Søren Kierkegaard
First published Tue Dec 3, 1996; substantive revision Fri May 8, 2009
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (b. 1813, d. 1855) was a profound and
prolific writer in the Danish “golden age” of intellectual and artistic
activity. His work crosses the boundaries of philosophy, theology,
psychology, literary criticism, devotional literature and fiction.
Kierkegaard brought this potent mixture of discourses to bear as social
critique and for the purpose of renewing Christian faith within
Christendom. At the same time he made many original conceptual
contributions to each of the disciplines he employed. He is known as
the “father of existentialism”, but at least as important are his
critiques of Hegel and of the German romantics, his contributions to
the development of modernism, his literary experimentation, his vivid
re-presentation of biblical figures to bring out their modern
relevance, his invention of key concepts which have been explored and
redeployed by thinkers ever since, his interventions in contemporary
Danish church politics, and his fervent attempts to analyse and
revitalise Christian faith.
Kierkegaard led a somewhat uneventful life. He rarely left his
hometown of Copenhagen, and travelled abroad only five times —
four times to Berlin and once to Sweden. His prime recreational
activities were attending the theatre, walking the streets of
Copenhagen to chat with ordinary people, and taking brief carriage
jaunts into the surrounding countryside. He was educated at a
prestigious boys' school (
Borgerdydskolen
), then attended
Copenhagen University where he studied philosophy and theology. His
teachers at the university included F.C. Sibbern, Poul Martin
Møller, and H.L. Martensen.
Sibbern and Møller were both philosophers who also wrote
fiction. The latter in particular had a great influence on
Kierkegaard's philosophico-literary development. Martensen also had a
profound effect on Kierkegaard, but largely in a negative manner.
Martensen was a champion of Hegelianism, and when he became Bishop
Primate of the Danish People's Church, Kierkegaard published a
vitriolic attack on Martensen's theological views. Kierkegaard's
brother Peter, on the other hand, was an adherent of Martensen and
himself became a bishop in the church. Kierkegaard regarded Martensen
as one of his chief intellectual rivals. Martensen was only five
years his senior, but was already lecturing at Copenhagen University
when Kierkegaard was a student there. Martensen also anticipated
Kierkegaard's first major literary project, by publishing a book on
Faust. Kierkegaard, who had been working up a project on the three
great medieval figures of Don Juan, Faust and Ahasuerus (the wandering
Jew), abandoned his own project when Martensen's book appeared,
although he later incorporated much of the work he had done into
Either/Or
.
Another very important figure in Kierkegaard's life was J.L.
Heiberg, the doyen of Copenhagen's literati. Heiberg, more than any
other person, was responsible for introducing Hegelianism into Denmark.
Kierkegaard spent a good deal of energy trying to break into the
Heiberg literary circle, but desisted once he had found his own voice
in
The Concept of Irony
. Kierkegaard's first major
publication,
From the Papers of One Still Living
, is largely
an attempt to articulate a Heibergian aesthetics - which is a modified
version of Hegel's aesthetics. In
From the Papers of One Still
Living
, which is a critical review of Hans Christian Andersen's
novel
Only A Fiddler
, Kierkegaard attacks Andersen for lacking
life-development (
Livs-Udvikling
) and a life-view
(
Livs-Anskuelse
) both of which Kierkegaard deemed necessary
for someone to be a genuine novelist (
Romandigter
).
Kierkegaard's life is more relevant to his work than is the case for
many writers. Much of the thrust of his critique of Hegelianism is that
its system of thought is abstracted from the everyday lives of its
proponents. This existential critique consists in demonstrating how the
life and work of a philosopher contradict one another. Kierkegaard
derived this form of critique from the Greek notion of judging
philosophers by their lives rather than simply by their intellectual
artefacts. The Christian ideal, according to Kierkegaard, is even more
exacting since the totality of an individual's existence is the
artefact on the basis of which s/he is judged by God for h/er eternal
validity. Of course a writer's work is an important part of h/er
existence, but for the purpose of judgement we should focus on the
whole life not just on one part.
In a less abstract manner, an understanding of Kierkegaard's biography
is important for an understanding of his writing because his life was
the source of many of the preoccupations and repetitions within his
oeuvre
. Because of his existentialist orientation, most of
his interventions in contemporary theory do double duty as means of
working through events from his own life. In particular Kierkegaard's
relations to his mother, his father, and his fiancée Regine
Olsen pervade his work. Kierkegaard's pseudonym Johannes Climacus
says of Socrates that “his whole life was personal preoccupation with
himself, and then Governance comes and adds world-historical
significance to it.” Similarly, Kierkegaard saw himself as a
“singular universal” whose personal preoccupation with himself was
transfigured by divine Governance into universal significance.
Kierkegaard's relation to his mother is the least frequently
commented upon since it is invisible in his work. His mother does not
rate a direct mention in his published works, or in his diaries — not
even on the day she died. However, for a writer who places so much
emphasis on indirect communication, and on the semiotics of
invisibility, we should regard this absence as significant. Johannes
Climacus in
Concluding Unscientific Postscript
remarks, “...
how deceptive then, that an omnipresent being should be recognisable
precisely by being invisible.” Kierkegaard's mother, who was not well
educated, is represented in his writings by the mother-tongue (Danish).
Kierkegaard was deeply enamoured of the Danish language and worked
throughout his writings to assert the strengths of his mother-tongue
over the invasive, imperialistic influences of Latin and German. With
respect to the former, Kierkegaard had to petition the king to be
allowed to write his philosophy dissertation
On the Concept of
Irony with constant reference to Socrates
in Danish. Even though
permission was granted he was still required to defend his dissertation
publicly in Latin. Latin had been the pan-European language of science
and scholarship. In Denmark, in Kierkegaard's time, German language and
culture were at least as dominant as Latin in the production of
knowledge. In defiance of this, Kierkegaard revelled in his
mother-tongue and created some of the most beautifully poetic prose in
the Danish language — including a paean to his mother-tongue in
Stages On Life's Way
. In
Repetition
Constantin
Constantius congratulates the Danish language on providing the word for
an important new philosophical concept, viz.
Gjentagelse
(repetition), to replace the foreign word “mediation”. In general, the
Danish language is Kierkegaard's umbilical attachment to the mother
whereas Latin and German represent the law of the father, especially
when employed in systematic scholarship (
Videnskab
).
The influence of Kierkegaard's father on his work has been frequently
noted. Not only did Kierkegaard inherit his father's melancholy, his
sense of guilt and anxiety, and his pietistic emphasis on the dour
aspects of Christian faith, but he also inherited his talents for
philosophical argument and creative imagination. In addition
Kierkegaard inherited enough of his father's wealth to allow him to
pursue his life as a freelance writer. The themes of sacrificial
father/son relationships, of inherited sin, of the burden of history,
and of the centrality of the “individual, human existence
relationship, the old text, well known, handed down from the fathers”
(
Postscript
) are repeated many times in Kierkegaard's oeuvre.
The father's sense of guilt was so great (for having cursed God? for
having impregnated Kierkegaard's mother out of wedlock?) that he
thought God would punish him by taking the lives of all seven of his
children before they reached the age of 34 (the age of Jesus Christ at
his crucifixion). This was born out for all but two of the children,
Søren and his older brother Peter. Søren was astonished
that they both survived beyond that age. This may explain the sense of
urgency that drove Kierkegaard to write so prolifically in the years
leading up to his 34th birthday.
Kierkegaard's (broken) engagement to Regine Olsen has also been the
focus of much scholarly attention. The theme of a young woman being the
occasion for a young man to become “poeticized” recurs in Kierkegaard's
writings, as does the theme of the sacrifice of worldly happiness for a
higher (religious) purpose. Kierkegaard's infatuation with Regine, and
the sublimated libidinal energy it lent to his poetic production, were
crucial for setting his life course. The breaking of the engagement
allowed Kierkegaard to devote himself monastically to his religious
purpose, as well as to establish his outsider status (outside the norm
of married bourgeois life). It also freed him from close personal
entanglements with women, thereby leading him to objectify them as
ideal creatures, and to reproduce the patriarchal values of his church
and father.
Kierkegaard's central problematic was
how to become a Christian in
Christendom
. The task was most difficult for the well-educated,
since prevailing educational and cultural institutions tended to
produce stereotyped members of “the crowd” rather than to allow
individuals to discover their own unique identities. This problem was
compounded by the fact that Denmark had recently and very rapidly been
transformed from a feudal society into a capitalist society. Universal
elementary education, large-scale migration from rural areas into
cities, and greatly increased social mobility meant that the social
structure changed from a rigidly hierarchical one to a relatively
“horizontal” one. In this context it became increasingly difficult to
“become who you are” for two reasons: (i) social identities were
unusually fluid; and (ii) there was a proliferation of normalizing
institutions which produced pseudo-individuals.
Given this problematic in this social context Kierkegaard perceived
a need to invent a form of communication which would not produce
stereotyped identities. On the contrary, he needed a form of rhetoric
which would force people back onto their own resources, to take
responsibility for their own existential choices, and to become who
they are beyond their socially imposed identities. In this undertaking
Kierkegaard was inspired by the figure of Socrates, whose incessant
irony undermined all knowledge claims that were taken for granted or
unreflectively inherited from traditional culture. In his dissertation
On the Concept of Irony with constant reference to Socrates
Kierkegaard argued that the historical Socrates used his irony in order
to facilitate the birth of subjectivity in his interlocutors. Because
they were constantly forced to abandon their pat answers to Socrates'
annoying questions, they had to begin to think for themselves and to
take individual responsibility for their claims about knowledge and
value.
Kierkegaard sought to provide a similar service for his own
contemporaries. He used irony, parody, satire, humor, and
deconstructive techniques in order to make conventionally accepted
forms of knowledge and value untenable. He was a gadfly — constantly
irritating his contemporaries with discomforting thoughts. He was also
a midwife — assisting at the birth of individual subjectivity by
forcing his contemporaries to think for themselves. His art of
communication became “the art of
taking away
” since he thought
his audience suffered from too much knowledge rather than too
little.
Hegelianism promised to make absolute knowledge available by virtue
of a science of logic. Anyone with the capacity to follow the
dialectical progression of the purportedly transparent concepts of
Hegel's logic would have access to the mind of God (which for Hegel was
equivalent to the logical structure of the universe). Kierkegaard
thought this to be the hubristic attempt to build a new tower of Babel,
or a
scala paradisi
— a dialectical ladder by which humans
can climb with ease up to heaven. Kierkegaard's strategy was to invert
this dialectic by seeking to make everything more difficult. Instead of
seeing scientific knowledge as the means of human redemption, he
regarded it as the greatest obstacle to redemption. Instead of seeking
to give people more knowledge he sought to take away what passed for
knowledge. Instead of seeking to make God and Christian faith perfectly
intelligible he sought to emphasize the absolute transcendence by God
of all human categories. Instead of setting himself up as a religious
authority, Kierkegaard used a vast array of textual devices to
undermine his authority as an author and to place responsibility for
the existential significance to be derived from his texts squarely on
the reader.
Kierkegaard distanced himself from his texts by a variety of devices
which served to problematize the authorial voice for the reader. He
used pseudonyms in many of his works (both overtly aesthetic ones and
overtly religious ones). He partitioned the texts into prefaces,
forewords, interludes, postscripts, appendices. He assigned the
“authorship” of parts of texts to different pseudonyms, and invented
further pseudonyms to be the editors or compilers of these pseudonymous
writings. Sometimes Kierkegaard appended his name as author, sometimes
as the person responsible for publication, sometimes not at all.
Sometimes Kierkegaard would publish more than one book on the same day.
These simultaneous books embodied strikingly contrasting perspectives.
He also published whole
series
of works simultaneously, viz.
the pseudonymous works on the one hand and on the other hand the
Edifying Discourses
published under his own name.
All of this play with narrative point of view, with contrasting
works, and with contrasting internal partitions within individual works
leaves the reader very disoriented. In combination with the incessant
play of irony and Kierkegaard's predilection for paradox and semantic
opacity, the text becomes a polished surface for the reader in which
the prime meaning to be discerned is the reader's own reflection.
Christian faith, for Kierkegaard, is not a matter of learning dogma by
rote. It is a matter of the individual repeatedly renewing h/er
passionate subjective relationship to an object which can never be
known, but only believed in. This belief is offensive to reason, since
it only exists in the face of the absurd (the paradox of the eternal,
immortal, infinite God being incarnated in time as a finite
mortal).
Kierkegaard's “method of indirect communication” was designed to
sever the reliance of the reader on the authority of the author and on
the received wisdom of the community. The reader was to be forced to
take individual responsibility for knowing who s/he is and for knowing
where s/he stands on the existential, ethical and religious issues
raised in the texts.
While much of Kierkegaard's writing is presented indirectly, under
various pseudonyms, he did write some works under his own name. These
works fall into three genres: (i) deliberations; (ii) edifying
discourses; and (iii) reviews. The point of indirect communication is
to position the reader to relate to the truth with appropriate
passion, rather than to communicate the truth as such. In a review,
however, it is appropriate to be objective, especially in drawing out
a novel's life-view and life-development. A deliberation
[
Overveielse
], on the other hand, ought to be provocative,
and turn the reader's assumptions topsy-turvy. It draws on irony, the
comic and is high-spirited, in order to get thoughts into motion prior
to action. A deliberation is a weighing-up, as a propaedeutic to
action. An edifying discourse [
Opbyggelige Tale
], by
contrast, “rests in a mood” and presupposes that the reader is already
in faith. It seeks to build up the faith that it presupposes.
Typically Kierkegaard's
Edifying Discourses
invite “that
single individual, my reader” to dwell with a biblical passage for the
sake of building up faith.
Kierkegaard's “inverted Christian dialectic” was designed not to
make the word of God easier to assimilate, but to establish more
clearly the absolute distance that separates human beings from God.
This was in order to emphasize that human beings are absolutely reliant
on God's grace for salvation.
Kierkegaard presents his pseudonymous authorship as a dialectical
progression of existential stages. The first is the aesthetic, which
gives way to the ethical, which gives way to the religious. The
aesthetic stage of existence is characterized by the following:
immersion in sensuous experience; valorization of possibility over
actuality; egotism; fragmentation of the subject of experience;
nihilistic wielding of irony and scepticism; and flight from boredom.
The figure of the aesthete in the first volume of
Either-Or
is an ironic portrayal of German romanticism, but it also draws on
medieval characters as diverse as Don Juan, Ahasverus (the wandering
Jew), and Faust. It finds its most sophisticated form in the author of
“The Seducer's Diary”, the final section of
Either-Or
.
Johannes the seducer is a
reflective aesthete
, who gains
sensuous delight not so much from the act of seduction but from
engineering the possibility of seduction. His real aim is the
manipulation of people and situations in ways which generate
interesting reflections in his own voyeuristic mind. The aesthetic
perspective transforms quotidian dullness into a richly poetic world by
whatever means it can. Sometimes the reflective aesthete will inject
interest into a book by reading only the last third, or into a
conversation by provoking a bore into an apoplectic fit so that he can
see a bead of sweat form between the bore's eyes and run down his nose.
That is, the aesthete uses artifice, arbitrariness, irony, and wilful
imagination to recreate the world in his own image. The prime
motivation for the aesthete is the transformation of the boring into
the interesting.
This type of aestheticism is criticized from the point of view of
ethics. It is seen to be emptily self-serving and escapist. It is a
despairing means of avoiding commitment and responsibility. It fails to
acknowledge one's social debt and communal existence. And it is
self-deceiving insofar as it substitutes fantasies for actual states of
affairs.
But Kierkegaard did not want to abandon aesthetics altogether in
favor of the ethical and the religious. A key concept in the Hegelian
dialectic, which Kierkegaard's pseudonymous authorship parodies, is
Aufhebung
(sublation). In Hegel's dialectic, when
contradictory positions are reconciled in a higher unity (synthesis)
they are both annulled and preserved (
aufgehoben
). Similarly
with Kierkegaard's pseudo-dialectic: the aesthetic and the ethical are
both annulled and preserved in their synthesis in the religious stage.
As far as the aesthetic stage of existence is concerned what is
preserved in the higher religious stage is the sense of infinite
possibility made available through the imagination. But this no longer
excludes what is actual. Nor is it employed for egotistic ends.
Aesthetic irony is transformed into religious humor, and the aesthetic
transfiguration
of the actual world into the ideal is
transformed into the religious
transubstantiation
of the
finite world into an actual reconciliation with the infinite.
But the dialectic of the pseudonymous authorship never quite reaches
the truly religious. We stop short at the
representation
of
the religious by a self-confessed humorist (Johannes Climacus) in a
medium which, according to Climacus's own account, necessarily
alienates the reader from true (Christian) faith. For faith is a matter
of lived experience, of constant striving within an individual's
existence. According to Climacus's metaphysics, the world is divided
dualistically into the actual and the ideal. Language (and all other
media of representation) belong to the realm of the ideal. No matter
how eloquent or evocative language is it can never
be
the
actual. Therefore, any representation of faith is always suspended in
the realm of ideality and can never
be
actual faith.
So the whole dialectic of the pseudonymous authorship is recuperated
by the aesthetic by virtue of its medium of representation. In fact
Johannes Climacus acknowledges this implicitly when at the end of
Concluding Unscientific Postscript
he
revokes
everything he has said, with the important rider that to say something
then to revoke it is not the same as never having said it in the first
place. His presentation of religious faith in an aesthetic medium at
least provides an opportunity for his readers to make their own leap of
faith, by appropriating with inward passion the paradoxical religion of
Christianity into their own lives.
As a poet of the religious Kierkegaard was always preoccupied with
aesthetics. In fact, contrary to popular misconceptions of Kierkegaard
which represent him as becoming increasingly hostile to poetry, he
increasingly referred to himself as a poet in his later years (all but
one of over ninety references to himself as a poet in his journals date
from after 1847). Kierkegaard never claimed to write with religious
authority, as an apostle. His works represent both less religiously
enlightened and more religiously enlightened positions than he thought
he had attained in his own existence. Such representations were only
possible in an aesthetic medium of imagined possibilities like
poetry.
Like the terms “aesthetic” and “religious”, the term “ethics” in
Kierkegaard's work has more than one meaning. It is used to denote
both: (i) a limited existential sphere, or stage, which is superseded
by the higher stage of the religious life; and (ii) an aspect of life
which is retained even within the religious life. In the first sense
“ethics” is synonymous with the Hegelian notion of
Sittlichkeit
, or customary mores. In this sense “ethics”
represents “the universal”, or more accurately the prevailing social
norms. The social norms are seen to be the highest court of appeal for
judging human affairs — nothing outranks them for this sort of
ethicist. Even human sacrifice is justified in terms of how it serves
the community, so that when Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia
he is regarded as a tragic hero since the sacrifice is required for the
success of the Greek expedition to Troy (
Fear and Trembling
).
Kierkegaard, however, does recognize duties to a power higher than
social norms. Much of
Fear and Trembling
turns on the notion
that Abraham's would-be sacrifice of his son Isaac is not for the sake
of social norms, but is the result of a “teleological suspension of the
ethical”. That is, Abraham recognizes a duty to something higher than
both his social duty not to kill an innocent person and his personal
commitment to his beloved son, viz. his duty to obey God's
commands.
But in order to arrive at a position of religious faith, which might
entail a “teleological suspension of the ethical”, the individual must
first embrace the ethical (in the first sense). In order to raise
oneself beyond the merely aesthetic life, which is a life of drifting
in imagination, possibility and sensation, one needs to make a
commitment. That is, the aesthete needs to choose the ethical, which
entails a commitment to communication and decision procedures.
The ethical position advocated by Judge Wilhelm in “Equilibrium
Between the Aesthetic and the Ethical in the Composition of
Personality” (
Either-Or
II) is a peculiar mix of cognitivism
and noncognitivism. The metaethics or normative ethics are cognitivist,
laying down various necessary conditions for ethically correct action.
These conditions include: the necessity of choosing seriously and
inwardly; commitment to the belief that predications of good and evil
of our actions have a truth-value; the necessity of choosing what one
is actually doing, rather than just responding to a situation; actions
are to be in accordance with rules; and these rules are universally
applicable to moral agents.
The choice of metaethics, however, is noncognitive. There is no
adequate proof of the truth of metaethics. The choice of normative
ethics is motivated, but in a noncognitive way. The Judge seeks to
motivate the choice of his normative ethics through the avoidance of
despair. Here despair (
Fortvivlelse
) is to let one's life
depend on conditions outside one's control (and later, more radically,
despair is the very possibility of despair in this first sense). For
Judge Wilhelm, the choice of normative ethics is a noncognitive choice
of cognitivism, and thereby an acceptance of the applicability of the
conceptual distinction between good and evil.
From Kierkegaard's religious perspective, however, the conceptual
distinction between good and evil is ultimately dependent not on social
norms but on God. Therefore it is possible, as Johannes de Silentio
argues was the case for Abraham (the father of faith), that God demand
a suspension of the ethical (in the sense of the socially prescribed
norms). This is still ethical in the second sense, since ultimately
God's definition of the distinction between good and evil outranks any
human society's definition. The requirement of communicability and
clear decision procedures can also be suspended by God's fiat. This
renders cases such as Abraham's extremely problematic, since we have no
recourse to public reason to decide whether he is legitimately obeying
God's command or whether he is a deluded would-be murderer. Since
public reason cannot decide the issue for us, we must decide for
ourselves as a matter of religious faith.
Kierkegaard styled himself above all as a religious poet. The religion
to which he sought to relate his readers is Christianity. The type of
Christianity that underlies his writings is a very serious strain of
Lutheran pietism informed by the dour values of sin, guilt, suffering,
and individual responsibility. Kierkegaard was immersed in these
values in the family home through his father, whose own childhood was
lived in the shadow of
Herrnhut
pietism in
Jutland. Kierkegaard's father subsequently became a member of the lay
Congregation of Brothers [
Brødremenighed
] in
Copenhagen, which he and his family attended in addition to the
sermons by Bishop J. P. Mynster.
For Kierkegaard Christian faith is not a matter of regurgitating
church dogma. It is a matter of individual subjective passion, which
cannot be mediated by the clergy or by human artefacts. Faith is the
most important task to be achieved by a human being, because only on
the basis of faith does an individual have a chance to become a true
self. This self is the life-work which God judges for eternity.
The individual is thereby subject to an enormous burden of
responsibility, for upon h/er existential choices hangs h/er eternal
salvation or damnation. Anxiety or dread (
Angest
) is the
presentiment of this terrible responsibility when the individual stands
at the threshold of momentous existential choice. Anxiety is a
two-sided emotion: on one side is the dread burden of choosing for
eternity; on the other side is the exhilaration of freedom in choosing
oneself. Choice occurs in the instant (
Øjeblikket
),
which is the point at which time and eternity intersect — for the
individual creates through temporal choice a self which will be judged
for eternity.
But the choice of faith is not made once and for all. It is
essential that faith be constantly renewed by means of repeated avowals
of faith. One's very selfhood depends upon this repetition, for
according to Anti-Climacus, the self “is a relation which relates
itself to itself” (
The Sickness Unto Death
). But unless this
self acknowledges a “power which constituted it,” it falls into a
despair which undoes its selfhood. Therefore, in order to maintain
itself as a relation which relates itself to itself, the self must
constantly renew its faith in “the power which posited it.” There is no
mediation
between the individual self and God by priest or by
logical system (
contra
Catholicism and Hegelianism
respectively). There is only the individual's own
repetition
of faith. This repetition of faith is the way the self relates itself
to itself and to the power which constituted it, i.e. the repetition of
faith
is
the self.
Christian dogma, according to Kierkegaard, embodies paradoxes which
are offensive to reason. The central paradox is the assertion that the
eternal, infinite, transcendent God simultaneously became incarnated as
a temporal, finite, human being (Jesus). There are two possible
attitudes we can adopt to this assertion, viz. we can have faith, or we
can take offense. What we cannot do, according to Kierkegaard, is
believe by virtue of reason. If we choose faith we must suspend our
reason in order to believe in something higher than reason. In fact we
must believe
by virtue of the absurd
.
Much of Kierkegaard's authorship explores the notion of the absurd:
Job gets everything back again by virtue of the absurd
(
Repetition
); Abraham gets a reprieve from having to sacrifice
Isaac, by virtue of the absurd (
Fear and Trembling
);
Kierkegaard hoped to get Regine back again after breaking off their
engagement, by virtue of the absurd (
Journals
); Climacus hopes
to deceive readers into the truth of Christianity by virtue of an
absurd representation of Christianity's ineffability; the Christian God
is represented as absolutely transcendent of human categories yet is
absurdly presented as a personal God with the human capacities to love,
judge, forgive, teach, etc. Kierkegaard's notion of the absurd
subsequently became an important category for twentieth century
existentialists, though usually devoid of its religious
associations.
According to Johannes Climacus, faith is a miracle, a gift from God
whereby eternal truth enters time in the instant. This Christian
conception of the relation between (eternal) truth and time is distinct
from the Socratic notion that (eternal) truth is always already within
us — it just needs to be recovered by means of recollection
(
anamnesis
). The condition for realizing (eternal) truth for
the Christian is a gift (
Gave
) from God, but its realization
is a task (
Opgave
) which must be repeatedly performed by the
individual believer. Whereas Socratic recollection is a recuperation of
the past, Christian repetition is a “recollection forwards” — so that
the eternal (future) truth is captured in time.
Crucial to the miracle of Christian faith is the realization that
over against God we are always in the wrong. That is, we must realize
that we are always in sin. This is the condition for faith, and must be
given by God. The idea of sin cannot evolve from purely human origins.
Rather, it must have been introduced into the world from a transcendent
source. Once we understand that we are in sin, we can understand that
there is some being over against which we are always in the wrong. On
this basis we can have faith that, by virtue of the absurd, we can
ultimately be atoned with this being.
Kierkegaard is sometimes regarded as an apolitical thinker, but in fact
he intervened stridently in church politics, cultural politics, and in
the turbulent social changes of his time. His earliest published essay,
for example, was a polemic against women's liberation. It is a
reactionary apologetic for the prevailing patriarchal values, and was
motivated largely by Kierkegaard's desire to ingratiate himself with
factions within Copenhagen's intellectual circles. This latter desire
gradually left him, but his relation to women remained highly
questionable.
One of Kierkegaard's main interventions in cultural politics was his
sustained attack on Hegelianism. Hegel's philosophy had been introduced
into Denmark with religious zeal by J.L. Heiberg, and was taken up
enthusiastically within the theology faculty of Copenhagen University
and by Copenhagen's literati. Kierkegaard, too, was induced to make a
serious study of Hegel's work. While Kierkegaard greatly admired Hegel,
he had grave reservations about Hegelianism and its bombastic promises.
Hegel would have been the greatest thinker who ever lived, said
Kierkegaard, if only he had regarded his system as a
thought-experiment. Instead he took himself seriously to have reached
the truth, and so rendered himself comical.
Kierkegaard's tactic in undermining Hegelianism was to produce an
elaborate parody of Hegel's entire system. The pseudonymous authorship,
from
Either-Or
to
Concluding Unscientific Postscript
,
presents an inverted Hegelian dialectic which is designed to lead
readers away from knowledge rather than towards it. This authorship
simultaneously snipes at German romanticism and contemporary Danish
literati (with J.L. Heiberg receiving much acerbic comment).
This intriguing pseudonymous authorship received little popular
attention, aimed as it was at the literary elite. So it had little
immediate effect as discursive action. Kierkegaard sought to remedy
this by provoking an attack on himself in the popular satirical review
The Corsair
. Kierkegaard succeeded in having himself
mercilessly lampooned in this publication, largely on personal grounds
rather than in terms of the substance of his writings. The suffering
incurred by these attacks sparked Kierkegaard into another highly
productive phase of authorship, but this time his focus was the
creation of positive Christian discourses rather than satire or
parody.
Eventually Kierkegaard became more and more worried about the
direction taken by the Danish People's Church, especially after the
death of the Bishop Primate J.P. Mynster. He realized he could no
longer indulge himself in the painstakingly erudite and poetically
meticulous writing he had practised hitherto. He had to intervene
decisively in a popular medium, so he published his own pamphlet under
the title
The Instant
. This addressed church politics directly
and increasingly shrilly.
There were two main foci of Kierkegaard's concern in church
politics. One was the influence of Hegel, largely through the teachings
of H.L. Martensen; the other was the popularity of N.F.S. Grundtvig, a
theologian, educator and poet who composed most of the pieces in the
Danish hymn book. Grundtvig's theology was diametrically opposed to
Kierkegaard's in tone. Grundtvig emphasized the light, joyous,
celebratory and communal aspects of Christianity, whereas Kierkegaard
emphasized seriousness, suffering, sin, guilt, and individual
isolation. Kierkegaard's intervention failed miserably with respect to
the Danish People's Church, which became predominantly Grundtvigian.
His intervention with respect to Hegelianism also failed, with
Martensen succeeding Mynster as Bishop Primate. Hegelianism in the
church went on to die of natural causes.
Kierkegaard also provided critical commentary on social change. He
was an untiring champion of “the single individual” as opposed to “the
crowd”. He feared that the opportunity of achieving geniune selfhood
was diminished by the social production of stereotypes. He lived in an
age when mass society was emerging from a highly stratified feudal
order and was contemptuous of the mediocrity the new social order
generated. One symptom of the change was that mass society substitutes
detached reflection for engaged passionate commitment. Yet the latter
is crucial for Christian faith and for authentic selfhood according to
Kierkegaard.
Kierkegaard's real value as a social and political thinker was not
realized until after his death. His pamphleteering achieved little
immediate impact, but his substantial philosophical, literary,
psychological and theological writings have had a lasting effect. Much
of Heidegger's very influential work,
Being And Time
, is
indebted to Kierkegaard's writings (though this goes unacknowledged by
Heidegger). Kierkegaard's social realism, his deep psychological and
philosophical analyses of contemporary problems, and his concern to
address “the present age” were taken up by fellow Scandinavians Henrik
Ibsen and August Strindberg. Ibsen and Strindberg, together with
Friedrich Nietzsche, became central icons of the modernism movement in
Berlin in the 1890s. The Danish literary critic Georg Brandes was
instrumental in conjoining these intellectual figures: he had given the
first university lectures on Kierkegaard and on Nietzsche; he had
promoted Kierkegaard's work to Nietzsche and to Strindberg; and he had
put Strindberg in correspondence with Nietzsche. Taking his cue from
Brandes, the Swedish literary critic Ola Hansson subsequently promoted
this conjunction of writers in Berlin itself. Berlin modernism
self-consciously sought to use art as a means of political and social
change. It continued Kierkegaard's concern to use discursive action for
social transformation.
1813
|
born May 5 in Copenhagen (Denmark)
|
1830
|
matriculated to the university of Copenhagen
|
1834
|
mother died
|
1837
|
met Regine Olsen
|
1838
|
father died
|
-
|
From the Papers of One Still Living. Published
against his Will by S. Kierkegaard
(
Af en endnu Levendes Papirer —
Udgivet mod hans Villie af S. Kierkegaard
)
|
1840
|
passed final theological examination
|
-
|
proposed to Regine Olsen, who accepted him
|
1841
|
broke off his engagement to Regine Olsen
|
-
|
defended his dissertation
On the Concept of Irony
with constant reference to Socrates
(
Om Begrebet Ironi med stadigt
Hensyn til Socrates
)
|
-
|
trip to Berlin, where he attended lectures by
Schelling
|
1842
|
returned from Berlin
|
1843
|
Either-Or: A Fragment of Life edited by Victor
Eremita
(
Enten-Eller. Et Livs-Fragment, udgivet af Victor
Eremita
)
|
-
|
second trip to Berlin
|
-
|
Two Edifying Discourses by S. Kierkegaard
(
To
opbyggelige Taler
)
|
-
|
Fear and Trembling: A Dialectical Lyric by
Johannes de Silentio
(
Frygt og Bœven. Dialektisk Lyrik af
Johannes de Silentio
)
|
-
|
Repetition: A Venture in Experimenting Psychology
by Constantin Constantius
(
Gjentagelsen. Et Forsøg i den
experimenterende Psychologi af Constantin Constantius
) (published
the same day as
Fear and Trembling
)
|
-
|
Three Edifying Discourses by S. Kierkegaard
(
Tre
opbyggelige Taler
)
|
-
|
Four Edifying Discourses by S. Kierkegaard
(
Fire
opbyggelige Taler
)
|
1844
|
Two Edifying Discourses by S. Kierkegaard
(
To
opbyggelige Taler
)
|
-
|
Three Edifying Discourses by S. Kierkegaard
(
Tre
opbyggelige Taler
)
|
-
|
Philosophical Fragments or a Fragment of
Philosophy by Johannes Climacus, published by S. Kierkegaard
(
Philosophiske Smuler eller En Smule Philosophie. Af Johannes Climacus.
Udgivet af S. Kierkegaard
)
|
-
|
The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple
Psychologically-Oriented Reflection on the Dogmatic Problem of Original
Sin by Vigilius Haufniensis
(
Begrebet Angest. En simpel
psychologisk-paapegende Overveielse i Retning of det dogmatiske Problem
om Arvesynden af Vigilius Haufniensis
)
|
-
|
Prefaces: Light Reading for Certain Classes as the
Occasion may Require by Nicolaus Notabene
(
Forord.
Morskabslœsning for enkelte Stœnder efter Tid og Lejlighed,
af Nicolaus Notabene
) (published on the same day as
The
Concept of Anxiety
)
|
-
|
Four Edifying Discourses by S. Kierkegaard
(
Fire
opbyggelige Taler
)
|
1845
|
Three Addresses on Imagined Occasions by S.
Kierkegaard
(
Tre Taler ved tœnkte Leiligheder
)
|
-
|
Stages On Life's Way: Studies by Various Persons,
compiled, forwarded to the press, and published by Hilarious Bookbinder
(
Stadier paa Livets Vej. Studier af Forskjellige. Sammenbragte,
befordrede til Trykken og udgivne af Hilarius Bogbinder
)
|
-
|
third trip to Berlin
|
-
|
Eighteen Edifying Discourses by S.
Kierkegaard
(a collection of the remaindered
Edifying
Discourses
from 1843 and 1844)
|
-
|
in an article in
Fœdrelandet
Frater
Taciturnus (a character from
Stages on Life's Way
) asked to be
lambasted in
The Corsair
|
1846
|
Kierkegaard lampooned in
The Corsair
|
-
|
Concluding Unscientific Postscript to
Philosophical Fragments: A Mimetic-Pathetic-Dialectic Compilation, An
Existential Plea, by Johannes Climacus, published by S. Kierkegaard
(
Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift til de philosophiske Smuler. —
Mimisk-pathetisk-dialektisk Sammenskrift, Existentielt Indlœg, af
Johannes Climacus. Udgiven af S. Kierkegaard
)
|
-
|
A Literary Review
: “Two Ages” — novella by the
author of “An Everyday Story” — reviewed by S. Kierkegaard (
En
literair Anmeldelse af S. Kierkegaard
)
|
1847
|
Edifying Discourses in Different Spirits by S.
Kierkegaard
(
Opbyggelige Taler i forskjellig Aand af S.
Kierkegaard
)
|
-
|
Works of Love: Some Christian Reflections in the
Form of Discourses by S. Kierkegaard
(
Kjerlighedens Gjerninger. Nogle
christelige Overveielser i Talers Form, af S. Kierkegaard
)
|
-
|
Regine marries Fritz Schlegel
|
1848
|
Christian Discourses by S. Kierkegaard
(
Christelige Taler, af S. Kierkegaard
)
|
-
|
The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress
by Inter et Inter
(
Krisen og en Krise i en Skuespillerindes Liv af
Inter et Inter
)
|
-
|
The Point of View for my Work as an Author: A
Direct Communication, A Report to History
(
Synspunktet for min
Forfatter-Virksomhed. En ligefrem Meddelelse, Rapport til Historien, af
S. Kierkegaard
) (unpublished)
|
1849
|
second edition of
Either-Or
|
-
|
The Lilies of the Field and the Birds of the Air:
Three devotional discourses by S. Kierkegaard
(
Lilien paa Marken og
Fuglen under Himlen. Tre gudelige Taler af S. Kierkegaard
)
|
-
|
Two Ethico-Religious Treatises by H.H.
(
Tvende
ethisk-religieuse Smaa-Afhandlinger. Af H.H.
)
|
-
|
The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian psychological
exposition for edification and awakening by Anti-Climacus, edited by S.
Kierkegaard
(
Sygdommen til Døden. En christelig psychologisk
Udvikling til Opvœkkelse. Af Anticlimacus. Udgivet af S.
Kierkegaard
)
|
-
|
“The High Priest” — “The Publican” —
and “The Woman taken in Sin”: three addresses at Holy Communion on
Fridays by S. Kierkegaard (“Yppersteprœsten” —
“Tolderen” — “Synderinden”, tre Taler ved Altergangen om
Fredagen. Af S. Kierkegaard)
|
1850
|
Training in Christianity by Anti-Climacus, Nos. I,
II, III, edited by S. Kierkegaard
(
Indøvelse i Christendom. Af
Anti-Climacus — Udgivet af S. Kierkegaard
)
|
-
|
An Edifying Discourse by S. Kierkegaard
(
En
opbyggelig Tale. Af S. Kierkegaard
)
|
1851
|
On My Activity As A Writer by S. Kierkegaard
(
Om
min Forfatter-Virksomhed. Af S. Kierkegaard
)
|
-
|
Two Discourses at Holy Communion on Fridays by S.
Kierkegaard
(
To Taler ved Altergangen om Fredagen
)
|
-
|
For Self-Examination: Recommended to the
Contemporary Age by S. Kierkegaard
(
Til Selvprøvelse, Samtiden
anbefalet. Af S. Kierkegaard
)
|
-
|
Judge For Yourselves! Recommended to the present
time for Self-Examination. Second series, by S. Kierkegaard
(
Dømmer Selv! Til Selvprøvelse Samtiden anbefalet. Anden
Rœkke, af S. Kierkegaard
) (published posthumously 1876)
|
1854
|
Bishop Mynster died
|
-
|
Martensen appointed bishop
|
-
|
“Was Bishop Mynster ‘a witness to the
truth,’ one of ‘the true witnesses to the truth’ —
is this the truth?
” by S. Kierkegaard in
Fœdrelandet
(“Var Biskop Mynster et ‘Sandhedsvidne’, et
af ‘de rette Sandhedsvidner’,
er dette Sandhed?
” Af S.
Kierkegaard) (the first of 21 articles in
Fœdrelandet
)
|
1855
|
This Must Be Said, So Let It Be Said, by S.
Kierkegaard
(
Dette skal siges; saa vœre det da sagt. Af S.
Kierkegaard
)
|
-
|
The Instant by S. Kierkegaard
(
Øjeblikket.
Af S. Kierkegaard
)
|
-
|
Christ's Judgement on Official Christianity by S.
Kierkegaard
(
Hvad Christus dømmer om officiel Christendom. Af S.
Kierkegaard
)
|
-
|
God's Unchangeability: A Discourse by S.
Kierkegaard
(
Guds Uforanderlighed. En Tale — Af S.
Kierkegaard
)
|
-
|
Kierkegaard died November 11.
|
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Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
|
individuals
|
personal identity
|
Socrates