Cruel intentions
The Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) was firmly convinced that his first philosophical book was also to be his last. His family’s grim medical history led him to assume that he would die young, and he felt that his short time would be more agreeably spent as a rural pastor. But “things did not go as I expected and intended”, he later wrote. “Oh, no.” Because that book, Either/Or (1843), quickly propelled Kierkegaard to literary celebrity and signalled the beginning of one of history’s most frantic writing careers.
As a child Kierkegaard was sensitive, sulky, ironical and precocious. In other words, he had precisely that youthful temperament which, while not a sufficient condition, is nonetheless a necessary condition for the later burgeoning of genius. In adolescence, Kierkegaard’s shyness gave way to defensive wit, his lack of physical endowments conditioning the need for a different type of strength. At school, he was talented but not exceptional, always overshadowed by his eldest brother, Peter. But posterity has been kind to the younger Kierkegaard: his childhood indolence is seen now as an indictment of the tedious pedagogical system of the time, rather than of his moral or intellectual stamina. Indeed, it is precisely here, in the oppressive nineteenth-century classroom, that the mature Kierkegaard’s radically individualistic, anti-authoritarian attitude developed – even if, for now, it could only manifest itself as naughtiness.
In his twenty-fifth year Kierkegaard’s dwindling family became smaller still when his father died (his mother and five of his six siblings had already done so), leaving him and Peter a fortune. But, in a way that can’t fail to be of interest to the post-Freudian reader, this period of unrest seems to have focused Kierkegaard’s mind, and he took to work on his theological examinations with uncharacteristic vigour. As the ground fell away beneath him, Kierkegaard found his feet.
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Around this time Regine Olsen entered his life. Later, Kierkegaard would claim that he had long planned to marry her, but there is little outward sign of this before his awkward, abrupt proposal in September 1840. During his relationship with Regine, documented in a series of startling, passionate but strangely abstract letters, Kierkegaard was not merely courting a kind-hearted and unusually patient teenager, but earthly life and its rewards. Thus when, a year later, he broke off the engagement, he was only ratifying a renunciation he had initiated long before, back while he was still making avowals of love: by identifying Regine with the sum of what the world had to offer, he had barred himself from ever appreciating what she herself had to offer. He had shrouded her particularity in the garb of the universal.
Determined though Kierkegaard was to retreat from life in order to devote himself to his work, his life remained inseparably caught up in that work. At that time, he was working on the manuscript of Either/Or, a long and baffling work, which looked at serious risk of remaining unfinished. Its longest section, “The Seducer’s Diary”, is a haunting novella-like narrative about a philandering aesthete called Johannes the Seducer. Johannes preys on a young woman called Cordelia, dedicating months to inducing her to fall in love with him, something he does with the calculation and guile of the modern-day “pick-up artist”. When he finally succeeds, he instantly and irrevocably takes leave.
Later, Kierkegaard claimed that writing the “Diary” – his most celebrated literary achievement, often published as a stand-alone book – was an act of what elsewhere he called “necessary cruelty”, an attempt to “repel” the still hopeful Regine by making her see him as a pervert and a scoundrel. (In fact, in its relative understatement, the near-contemporaneous Repetition, which also concerns a broken engagement, is arguably the crueller book. And in Stages on Life’s Way, Kierkegaard even went so far as to include a verbatim copy of the letter in which he broke off the engagement.) During this period, both on the page and off, Kierkegaard’s behaviour towards Regine was often truly callous, but it appears that he succeeded more by perseverance than by the believability of the charade.
Like most of Kierkegaard’s better-known works – in fact, as Mark Bernier reminds us in The Task of Hope in Kierkegaard, like many Danish works of the period – Either/Or was written pseudonymously. The first volume comprises the assembled papers of an unnamed young cynic – “A” – who inhabits what Kierkegaard calls the aesthetic “stage of life” or “sphere of existence”. A’s passions lie in music, art and erotic love; his hero is Mozart’s Don Giovanni. His life is organized around a perpetual search for pleasure, which, in his atheistic world view, is the only thing with intrinsic value. Throughout his search, A is haunted by the menace of boredom, that unwanted spectre which always threatens to turn up and spoil the banquet. His solution is nothing short of extraordinary. No stranger to the commonplaces that familiarity breeds contempt and fulfilment spells the death of desire, A advocates nurturing an attitude of arbitrariness towards the world. In such a relation lies “the whole secret” of enjoyment, because it transforms anything into potential material for pleasure – be that the affection of a beautiful lover or, to use A’s own example, watching the sweat gather on and cascade off the nose of an insufferable interlocutor.
But for all its ingenuity, A’s approach to life is self-defeating: if one can enjoy anything, then really one can enjoy nothing, for the distinction between pleasure and displeasure collapses. As we learn from Hegel – Kierkegaard’s Aunt Sally – concepts only have meaning if they can discriminate between particulars. What’s more, by placing his source of meaning outside himself, in the world, A remains at the mercy of that all too often unmerciful world; while one can perhaps evade boredom – perhaps even indefinitely – what about the common doom that sooner or later makes its mark on every life?
In the second volume, A is lambasted by his friend and antagonist Judge Vilhelm, who, true to his name, judges the younger man’s behaviour and outlook harshly, albeit out of solicitude and affection. Judge Vilhelm’s interest lies not in the perpetual cycle of A’s falling in and fleeing from love, but in the way that love persists between a single couple, in the ordinary pleasures of abiding, fidelity and devotion. If love is to burgeon beyond the opening salvos of infatuation, he argues, it must be underwritten by the presence of God, something which gives the lovers’ finite, earthly relationship the stamp of eternity. Eventually, the judge enjoins his friend to make the titular “either/or”, to leap beyond his self-defeating pursuit of pleasure and, in the presence of God, enter into the more committed, meaningful existence that belongs to the ethical sphere – the sphere defined by discerning calculation and choice.
Judge Vilhelm insures against the fickleness of fate through an inward turn. What gives his life meaning is not this or that thing “out there”, but his own act of calculated choice. However, this makes his engagement with the world rather abstract; after all, his commitment is not to that which he has chosen (his wife; his career; his values), but to the formal act of choosing. His dalliances with particulars are mere conduits to the universal. Above all, for Kierkegaard the judge fails to live to the highest ideal – faith – because he remains too ensnared in the world, retains too much futile hope of realizing his infinite projects within its finite bounds.
In the language of Fear and Trembling (published the same year under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio), the well-intentioned judge has failed to the movement of “infinite resignation”, a prerequisite of entry into the highest sphere: the religious. (In Either/Or this sphere is only hinted at, but it is thoroughly elaborated in Kierkegaard’s other works from this period such as Stages on Life’s Way.) Contrary to stories of those who find faith and then renounce all their worldly possessions, according to de Silentio one is only ready to enter into faith after one has renounced everything – and not simply one’s television and sports car, but all of one’s worldly hopes and aspirations. If, having done this, one breaks free from despair and makes the requisite leap towards God, then one receives everything anew, no longer by virtue of worldly calculation but by “virtue of the absurd”.
Like its predecessor, Fear and Trembling is about the incommensurability of life’s stages; specifically, it is about the religious suspension of the ethical, epitomized by Abraham’s willingness to kill his son, Isaac – an act which, ethically speaking, remains an abhorrent crime. Abraham’s anxiety lies in the terrifying, insuperable contradiction between these perspectives – between the ethical and the religious, between infanticide and sacrifice. For Kierkegaard, this anxiety is the inevitable consequence when a finite, worldly being properly confronts the infinite; it must underwrite each person’s reckoning with God.
This is a dizzying vision of faith, and it is one that proves too much for even de Silentio to bear; he claims he has never met a true believer (a “knight of faith”) and wonders whether such a person even exists. In subsequent books this vision becomes more frightful still, because later Kierkegaard has more to say about sin and despair, which are mostly absent from the early texts. Terrifying though despair is, it is also necessary, for it is only by passing through it that one can become a fully fledged individual self. In The Sickness unto Death (1849), Kierkegaard’s Anti-Climacus explains how, far from an inheritance of birth, the “self” is in fact a vocation – something that one must forge in a solitary reckoning with God, an experience that couldn’t be further from the comforts and consolations offered by mainstream Christendom. Despair, he explains, is man’s common lot, even if it is often only implicitly so. The worldly majority who do not experience despair directly have the bleakest prognosis when it comes to escaping its grips; for one does not defeat despair by flight, but by ascending through its levels until one reaches its apotheosis. If one finds reading a book like The Sickness unto Death an unpleasant experience, then that is about right: Kierkegaard aims to strip his reader of “the so-called security, contentment with life, etc., which is simply despair” so that he or she may face up to the difficult – but necessary – task of “becoming a single individual”.
Newcomers to Kierkegaard searching for the typical philosophical fare of theses and arguments may well find themselves baffled. These books are exercises in what he famously called “indirect communication” – a tactic Socratic in origin, which springs from the conviction that philosophical truths are not exchanged like currency, but arrived at individually; that the task of the philosopher is therefore not to represent truths directly, but to provoke the requisite gestation, to “deceive a person into the truth”. This casts light on Kierkegaard’s controversial, often misunderstood dictum that “truth is subjectivity”, which doesn’t mean that something becomes true by virtue of my saying or believing it to be so, but that beliefs acquire truth only in relation to the individual’s lived orientation towards them.
John Updike famously argued that Kierkegaard’s works owe much to the art of novel-writing. After all, they are written by and about fictional characters whose world views they attempt to occupy from within. In a way that would please the contemporary teacher of creative writing, Kierkegaard does not tell – he shows. But we mustn’t get carried away; we do Kierkegaard a disservice if we simply appreciate his books. By departing from the normal philosophical form, they arguably tighten rather than slacken the demand on our attention, because arguments are present, but one must search for them, and often they reside in what Kierkegaard’s characters do not or cannot say – in the implicit gaps in their imperfect world views.
It is important to remember that these pseudonymous texts represent only one – albeit posterity’s preferred – side of Kierkegaard’s amphibious authorship. Throughout his career, Kierkegaard published many texts under his own name. Some, such as “Two Ages” (1846; written after the infamous “Corsair Affair”, during which Kierkegaard was attacked by a popular satirical magazine), are pieces of biting cultural criticism. In that book-length essay, he attacks his “passionless but reflective age” which “levels” all values until all things are equal, and all things equally meaningless (pithy thoughts for the internet age – where an article about Kierkegaard might be flanked by a cosmetics advert). The agent of this great reduction is an anonymous, abstract “public”, which – with the help of mass media – drowns the individual with its chattering “gossip”. (This essay evidently made a strong impression on the young Martin Heidegger.) Also, at the end of his life, in the mid-1850s, Kierkegaard wrote a series of acidic, virulent pamphlets in which, with outrageous hyperbole, he dissected the paltry hypocrisies of official Danish Christendom. Despite being radically different in topic and tone, both bear a close relation to Kierkegaard’s philosophical project: they seek to violently strip the reader of the psychic and social comforts that stop one from being forced – and therefore able – to confront the terrifying task of forging an individual self before God.
But there is another, quieter side to Kierkegaard’s personal authorship. Right from the start, he wrote directly religious biblical exegeses – what he, aware of his non-clerical status, refused to call sermons, but called instead “discourses”. one of these, recently published in a new translation in a gorgeous stand-alone edition, is called The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air: Three godly discourses. It was written in the spring of 1848, at the outbreak of the First Schleswig War, as Danish troops gathered north of Flensburg. The all too worldly context of territorial disputes serves as a fitting backdrop for a work which concerns the famous passage from the Sermon on the Mount about the vanity of worldly preoccupations.
For a reader familiar with Kierkegaard’s philosophical work, what’s most striking about Three Godly Discourses is its gentle, graceful simplicity. Gone are the ironic distance, artifice and polyphony of his better-known works; instead we find a work that is disarmingly sincere – one offered, he says, not with his left but with his right hand. The book opens with the observation that there appears to be a kinship between the poet’s and the Christian’s praise of nature, but quickly points out that really things couldn’t be more different. The poet’s “sincerity” is but dissembled cynicism; really, his euphonic lament at man’s inferiority to silent nature is an attempt to prove the dominance of speech – namely, his own – over silence. Unlike the poet, the Christian does not lament; instead, he earnestly submits himself to the lily and the bird, treating them as teachers from which one can learn the virtues of silence, obedience and joy. As Anti-Climacus writes in the near-contemporaneous (and decidedly less gentle) The Sickness unto Death: “From the Christian viewpoint”, the poet commits the sin “of relating oneself in imagination to the good and true instead of . . . striving existentially to be it”. It is of course ironic that, despite being about Christianity’s superiority over poetry, Three Godly Discourses is itself undoubtedly a poetic work, one whose points are established not through argumentation but through repetition. one could argue, however, that Kierkegaard’s book aims humbly to point to an experience of silence that escapes it, whereas a poem points only to itself.
Given this dizzying proliferation of names, masks and personae – among which the inclusion of Kierkegaard’s own name serves to confound rather than clarify – the question arises: how does one read Kierkegaard? For some this is the question of Kierkegaard studies, while for others it constitutes no more than an interesting distraction that prevents one from ever making a start. In his interrogation of the neglected topic of hope (“an essential thread that connects despair, faith, and the self”), Bernier places himself firmly in the second camp. True, this approach has the virtue of expediency, and Bernier’s book is certainly admirable, but surely a detailed examination of Kierkegaard’s diverging voices and registers can serve to illuminate, rather than distract us from, his treatment of other topics. In her curious little volume Kierkegaard’s Dancing Tax Collector, Sheridan Hough does just that. Hough uses the tantalizing image of the inauspicious knight of faith (who, Johannes de Silentio tell us, looks just like a bourgeois philistine tax collector) as a unifying theme to guide her investigation of Kierkegaard’s polyphonic corpus. Written in lively, engaging narrative form, Hough’s book would make a good point of entry to those newcomers who find the idea of starting with the man himself too daunting, and with a student’s guide too dreary.
Of course, at some point one will have to immerse oneself in that formidable body of work. It wasn’t just Either/Or that Kierkegaard thought would be his last book. In fact, in the 1840s he made himself this promise with every book that he wrote, or so he says (given that he was not unknown to publish several books on the same day, one does wonder how seriously one can take this claim). Perhaps it was a pity that Kierkegaard never enjoyed the bucolic pleasures of the rural life he idealized, but his messianic sense of purpose – his feeling that he must be “sacrificed . . . in order to promulgate the idea” – meant that this was never seriously on the cards. Feeling death’s cold breath on his neck did not slow him down; far from it. In fact, his writing career was almost peerlessly prolific. In the twelve years that he was writing, Kierkegaard left behind enough work to fill fifty-five volumes, before he died – young, as he predicted – at the age of forty-two.