Kierkegaard

by Stephen Backhouse

  Cartoon from the Corsair. A famous author rises to prominence by riding on the back of an innocent young girl.

  The active members of Denmark’s literary Golden Age were used to lobbing witty and erudite salvos at each other from behind the comfort of their own pseudonyms. The tone and content of the Corsair gave license to a level of mockery Kierkegaard did not expect. His walks down the street would be followed by jeering catcalls of “Søren! Søren!” or “Either Or!” from members of the public. “Every kitchen boy feels justified in almost insulting me in accordance with the Corsair’s orders,” he vented in his journal, “young students titter and grin and are happy to see a prominent person trampled on… . The slightest thing I do, if it is merely to pay a visit … if the Corsair finds out, it is printed and read by everybody, the man I visit is embarrassed, gets almost angry with me, for which he cannot be blamed.” On his city walks, Søren encountered groups of people who either would sheepishly stop talking when he approached or call out names as he passed. Matrons with their charges in the park allowed the children to run up to Søren, one after the other, so that they could ask inane questions and run giggling back to the group. Søren would sit in his pew at church, only to overhear his neighbours talking in a loud voice about his trousers.

  Cartoon from the Corsair. Søren’s curved spine is mocked here.

  The trousers. Always the trousers. Søren’s physicality became a focal point for attention, and his legs especially a matter for scrutiny. This public obsession with how well his ungainly body was clothed was not a figment of Søren’s imagination. “Once,” Troels Frederik recalls of his uncle, “I was walking behind him and wanted to run up to him to say hello. But just at that moment I heard some passer-by say something mocking about him and saw a couple of people on the other side of the street stop, turn around to look at him and laugh. His one trouser leg really was shorter than the other … he was odd-looking. I instinctively stopped, was embarrassed, and suddenly remembered that I had to go down another street.” The philosopher George Brandes recalled how when he was growing up, if he tried to leave the house with his socks showing, his Nanny would admonish him, “Don’t be such a Søren Kierkegaard!”

  Things got so bad that Kierkegaard’s tailor hinted that if Søren were to find another garment maker, it certainly would not hurt business. The taunting, grins, gapes, and social embarrassment made Søren’s beloved “people baths” untenable. Formerly he had prided himself on his ability to converse with people of all stations. Now “it is the rabble, the utterly brutish humanity, the rowdies, silly women, schoolchildren, and apprentices” who were abusing him. Against his best intentions, Søren had become “eminent,” cut off. He could not walk the streets of Copenhagen as before. Søren accrued further travel expenses taking cabs into the country so he could walk in peace. Alas, even these excursions were of no help, for Kierkegaard’s reputation was not restricted to his physical appearance.

  Thanks to the Corsair “Søren” had become “Søren,” a by-word for a half-mad, lovelorn, and awkward philosopher.

  And so I am wasted on Denmark: and everybody pretends that it is nothing… . My first name is now a nickname every schoolboy knows. The same name is more frequently used by authors; it appears in comedies all the time now and everyone knows it is I.

  A number of plays began to use this name when they wanted a shortcut to developing a minor comic character. The most overt, pernicious, and popular of these plays was called Opposite Neighbours by Jens Christian Hostrup. The first version had hit the stage in 1844 as a student production with a limited run. Here, a character named “Søren Kirk” spouts convoluted jargon filled with “either/or” propositions before being pulled off his perch by a frustrated mob. The play was originally by and for students and was filled with jokes aimed at university insiders. Søren was displeased at the time, but he was just about able to brush off the insult as an example of sophomore hijinks. After the Corsair however, it became impossible to pretend that the piece was the lighthearted parody amongst friends that Hostrup claimed it was. In 1845 and ’46 Hostrup’s play went on tour around the provinces, its success fuelled in part by the publicity that the name “Søren” was currently receiving from that other comic composition. Despite changing the name on the playbill to “Søren Torp. Theologian,” it was obvious to everyone who the character was supposed to be. The national hit soon became international, with Holstrup’s play touring Norway in 1847. Norwegian reviewers made free use of the name “Søren Kierkegaard” when discussing the character and his foolish speeches.

  Søren had expected the great and the good of Danish society to rally to his defence when he took on the Corsair, for they too suffered at the hands of the “rabble-barbarians.” But even his friends, including Bishop Mynster and Giøwad, the editor of the Fatherland, stayed silent, and Søren was left to face the onslaught alone. Søren had picked his fight by calling out the real people behind the anonymous mockery of the pirate paper. Yet the attempt at personalising the beast had led to the rise of a greater monster. The snapping, cackling crowd was threatening to overwhelm. “What I as a public person am suffering is best described as a slow death, like being trampled to death by geese.”

  It was not just the attention that got to Søren, it was the manner of the attention that was so dispiriting. In Søren’s reflections on the matter it is evident that it was the cartoons that pained him far more than the prose. Clearly personal sensitivity was an issue: it is not much of a leap to move from “Søren Sock” of schoolboy days to Søren with the uneven trousers of 1846 after all. Yet it was not simply being bullied yet again that irked Kierkegaard. The affair of the Corsair drove home to Søren something about the nature of the Christendom in which he was operating. The cartoons had the very real effect of reducing the carefully cultivated intellectual and spiritual edifice Søren had been building with his authorship to a matter of how odd he looked. The members of “the public” proved themselves unwilling (if not incapable) of treating the authorship on its own terms. They did not bother to trace the movements of the separate ideas or weigh one pseudonymous voice up against another in order to own the conclusions inwardly as individuals. Instead, thanks to the Corsair and the response it received from all levels of society, it was not their relation to the truth that counted but Søren’s relation to his pants.

  I am positive that my whole life will never be as important as my trousers have come to be. Yes, one might almost think that my trousers have become what the age demanded, and, if so, I sincerely hope that the demand of every age may be as moderate for the person concerned, for, good Lord, it does not demand trousers from me, after all, it merely demands that I wear them, and this demand really does not embarrass me, inasmuch as I have made a practice of wearing trousers since I was four years old … for someone ardently trying to hold to a concept of the greatness in or potential to every man there is something sad about having an abundance of observations which seem only to bear witness to irresponsibility, silliness, crudity, and the like.

  Søren had intended to conclude his authorship with the appropriately named Concluding Unscientific Postscript. There were other texts in various states of completion, but these were never considered to be part of the scheme begun with Either/Or. The end of the Postscript contains Søren’s confession that he is indeed responsible for the pseudonyms and finishes with a “wish and prayer” that readers nevertheless respect the pseudonyms as the authors of their works. The bulk of Postscript was completed before Søren took up his pen against the pirates, but the decision to include this final authorial confession and plea overlapped with his unmasking and be-trousering by the Corsair. In light of the tabloid’s crude pre-emptive strike, Søren prevaricated over whether he should take in or leave out the acknowledgement of his authorship. In the end he convinced himself in his journal to leave it in and let the chips fall where they may. “But, no! I owe it to the truth to pay no attention to all this and to do everything as had been decided, leaving the
outcome up to God and accepting everything from his hand as a good and perfect gift, refusing to act shrewdly, trusting that he will give me a steady and wise spirit.”

  It did not take Søren long to realise that his idea of concluding the authorship and taking up a quiet residency as the pastor in a village church was not going to fly. By January 20, 1847, he could write how “the wish to be a rural pastor has always appealed to me and been at the back of my mind… . It seems perfectly clear, however, that the situation here at home is becoming more and more confused.” He perceives the times demand an extraordinary figure and dares to think this might be him. “When I gave [Regine] up, I gave up every desire for a cosy, pleasant life,” he writes, but “from now on I must take being an author to be the same as being at the mercy of insult and ridicule. But to continue along this road is not something self-inflicted, for it was my calling; my whole habitus was designed for this.” In this same entry, Søren finds connections between Mynster’s “idolization of the establishment,” “bourgeois mentality,” the “cowardice and envy” of the cultured elite, and the violence of the “rabble-barbarians.” The course Søren was setting was nothing less than a collision with all of Christendom.

  Humanly speaking, from now on I must be said not only to be running aimlessly before me but going headlong toward certain ruin—trusting in God, precisely this is the victory. This is how I understood life when I was ten years old, therefore the prodigious polemic in my soul; this is how I understood it when I was twenty-five years old; so, too, now when I am thirty-four. This is why Poul Møller called me the most thoroughly polemical of men.

  The fight to save Goldschmidt’s soul and that of the common man from the Corsair was not going be an extra project added on to a concluded writing career. Instead, for Søren, the affair and its fallout marked a new turn in the path Governance had set him on years before. The monstrous public had loomed up, and Søren began to think he was the man appointed to slay it.

  But to do that he would need to write more books.

  CHAPTER 8

  An Armed and Neutral Life

  It is 1838. The old father has just passed away. The youngest son takes it upon himself to tell the family pastor the sombre news. The father had always revered Mynster and shaped his family’s spiritual formation along lines Mynster set. Now, upon being informed of the old man’s death, Mynster is puzzled. Who has died? It takes him a moment or two to recall how he knows the name of Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard. The preacher is a busy man with many demands on his time and many parishioners. But the son remembers that the bishop forgot.

  “Voluntarily exposing myself to attack by the Corsair is no doubt the most intensive thing along the order of genius that I have done,” Søren reflected in 1849. “It will have results in all my writing, will be extremely important for my whole task with respect to Christianity and to my elucidation of Christianity.” In this he was correct. The effects of the Corsair, while apparently trivial to some, were in fact deep and long-lasting for Søren’s sense of himself, his authorship, and the audience to whom he was writing. It also led to a renewed fascination with what it means to stand apart as a witness to the crowd. “It is frequently said that if Christ came to the world now he would once again be crucified. This is not entirely true. The world has changed; it is now immersed in ‘understanding.’ Therefore Christ would be ridiculed, treated as a mad man, but a mad man at whom one laughs.”

  Søren had always known he was singular. Now he was beginning to see himself as a type of potential martyr or witness to the truth. “What Christendom needs at every moment is someone who expresses Christianity uncalculatingly or with absolute recklessness,” runs an 1848 entry. “He is then to be regarded as a measuring instrument—that is, how he is judged in Christendom will be a test of how much true Christianity there is in Christendom at a given time.” Søren continues, “If his fate is to be mocked and ridiculed, to be regarded as mad, while a whole contemporary generation of clergy (who, note well, do not dare to speak uncalculatingly or recklessly) is honoured and they are also regarded as true Christians—then Christendom is an illusion.” Søren is clear in his reflections that his martyrdom—if martyrdom it be—is not for Christianity as much as it is for “the truth.” The one who presents the truth of the situation as completely and faithfully as he can has made no judgements about his own or anyone else’s Christianity, but he has provided the opportunity for a clear choice to be made. “The judgment is not what he says but what is said of him.”

  The intensified direction of Søren’s vocation follows his tentative “conclusion” to the authorship and coincidental “unmasking” in the Corsair. Søren was self-conscious about how the loss of his trial at the court of popular opinion marked a new chapter in his life. Literally. On March 9, 1846, he began a new journal with a new system of notation. Each volume was labelled “NB” (from the Latin nota bene meaning ‘note well’) and successively numbered, eventually running to thirty-six books in all. Unlike the pre-Corsair journals, which tend to be a jumble of haphazard thoughts and rough drafts, the NB volumes are clearly written with an eye to future readership and often aspire towards a coherence unseen in the earlier journals. A common theme is Søren’s reflection on his own mission, as an author and as a witness. Another theme is that of the nature of the Single Individual, Christ, and authentic Christianity. Another is the many “collisions” the trajectory of his life against Christendom was putting in his way. The long, opening entry of the first volume titled “Report” sets the tone. “The Concluding Postscript is out; the pseudonymity has been acknowledged … Everything is in order; all I have to do now is to keep calm, be silent, depending on the Corsair to support the whole enterprise negatively, just as I wish.” The Report describes the events from Søren’s point of view, straining to put the mockery in as best a light as possible, but he admits “this existence is exhausting; I am convinced that not a single person understands me.” Søren is frustrated by the fact that people might think it was because of the Corsair that he had ended his authorship, and he is chagrined that luminaries like Bishop Mynster might think he adapted his books for the express purpose of engaging with the low tabloid. Instead, Søren insists the opposite is true. It only looks like he has inserted Corsair-specific passages into the Concluding Unscientific Postscript because his analysis of the state of things was so astute. The Corsair has merely brought to light what was always present in the culture. Søren ends the entry with a reiteration of his conviction that his authorship is concluded, and he expresses the wish once again that he might retire to a quieter life. “If I only could make myself become a pastor. Out there in quiet activity, permitting myself a little productivity in my free time, I shall breathe easier, however much my present life has gratified me.” Søren’s hesitancy is evident even in the passages where he claims this is what he wants. Despite his occasional assertions that a country parish is the life for him, Søren is too aware of himself and too concerned with truth to push the matter very far.

  A visit to Bishop Mynster in the autumn of 1846 confirmed to Søren he was bound for something other than church life. Ironically, it was Mynster’s approval of Søren’s plan for a pastorate that set the wheels turning. Mynster encouraged Søren to seek a living somewhere in the country. The response immediately put Søren on guard. He sensed Mynster agreed in some way with the treatment Søren was currently receiving at the hands of the Corsair rabble, thinking it would do him some good. A spell in a rural parish would take Søren down another peg or two and set him on a more respectable career in the church. These were decidedly not Søren’s feelings towards either the Corsair or churchmanship. “When Bishop Mynster advises me to become a rural pastor, he obviously does not understand me.” Despite the slight to his father’s memory years before, Søren retained the habitual Kierkegaard family reverence for Mynster. Yet at the same time he suspected the bishop had less than pure motives for encouraging Søren to leave Copenhagen. Søren was trouble and Mynster knew it.
It would not hurt the old bishop to get the annoying author out of the way. Søren would continue to occasionally meet with Mynster over the coming years, but more often than not the truncated visits would prove dissatisfying. Mynster was clearly not keen to maintain a relationship with his former parishioner’s quarrelsome son and he kept Søren at arm’s length.

  Jakob Peter Mynster, bishop, pastor to the Kierkegaard family and erstwhile mentor to Søren. “You have no idea what sort of poisonous plant Mynster was… . He was a colossus. Great strength was required to topple him, and the person who did it also had to pay for it.”

  The reason is not hard to fathom. Søren’s books during this time were filled with hidden and not so hidden critical allusions to Mynster, the church, and the Christian culture over which he presided as primate. And there were a lot of books. Both Søren’s plan to take up a pastorate and his idea that his authorship was concluded came to nothing in the years following the Corsair. Between 1846 and 1854, under his own name, Søren brought out Two Ages, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, Works of Love, Christian Discourses, The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air, Three Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, On My Work as an Author, and For Self-Examination. Neither did the practice of pseudonymity cease. Newly invented characters were assigned to The Sickness Unto Death, Two Ethical-Religious Essays, The Crisis and A Crisis in the Life of an Actress, and Practice in Christianity. Other substantial books did not see the light of day in Søren’s lifetime: The Point of View for My Life as an Author, The Book on Adler, Armed Neutrality, and Judge for Yourself! were written but not published in this period. Newspapers received open letters, old journals were edited, the thirty-six volumes of the NB journals continued apace, and Søren prepared Either/Or, Works of Love, and some other texts for their second printing. Far from representing the nadir of his creative life, the years following the conclusion of the first authorship saw an explosion of productivity.