overwhelms me. Alas, ultimately I know of no truer prayer than what I pray over and over, that God will at any rate allow me—that he will not be angry at me—that he will allow me to thank him continually, thanking him because he has done, and indeed, continues to do, so indescribably much more for me than I had ever expected. Surrounded with mockery; plagued day in and day out by the pettiness of people, even of those closest to me, I know of nothing else to do in my home or in my inmost being, but to give thanks and to thank God, for I understand that what he has done for me is indescribable…. He permits me to weep before him in quiet solitude, to weep away my pain again and again, blessedly consoled in the knowledge that he is concerned for me—and at the same time he gives this life of pain a significance that almost overwhelms me, he grants me success and strength and wisdom in all my accomplishments…. Faith is immediacy after reflection. As a poet and a thinker I have presented everything in the medium of imagination, while I myself lived in resignation. Now life is coming closer to me, or I am coming closer to myself, coming to myself.”
“I Am Regarded as a Kind of Englishman, a Half-Mad Eccentric”
The closer life came to Kierkegaard, the greater became his distance from another sort of life—social life, other people. The aftershocks of The Corsair were far from over; on the contrary, they seemed to defy the laws of nature, increasing with the passage of time into a tidal wave that threatened to sweep him away: “This is actually how I am treated in Copenhagen. I am regarded as a kind of Englishman, a half-mad eccentric, whom every damned one of us, from the most aristocratic to guttersnipes, imagines he can have a bit of fun with. My work as an author, that enormous productivity, the intensity of which, it seems to me, could move stones, the individual segments of which (not to mention the totality) not one living writer can compete with: This writing is regarded as a sort of hobby, like fishing and that sort of thing…. I am not supported by a single word in reviews and such. I am plundered by small-time prophets in foolish lectures at religious meetings and the like. But mention me by name? No, that isn’t necessary.”
This fury, which however is not without a bit of mirth, was occasioned by situations Kierkegaard repeatedly referred to in his later journal entries. The number of these entries, and the energy with which Kierkegaard dealt with the same themes over and over again, are in themselves so overwhelming that it is difficult to free ourselves of the suspicion that the preoccupation with painful situations, which had started out as therapeutic activity, had ended up in sheer auto-suggestion. It would be very helpful if we could hear Kierkegaard read this particular journal entry in his own voice, whose emphasis and rhythm would invest the lines with invaluable interpretive information. Without that voice, these unvarnished reactions often seem to be entirely out of proportion. Thus, a stupid little bit of teasing in the March 6, 1846, issue of The Corsair to the effect that Kierkegaard did not deign to remove his hat for anyone—an allusion to a charming dialectical twist in the preface to the Postscript—made Kierkegaard flash with fury: “But that is an enormous and disgusting bit of crudity. A little remark by a pseudonymous figure (the remark by Climacus about removing his hat), a little humorous remark by a humorist (and excellent in itself) in the preface of an enormous book, which only a very few people know exists: This remark is torn out of context and is printed in a journal for the riffraff (which is read by the entire population, because in Denmark everyone is riffraff, which is of course proved by the fact that everyone reads the journal for the riffraff), and it is made to look as if it were me (S. Kierkegaard) who had uttered these words, and that I had spoken them to the actual inhabitants of Copenhagen. This is written for every brewer, bartender, bricklayer, et cetera, et cetera, for schoolboys, et cetera, et cetera. And to make sure that they will all be able to recognize me, a drawing is provided. And now everyone is inflamed against me—because out of pride I refused to remove my hat for them. Pro dii immortales. It is certain that a country in which this can happen is no country; it is a provincial town, a demoralized provincial town.—Even today (two years later) a man refers to the fact that I said this in the preface to a book (which, naturally, he has never read).”
Pro dii immortales. By the immortal gods! It is amazing that Kierkegaard even deigns to make a fuss about what a random man has said about a random hat. But for one thing, Kierkegaard never entirely got over the episode with The Corsair, and for another, he was absolutely unable to ignore it. And indeed, in his journals he was more than happy to cite Poul Martin Møller’s remark—that he was “so polemical, through and through” that it was “quite frightful”—as a sort of legitimation of his polemical potshots at more or less everything that moved.
Rather surprisingly, Kierkegaard’s relation to “the vulgarity of the mob” mirrors his relation to what he called “the coteries,” by which he meant the intellectual cliques and cultural clans of Copenhagen that had more or less closed their ranks to him. “If only they had given me my due as an author in the beginning,” he sighed in 1848, “then I would have had an opportunity to speak about myself in a different fashion. People would easily have seen how far I am from being haughty.” Heiberg was among those who at an early date had missed the opportunity to accommodate Kierkegaard’s need for acknowledgment, having chosen instead to turn thumbs down, or at least to a forty-five-degree angle. Kierkegaard could not get over this demeaning treatment, and in weak moments—of which he had more than a few—he indulged in wild and exuberant fantasies of literary success: “Besides, after having suffered the most extreme pains of melancholia through having to be sacrificed, and suffering all possible abuse in the world, it is not impossible that it could suddenly be God’s will for me that I would in fact become a success in the world.”
This was never God’s will for Kierkegaard, and as time passed and the cliques consolidated themselves more and more, he saw to his dismay that not only was he being ignored, but that he had also been the victim of underhanded intrigue, and for this reason he decided—with the assistance of Governance—to carry out a series of tactical maneuvers that would shatter the image of him held by the members of the various cliques. He reported on this in detail: “My tactic has always been to sow discord in the coteries. And now in retrospect I see once again how Governance has helped me. The great coterie is Mynster, Heiberg, Martensen, and company. Because Mynster was a part of it, even if he never condescended to admit to it openly. This coterie thus intended to destroy me by means of negative resistance. Then there was the fortunate circumstance that I venerated Mynster so absolutely. This was an annoyance to them, and in fact the coterie could not get the rumor mill running. Then time passed and Heiberg became less and less active. Furthermore, he saw that he had been wrong, that I had absolutely no intention of becoming an aesthetician. Perhaps he even had a bit of a feeling of having wronged me…. Then I took his mother and celebrated her. And that was annoying, inasmuch as the coterie is a pillar of society. And now his wife—and for safety’s sake a little wizardry against Martensen, in order that the coterie not be too pleased with all this.”
The journal entry goes on, but a couple of explanations are needed at this point. When Kierkegaard wrote that he had celebrated Heiberg’s mother, he had in mind his flattering remarks about Mrs. Gyllembourg in A Literary Review. By Heiberg’s “wife” Kierkegaard naturally meant Johanne Luise (who would hardly have been delighted with that label), whom he had praised to the skies in The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, which went down well with the house of Heiberg. And finally, the words about “a little wizardry against Martensen” refer to a quite slanderous little passage in that same article—that is, The Crisis—in which Kierkegaard had engaged in rough (word)play with respect to a “Senior Court Chaplain” who was also the “City Chaplain” or perhaps more correctly the “magnificent Senior Court Chaplain,” all of which, according to Kierkegaard, was a “little allusion to Martensen.”
As part of his efforts to destabilize the entire Copenhagen “coterie,” Kierkegaard engaged in a tactical relationship with Grundtvig, whom neither Mynster, Heiberg, nor Martensen could stand: “I have been successful in maintaining a sort of high-spirited relationship with him [Grundtvig], which very much embitters the party.” Kierkegaard believed that he could continue this account of his teasing little maneuvers at some length, but he checked himself: “But it would be an unending task to catalog all these complexities. It is true that I was born for intrigue, and it is certain that there is a power that joins in this game and that has helped me in a very curious way.” The tactical triumph would have been complete if the two captains on board The Corsair could have been forced to walk the plank armin-arm, but here Kierkegaard had to be cautious in celebrating his victories. Kierkegaard did claim that “with respect the coterie of P. L. Møller and Goldschmidt, there, too, it was my calculation to lump them together,” but in the margin he added a line that modified the “calculation” so much that one can have no doubt about the way things had actually gone: “And after all, it is not impossible that this was to some extent successful.”
Kierkegaard—who had been stricken from “the Guard’s roll” in 1830—could probably have become an extraordinary military strategist, but with respect to “the coteries” his planning was a waste of time and trouble because no one ever noticed his cunningly conceived campaign. None of the members of the clan mention him during the latter half of the 1840s. We search in vain for Kierkegaard’s name in Grundtvig’s correspondence just as in Mynster’s. Neither did Martensen give any sign that he knew Kierkegaard was alive; he did so only later on. Nor did the Heiberg couple indicate that they knew Kierkegaard existed, despite the fact that Johan Ludvig had a number of Kierkegaard’s works, including Either/Or, Repetition, and Prefaces, on his bookshelf. And if Kierkegaard had counted on Johan Ludvig dilating upon his paean to Mrs. Gyllembourg, he was going to have to do a recount, because in Johan Ludvig’s personal papers there is not so much as a comma concerning A Literary Review. There is a bit more to be gained from Johanne Luise, who subsequently “reexperienced the entire period in recollection” (to lift a phrase from the title of her memoirs), but even here we are still in bagatelle territory—a few lines on Kierkegaard’s analysis of her revival of the role of Juliet. And at the places where we might expect Kierkegaard to appear in her account, he is noticeably absent. In the rather voluminous chapter on The Corsair, for example, she recounted quite indignantly that “scandal at the expense of one’s neighbor was the order of the day.” And, she continued, “This new fashion of attacking private individuals caused quite a stir and gained the journal an enormous circulation. Everyone who was not the object of its attacks found it enormously amusing until they themselves were attacked; then they found it outrageous and scandalous.” When we remember that Kierkegaard often explained his “leap into The Corsair” as a protest made in solidarity with the Heibergian platform, the way in which his efforts (heroic efforts, he believed) were ignored is almost painful.
We cannot avoid the disheartening conclusion that Kierkegaard’s attempt to sow discord in the “coteries” recoiled principally on himself and that those attacked never felt the least touched by the assault. As a consequence of this historical situation, we are compelled to speculate a little as to whether Kierkegaard’s depiction of his infinite sufferings at the hands of The Corsair is a similar sort of construction, something that certainly was full of significance for Kierkegaard, but had only minimal connection to reality.