Kierkegaard

by Stephen Backhouse

  From October 1841 through to February 1846, Søren would write and publish thousands of pages of text. In less than five years, the Danish reading public were presented with Either/Or (two volumes), Repetition, Fear and Trembling, Philosophical Fragments, Prefaces, Concept of Anxiety, Stages on Life’s Way, and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Many of these volumes were published on the same, or subsequent, days. Running alongside this welter of pseudonymous works, Søren also produced, under his own name, twenty-one “Upbuilding Discourses,” which, by and large, he arranged to come out at the same time as the pseudonymous books. Even the shortest of these works are substantial in their own right and have been subject to sustained scrutiny and academic study. The longest are compendious—Either/Or runs to 838 pages, Stages on Life’s Way 383, and Concluding Unscientific Postscript 480. Søren carefully edited every one of his pieces, in some cases rewriting them two or even three times. Some books were partially written before being abandoned. Besides this series of publications, which Søren referred to as his “authorship,” he continued to fill journals and compose newspaper articles, personal letters, and occasional pieces. He would later sum up this time with pithy accuracy: “To produce was my life.” In light of this stupendous output, the question that comes to mind is not “Wherever did he find the time to write?” It is instead “Wherever did he find the time to do anything else?”

  Søren returned home on March 6, 1842. Apart from two brief trips to Berlin in 1845 and 1846 (each visit lasting less than two weeks) Søren would remain in Copenhagen for the rest of his life. The city itself became crucial to his writing process. Lengthy walks around Copenhagen were part of the authorial process, because it was on the city streets that Søren “put everything into its final form.” Søren “wrote” while walking. The hiking stage was only the first part of his process. The second stage occurred when he got home, where he would be observed by his servant, Anders Westergaard, standing at his desk, hat still on head and umbrella tucked under arm, furiously scribbling down with his hands the words he had already written by foot.

  Yet Copenhagen was no mere inert backdrop. The living, breathing people of the city were key.

  I regard the whole city of Copenhagen as a great social function. But on one day I view myself as the host who walks around conversing with all the many cherished guests I have invited; then the next day I assume that a great man has given the party and I am a guest… . If an elegant carriage goes by with four horses engaged for the day, I assume that I am the host, give a friendly greeting, and pretend it is I who has lent them this lovely carriage.

  Søren called these excursions his “people bath,” and he became known for plunging into conversation with everyone and anyone, whatever their age and stage. In 1844 Søren remarked that “although I can be totally engrossed in my own production, and although together with all this I am doing seventeen other things and talk every day with about fifty people of all ages, I swear, nevertheless, that I am able to relate what each person with whom I have spoken said the last time, next-to-the-last time … his remarks, his emotions are immediately vivid to me as soon as I see him, even though it is a long time since I saw him.” Such a claim might seem an exaggeration except for the multiple eyewitness accounts that appear to affirm the assertion. “He preferred to involve himself with people whose interests in life were completely different from his own or which were diametrically opposed to his own.” The sight of Master Kierkegaard gently but firmly taking someone by the arm while walking with them down the street, talking all the while and swinging his walking stick for emphasis, is one well attested by many contemporary Copenhageners.

  Some people loved it and found Søren sincere, humorous, and good natured. Others disliked the feeling they were being pumped for information, suspecting they were fodder for a character study in a future book. Both reactions were valid. “His smile and his look were indescribably expressive,” remembered his old friend and tutor Hans Brøchner. “There could be something infinitely gentle and loving in his eye, but also something stimulating and exasperating. With just a glance at a passer-by he could irresistibly ‘establish a rapport’ with him as he expressed it. The person who received the look became either attracted or repelled.” Brøchner recalled how Søren would “carry out psychological studies” with everyone he met. The practice sounds more sinister than it really was, however. For Søren, a “psychological study” was synonymous with meaningful conversation focussed on the individual before him. Søren, Brøchner tells us, would “strike up conversations with so many people. In a few remarks he took up the thread from an earlier conversation and carried it a step further, to a point where it could be continued again at another opportunity.” Undoubtedly some people felt illused by the Kierkegaard treatment, such as his secretary Israel Levin. Levin was employed in 1844 as a proofreader and scribe (he would stay on until 1850). Levin was a notoriously cantankerous individual and seems to have been retained by Søren partly for his ornery (and therefore psychologically interesting) nature. A daily fixture in the home, Levin was often drafted into helping prepare the morning coffee. He hated this duty, as invariably Søren would ask him to choose a coffee cup from the jumble in the cupboard and then demand that Levin give a personal accounting for why he chose that particular cup on that particular day.

  Overall, the intense, honest attention was welcomed by others. In personal relations, Søren would often employ a psychological directness that eschewed the normal platitudes of everyday chatter. His letters to mourning or infirm acquaintances, for example, show a man who faces difficulties directly and thereby validates the person experiencing the problem. Hans Brøchner recalled with fondness the way Søren once helped a grieving widow of a friend. “He comforted not by covering up sorrow but first by making one genuinely aware of it, by bringing it to complete clarity.” A case in point is Søren’s cousin, Hans Peter, who was granted rare permission to visit Søren at home rather than on the street. Peter (as he was known) was paralysed on one side, and the infirmity seems to have awakened in Søren a kinship of feeling for a fellow awkward figure. The two would spend hours talking together, with Søren unapologetically transmuting Peter’s condition into a spiritual treatment of a man with physical weakness in a section of Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits. Peter was deeply touched by the attention. “He is so unspeakably loving and understands me so well, but I am really afraid to make use of his arm when he offers it to me to help me into my carriage.”

  Back out on the streets, there was another reason for the city walks. At the same time Copenhagen was illuminating the human condition to Søren, it was also helping the secretive author hide in plain sight. In The Point of View, written near the end of his life, Søren claims he used these public appearances as a way to keep up his authorial project of indirect communication. The city walks served as a way of disguising just how much time and effort was going into the authorship, which was supposed to be by many different people. Often, while writing and editing these works, Søren had no time to walk as he would like. So instead he arranged to be at the theatre for ten minutes at a time, presumably during the intervals. This way the “gossipmongers” would still see him and the word would be put about that as Søren was always out and about, he couldn’t possibly also be the author of all these serious works.

  The secretive and pseudonymous element of his project was not incidental to the authorship. It was essential to it. This way deeply autobiographical elements could be obfuscated behind a cloud of misdirection and absurd characters, pious reflections could appear alongside scandalous anecdotes, and letters of protest to newspapers could shift attention from Kierkegaard onto his pseudonyms and vice versa. Pseudonymity provided the means by which Søren could explore and present different points of view without having to claim each account as his own. It enabled him to draw from his own personal life without making him and his loved ones the object of direct examination. It was also just a lot of fun.

  He may have perfe
cted the art, but by no means were pseudonyms a Kierkegaardian invention. The literary world of Golden Age Denmark was positively lousy with them. In a culture in which newspapers were the medium by which intellectual conversations were carried out in public, pseudonymity (or anonymity) was a literary convention followed by almost everyone. Copenhagen was a small city; pseudonyms allowed people to express their views forthrightly without also having to meet their opponents the next day on the street. The practice could be spiteful, but more often than not it was playful, with authors deliberately constructing pen names that hinted cheekily at the man behind the curtain. (Bishop Jakob Peter Mynster, for example, often wrote under the initials “Kts,” the middle letters of each of his names.) Some pseudonyms remained mysterious, while others appeared with enough regularity in journals and newspapers that the true identity of their owners became an open secret. Pseudonymity was a game, and like any game it had rules, the first being that you did not talk about pseudonymity. To publicly identify an author with his pen name was considered bad taste. People who refused to respect the deliberate disguise of others had to be prepared to face the consequences.

  It was for this reason that Søren chose an editor of the Fatherland newspaper as his prime helper when proofreading the disparate elements of Either/Or. During the winter of 1842–43 Søren was a frequent visitor to the offices of J. F. Giøwad. He liked Giøwad because of his reputation for protecting the identity of his anonymous contributors and because of the editor’s discretion in other matters too. Often when at Giøwad’s, Søren had “strong attacks of his suffering so that he would fall to the floor, but he fought the pain with clenched fists and tensed muscles, then took up the broken thread of the conversation again, and often said: ‘Don’t tell anyone; what use is it for people to know what I must bear?’ ” It is clear that Giøwad liked Søren, and the two would talk for hours on end. Their mutual respect did not spill out to the rest of the office. Another assistant editor, Carl Plough, would later bemoan the “impractical and very self-absorbed man sitting in the office, ceaselessly lecturing and talking without the least awareness of the inconvenience he is causing.” Søren had enlisted Giøwad for his cause, but to ensure the success of his impending authorial onslaught he used the Fatherland to publish a “Public Confession” in the June 12, 1842, edition. The article (written by Søren) urges the good people of Copenhagen never to regard Søren as the author of anything that does not bear his name. (Incidentally Søren was luckier with Giøwad than with his other choices of assistants. Around this time he also enlisted the help of a poor theology student, P. V. Christensen, as a scribe and proofreader. Søren soon regretted letting “my little secretary” in on his secrets, however, and later that year had to fire him on suspicion of plagiarism. “I wager that he is the one who in various ways is scribbling pamphlets and things in the newspapers, for I often hear the echo of my own ideas.”)

  The ground thus prepared, Either/Or was published February 20, 1843. If the literary wags of Copenhagen liked their pseudonyms, they were possibly about to get too much of a good thing. This is the book that began the dialectical movement through the stages of Christendom, but it is also the one that put the complex “Russian doll” pattern of the authorship into play. Victor Eremita is responsible for Either/Or, but he claims he is not the author. With Kierkegaard, even the pseudonyms have pseudonyms, and Victor (whose Latin name means “victorious hermit”) is supposedly merely editing a collection of papers that he found hidden in an old desk, one set written by “A,” a young, hedonistic man, and another by “B,” who may or not be “A” as an old man but who in any case is actually revealed to be a moral character named Judge William, who supports marriage by objecting strenuously to “A” and to another essay in the book called the “Diary of a Seducer” by someone named Johannes. Got it? Other books would contain the same bewildering teases. Constantine Constantius is the “constantly constant” author of Repetition, an elliptical novel that also contains the thoughts of an unnamed “Young Man” who is working through the implications of a failed romance. On October 16, 1843, the same day Repetition hit the shelves, another mysterious tome called Fear and Trembling appeared. Its author, Johannes deSilentio (“John the silent one”), lives up to his name by trying to understand the story of Father Abraham and his son Isaac, by retelling it multiple times in various ways. His attempts to understand Abraham’s faith fail, and in the end Johannes confesses, in a wordy and eloquent manner, that he must shut up. June 13, 1844, saw Philosophical Fragments by Johannes Climacus, who shares a name with a medieval monk, and whose name literally means “John the climber.” Climacus’s extended reflection on history, reason, and the Absolute Paradox of the incarnation is followed five days later by Vigilius Haufniensis (the “vigilant watchman”), whose book Concept of Anxiety ponders the role that angst over inherited sin plays in making a human an authentic person. It is all getting complicated, but never fear! Readers discomfited by paradox and dread could quickly turn to a slighter book, also published on June 17, 1844, called Prefaces, and whose subtitle purports to offer “Light reading for the different classes at their time and leisure.” Its author, Nicholas “notewell” Notabene has been forbidden by his wife to write any books, so as a loophole he has produced a series of prefaces to books that have never been written, taking the wind out of public luminaries like Heiberg and Martensen along the way. The next year, on April 30, 1845, Hilarius Bookbinder does one better. His monstrous book, Stages on Life’s Way, is a compilation of a veritable army of pseudonyms. Here we meet again Johannes the Seducer, Victor, Constantine, a tailor, and Judge William, who is still busy defending marriage. Stages also finds room for Frater Taciturnus (“Brother Silence”), who fishes a diary out of a lake. The journal, entitled “Guilty?/Not Guilty?” is by someone named Quidam. It details his descent into madness after breaking troth with the cheerful and beautiful Quaedam. Yet it soon becomes apparent that the waterlogged diary is about more than love, for in it we are also introduced to a “bookkeeper” who bears a striking resemblance to a former merchant hosier of the city and who is labouring under a guilty burden he cannot shake off.

  Original 1843 title page for the first edition of Either/Or, the book Søren considered the true beginning of his “authorship” proper.

  Despite the clear autobiographical elements for those with eyes to see, Søren took pains to distance himself from this portion of his authorship. He would never be able to hide his involvement completely, however, as he was fully aware. All his books, he wrote to Emil, are “healthy, happy, merry, gay, blessed children born with ease and yet all of them with the birthmark of my personality.” It is worth stressing that not all pseudonyms were created equal. Søren occasionally prevaricated over to whom he would ascribe an already-written manuscript. For example, Concept of Anxiety was going to be published under Kierkegaard’s own name until a few days before the manuscript went to the printer. In the end, the book contains a highly personal dedication to Søren’s teacher, P. L. Møller, passing without comment over the curious coincidence that Vigilius Haufniensis also considered the deceased philosopher to be a personal friend and inspiration. The case of Anxiety highlights the caution one must take over reading too much into the pseudonyms, but it also highlights the fundamentally playful nature of the pseudonymous project itself. The pseudonyms are not watertight, neither are they meant to deceive utterly and completely. Instead, pseudonymity is a mechanism by which the reader is forced to pause and consider their own relation to the text rather than to the author. Søren clearly enjoyed playing the pseudonymous game with his public. At various times he arranged for Victor Eremita, “A.F.” and an “Anonymous” letter writer to reply to critics in the newspapers, and to offer their theories as to the true author of the books. Anyone familiar with the practice of “sock-puppetry” on internet message boards (where one user creates many aliases and uses them to converse with each other) will recognise what Søren was doing with the newspaper technology of his day. In
May 1845, he wrote a letter to the Fatherland under his own name, objecting to the free-and-easy association that an enthusiastic reviewer had made between Kierkegaard the author of the Upbuilding Discourses and the author(s) of such works as Either/Or and Stages on Life’s Way. Even here, however, the objections are tongue-in-cheek. Everyone knew, or strongly suspected, that Kierkegaard was the real author, and he knew that everyone knew. Still, the playful charade needed to be kept up for the sake of the authorship as a whole.

  The pseudonyms were only part of the authorship. Søren considered the self-penned Upbuilding Discourses to be as essential to his output as the books ascribed to the others. There are twenty-one Discourses in all, brought out in batches that roughly correspond to the pseudonymous publications. The first two arrived on May 16, 1843, a couple of months after Either/Or. Three more entered the shops the same day (October 16) as Fear and Trembling and Repetition. December 6 saw four Discourses, March 5, 1844, saw two and June 8 three more, five days before Philosophical Fragments hit the shelves and less than ten days before Concept of Anxiety and Prefaces burst onto the scene. Readers had a couple of months to get their bearings before tackling four more Discourses on August 31, but they would have to wait until April 29, 1845, before they could be edified by the final Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, which handily arrived a day before Stages on Life’s Way.

  If the pseudonyms represented the array of non-Christian, anti-Christian, or deluded-Christian characters one finds on Christendom’s stage, then the Discourses were Søren’s attempt at straightforward spiritual nourishment. Or were they? Straightforward is not a word easily ascribed to Kierkegaard. The Discourses are openly Christian in their language and are usually built around reflection on a biblical passage. Yet they are as challenging to platitudinous religiosity as anything else he penned, and they are by no means easy reads. One cannot shake off the suspicion that “S. Kierkegaard” of the Discourses might also be a character playing a role invented by Søren Kierkegaard. The Discourses counterbalance material found elsewhere, offering different takes on similar themes. Whatever it is Kierkegaard is trying to say to his readers is not found in any one book or in any one author, named or unnamed. Instead, the truth is found as the reader engages in reflective and dialectical conversation with all the books in the authorship.