INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
Somewhere in the Journals Kierkegaard remarks that the skipper of a fishing-smack knows his whole cruise before sailing, but a man-of-war gets its orders only on the high seas. That is what happened to him. It was not until he had completed his work, in 1845, that its full significance dawned on him, and he understood his mission. That mission was not a self-chosen, self-imposed task, but was implicit in the work he had written. The Revolutions of 1848 in Paris, Rome, Berlin and Vienna showed him the situation in Copenhagen in a new light.
What he calls “the Journal proper” begins in January 1846 and is the record of that change and its consequences. The earlier Journals had been haphazard by comparison. They allow us to see the raw material of his life, so to say, before his destiny had taken shape. The Journal proper enables the reader to assist at the process of simplification and clarification in which he understood himself in existence.
The Introduction, I need hardly say, confines itself to giving the reader an outline of Kierkegaard’s life and work which I hope will enable him to read the Journal in comfort. Those who wish to follow up their reading may usefully consult The Mind of Kierkegaard, by James Collins, and Johannes Hohlenberg’s biography. Dr. Walter Lowrie’s Short Life is a sound, dual-purpose volume.
Childhood and Youth
Copenhagen, where Kierkegaard was born on 5th May, 1813, was a small provincial town, the seat of Government and, at that time, the intellectual centre of Scandinavia, with its University and its learned Academies—a closely-knit society which provided Kierkegaard with a clinical specimen of the social and political, intellectual and religious currents of the day, which he could consult like a barometer. There was hardly anyone from the King, Christian VIII, to the women in the fish-market, whom he did not know, and there was certainly no one who aroused more curiosity than the gnome-like figure, with his umbrella under his arm, who could be seen on his daily walks about the town.
In appearance he was certainly odd. He was slight, spindly and with so pronounced a stoop that he was regarded as a hunch-back. The curvature of his spine, which he thought had been caused by a fall from a tree when he was a child, made him lean back as he walked, and gave him a dislocated, mechanical, crab-like gait, so that every movement appeared to be deliberate. His head was finely shaped and well-rounded, crowned with a mop of uncontrollable fair hair. The eyes behind his glasses were pale blue, his nose straight and strong, his mouth large, his teeth protruding, his chin receding. Unprepossessing and unimpressive though he was, he had only to begin talking, and in spite of a rasping voice that easily cracked, he was altogether transformed. His conversation could be captivating in the highest degree, and he possessed an uncanny, but not always reassuring, gift of penetrating the minds of others. When Hans Brøchner, later Professor of Philosophy at the University, first met him, he assumed he must be some little clerk from an office. But it was not long before he was disillusioned on that score, and delighted in his company. “His smile,” he wrote, after Kierkegaard’s death, “and his look, were indescribably expressive. He had a particular way of greeting one at a distance, with a mere look. It was just a little movement of the eyes, and yet it conveyed so much. He could put something infinitely gentle and loving into his gaze, but he could equally goad and tease people to frenzy. With a single look at a passer-by he could, as he expressed it, ‘put himself in touch with him.’ Whoever met his gaze was either drawn to him or repelled, was either made to feel uncomfortable, or attracted to him. I have walked down whole streets with him while he explained how one could make psychological studies by ‘getting in touch’ with people; and while he explained his theory he put it into practice with almost everyone.”
Seen from the inside, through the pages of the Journal, Kierkegaard is all melancholy and the microscopic analysis to which he submitted his thoughts and feelings and experience is in danger of concealing as much as it reveals. For from the outside nothing of this appeared. No one, he triumphantly asserts, ever pitied him. To his contemporaries he was a man of infinite wit whose flashing intelligence dazzled and disturbed; but although his superiority was never in question, he remained an enigma. Far from appearing serious, he gave the impression of taking a frivolous delight in making a mockery of everything they took to heart. “There is nothing spontaneous or straightforward about him,” one man who knew him well wrote. “I am surprised he can eat and sleep, etc. Otherwise I acknowledge him to be the most cultured and talented author; but he seems to me like a decrepit old man, or rather like an exceptionally intellectual person with a sickly imagination.”
Kierkegaard would not have disagreed. He had never known what it meant to be young, and his genius, he thought, lay in an exceptional compound of opposites, of reflection and imagination and a diseased absence of spontaneity, so that the very qualities which gave him his superiority over others, were at the same time the source of his misery, cutting him off from ordinary life at which he could only assist as an observer, or a spy, he wrote later, in the service of an idea. It was as though his infinitely reflective mind disintegrated experience as it came to him, putting spontaneous reaction beyond his reach. And yet at the same time a vivid imagination enabled him to feel and grasp all that was denied him. “Lacking almost all the requirements for being a man,” crippled by the disproportion between body and spirit, he was nevertheless possessed by a vitality which nothing could subdue. Even at the point where he felt that he was on the borderline of madness, his vitality of mind held everything together, piercing the web of explanation in which his reflection tried to imprison him, and finally restoring order. It was this agonising sense of the dislocation between thought and existence which drove him, as he grew up, to search for “the idea for which I can live and die,” for the truth which would be the full-blooded union of thought and existence which fate, in the first instance, had denied him.
“From my earliest youth,” Kierkegaard writes, “I was in the grip of a profound melancholy.” The expression is misleading, and on one occasion at least, he is more precise, and adds, “from my twentieth year.” What he meant was that “we are all of us what we are to be by the time we are ten years old:” he was predisposed by his physical weakness, by his malformation and his whole cast of mind to fall into melancholy. But it was only by stages that his singularity turned into isolation, and his isolation was transformed by his imagination into an inescapable fate. The events which determined the course of his life have been discussed ad infinitum and the full truth will probably never be known; but the main outline of the great moral and intellectul crisis of his youth is clear enough, and it is possible to follow the steps by which Kierkegaard came to understand the forces of heredity and upbringing by which he was formed. The story is briefly summarised in a group of quotations and comments in which he describes the culminating point as “the great earthquake.” They were written on three pages of gilt-edged paper and are given here (p. 39) in the order in which they were written, and not as printed by the editors. Variously interpreted, they give the phases of Kierkegaard’s development from childhood until the death of his father in August, 1838.
Kierkegaard was anything but a melancholy child. He was, from all accounts, alert, independent and precociously intelligent, “with a tendency to freedom and irresponsibility which prevents him from taking anything seriously.” He was perfectly well able to look after himself at school, more than a match for a master who showed any signs of weakness, and never without the physical courage to deal with the boys of his own age, who noticed nothing particularly odd about him except the curious suits he was dressed in and his sarcastic remarks. It was not until much later that he became conscious of being unlike others, and by then he had discovered ample compensation in his home life.
Everything there centred round his father. As the youngest of seven children he was spoilt and allowed a degree of freedom which his brothers and sisters had not known. And as he grew older the natural affinity between him and his father came into play. Everything, it seemed to him in after life, had been done to favour his development and to establish his self-confidence. The autobiographical sketch, “Johannes Climacus” (p. 8o) gives a stylised impression of the “insane upbringing” which he cursed and blessed in the same breath as wonderfully suited to his genius, though by developing his natural gifts it encouraged his singularity and made him old before his time. Then and afterwards, his father was the only man with whom he lived on equal terms, whose cast of mind was in many respects like his own, and on whom he could count absolutely for understanding From him, he says, he learnt the meaning of fatherly love, and so gained some analogy for the love of God. The motto chosen for these years, “Half childish games, Half God in my heart,” taken from Goethe, sums up the happy and solid foundations on which his life was built, the sense of freedom and duty and the belief that “one can do what one wills” which supported him through all the trials and crises of his life.
But when the crisis came involving his father, his whole world came crashing about his ears. It is a matter of conjecture when Kierkegaard’s suspicion first arose. But whenever it was, he gradually began to notice that the facade of his father’s life concealed a different world, that the faith in God which he had been taught, and the Christianity in which he had been reared, were powerless to support the man he loved. He came to see that his father was deeply vulnerable, and that his faith was undermined by “silent despair.” This suspicion was explored in every direction, and kept alive by his father’s unguarded remarks. When his mother and all but one of his brothers died within a few years, and his father’s melancholy could no longer be hidden, Kierkegaard brooded over his suspicions until they acquired the compulsive force of “a frightful foreboding” that in some unexplained way he himself was involved in the fate of the whole family. In 1835 he seems finally to have stumbled on the “secret” that explained everything, and its power over him was doubly increased by the fact that his worst forebodings had been fulfilled. He had discovered the “infallible law” that explained everything and it became an idée fixe, something objective, a point on which his sense of isolation could centre and round which his melancholy coagulated.
Kierkegaard’s father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, was born in Saeding, a hamlet in the poorest district on the moors of Jutland, where the peasants scraped a bare existence from the soil. As a child, he was often sent out on to the moor to mind the sheep, and it was there, when he was twelve years old, that in his misery and solitude, he climbed on a hill and cursed God. The primitive intensity of thought and emotion which the gesture reveals was never dulled or transformed by education, and the act of rebellion which his grinding poverty had provoked was firmly fixed in his memory when his luck suddenly changed.
When he was about sixteen, Michael Pedersen was sent to assist a cousin in a hosier’s business in Copenhagen. He was quick to learn the business and soon took over the management entirely. By the time he was forty he had saved a very substantial sum for a man of his position, and subsequently, in the year of Søren’s birth, his capital was unexpectedly increased by a lucky investment. But his material prosperity had already been payed for in spiritual tribulation.
Shortly after the death of his first wife, who died childless, in April 1796, Michael Pedersen wound up his affairs and sold his business. Within a year, in April 1797, he had married his servant, and less than five months later their first child was born. Behind that sequence of events, the death of his first wife, to whom he was devoted, his retirement, and his hurried second marriage, lies the secret on which he began to brood, and which his son was to discover with such tremendous consequences. He had loved his first wife, and to the end of his life continued to regard her as his real wife and himself as responsible in some sense for her death—perhaps she had learnt of his relations with their servant. If Kierkegaard’s expressions are any guide, he accused himself of seducing, if not raping, the girl who lived under his roof and under his protection, and who became the mother of his children. Outwardly fortunate, eminently successful, a close friend of Mynster, the future Primate of Denmark, and widely respected for his uprightness and his intelligence, he was inwardly broken by remorse. His vigorous mind was imprisoned in a narrow, disfiguring Protestantism, an arid predestinarian theology and a meagre pietism that accentuated the personal dependence of man on God at the price of confining it in an almost mechanistic conception of Divine Providence. To him the chain of cause and effect, of guilt and punishment reached from his first rebellion against God, down through his sensuality to the successive deaths of his children. It was a religion which neither education nor vision had touched; it remained morose, intense, and sterile. In a softened light it was the Christianity which Kierkegaard himself was offered and against which he reacted healthily, though to the end his mind was coloured by it.
By his second wife, Michael Pedersen had seven children, four boys and three girls, the eldest of whom died as the result of an accident in 1819. Two years later his eldest daughter died suddenly. It was ten years later, just as Søren Kierkegaard left school and began going to the University, that his mother and three of his remaining brothers and sisters died within the space of three years. It was this succession of deaths which made such an impression on Michael Pedersen and his two surviving sons. Søren’s brother Peter, then lecturing at the University, was himself in the grip of religious melancholy which a grim theology had fastened so firmly on him that at the end of his life, when he had been Bishop of Aalborg for some years, he begged to be relieved of his office, unable to bear the responsibility any longer. The atmosphere in the large house in the main square, where they all three lived, was such that a less sensitive mind than Søren’s might well have wondered what lay behind the inheritance of melancholy that had descended upon him.
All three, as Kierkegaard now discovered, had arrived independently at the same conclusion. His father and his brother had come to believe that the father’s sins were to be visited on the sons, and that Michael Pedersen was destined, as the deaths of his children had proved, to outlive them all, “a cross on the tomb of all his hopes” and that the “outstanding intellectual gifts of our family were only given to us in order that we should rend one another to pieces.” Kierkegaard had found the infallible law which explained all the facts; the “great earthquake” shattered his world and left him stranded. “Inwardly torn asunder as I was . . . what wonder then that in desperate despair I grasped at nought but the intellectual side in man, and clung fast to it, so that the thought of my own considerable powers of mind was my consolation, ideas my one joy, and mankind indifferent to me.” (p. 40).
The “infallible law” was not merely an explanation of his father’s despair; it was a “terrifying, mysterious explanation of religion, which a frightful foreboding had played into my hands, which my imagination worked upon, and the scandal which religion became to me.” His life which had begun in an idyllic, patriarchal key was suddenly transformed into terror. Instead of submitting like his father and brother and bowing under the weight of the fate they had constructed for themselves, Søren reacted violently and broke with everything which had hitherto protected and supported him, and found release in the new intellectual life that opened out before him at the University. For however firmly “the infallible law” had taken root in his mind, there was the outside world to be explored and new levels of experience to be tasted and tested.
It is at this time that Kierkegaard first appears on the scene rejoicing in his talents and making his superiority felt. He is seen addressing the University Club on a political motion, cutting short a rowdy meeting with his sarcasms and making his début in the press. His articles on the Liberal leader, Orla Lehmann, were at once attributed to J. L. Heiberg, the most distinguished littérateur of the day—though what the author intended was not quite clear, except to ridicule the Liberals. But neither his father, nor his brother was impressed by his success. They did not share his interest in politics, his enthusiasm for the romantic school, his passion for Mozart or his boundless curiosity in his contemporaries. They only saw him drifting away from home, and speaking and thinking in a cold and critical way to Christianity, while he found as little substance in the stodgy orthodoxy of old-fashioned Protestantism as in the brittle newfangled rationalistic theology of the young Hegelians like Martensen, his coach. In the hope of bringing him to his senses his father sent him for a holiday to Gilleleje, on the north coast of Zealand, where the first entries in this selection were written in August 1835. For a moment Kierkegaard pulled himself together and the deeper note in his mind sounds through his despair. But on his return to Copenhagen his new state was soon worse than the first.
For the next two years he speaks of himself as “on the path to perdition,” but what looked like frivolity and irresponsibility to his father and others and even to himself was a necessary safety-valve. The Journal for these years is short and intermittent, hardly more than an echo of his conversation and the carefree mood he adopted in public where he was “never so ungracious as to appear without a freshly picked bouquet of wit.” He spent much of his time with a group of seedy aesthetes, Hans Andersen among others, who met regularly in one of the cafés. Among these was P. L. Møller, a gifted young man who supplied the model for the Don Juan character who appears in Either-Or, and a drunken, déclassé intellectual Johannes Jørgensen. It was probably in their company that he visited a brothel—an incident which suddenly sprang to the forefront of his mind some time afterwards like “lightning announcing a violent storm,” at the time when he first met Regine Olsen, the girl to whom he became engaged.
The one man who penetrated his mask, and was not taken in by his nihilism, was the poet and philosopher Poul Martin Møller (not to be confused with P. L. Møller) to whom Kierkegaard afterwards dedicated The Concept of Dread where he defines the notion of Angst and analyses his own spiritual attitude during these years with special reference to sin and sexuality. In the long dedication Møller is addressed as “the mighty trumpet of my awakening.” Møller was almost the only man at the University who sympathised with Kierkegaard’s growing irritation with the fashionable philosophy of Hegel, and he suspected rightly enough that the young man whose sardonic comments amused him would, if only he could concentrate his energies, play David to Hegel’s Goliath. They were often seen about together, Møller large and easy-going, and Kierkegaard walking him into the gutter as he threw out his ideas and explained his point of view. Møller’s early death, in the spring of 1838, touched him deeply and a few days later, he took up his interrupted Journal again.
The first sign of change is Kierkegaard’s reconciliation with his father. At about this time Michael Pedersen paid his son’s debts and made him an allowance which enabled him to leave his father’s house and live in rooms. It may have been part of the bargain that Kierkegaard should begin working, and he taught Latin for a time at the school he had attended as a boy. To judge by the quotation from Lear (p. 40) headed “twenty-five years old” it was on the occasion of his legal coming of age that his father made full amends for the past and confessed his sins. A week or so later, on 11th May, 1838, Kierkegaard recorded an experience of “indescribable joy” unique in the journals. On August 9th his father died and Kierkegaard’s period of crisis was over. “The powerful religious impressions of childhood acquired a renewed power over me, but softened by reflection.” Now that his father was no longer alive to be put off with excuses, Kierkegaard felt in duty bound to set to work and take his degree which during the last eight years he had not attempted to do. He began working for the theological examination which would give him the right to preach.
In the spring of 1837, Kierkegaard had visited his friends the Rørdams, whose daughter Bolette had made an impression on him. It was in their house that he met Regine Olsen. She was barely fifteen at the time, and for the next year or two he only saw her occasionally. In her old age Regine recalled their first meeting clearly, and was in no doubt that Kierkegaard had decided then and there that she should be his wife. Immediately after his father’s death he made a pilgrimage to Jutland, carefully noted in the journal, and on his return began working for his examination. He presented his thesis “On Socratic Irony” in September, 1840. A few weeks later he asked for Regine’s hand, and they became officially engaged. His self-confidence had returned. He was still under the impression of his religious experience, and he saw the past through the haze of his reconciliation with his father. In his happiness he never doubted that he could escape his father, overcome his isolation and “realise the universal”; marry and be like others. But no sooner had he spoken than he felt he had overstepped the mark. And the more he pored over his dark secret the more certainly he knew that he could never reveal it and speak of his father’s sin, his mother’s dishonour or involve the girl he loved in his exceptional life. It never occurred to him to conceal anything. After a long struggle, during which he hoped she would break with him, he had finally to tell her he would not marry. The engagement was broken off in October 1841, and after remaining in Copenhagen for a couple of weeks, in order to give the impression that he was indifferent to the whole affair and so, if possible, make things easier for Regine, he took the boat for Stralsund and went on to Berlin. The possibility that he might still marry however was not entirely ruled out and he remained in an agonised state of suspense. “Had I had faith,” he wrote afterwards, “I should have remained with Regine”—but on another level he had felt “a divine protest” and believed that his destiny lay elsewhere. Even before he had become engaged he had asked himself whether he was to be able to marry Regine or whether perhaps “the orders are: further”: whether fate had other plans for him.
Kierkegaard’s Work: The Pseudonyms. 1841-1845
Kierkegaard returned to Copenhagen early in March, 1841. For the next four and a half years, until the end of 1845, he lived for his work and his whole life was planned accordingly. He was comfortably installed in the house on Nytorv, cared for by his servants, and spared the worst drudgery by his secretaries. Food and wine, coffee and cigars interested him, and he fussed about the temperature of his room as he could not bear the heat. His daily walks round the town continued, and he was often seen at the theatre, and when the long summer days came he hired a carriage and horses and made expeditions into the surrounding country, where he dined and supped at an inn, occasionally spending a night or two away. As long as he was writing, his melancholy was in abeyance, and his whole attention was given to the works in hand. A glance at the chronological table will suggest the speed at which he worked.
Kierkegaard’s work is so large, complex and detailed, that the reader is often unable to see the wood for the trees. In fact the main lines of the structure are large and simple, and it is the ground-plan, if I may so call it, that needs to be made clear if the Journals are to be read in comfort: for it is in the Journals that the significance of his work as a whole can be seen developing—in the same way that a photograph “develops,” until what had been a literary and private work appears as his mission.
Kierkegaard’s work falls into two perfectly distinct parts. The first, written consecutively and at full speed between 1841 and 1845, is a complete oeuvre, a self-contained Comédie Humaine, attributed to half a dozen pseudonyms, some of whom reappear in subsequent volumes. Into this part Kierkegaard poured everything which he had seen, read, thought and experienced during his youth; it is autobiographical, of course, but equally a study of his times, full of portraits of his contemporaries, scenes he had witnessed, in which he looks back and explains his own life and the times in which he lived.
The second part (already latent in the first) is a “work in progress” where, working within narrower limits, he moves circumspectly towards the open “attack on Christendom” which exploded in the last series of pamphlets which were cut short by his death. A work of a different stamp altogether which he perceived in the course of the metamorphosis or conversion which occurred in 1847 and is described in the next-section. It is no longer literary or assigned to pseudonyms, except incidentally, but signed with his own name. The oblique approach is abandoned, not without loss, in order to bring out the basic themes of his apology for Christianity.
The first part of the work consists of the great pseudonyms, Either-Or, Fear and Trembling, Repetition, The Concept of Dread, Stages on the Road of Life and two philosophical essays, Fragments of Philosophy and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. The latter, as the title indicates, was to have been the end of his work. It proved in the event to be the beginning of a new series. In addition there are the Eighteen Edifying Discourses published under his own name.
With all the intensity at his command, Kierkegaard focussed his work on the juncture of thought and existence, of philosophy and Christianity. At first sight everything else seems to go by the board and everything objective is sacrificed in the pursuit of subjectivity or inwardness. Church and State, culture and history, everything except religion in its inward and moral aspect is brushed aside and appears as a distraction, like geometry to Pascal. His purpose seems to be to isolate the individual man in a deathly silence where he will be face to face with the one thing necessary: the fusion of thought and existence. For it is only then that the spirit of man is born, and he becomes “the individual.” That unswerving insistence on the essential repeated in a variety of keys, is what makes Kierkegaard at once curiously remote and yet intensely personal. In one respect he is what he called “an author’s author,” yet without losing the capacity to speak to “the individual” in accents which have not been dulled by time.
The outstanding feature of this part of his work is the polemic against Hegel, a criticism of the whole corpus of post-Christian philosophy from Spinoza to Hegel; an attack on “philosophy” itself for its wordy metaphysics and its verbal scepticism and for its original sin of divorcing thought from existence or reality. It is also a criticism, on the moral and psychological level of the humanism of that period, of the world which emerged after the Reformation which he called for short the “Goetheo-Hegelian” world. That world, with its rationalist philosophies and its aesthetic humanism was, in his view, already moribund, a mirage, but a potent illusion which prevented men from seeing the real problems of both faith and doubt. It is “the dregs of Christianity.”
The critical, almost nihilistic aspect of Kierkegaard’s work is so sharp and prominent, his attack on rationalism and “humanism” so unrelenting, that the constructive element is in danger of being overlooked. But parallel with it runs the analysis and phenomenological description of “the individual” depicted in a series of scenes and situations which define the stages or levels of existence: the aesthetic, ethical and religious levels which are presented both as alternatives and again as the material to be co-ordinated. Much of the material, such as the archetypes, Don Juan, Faust and the Wandering Jew, are derived from the romantic school, and the inspiration of Hamann had borne fruit. This aspect of his work is the best known, but it is often isolated, admired for its psychological penetration and not always read in the context of the wider argument. In these works, however, Kierkegaard starts from various points of view, and his thought moves always in the same direction, towards the moment of decision, the “choice” in Either-Or, the “leap of faith” in Fear and Trembling, and guided by the conception of the individual which is being put forward, leads up to the moment in which decision and action fuse thought and existence, the moment in which temporal and eternal meet and man can fulfill his destiny.
Kierkegaard does not merely criticise the error of the basic idea in Hegel’s system, which is the identity of thought and reality or existence—the error of rationalism in fact. The core of his work is an attempt to bridge the gulf—an attempt which he regarded as a return to tradition, to the Greeks and to the Christian thought which sprang from them.
It is here that the two foundations of his work appear: the role allotted to “feeling,” “passion” or “pathos” (he uses the words interchangeably); and secondly, though in his view this was the more important point, the new form of communication which the role of feeling demands. Briefly and crudely stated, Kierkegaard’s argument is that abstract thought is incapable of grasping “what it means to exist” (because it abstracts from the concrete) and is confined, by definition, to the world of the possible, to a timeless and static world, seen sub specie aeterni. But “passion” is the door to existence and under the right conditions opens the way to a real and certain knowledge of existence, although that knowledge cannot be communicated in the ordinary, “direct” dialectical form (the formal logic of abstract thought).
But this does not mean that our knowledge of existence cannot be communicated at all. Where existence is concerned, the form of communication must, self-evidently, correspond to the faculty of mind through which it is grasped, and that faculty is “feeling.” Feeling or pathos cannot, however, be communicated “directly”—love cannot be “proved” syllogistically, nor beauty demonstrated by formal logic. But the knowledge which “feeling” brings—and this includes our knowledge of quality as opposed to quantity—can be communicated indirectly. The poet, for example, is not necessarily talking nonsense pure and simple, though his form of communication differs essentially from that of the “philosopher” in the narrow sense of the word. Hence the importance which Kierkegaard gives to music and Mozart in particular, in Either-Or and to the significance of the “poet” throughout his works. Feeling, in fact, does not deny reason, but can only be expressed indirectly, by the use of analogy, images, and last but not least, form (as in poetry and the arts).
Kierkegaard would, however, be misunderstood if it were not at once made clear that feeling is not sentiment or emotion isolated from the other faculties of mind. Feeling and passion are only the gateway to reality when purified by reason and will and integrated by that process with the other faculties. Feeling is in one sense the faculty which leads to the quality of intensity of our knowledge, as opposed to knowledge which is significant by virtue of its extensity. It is only when both are co-ordinated that “the individual” begins to exist and becomes a complete man. The error of rationalism is therefore twofold. It limits man to being “a rational animal,” and because it excludes feeling, limits him to one form of communication which, by definition, excludes reality. It is the world of a man who “has forgotten what it means to exist,” who does not really live in the same categories as he thinks in:
“But as people have forgotten what to exist sensu eminenti means, because they generally make the pathetic refer to imagination and sentiment, allowing it to be annulled by the dialectic (the direct form), the pathetic has fallen into disrepute in our 19th century philosophy and dialectics have become its passion.”
From this it should be plain that “the choice” and “the leap of faith” are not arbitrary acts of the will divorced from reason and feeling, and intervening like a deus ex machina to solve the problem of life, but acts of the whole man which alone give him the right to speak of existence. It might almost be said that Kierkegaard reverses the cogito. Instead of saying “I think, therefore I am,” he says, “Only if I exist sensu eminenti can I begin to think” and that thought, moreover, requires a dual form of communication, both direct and indirect. The real difficulty consists in co-ordinating the two forms of communication, as Kierkegaard says quite clearly in the Postcript:
“Where existence is concerned, thought is not higher than imagination and feeling, but is co-ordinated with them. In existence, the supremacy of thought (abstract thought) produces confusion. . . . Where the thinker is concerned, this distinction (between imagination or feeling and thought) is abolished. To that one must reply: all right, for thought, abstract thought, it is untenable, but abstract thought in its turn is untenable where existence is concerned. . . . Thought may well despise imagination; but en revanche, imagination despises thought, and the same is true of feeling. The task is not to annul the one at the expense of the other, but to preserve, on the contrary, their equilibrium, their simultaneity; and the plane on which they are united is existence.”
To complete the circle of Kierkegaard’s thought, it could be pointed out that “imagination” is defined as the faculty instar omnium, which takes the place of all the others, for it is a reflection, or if one likes synthesis, of feeling, reason and will, which is why it is an essential element in the communication of the knowledge derived from the fusion of all three faculties in “the individual.”
That fusion takes place in the “choice.” For the choice is not the choice of something external (a view of life, a particular corpus of knowledge) but of oneself, of a complete existence. Prior to that constitutive act man is always consciously or unconsciously in despair, for despair is the disintegration of personality in the course of which one or the other of the faculties assumes “supremacy”: either reason, resulting in rationalism; or feeling, resulting in sentimentality; or will, resulting in voluntarism. It is really only after the “choice,” that the “leap of faith” becomes possible, for only the complete man can really become a Christian. And in fact Kierkegaard goes so far as to say that “one can guarantee to make a Christian of every man one can get to come under the category of the individual”—in so far, that is, as one man can do this for another. Kierkegaard concludes in the Postscript, “Man only begins to exist in faith.” For Christianity, from this point of view, is a new level of existence.
“Life” he says elsewhere, “must be lived forward, but understood backwards” so that there never can be a complete, all-embracing and systematic explanation of life, since man cannot stand still outside its movement in order to grasp and explain it. Existence can only be understood in that movement which no static scheme can hold fast. Decision and faith are in that movement, and then action qualifies and enriches thought, and thought elucidates action simultaneously. That does not mean that existence is irrational (except in terms of rationalism). But looking forward, living forward, faith appears as the paradox, and from the point of view of reason alone, it is “the absurd” which reason cannot digest, as long as it is uninflected by feeling and undetermined by will, choice and action. But in the concrete everything is reversed, and the second or mature form of reflection, the reflection of the complete man, makes things fast once again (p. 146). The task is not to prove the truth of Christianity beforehand, which puts the accent on abstract thought instead of upon life, but to communicate it afterwards. But at that point, even the indirect method ultimately becomes inadequate or rather it must be enlarged and extended. The second part of Kierkegaard’s work therefore turns to the specifically Christian form of communication, “the witness to the truth,” the confessor and martyr, while he regarded his own task as on a lower level altogether: “to make men aware.” He therefore regarded the problem of communication as “the distinctive characteristic” of his work, and as embodying “the reality of his historical importance,” for Christianity is “the truth that is troubled,” i.e., essentially concerned with communicating it to others (see p. 169).
That, as far as I can see, is the core of Kierkegaard’s work, neither rationalistic, nor irrationalistic, nor inhuman. Its humanism lies in the conception of “the individual” which, unlike the aesthetic humanism of the bourgeois period, is open to all men equally, and in the fact that his conception of the complete man was an indirect proof of Christianity: not a demonstration which could be received second hand, but which “looking backwards” (and provided one lived forwards) gave the mind the freedom to be itself and fulfil its destiny.
Seen in its broadest lines, Kierkegaard’s work involves a shift of emphasis from the objective world of Reason and Culture, to the moral and inward sphere. That is why everything, in the first instance, is obliterated by the intensity with which he maneouvres to reach “the choice.” That truth lies in subjectivity does not mean that truth is subjective. On the contrary, inwardness, or subjectivity, is the starting point at which “the individual” enters life by acting decisively. Maturity does not consist in some form of cultural humanism, with its accents on the externals of personality, such as gifts and genius, but in the depth and riches of the spiritual life which is the spring of action. It is that inward action, as Kierkegaard says in one of the earliest entries, which means everything, and then the rest, the objective aspect, will follow. In the first part of his work Kierkegaard does not go beyond the choice. It was only after he himself had acted decisively, when he was forced out of his work into life by his conflict with The Corsair, a weekly newspaper, that he saw the future clearly.
The Metamorphosis
Kierkegaard completed his work in the autumn of 1845 and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript was sent sent to the printers in December. With his vast, though unrecognised, achievement behind him Kierkegaard once again began to think that his melancholy and self-isolation might be overcome. His ambition now was to write finis to his work and retire to a country living. He discussed the plan with Bishop Mynster, his father’s friend, who thought well of any arrangement by which so restive a mind could be kept at a distance. But the romantic gesture was hardly practicable. He began to have doubts about his worthiness for the ministry and before he had had time to reach a decision fate intervened. He was not destined to languish in a vicarage.
Just as Kierkegaard had sent off the manuscript of the Postscript, P. L. Møller, whom he had hardly seen for the last five or six years, published a violent attack on the author (the pseudonym was “Frater Taciturnitus”) of Guilty?—Not Guilty? which is a thinly disguised account of Kierkegaard’s engagement. Møller was perfectly aware that he had figured in The Seducer’s Diary and now that Kierkegaard had produced the pendant to it (published at the end of 1844) he took his revenge and held up the writer to ridicule. Møller, who was not without ability as a critic, was trying to live down his reputation in the hope of succeeding the poet Oelenschläger in the Chair of Aesthetics at the University. To this end he used flattery in his more serious articles, but could not resist the pleasure and profit to be derived from writing anonymously in The Corsair—an amusing, gossipy weekly belonging to Meier Goldschmidt, a liberal and enlightened Jew.
Kierkegaard had had his eye on Goldschmidt and The Corsair for some time past. He regarded it as lowering the tone and the standard and compromising the reputations of reputable writers such as Heiberg. He had already prepared an article expressing his views, which were shared by very many, though no one had had the nerve to protest for fear of appearing in its pages. Kierkegaard had up to that time always been singled out by Goldschmidt and Møller for praise; they admired certain parts of his work immensely and felt with a certain justice that Kierkegaard was on their side and against the orthodox reputations it amused them to prick. This was a mistake. Kierkegaard had no intention of allowing his criticism of Heiberg to be used in the levelling down process. His reply to Møller was meant to prevent The Corsair from distinguishing between him and men like Heiberg and Gjødwad, the editor of The Fatherland, and to force Møller into the open. Heiberg and Gjødwad both thanked Kierkegaard for his article in private, but said nothing, to his irritation, in public, and left him to bear the brunt of it.
Once Møller’s association with The Corsair had been made public his prospects in Copenhagen were finished. He ultimately went abroad and died in poverty. But not before exploring the possibilities of revenge. Week in week out, for almost a year, Kierkegaard was caricatured, parodied and ridiculed without mercy. Nothing was omitted: his odd appearance, his rounded back, his spindly legs, his ill-fitting clothes, his ridiculous love affair, his incomprehensible jargon, his comfortable life, his high-falutin’ Christianity. He was depicted as a megalomaniac. As usual, no one seems to have guessed how deeply Kierkegaard felt these personal attacks, least of all Goldschmidt with whom he continued, when they met on the street, to discuss the rights and wrongs of Frater Taciturnitus, as though Kierkegaard were not involved. His air of treating the matter as a bagatelle convinced everyone.
When finally Kierkegaard cut him in the street, Goldschmidt realised the position and soon after the attacks ceased and the paper was suppressed.
This incident, trifling though it appears, is the dividing line in Kierkegaard’s life and work. The Corsair affair turned his attention back from his work to the world about him—for the first time he saw his work complete in its historical setting: the historical context of his work revealed it to him in a new light, and he understood his mission.
This change in perspective, first suggested to him by the social and political conditions which The Corsair had revealed, occupied him intensely for the next two years. Almost simultaneously with the article against Møller, published in The Fatherland like all his newspaper articles, Kierkegaard reviewed a novel by Fru Gyllembourg, Heiberg’s mother-in-law, and in the last part (translated under the title The Present Age) set down his diagnosis of the times in which he lived, with special reference to Christianity. He could now see the historical situation clearly. His mind then swung back to his own life, and he considered his future. For the first time he realised that his financial independence was threatened and his way of life endangered. He had always spent his money freely and the end was in sight—had he lived a month longer he would have been penniless—and it occurred to him for a moment to apply for a pension. But he had also grasped how important money had been to him by making it possible “to perform a salto mortale into a purely spiritual existence.” It was at this point that the curious case of a certain Pastor Adler claimed his interest. Adler provided an instructive example of “religious enthusiasm,” of a man with a mission without the faintest notion of how enthusiasm would need to be qualified in “the present age.” Kierkegaard was fascinated by the spectacle of Adler’s naïveté and the insoluble problems which it set to Mynster and the Church authorities. Most of what he wrote was left unpublished, but although The Great Book on Adler (re-written three times) is a poor book, it shows the direction which his mind was taking and the renewed importance which he gave to social and political conditions—an aspect of his work that is often neglected.
During the first half of 1847 Kierkegaard finished his most important religious work, Works of Love, and by August the meditations of the last year and a half began to bear fruit. “Something is stirring within me” he wrote, “which points to a metamorphosis. For that very reason I dare not go to Berlin, for that would be to procure an abortion. I shall remain quietly at home . . . (and) really think out the idea of my melancholy together with God here and now.”
Six months later the metamorphosis which he had suspected culminated in his second conversion. On Wednesday in Holy Week, 1848, all the strands of his thought were drawn together, and for the third time in his life he believed that he was to escape his fate. “My reserve and self-isolation are broken” he exclaims, “I must speak out—Lord give thy grace. It is indeed true as my father said of me, ‘you will never become anything as long as you have money’.” The spell was broken. At first he assumed that his isolation was to be broken and that he could now take Holy Orders—which would also have solved the financial problem. But almost at once he dismissed the thought and finally understood that his task was not to become like others but to fulfil his mission. In the place of a cruel fate he saw Providence “which had done so much more for me than I ever expected.” He could say that he had found the idea for which he could live and die, and could see where his melancholy had entered his soul. “In my melancholy I loved the world. Now I am weaned.” He had wanted to be like others. His resignation hitherto had been a shield enabling him to live a purely spiritual existence, more stoical than Christian. Suffering voluntarily accepted and his decision to remain “the exception” opened his eyes to a new world. The metamorphosis had revolutionised his point of view and at one essential point altered the character of his work.
“The communication of Christianity must ultimately end in bearing witness, the maieutic (indirect) method can never be final. For truth from the Christian point of view does not lie in the subject, as Socrates understood it, but in a Revelation which must be proclaimed.”
The Second Group of Works and the “Attack on Christendom”
The Journal entry quoted above marks the end of the metamorphosis. Nothing is unsaid, but the form of communication undergoes a transformation. The perspective changes, and “the individual” instead of being the centre and aim is now seen against the concrete historical background of The Present Age. This little essay, which opens the new phase of authorship, is a diagnosis of the world in which Christianity has to be proclaimed. Much of it reads like Nietzsche avant la lettre, and is a diagnosis of the moral and intellectual characteristics of the “mass man”—déracine, without a protective cultural or religious tradition, clever, emancipated but at bottom wanting in feeling and lacking in passion, only acting as one of the herd and given to envy. The situation as he saw it meant that all the former methods of apologetic were useless. The rationalistic apologetics of the age of reason, and the cultural apologetics of the romantic period (such as Chateaubriand’s Génie du Christianisme) were anachronisms. Two things were necessary. First, as he had always said, to get men into the “category of the individual,” to save them from vanishing in the herd; and secondly to dispel the illusion that Europe was still Christian. The “attack on Christendom,” which is often regarded as the chief, if not the only, aim of the last part of his life, is misunderstood unless it is realised that the real aim of his polemic is “the masses.” These two aspects of his work belong together. In the new circumstances, “Christendom” was an illusion which prevented men from seeing Christianity in a light in which it was relevant, and that light was “the individual.”
These thoughts had been occupying him for some time when the Revolutions of 1848 brought everything to a head.
“Even now, in 1848, it certainly looks as though politics were everything; but it will be seen that the catastrophe (the Revolution) corresponds to and is the obverse of the Reformation: then everything pointed to a religious movement and proved to be political; now everything points to a political movement, but will become religious.”
Kierkegaard was not so naïve as to expect the triumph of Christianity or even a great religious revival. What he means is clear enough. “Now we are going to begin at another point, namely the intensive development of the state itself,” but just as Marx foretold that the State (the political conception of life) would wither away, so too Kierkegaard believed that the age of politics in the old sense was over and that under the new conditions religion would become relevant, provided it were proclaimed in its original form—and not as the culture which it had helped to create in the past: Christendom.
This conception of the Revolution obliged him to modify his form of communication. It could not longer remain “indirect” in a purely intellectual sense, and he could no longer only be a poet. In the present age only “the witness to the truth” could proclaim Christianity effectively, proclaim it directly as a revelation of man’s destiny, but indirectly through his life. “I am,” he now saw, “the ultimate phase of the poetic temper, on the way to becoming a sort of reformer on a small scale.” He never confused himself with the witness, though he believed that his work had become action.
In this light the “attack on Christendom” ceases to be an attack on the Danish Church as such. He had, in fact, nothing to say about its doctrine or organization. He only wished to dissociate it from the antiquated apologetics to which it was committed, and from the Erastianism which paralysed it. This accounts for his view of Catholicism. His whole purpose was to make the teaching of Christianity more inward and to bring it back to the individual.
It is a fact that as long as Bishop Mynster lived, he clung to the hope that, although Mynster was the personification of the status quo, he might be persuaded to mend his ways. But when Martensen was appointed to succeed him, Kierkegaard concluded that the Establishment was petrified and could not reform itself. When Martensen publicly described Mynster as a “witness to the truth” (possibly knowing Kierkegaard’s insistence on the term), he determined to speak out.
His first article appeared in January 1855 and was followed by a series of scathing pamphlets on the Establishment. He exaggerated without fear, and certainly forgot that what was true of Luther was true of him: “a corrective made into a norm is eo ipso confusion.” He confused many and allowed himself to be carried away by the force of his own logic. Everything was strung a tone higher in order “to make men aware,” in order to shake the complacency of both the Established Church and of the “masses.” He was confident, not of victory against the “masses” but of having fought for the truth, for the cause of truth was not triumphant—as Christendom and the Establishment implied—but militant. To be an author had at last become action, and the conclusion of his life was expressed in the fact that he had emerged from his melancholy without overstepping the boundaries of or falsifying his personality. Professor Sibbern, who had taught him and known him all his life, was amazed that so circumspect a man should have landed himself in an imbroglio. Everyone could understand him, Kierkegaard remarked, as long as he expressed his thought in words; as soon as he acted, he caused a “scandal.” Action, to use his favourite metaphor, was the knot in the thread that made the end fast.
In the middle of October, shortly before the last of the pamphlets was sent to the printer, Kierkegaard collapsed in the street. He was taken to the Frederiks Hospital. He knew he was dying, but refused to receive communion from “the King’s official.” His brother Peter, who was of Grundtvig’s persuasion, was not admitted. Not even his oldest friend, Emil Boesen, could persuade him to retract a word of what he had said. He was visited by his brother-in-law Hendrik Lund, by his nephew and niece. One and all were struck by the radiance of his spirits. “He preserved a loving sympathy for others,” Hans Brøchner wrote after his death, “even in the smallest matters, preserved a gentleness and even humour, a sense of proportion and a clarity of thought, and above all a calm and peaceful faith, which did not desert him even during the severe suffering of his death bed.”
He died on 11th November, 1855, at the age of forty-two.
November, 1958 ALEXANDER DRU