Kierkegaard

by Stephen Backhouse

  Søren was gaining a reputation as one of the wittiest and cleverest of the bunch, due in large part to his student activities. Søren may not have been a keen theologian, but he was active in other university circles and he was making a name for himself in this sphere. Søren attended lectures in psychology, poetry, history, and philosophy. He does not seem to have loved any of these subjects, but two philosophy lecturers in particular were to catch his attention, and he theirs. Søren became friendly with Frederik Christian Sibbern, who taught aesthetics. Sibbern was a serious man, averse to affectation. He wrote complicated, dense texts, but he was also a poet. His daughter remembered Søren’s visits to the family home, where the two men talked into the long evening “when the fire gleamed in the stove.”

  The other key person in Søren’s education was Poul Martin Møller. Of the two favourite professors, Møller’s life was the more colourful. Before taking up his post at the university, Møller had served as a ship’s chaplain. He too was a poet and a celebrated public figure. There is little indication of how much Søren actually learned from Møller’s philosophy lectures: it was Møller’s style and personality that won him over. Møller also lived in a house on Nytorv and was known to frequent the same cafes as Søren. An early champion of the idea that one should authentically inhabit one’s ideas, Møller was a sharp critic and a keen satirist, who, to Søren’s delight, could easily puncture the pomposity of Copenhagen’s intellectual elite.

  The prime source of puffed-up cultural superiority in nineteenth-century Europe was the German thinker Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. One of Hegel’s Big Ideas was that the historical development of art, religion, and philosophy told us something true about the development of the Divine Mind in the universe. The revelation of God was not to be found in a person or a holy text but in the development of a culture’s history. The unfolding Spirit is first encountered in a society’s art. This artistic expression is then given meaning and explanation in that society’s religion. Finally, it is philosophy that explains the religion. The Spirit is ever developing and thus the Divine is revealed in mankind’s highest achievements. To see the latest and best manifestation of the Divine Mind in the world, all one has to do is look at the latest and best manifestation of the world’s civilisation. The reader will be given no prizes for guessing whose art, religion, and philosophy the Western European Hegel thought was currently sitting on the top of the civilizational pile.

  Hegel was (and is) a towering figure in Western philosophy. His influence was (and is) immense, even where his name goes unacknowledged. Hegel and his followers have a hand in such apparently opposite movements as the Manifest Destiny of American exceptionalism, the class-war struggle of Marx’s dialectical materialism, and the triumphalism of the Third Reich. Both the liberal myth of progress and the conservative myth of the Golden Age owe Hegel a debt of gratitude. Wherever one finds a commitment to one’s culture and history as itself being a vehicle for truth, one finds Hegel’s fingerprints.

  If you were an academic or literary figure in Denmark in the 1830s, Hegel was inescapable. Either you were setting yourself against him and his systematic view of culture or you were seeking to align your favoured theories with his. Either way, you were grappling with the knotty Swabian. As with the rest of Europe, much of the Danish scene at this time saw authors, philosophers, theologians, and churchmen finding ways to articulate their innate sense of cultural superiority along Hegelian lines.

  Sibbern and Møller were no different. Sibbern had to account for Hegelian dialectic in his own aesthetic philosophy. He questioned the Hegelian presumption that one could approach a subject without presuppositions and attain some sort of neutral, objective point of view. By 1837 Møller was offering a sympathetic critique of Hegelianism, based in part on Hegel’s inability to account for individual experiences. What marks Sibbern and Møller apart from many of their contemporaries at the university is a healthy scepticism about the pretensions of many of Hegel’s Danish followers. It is from them that Søren must have begun to form his own approach to Hegel: a respectful yet critical reading of the master coupled with fierce and unrelenting attacks on the affections of his self-styled disciples. Hegel yes, but especially the Danish Hegelians would be a primary target for the rest of Søren’s life.

  The main disciple was Hans Lassen Martensen. Long before he became the bishop overlooking Søren’s funeral from afar, Martensen was a promising young theologian. In the 1830s he was gaining a reputation in church and university circles as an exciting communicator of complex ideas, especially Hegelianism, of which Martensen was an early champion. In his lectures and publications throughout this time Martensen developed his take on the typical Hegelian view that the established church, culture, and state are crucial to religion and part of Christianity’s inevitable progress. Martensen was also adept at teaching on subjects such as Cartesian philosophy and modern theology, and Søren engaged him as a personal tutor in the summer of 1834. True to Søren’s form, studies with Martensen were not focussed, and Martensen seems to have been given free rein to choose the subject. Martensen led Søren through readings of Schleiermacher, the eighteenth-century “father of liberal theology.” Open warfare between the two men was still years away, but it is safe to say the two did not hit it off. At twenty-six, Martensen was five years older than Søren, not old enough to command respect yet still young enough to pose something of a professional rival. It is clear that Martensen’s popular style rankled Kierkegaard as much as his subject matter. That a complex set of thoughts could be packaged and presented in an easy manner bothered Søren. In later years, he would cast a critical eye on the young Martensen who “fascinated the youth and gave them the idea they could swallow everything in half a year.”

  For his part, Martensen claims not to have been impressed with the callow Søren either. In his memoirs, also written long after Kierkegaard had become an avowed enemy, Martensen paints a picture of a mentally sharp but emotionally unbalanced man with “a crack in his sounding board.” It is from Martensen’s memoirs that we get a unique anecdote, which Martensen intends to demonstrate Søren’s temperament. Søren engaged Martensen in the same summer of 1834 that his mother, Anne Kierkegaard, died. At this time Søren paid a visit to the Martensen family home and met with Martensen’s mother. “My mother has repeatedly confirmed,” Martensen writes, “that never in her life … had she seen a human being so deeply distressed as S. Kierkegaard by the death of his mother.” From this Mrs. Martensen concluded that Søren had “an unusually profound sensibility.” Why did Martensen include this curious story? It was certainly not to redress the utter lack of mention of Anne Kierkegaard in Søren’s own writing. Instead, Martensen offers this incident as demonstration of how Søren’s development became stunted. As the years passed “the sickly nature of his profound sensibility” increasingly got “the upper hand.” Of their tutorials together, Martensen comments, “I recognized immediately that his was not an ordinary intellect but that he also had an irresistible urge to sophistry, to hair-splitting games, which showed itself at every opportunity and was often tiresome.”

  Hans Lassen Martensen, a promising and popular academic and a private tutor to Kierkegaard. Søren dismissed Martensen as one who “fascinated the youth and gave them the idea they could swallow everything in half a year.” For his part, Martensen claimed that Kierkegaard had “a crack in his sounding board.”

  It was not only Søren’s enemies who noticed his tendency to latch, terrier-like, onto an argument and not let go. His friends too were concerned that his contentious nature would get the best of him. After one social engagement, Møller berated Søren for being so polemical all the time, a caution that Søren took to heart and mentioned in his journals more than once. Nevertheless, it was his arch, argumentative manner that catapulted Søren into the public consciousness.

  Søren’s first published works were examples of rhetoric and juvenile satire. An 1834 essay entitled “A Defence of Woman’s Superior Capacity�
� was printed in The Flying Post, a showcase for new writers and their ideas. The piece strains to be clever and funny about serious issues, a form typical to student journalism then as now. More significant for his reputation was the public debate that Søren undertook in the autumn of 1835. In November, J. A. Ostermann, an up-and-coming political leader, gave a paper to the Student Union in favour of increased liberalised press freedom. Two weeks later, Søren volunteered to offer a rebuttal. It would be his first foray into public debate. In the talk, titled “Our Journalistic Literature,” Kierkegaard took the position against freedom of the press and, crucially, its sense of self-importance. He argued that the recent political reforms the press had been claiming responsibility for had, in fact, originated from the government. The presentation was hailed as a success from many quarters. Ostermann was impressed by the “brilliant dialectic and wit” Søren showed at puncturing his arguments, but he did not bother to engage further with the dilettante. Ostermann recognised that Søren was not a serious political sparring partner. “I knew [he] had only a slight interest in the reality of the matter.” Søren seems to have chosen the position for largely polemical, rhetorical reasons, but in any case he continued the attack in the newspapers for the next few months under the pseudonym “B.” These pieces were also feted and after a bit of speculation in the student press, Søren was “outed” as the true source.

  As a result, Søren garnered a reputation amongst Copenhagen’s literati. The circle was led by Johan Ludvig Heiberg and his wife, Joanna, an actress and celebrated beauty. A leading light of what would come to be known as Denmark’s “Golden Age,” it was J. L. Heiberg who was one of the first to introduce Hegel to the Copenhagen scene. He was also an accomplished playwright and dramatic theorist who aligned his aesthetics with Hegelian systematics. Heiberg was the editor of The Flying Post and other literary journals. His attention could make or break careers, and he knew it. It is not hard to imagine young Søren’s beating heart and trembling fingers as he cracked the seal on the invitation to his first Heiberg soiree.

  A view of old Copenhagen

  Søren was a hit. He soon gained a reputation for his quick mind and witty repartee. Kierkegaard would go on to become a regular fixture at the salon parties, which included luminaries of the age such as the scientist H. C. Ørsted, Hans Christian Andersen, Møller, and Martensen. Søren seemed to be taking to this world like a duck to water. Yet the journals of this time reveal the furious paddling going on just under the surface. In one entry Søren likens himself to a two-faced Janus: “with one face I laugh, with the other I cry.” “People understand me so little that they do not even understand my laments over their not understanding me,” he wrote after one such soiree. And after another:

  I have just now come from a gathering where I was the life and soul of the party; witticisms flowed out of my mouth; everybody laughed, admired me—but I left, yes, the dash ought to be as long as the radii of the earth’s orbit———–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––and wanted to shoot myself.

  The public could see the comparison between Søren and his brother Peter, his relationship with his father, his spending habits, odd ways, desultory studies, sharp wit, polemical manner, impressive friends. They saw a cocky young gentleman with little practical sense, too much spare time, too much money, and a lot of unfocused talent. And they saw rightly. What no one could know, however, was that Søren saw it too.

  Søren began keeping a journal in 1833 and would continue to fill pages of volumes until his death in 1855. It is not a conventional diary by any means and rarely mentions the sort of daily events that other people tend to include in their log books. Most of the journal entries are undated. Some read like rough drafts of essays or written psychological experiments tracing the implications of this or that supposition. Some entries are rough-and-ready fragments; others are carefully edited with the full realisation that they would one day be read by others. The tone of the entries from the early stage of Søren’s life are introspective, demonstrating a high level of self-awareness and insight into what is going on around him. His role of the arch-observer who participates in sophisticated society at the same time as he winkles out that society’s weaknesses was one Søren recognised but did not relish. His journals reveal a growing distaste at events and of the part he was playing in them. “Blast it all, I can abstract from everything but not from myself; I cannot even forget myself when I sleep.”

  In the 1830s Søren was using the journals to test out different parts for himself, some of which he was to play for the rest of his life. One such role is that of “the master thief.” These early entries see Søren working on the theme of a rebel outsider who takes on the system and suffers punishment as a result. The journals are not all doom and gloom, even when they are morbid. Like the soldier in the trench or the nurse on the ward, Søren, the “master thief” awaiting his punishment, was adept at gallows humour. “One who walked along contemplating suicide,” he wrote in 1836, “at that very moment a stone fell down and killed him, and he ended with the words: Praise the Lord!” Or in 1837: “Situation: A person wants to write a novel in which one of the characters goes insane; during the process of composition he himself gradually goes insane and ends it in the first person.” Søren is alert to the ridiculousness of his own ennui: “I don’t feel like doing anything. I don’t feel like walking—it is tiring; I don’t feel like lying down, for either I would lie a long time, and I don’t feel like doing that, or I would get up right away, and I don’t feel like that either … I do not feel like writing what I have written here, and I do not feel like erasing it.”

  The restless spirit accompanying the apparently carefree gadabout had in fact been awakened in 1835. Father Michael was concerned and flummoxed about his wayward son. That year, in order to get Søren away from the deathly atmosphere at home and the witty time-wasters of his Copenhagen circle, Michael paid for Søren to spend the summer well out of town. In June, Søren travelled to Gilleleje in North Zealand, the area from which the Kierkegaard family hailed. For the twenty-two-year-old urbanite, the time of country living in the fresh air was a revelation. If Michael had been hoping to occasion in Søren a sense of perspective, it is likely he never knew how successful his scheme had been. Outwardly and in public Søren would appear to continue with his dilettante life for years to come. Inwardly, however, the journals from Gilleleje suggest serious work had begun. The entry for August 1, 1835, has become particularly famous. Its theme is about knowing oneself and one’s way in the world and it deserves quoting at length:

  What I really need is to get clear about what I am to do… . What matters is to find my purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth that is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die. Of what use would it be to me to discover a so-called objective truth, to work through the philosophical systems so that I could, if asked, make critical judgments about them, could point out the fallacies in each system; of what use would it be to me to be able to develop a theory of the state, getting details from various sources and combining them into a whole, and constructing a world I did not live in but merely held up for others to see; of what use would it be to me to be able to formulate the meaning of Christianity, to be able to explain many specific points—if it had no deeper meaning for me and for my life? … [Truth] must come alive in me, and this is what I now recognize as the most important of all. This is what my soul thirsts for as the African deserts thirst for water. This is what is lacking, and this is why I am like a man who has collected furniture, rented an apartment, but as yet has not found the beloved to share life’s ups and downs with him. But in order to find that idea—or, to put it more correctly—to find myself, it does no good to plunge still farther into the world. That was just what I did before… . I ha
ve vainly sought an anchor in the boundless sea of pleasure as well as in the depths of knowledge. I have felt the almost irresistible power with which one pleasure reaches a hand to the next; I have felt the counterfeit enthusiasm it is capable of producing. I have also felt the boredom, the shattering, which follows on its heels. I have tasted the fruits of the tree of knowledge and time and again have delighted in their savouriness… . Thus I am again standing at the point where I must begin again in another way. I shall now calmly attempt to look at myself and begin to initiate inner action; for only thus will I be able, like a child calling itself “I” in its first consciously undertaken act, be able to call myself “I” in a profounder sense. But that takes stamina, and it is not possible to harvest immediately what one has sown… . I will hurry along the path I have found and shout to everyone I meet: Do not look back as Lot’s wife did, but remember that we are struggling up a hill.

  Søren’s quest for truth that was personally engaging—for which he could “live and die”—led to an early rejection of much of the Christianity he had so far encountered. In an 1835 letter to his brother-in-law, Søren admits, “I grew up in orthodoxy, so to speak,” however, “as soon as I began to think for myself the enormous colossus gradually began to totter.” This was, undoubtedly, an awkward position to be in for someone training to be a minister in the established state church. Søren’s prevarication did not spring from hostility to Christianity as much as aversion to the way Christianity took the form of coteries in Christendom. Brother Peter seemed to be able to align his religious seriousness with a willingness to associate with specific factions in church politics. For some years Peter had been a supporter of N. S. F. Grundtvig, a Danish nationalist, poet, populist politician, and church reformer whose group set Creedal Christianity against the liberal Christianity of Mynster and Bible-minded enthusiasts like the Moravians, who in turn were set against the cultured elitism represented by Martensen and Heiberg. The endless, noisy tribalism of Christendom was wearing on Søren. He did not mean to find his life’s purpose by joining a group. Søren often writes of the enthusiasm to band together and defend a certain expression of Christianity as a type of betrayal of the original ideal.