“To Find the Idea for Which I Am Willing to Live and Die”
The Still Voices of the Dead
Apparently the family tragedies that periodically plunged Peter Christian into complete inactivity had no effect, or perhaps even the opposite effect, on his younger brother. Søren Aabye’s journals, to which he devoted more and more attention as time went by, are as silent as the grave in regard to deaths, without even so much as a little cross to note them. Therefore it is all the more striking when one suddenly reads the following: “I have had grief since I last wrote you. One of the signs by which you will perceive this is the black sealing wax that I have had to use—despite the fact that I generally abhor this sort of external indicator—since nothing else is to be had in our grieving family. Yes, my brother is dead. But curiously enough I am not really grieving over him, but on the contrary I am dominated by my grief over my [other] brother, who died many years ago. In general I notice that my grief is not momentary but increases over time.”
This is a carefully drawn little study of the displacement, postponement, and growth of grief; it has a definite literary character and style that gives a biographer pause. The piece has the appearance of being one of several letters to an acquaintance to inform him of the death of an unnamed brother, who could be Niels Andreas, just as the other brother could be Søren Michael. But not uncharacteristically, the words float above the actual events with a special sort of pathos and buoyancy, heading off in the direction of a short story or whatever is intended that requires black sealing wax and other romantic accoutrements for its realization. Kierkegaard’s journal entry wavers between reality and the artistic reproduction of reality. And thus in one and the same movement he works through his grief and perfects his pen.
Incidentally, all other sources are silent concerning his mental state at this time—even the Rudelbach sisters! But in his memoirs Martensen recollects that he himself had been out of the country at the time, and that Kierkegaard therefore had occasionally called on his [Martensen’s] mother to hear news of him. During one such visit Kierkegaard, in “deep sorrow,” told Martensen’s mother of the death of his own mother. Martensen: “My mother has repeatedly confirmed that she never in her life (and she had had no little experience) had seen a human being so deeply distressed.” Martensen goes on to say that on the basis of this his mother had concluded “that he must have an unusually profound sensibility. She was not wrong about this. No one can deny him that.”
The profound honesty of Kierkegaard’s spirit was combined with a sense of modesty, and if others suffered too obviously or displayed their feelings in an all-too-conventional manner, he was quick to crawl into his shell and wrap himself up in silence. Thus in the journal entry about his deceased brother, Søren Aabye broods on the discrepancy between the grief itself and the empty external symbols that trivialize it. With grotesque realism he depicts the hubbub in a house on the day before a burial: Beset with clichéridden sympathy and with the undertaker’s pronouncements about the approaching meal of “ham, sausages, and Gouda cheese,” the brother-in-law stands there pondering his own image in the mirror and removing unwanted grey and red hairs with a little “tweezers.” Suddenly, he stands up straight and—in a voice that grates with hollow pathos and parodies the gentleman he is trying to resemble—exclaims: “ ‘Yes! What is man?’ ‘A clarinet,’ I replied, whereupon he really fell out of his role.” The editors of Kierkegaard’s journals dutifully inform us that this odd scene is presumably to be viewed as “fiction,” and this is true enough, especially if by “fiction” they mean the medium in which personal experiences and repressed events grope their way forward, finding their form. But in that case these editorial guidelines for the consumer ought to be inserted in more or less every note that accompanies Kierkegaard’s journal entries from this period.
If the journals are mute about the grief to which Martensen’s mother could testify, outward circumstances, on the other hand, speak volumes about how Kierkegaard intellectualized his way out of his sorrow. Earlier, in the spring of 1833, Johan Ludvig Heiberg, the chief tastemaker of the day, had advertised a series of philosophical lectures at the Royal Military College, and in his prospectus he had declared that although men usually have a “sharper and more logical understanding, a greater talent for dialectics, women, on the other hand, generally have a surer and more certain touch when it comes to grasping the truth immediately.” And this was something, at any rate, so women of cultivation were therefore welcome to “join in the serious investigations that are the subject of these lectures.” Indeed, they were all the more welcome because they would “grace the group with their presence.” Only two cultivated ladies signed up, so the lectures were canceled, but since the question of the emancipation of women was in the air, the theologian P. E. Lind penned an article “In Defense of Women’s Higher Origin,” which was published in Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post [commonly known as Flyveposten, published by J. L. Heiberg, 1827–37; not to be confused with Flyve-Posten, an unrelated newspaper published 1845–70] on December 4, 1834. A couple of weeks later, on December 17, Kierkegaard, writing in the same newspaper under the pseudonym “A,” continued the debate on this question with “Another Defense of Women’s Great Abilities,” in which he took exception to the cheap irony that had characterized P. E. Lind’s attack on women’s intellectual limitations. Kierkegaard’s piece thus elevated ironizing about the excellence of women to a higher power. “Hardly was man created before we find Eve as an auditor of the serpent’s philosophical lectures,” he wrote, pouncing with a special panache that was typical of the style of the times—typical, that is, of Heiberg’s style. But in other respects Kierkegaard’s piece was not much more than a silly literary exercise by a young university student who wanted to make merry and, not least, to make a name for himself. This bagatelle is worthy of interest only because it was Kierkegaard’s literary debut—and also because it was published while Petrea Severine lay in childbed with only a couple of weeks left to live.
Whether it was attributable to the cynicism that always accompanies great self-absorption, or whether it should be chalked up to a devil-may-care repression mechanism, it is in any case striking that Søren Aabye did not seem to permit himself to be moved noticeably by the tragedies that were playing themselves out in his immediate vicinity. Thus, on September 12, 1834, a bit more than a month after his mother’s death, he made an interim report on the results of a rather unusual study that had apparently been in progress for quite some time: “I am surprised that no one (as far as I know) has ever treated the idea of the master thief, an idea that is certainly very well suited for dramatic treatment.” His study is not about “one or another actual thief,” he explains; living next door to the courthouse apparently had its effect on Søren Aabye, and we learn that he familiarized himself with such obscure reading matter as the Archives of Danish and Norwegian Crime Stories and an article quite strikingly titled “Psychological Observations concerning the Murderer Søren Andersen Kagerup, Executed with a Poleax.” His library also included all seven volumes of F. M. Lange’s Selected Danish and Foreign Criminal Cases and Noteworthy Legal Proceedings concerning Criminal Cases. However, these reports of petty larceny committed by deaf-mutes and murders by poisoning carried out by millers’ widows were less interesting than the question of a criminal’s psychological makeup, and it is clear from half a score of journal entries containing sketches related to the idea of the “master thief” that such a thief would be compelled to use all his ingenuity and savoir faire in order to strike a nice balance between criminal activity and large-scale generosity, all the while living for an “idea.” The master thief feels that he is not understood by his contemporaries, and he is so “displeased with the existing order” that he wants to violate “the rights of others,” which naturally ends up putting him in conflict with “the public authorities.” Buried deep down in these sketches do we catch a fleeting glimpse of the outlines of an unconscious self-prophecy?
“Things seem to be going well with Søren, and with God’s help he will bring joy to the old folks,” the Rudelbach sisters had written at the time Søren Aabye passed his matriculation examinations. For the time being, however, things were not going so well, nor did he bring the old folks much in the way of joy. During the summer semester of 1833 he had attended Professor F. C. Sibbern’s lectures on aesthetics and poetics, then he spent the winter semester 1833–34 listening to the same man lecture on “the philosophy of Christianity.” This was better than nothing, but far from sufficient if one was to pass the examinations required for the theology degree.
Everyone could see that Søren Aabye needed a change of atmosphere both mentally and physically. He had to get out of town.
The Summer of 1835 in Gilleleje
So on Wednesday, July 17, 1835, Søren Aabye traveled north to Gilleleje, where he took up lodgings at the Gilleleje Inn, Christoffer G. J. Mentz and his wife Birgitte Margrethe, proprietors. He remained there for more than two months, too long a time for him to pass unnoticed, and sure enough, the locals were soon calling him “the crazy student.” According to Israel Levin, whose well-tuned ears were matched only by his gossipy mouth, the local inhabitants could recall how the “chambermaids [had been] confused and frightened by the way Søren Aabye looked at them when they entered his room.” Apparently he was able to do something with his eyes.
He kept in contact with the family home by means of various little notes, now lost, whose receipt Peter Christian registered in his diary. Presumably it was also Peter Christian’s responsibility to see that, at regular intervals, letters with cash, packages of cigars, and hampers of newly washed clothes found their way to the university student in his splendid isolation. On July 4, his father—in the only surviving letter from his hand to Søren Aabye—reported that everything was as usual, which unfortunately included his colic and his continually “increasing difficulty in writing.” Displaying a solicitude that far exceeded anything he ever showed Niels Andreas, the father signed his short epistle in the trembling handwriting of an old man: “Your deeply loving and utterly devoted father, M. P. Kierkegaard.”
Amid surroundings of natural beauty and far from the temptations of the big city, the unfocused university student was supposed to settle down and get to work on his theological studies. “To judge from his letters, Søren is now well and busy with his studies,” Peter Christian wrote in his diary on July 7. In any event there was no lack of self-esteem; on July 6 Søren Aabye wrote to his friend P. E. Lind, then in Copenhagen: “When I was in town I was accustomed to enjoying a certain amount of attention from a number of students, something which really pleased me and which my personality required.” Nonetheless, he was now quite certain that his present isolation would also be favorable because, as he put it, it “teaches me to focus my gaze on my own interior, it encourages me to seize hold of myself, my own self, to hold it fast amid the ceaseless changes of life, to direct towards myself the concave mirror in which, until now, I have sought to capture the life around me.”
It was not an easy matter to position this “concave mirror” so that it produced an undistorted reflection of the self-reflective student. This is made clear in a long letter the twenty-two-year-old had started writing just before his departure, a letter addressed to the naturalist Peter Wilhelm Lund way over on the other side of the world, somewhere deep within the enchanting and terrifying natural world of Brazil. The letter is dated July 1, 1835, and it begins: “You know how delighted I was to listen to you talk in those days, how enthusiastic I was about your descriptions of your stay in Brazil.” After his first stay in Brazil, which lasted three years, Lund had been in Copenhagen from April to December 1829 and again from July 1831 until October 1832, so it must have been during one of these intervals that Kierkegaard had listened to Lund’s tales. Now Lund was once again in Brazil where, after some excursions to Rio de Janeiro in the company of the German botanist Riedel, he had moved to the town of Curvelo in the province of the same name, and on the advice of his fellow countryman Peder Claussen (“Pedro Claudio Dinamarquez,” as the Brazilians called him), he had begun to devote himself to investigations of the local limestone caves, which contained great quantities of animal bones and skeletal remains. In October 1835 Lund settled in the rural village of Lagoa Santa, where he painstakingly excavated limestone caverns, studying fossilized deposits of marsupials, edentates, rodents, ungulates, and bats—fossils supposedly stemming from the era “before the Flood”—but their actual age proved, bit by bit, to be the undoing of the biblical Creation narrative, reducing it to catastrophic chronological confusion.
In honor of his—in two senses—distant relative, Kierkegaard festooned the first part of his letter with flowery rhetoric, but then he became more concrete and turned to reflections concerning the choice of his life’s work: “Naturally, every person wants to be active in the world in accordance with his abilities, but this in turn implies that he wants to develop his abilities in a particular direction, namely in that which is best suited to his particular personality. But which direction is that? Here I am confronted with a great question mark. Here I stand like Hercules, but not at a crossroads. No, here there are a great many more roads, and it is thus all the more difficult to choose the right one. Perhaps it is precisely my life’s misfortune to be interested in far too many things, but not decisively in any one thing. My interests are not all subordinated under one heading, but are all coordinated.”
Kierkegaard expressed his profound admiration for the natural sciences and all their practitioners—from those who calculate “the speed of the stars” to those who study “intestinal worms”—but at the same time he was compelled to admit that he thought they often merely stirred up clouds of “particularities” by means of which they might perhaps guarantee themselves “a name in the scholarly literature,” but nothing more. Fortunately, however, there were individual exceptions to these scientists who fragment the world with such planless efficiency. There were also “natural scientists who by their speculations have discovered or have sought to discover that Archimedean point that exists nowhere within the world and who from this point have observed the totality and have seen the particularities in their true light. And in this respect I cannot deny that they have made an extremely favorable impression on me. The peace, the harmony, the joy one finds in them, is rarely found elsewhere.” As examples of this sort of natural scientist Kierkegaard named the physicist Hans Christian Ørsted, the botanists J. F. Schouw and J. W. Hornemann, plus P. W. Lund himself, but he was nonetheless compelled to conclude: “I have been inspired by the natural sciences and I still am, yet it seems to me that I will not make them my principal field of study. By virtue of reason and freedom, it is life that has always interested me most, and it has always been my wish to clarify and solve the riddle of life.”
However immodestly proclaimed it may have been, this desire to solve the riddle of life would seem to have made the choice of theology a natural one. And yet not. Orthodoxy appeared to Kierkegaard to be a giant with feet of clay, while rationalism was neither fish nor fowl, more like a sort of “Noah’s ark,” as Heiberg once put it in Flyveposten, in which the clean and unclean beasts bed down side by side. The letter ends: “With respect to minor annoyances, I will note only that I am studying for my theological examinations, a pastime which is of absolutely no interest and which accordingly is not proceeding very quickly. I have always preferred free—and therefore perhaps somewhat undefined—studies…. For it seems to me that the learned theological world is like the Strand Road on a Sunday afternoon during the peak of the season at the Deer Park: People rush past one another, hooting and shouting, laughing and making fun of one another, driving their horses to death, they tip over and are run over, and when they finally arrive at the amusement park, all covered with dust and out of breath—well, then they have a look at one another and go home.” If he was continuing his burdensome studies despite all this, it was because by doing so he would give “great joy to Father,” since—as the son wrote with a touch of unconcealed shamelessness—his father believed that the true “Canaan lies on the far shore of the theological examinations.”
So much for the main points of the letter to P. W. Lund. We do not know whether it was ever sent, and perhaps it was not even an actual letter but was merely addressed by Kierkegaard to himself. In any case, we encounter here an expressed interest in the natural sciences, which are placed far above theology but which take on meaning only when they are speculatively subordinated to “that Archimedean point that exists nowhere within the world,” because this point can be sought only in the individual, who can find himself only by abandoning the distractions of the objective world in favor of existential concentration.
Nonetheless, Kierkegaard was determined to investigate the natural world of northern Zealand, and during the first two weeks of his stay he visited Esrom, Fredensborg, Frederiksværk, and Tisvilde. At the end of July, in the company of Jens Lyngbye, an older cousin of Hans Christian Lyngbye, the local parish pastor, Kierkegaard made his first and only trip to Sweden, where he visited Mølleleje, a little fishing village on the western side of Kullen, and thereafter called at the imposing castle of Krapperup, meeting Nils Kristoffer Gyldenstierna himself, who in addition to being a lord and a baron was also an ichthyologist and was thus in a position to show off his impressive “collection of fish.” The next day held visits to “Östra Högkull and Vestra Högkull,” which towered 618 feet above sea level, plus a little “botanical excursion” in the same district, collecting plants which Pastor Lyngbye afterwards “was so kind as to present me with, dried and packed in paper.” Not quite a week later, on August 4, Kierkegaard was sitting with this same Pastor Lyngbye in a boat on the shallow-bottomed Søborg Lake, which had gradually become so overgrown and so full of mud that they could only propel the boat forward with a great deal of difficulty. But if “we ignore this, our natural surroundings were very interesting: The heavy, six-foot-tall rushes and the luxuriant vegetation of all sorts of water plants really permitted us to imagine that we were in an entirely different climate.” The Brazilian climate, for example. When the two men reached the open lake, they divided up their tasks, so that the parish pastor, who was also a zealous botanist and zoologist, could gather plants in order to study the lives of mollusks, while the university student leaned back romantically in the stern of the boat, enjoying “the clamor of wild ducks, gulls, crows, et cetera,” which in general made a “very pleasant impression.” Out on a little islet in the lake the two men also visited the ruins of Søborg Castle, where Queen Margaret I of Denmark had been born—“though I did not see anything new,” as Kierkegaard noted. (After his outing Kierkegaard had compared what he had seen with the text in his travel guide—J. G. Burman-Becker’s Information on the Old Castles of Denmark and the Duchies—and he thus noted simply that “everything is more or less as in Becker’s description of Danish castles.”)
Kierkegaard had left town in order to see something different and foreign, but he was forced to admit to himself that other people had long since gawked at, walked on, and written up the natural scenes whose supposed pristineness had been the great attraction. If one of the many painters of the period—Wilhelm Bendz or Martinus Rørbye, for example—had been in the vicinity, he would have found in Kierkegaard a perfect model for a slightly ironic depiction of a Copenhagen intellectual in a natural landscape. Typically enough, it was also in these surroundings that Kierkegaard produced his first sketch of himself as he might appear to an observer, namely as a “man dressed in modern attire, wearing glasses, and with a cigar in his mouth.”
This self-portrait is from his stay in Tisvilde, to which the sick and palsied made pilgrimages at Midsummer Eve in order to drink from the spring of Saint Helene. According to legend, the spring derived its name from a Swedish hermit woman who was murdered by criminals and cast into the sea, but who subsequently had been miraculously avenged by the forces of nature. The whole tale had a slightly exotic character, but since Kierkegaard wanted to know what he was going to see before he saw it, with the tourist’s never-failing pleasure of anticipation, he consulted the relevant literature, in this case J. M. Thiele’s Danish Folk Legends. At the end of an avenue of chestnut trees on the outskirts of Tisvilde is a three-sided, ten-foot-tall rococo monument of sandstone, with inscriptions in Danish, German, and Latin telling of the time when sand dunes drifted across the land and buried man and beast in the rural village of Tibirke. But when Kierkegaard gazed down on the little, pleasant buildings then visible, his great expectations could find nothing on which to focus. Literature, on the other hand, can manage what all-too-peaceable nature is incapable of. So suddenly Kierkegaard felt—or, perhaps better, his journal reported—that the whole business was a “fiction, a strange fiction: that precisely in this district where people seek healing, precisely here is where so many people have found their graves. Illuminated in the evening twilight, the whole place looks like a legend made visible, a sort of Job story in which Tibirke Church in particular plays the principal role.” Thus in itself the landscape was without much significance; it received its importance from the spectator who recalled something that the landscape might call to mind, in this case, the story of Job. Without such “a legend made visible,” the scene at Kierkegaard’s feet would have been merely banal and he merely a disappointed tourist.
Things were no better when he arrived in Tisvilde, which did not exude rural peace as expected but echoed with the hubbub of German women hawking their wares from their little shops. Kierkegaard retreated to the field where Helene’s tomb lay on a little rise, encircled by large monoliths. But just opposite the tomb some travelers had set up camp and were loudly mocking the devout pilgrims who approached the tomb, thereby dispelling every “impression of solemnity.” And if the great, romantic experience of nature had not been totally ruined already, suddenly an “inspector” appeared out of nowhere and commenced to act as a guide, quickly betraying his own skepticism about the entire business of the miracle. Kierkegaard made his way to the tomb, however, and soon found himself amid all sorts of primitive votive gifts—locks of hair, rags, and crutches. For an instant he sensed the “cries of the sufferers, their prayers to heaven,” but with the exception of the tumult and shouting from the encampment across the way there was in fact nothing to be heard.
Nature was vanquished, so to speak, by the expectations with which Kierkegaard encountered it. This was again demonstrated when with his faithful Thiele’s guide to folk legends in hand, he visited Gurre Castle, said to have been built by Valdemar Atterdag, whose ruins had been under excavation since 1817. Kierkegaard looked out over the long and narrow Gurre Lake, with beech forests on both sides, but he saw little more than this and noted in his journal: “A rather special feature of this view is the rushes that wave along the shore. While the sighing of the trees permits us to hear King Valdemar’s hunt, the echo of the horns, and the baying of the hounds, the rushes seem to exhale applause—the blonde maidens who admire the knight’s swift riding and noble bearing…. And then there is the sea, which like a mighty spirit is always in motion, which even in its greatest stillness betrays violent spiritual sufferings. A quiet sadness broods over the district around Gurre Lake…. The former (the sea) is like a Mozart recitative; the latter is like a Weber melody.” When Kierkegaard left Gurre Lake, continuing on toward Hellebæk through a beautiful and trackless forest, he emphasized that “wheel tracks” were now his only “connection with the world of men.”
He did, however, remain connected with the world of men, which left its tracks and traces everywhere, not only quite concretely, as in the above-mentioned case, but also in the more general sense of the associations that dogged the heels of the wandering student and imprinted on his experience of nature a whole series of cultural signs: The sighing of the trees is connected to Valdemar Atterdag’s hunt, the rushes bring to mind blonde maidens—indeed, even Mozart and Weber are summoned to assist with the descriptions. Not far from Hellebæk he climbed Odin’s Hill, which offered a lovely view across the Sound with Kullen in the distance, but no sooner had he reached the top than he noted: “The view has been much praised and discussed, which regrettably causes much of the impression to disappear.” And, he continued, on a somewhat indignant note: “If only people would tire of running around so officiously, pointing out romantic settings (for example, K——at Fredensborg).”
Might the mysteriously parenthetical “K——” be Kierkegaard himself, distancing himself with weary irony from his own busy search for romantic situations in Fredensborg and environs?
“To Find the Idea for Which I Am Willing to Live and Die”
Most of the nearly twenty entries Kierkegaard made in his green, cloth-bound journal during his stay are dated and tell us something about one or another specific geographical location. There is a three-page entry, for July 29, which gives a brisk impressionistic sketch of Kierkegaard’s walking tour from Gilleleje Inn, via Black Bridge, and thence across empty fields along the coast to Gilberg Head, a hundred-foot cliff that is the northernmost point of Zealand: “This spot has always been one of my favorite places. And so when I stood here one quiet evening; when the sea sounded its song with deep but quiet solemnity; when my eye did not encounter a single sail on that enormous surface, while the sea bounded the heavens and the heavens the sea; when, at the same time, the bustle of life’s affairs fell mute and the birds sang their vespers—then the few dear departed ones would often rise from the grave before me, or rather, it seemed to me as if they were not dead. I felt so much at ease in their company. I rested in their embrace. It was as though I were out of my body, floating with them in a loftier ether. Then the cry of the gulls reminded me that I stood there alone. It all vanished before my eyes, and with a mournful heart I reentered the teeming world, though without forgetting such blessed moments.”
Upon closer inspection, however, the sequence of many of the journal entries is unreliable, and their dates of composition are equally uncertain. But the most striking thing is that time and again one does not come across what one might normally expect of an entry in a travel diary. On July 8, the diary reports on a walking tour from Esrom and thence via Nøddebo to Fredensborg. In itself this seems quite straightforward, but then, compelled by a sudden rainstorm to take shelter in a wretched peasant cottage, the writer makes a markedly literary entry: “Clad in my enormous cape, I entered the parlor, where I found myself in the presence of a party, consisting of three persons, who were having dinner. Among the furnishings there was of course a great long table at which it pleased our peasants to feed…. The adjoining room, to which the door stood ajar, was a storeroom for linen, canvas, cotton drill, et cetera, in disorderly heaps, which could easily lead one to believe that one was in a little den of thieves, to which the location of the place … as well as the external features of the people seemed appropriate. We will now have a little look at them. At the far end of the aforementioned long table sat the man himself, with his sandwiches and a bottle of spirits in front of him. He listened impassively to my account of my sorrowful fate, merely taking a nip from his glass every now and then, something that the cubic capacity of his nose appeared to testify he had done quite frequently…. The woman was not particularly tall, with a broad face and an ugly upturned nose…. The rain drenched us quickly, so we had no reason to hurry on that account, but the little boy (Rudolph) who was with me was quite afraid. There I sat, sopping wet, the water pouring down, beset by thunder and lightning in the middle of Grib’s Forest, and beside me was a boy who trembled at the lightning. Walking at a stiff pace we finally reached a house in which we took refuge.”
Here the travel diary has ceased to be a travel diary and has become a sketchpad on which Kierkegaard is experimenting in the art of the short story, and in doing so he yields his place to a fictional figure who gives an “account of my sorrowful fate” to a drunken peasant with a cubic-capacity nose. The little “den of thieves” bears the stamp of Steen Steensen Blicher, whose Collected Short Stories Kierkegaard purchased when the various volumes began to appear in 1833. Despite Professor Madvig’s characterization of Blicher as a “very handsome talent, though limited to a certain sphere,” Kierkegaard continued to read him passionately, and here he attempted to copy Blicher’s literary genre paintings and sketches of the common people. The scene with the peasants reads as if it were lifted from The Hosier, which in any case would have attracted Kierkegaard simply by its title.
A good many other journal entries also have a transparently literary character. This is particularly so for the most famous of them all, which Kierkegaard titled “Gilleleje, August 1, 1835,” and which reads as follows: “The way in which I have attempted to depict things in the preceding pages is how things actually seemed to me. On the other hand, now, when I try to get a clear look at my life, it seems otherwise to me.” It is uncertain which were the “preceding” pages; most likely this refers to the pages addressed to P. W. Lund, but in any case it is certain that the problems discussed in those earlier pages remained unresolved: “What I really need is to be clear about what I am to do, not about what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every action. It is a question of understanding my destiny, of seeing what the Deity really wants me to do. It is a question of finding a truth that is truth for me, of finding the idea for which I am willing to live and die. And what would it profit me if I discovered a so-called objective truth; if I worked my way through the systems of the philosophers and was able to parade them forth on demand; if I was able to demonstrate the inconsistencies within each individual circle….—what would it profit me if I were able to expound the significance of Christianity, able to explain many individual points, if it held no deeper significance for me and for my life? … What would it profit me if the truth stood before me, cold and naked, not caring whether I acknowledged it or not, calling forth an anguished shudder rather than confident submission? I will certainly not deny that I still believe in the validity of an imperative of knowledge that has an influence upon men, but it nonetheless must become a living part of me, and this is what I now understand to be the heart of the matter. It is for this my soul thirsts, as the deserts of Africa thirst for water.”
These breathless, rhetorical questions have subsequently assumed a permanent position in pretty nearly every introduction to existentialism as a sort of manifesto of authenticity. And from a biographical point of view this entry is of great interest because it resembles the great breakthrough texts one finds in Augustine or Luther, for example. Finally (one almost sighs), the young, eccentric man has attained clarity about his task and his destiny. It only remains for him to realize these mighty visions. Usually, however, the last portion of the entry is not cited, and this might well be because people are not happy with what Kierkegaard has to say next: “But in order to find that idea, or rather, to find myself, it will not profit me to plunge even more deeply into the world. That was precisely what I did before. Thus I thought it would be a good idea to throw myself into jurisprudence in order to develop insight into the manifold complexities of life. Indeed, here there beckoned a great mass of detail in which I could lose myself; here I could perhaps construct a totality from the available facts—a criminal life in its organic wholeness—and could pursue it in all its darkness…. Thus I could wish to become an actor so that by putting myself in someone else’s role I could obtain, so to speak, a surrogate for my own life.”
Thus, little by little, the existential emotion at the beginning of the entry is replaced by a soft-focus retrospective view of previous events and the wish, in this connection, to study the science of law or the art of acting. It is certainly Kierkegaard who is doing the writing, but the text frees itself from his actual life situation and becomes a little fictive tale which in a way is itself a “surrogate” for his own life. There is not much existential clarification in the tale, but it is clear that Kierkegaard became himself in dialogue with the texts, fictive or less fictive, that he set down on paper. It was in fact these texts that constituted his own actual “concave mirror.” And if we dare, we might even find ourselves struck by the idea that this textual double-reflection foreshadows Kierkegaard’s subsequent pseudonymous practice. For here, too, he balances between notorious presence and indubitable absence.
The young man who returned to the city on August 24 was thus not identical to the slightly younger man who had left the city on June 17. He had been enriched by a series of flickering perceptions, and he had summarized them somewhere deep inside his green, cloth-bound journal with these paradoxical words: “What did I find? Not my ‘I.’ ” He had come to the negative realization that his identity would not emerge by cultivating the natural sciences, because those disciplines do not narrow the scope of the problem but enlarge it, just as he had also come to understand that in itself nature is nothing, that nature always refers the observer back to himself and to his cultural framework. He had come to the positive realization that no one begins with a given or a priori possession of his true “I,” but that this could only be acquired by traveling via detours and dead ends, both culturally and personally. For the nonce Kierkegaard had not accomplished anything except to overexert himself by attempting to lift his own lightness, to outrun himself in attempting to catch up with this “I.” In this respect Kierkegaard readily calls to mind one of the creatures he discussed in a journal entry dating from this same year. These creatures, “when they really want to accomplish something, take such grandiose steps that they utterly fail to succeed in their object. They are like the dwarf in the fairy tale who, when he wanted to pursue the fleeing prince and princess, put on sevenleague boots; he reached Turkey before he remembered that the fugitives most likely had not used this means of transportation.”
It would take time. And for Kierkegaard, time was writing. The idea for which he was willing to live and die was in fact the production of dazzling literary work.
But of course he could not know that yet, university student that he was.