Kierkegaard

by Stephen Backhouse

  1944. United States. The author Richard Wright, best known for the novel Native Son (1940) and the soon to be issued autobiography Black Boy (1945), asks his friend Dorothy Norman to instruct him in existentialism and the works of Kierkegaard and others. Norman invites the exiled German theologian Paul Tillich and Hannah Arendt to her home in New York to form a study group with Wright. Wright becomes an enthusiastic reader of Kierkegaard, finding in him a voice for individuals seeking authenticity in the face of a hostile culture. Wright goes on to pen The Outsider, his exploration of the black experience in the US and the first American existentialist novel. The book opens with a quote from The Concept of Anxiety, and its main character is a conscious embodiment of Kierkegaardian ideas.

  1944. United States. Howard A. Johnson, a former student of Lowrie and now curate of St. John’s Church, has been invited to a dinner hosted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR expresses a love for the mystery stories of Dorothy Sayers. Johnson tentatively suggests that she is even more important as a theological writer. “Many moderns like Dorothy Sayers derive from Kierkegaard.” A few days later, Roosevelt’s Cabinet colleague Frances Perkins finds the president in a thoughtful mood. “Frances, have you ever read Kierkegaard? … Well, you ought to read him,” he says enthusiastically. “It will teach you about the Nazis. Kierkegaard explains the Nazis to me as nothing else ever has. I have never been able to make out why people who are obviously human beings could behave like that. They are human, yet they behave like demons. Kierkegaard gives you an understanding of what it is in man that makes it possible for these Germans to be so evil.”

  1959. United States. Martin Luther King Jr. is invited to write about the influences that have led to him embracing nonviolence as a way of life. In “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” he talks about how Kierkegaard and others helped shape his thought by introducing him to existentialism. “Its understanding of the ‘finite freedom’ of man is one of existentialism’s most lasting contributions, and its perception of the anxiety and conflict produced in man’s personal and social life as a result of the perilous and ambiguous structure of existence is especially meaningful for our time.” Shades of Kierkegaard hover behind King’s 1964 Nobel lecture, where he says, “Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live.”

  c. 1965. United States. The West family lives in Sacramento, California. As African Americans, they face unfair practices in housing and working conditions and are restricted in their access to services such as public libraries. The injustice is not lost on thirteen-year-old Cornel, who is beginning to wonder what he sees in America says about the human condition. Cornel has to get his books from the rotating stock of the bookmobile and it is there he stumbles across a handful of Lowrie’s translations. Cornel’s discovery helps him make sense of human nature. “In reading Kierkegaard from the Bookmobile … here was someone [who was] seriously wrestling with [this] terror, this suffering and [this] sorrow. It resonated deeply with me.” Kierkegaard leads West to study philosophy at Harvard and Princeton. West is an admirer of Martin Luther King Jr. and an ally of Malcolm X but was never a member of the Black Panther Party. As an African American and Christian involved in radical politics, he often finds himself on the outside of many circles. Kierkegaard helps him navigate these ideas, while always maintaining the need to do one’s thinking in “existentially concrete situations.” In 1982 Cornel West publishes Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity where he identifies Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript as amongst the key books primarily informing his viewpoint. West will go on to become a prominent public intellectual figure, infuriating and inspiring in equal measure. A cultural icon, West lent his political and philosophical aura when he appeared in the Matrix films, a set of science-fiction movies themselves brimming with Kierkegaardian ideas.

  1967. United States. The first of the multivolume Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers is published by Indiana University Press to great acclaim. The translators, Howard and Edna Hong, have devoted their lives to the transmission of Kierkegaard. Before the Second World War, Howard had studied under David Swenson in Minnesota, and together he and his wife, Edna, had lived in Copenhagen as part of Malantschuk’s study circle. Back in America, the Hongs minister to displaced persons and prisoners of war while nurturing their Kierkegaardian dreams. It was apparent to them that the Lowrie translations and the haphazard method of the OUP production schedule meant the corpus needed another look. Following the success of the Journals, between 1978 and 1998 the Hongs would go on to translate all but four of the twenty-five volume series published by Princeton University Press. The completion of the work prompts praise from the Times Literary Supplement: “All honour to the Hongs. Kierkegaard’s Writings is one of the outstanding achievements in the history of philosophical translation.”

  1976. United States. The Howard and Edna Hong Kierkegaard Library is formally dedicated at St. Olaf College in Minnesota. It houses a replication of Kierkegaard’s library, painstakingly collected by the Hongs and others, as well as copies of everything written by and about Kierkegaard from around the world. A major centre for academics and others, past visitors to the Library include Viktor Frankl, Paul Tillich, and the novelist Walker Percy. The philosopher C. Stephen Evans was the Library curator before handing the reigns to Professor Gordon Marino.

  1994. Denmark. The Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre opens in Copenhagen. It is a place for academics and researchers to work, but its primary purpose is the production of the definitive editions of Kierkegaard’s entire body of work. Overseen by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, the Søren Kierkegaard’s Skrifter (“Søren Kierkegaard’s Writings,” or SKS) project runs to fifty-five volumes of text and commentary. Under the general editorship of Bruce Kirmmse, the English translation of the SKS journals has been well underway since 2007. Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks will run to eleven volumes, published by Princeton University Press. Unlike the previous versions of Kierkegaard’s journals, which were largely hampered by the ham-fisted treatment traceable back to Barfod and even Henrik Lund, these new editions attempt to reproduce on the page what the originals looked like, putting back the large margins (with their marginalia) that Søren created so he could comment on the main text he had written, sometimes years later.

  1995. Japan. Kierkegaard is part of Japanese popular culture. For example, Neon Genesis Evangelion, created by Hideaki Anno, is a science-fiction anime television series that uses the adventures of young people piloting giant robots in a post-apocalyptic Tokyo as a pretext to tell complex and serious stories about personal identity and existential meaning. The show contains numerous references to Kierkegaard, with one episode named after Sickness unto Death. A manga series, also called Sickness unto Death, written by Hikaru Asada and illustrated by Takahiro Seguchi, was released in 2010. It tells the story of a psychologist who falls in love with his patient, a woman who suffers from despair and multiple personalities.

  2012. Whereabouts Unknown. An anonymous Twitter user gains worldwide attention by mashing vapid phrases in the style of reality television celebrity Kim Kardashian with the thoughts of Søren Kierkegaard. The account, revelling in the name KimKierkegaardashian, is less about making fun of Kim (or Søren) and more about highlighting what happens when the typical banal chatter of self-publicity meets existential angst. “My soul is a hollowness & everything around me is as empty as eternity. Where do I look for fashion inspiration or fun trends?” runs one entry. “We love selfies! The despairing self, by taking notice of itself, tries to make itself more than it already is,” runs another.

  2013. United States. When not a professor of philosophy, Gordon Marino is a boxing coach and a sports journalist. So it is that one of his books on Kierkegaard makes its way into the hands of former boxing heavyweight world champion Mike Tyson. Tyson makes international headline news when he talks
about Kierkegaard on Twitter and in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “He wanted his epitaph to read: ‘In yet a little while I shall have won; Then the whole fight / Will all at once be done.’ I love reading philosophy,” said Tyson. The comments lead to widespread derision from some corners of the popular press, revealing a thinly disguised racism and snobbery, clearly incredulous that an African American athlete with a criminal past could possibly get anything out of the intellectual Dane. Doubtless Søren, who had a thing or two to say about the media and who thought that anyone could be the Single Individual, would have had a different opinion.

  2013. Canada. The Montreal-based music group Arcade Fire release their fourth studio-album to rave reviews. “Reflektor is populated by characters who actively seek to escape systems of control,” writes Pitchfork, “but the path to the exit leads through the dance floor.” The album is inspired by, and named after, Kierkegaard’s discussion of the ages of passion and reflection in The Present Age. “It sounds like he’s talking about modern times,” says front man Win Butler to Rolling Stone. “He’s talking about the press and alienation, and you kind of read it and you’re like, ‘Dude, you have no idea how insane it’s gonna get.’ ”

  2013. Canada. Actor and rapper Donald Glover is in Toronto on a press tour promoting his new hip-hop album released under his pseudonym Childish Gambino.

  VICE magazine: Are you reading books right now?

  Glover: Yeah, I’m really into Kierkegaard s**t right now.

  VICE: Man, that is not going to make you happy.

  Glover: It does make me happy, because it makes me feel less alone.

  2015. United Kingdom. Simon Munnery is a stand-up comedian, television performer, and occasional “spokesman” for the graffiti artist Banksy (another agent provocateur who uses pseudonyms to get a rise out of his urbane audience). Munnery has long admired Kierkegaard and decides rather impulsively one day to perform passages taken from his writing in a comedy show called Simon Munnery Sings the Songs of Søren Kierkegaard. Deploying a voice somewhere in the region of Johnny Rotten combined with Kenneth Williams (“an outsider, slightly camp, and scathing”), Munnery reads and recites from memory extended passages, interspersed with his own humorous observations. The professional comedian is keen to point out that Kierkegaard was a master humour writer. “I like the jokes—the conciseness, the really tight language,” says Munnery in conversation. “There are points in the recitations where the audience laughs every time.” Kierkegaard, he insists, really knew how to write a joke.

  Kierkegaard is hardly a household name, yet his fingerprints are everywhere. For most authors, merely being read in Danish, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and English would be enough, yet Kierkegaard also stands as a significant figure in these cultures. Not bad for a man who rarely strayed from outside Copenhagen’s city walls. The history of modern life and thought cannot be told without the name of Kierkegaard. His words have shaped high art and low, politicians and revolutionaries, churchmen and atheists, missionaries, teachers, journalists, psychologists, therapists, artists, musicians, poets, novelists, comedians, theologians, philosophers, and yes, even academics. Still, Kierkegaard remains a perennial outsider. There is no church or school of Kierkegaard, no movement in his name. How could there be? His thoughts cannot be easily summarised and handed on whole. They scratch and fight and kick against the system, any system—even his own. Kierkegaard’s thoughts need to be encountered, one by one, person by person, or they are not encountered at all. His insistence on authentic existence is simply stated. It is the consequences of that existence that run amok. The infinite, eternal God is standing before you now with greasy hair and a bit of fish in his beard, bidding you who are weary to come to him and he will give you rest. To turn away in offence from this person is natural, expected, even reasonable. Yet to turn towards such a one is to turn away from all that has a false claim on your identity and into the one who defines what it is to exist. Family, nation, religion, and ideology are “put in their place.” It is easy to discover what gods any given established order worships—simply find out what you are not allowed to “put in their place.” As long as people continue to live and move and have their being in habitual ideas of their own creation, Kierkegaard will continue to upbuild and provoke wherever he is encountered by the Single One.

  The new bishop stands at the window, looking at the crowd milling in the courtyard below. He cannot see, but at the same time he does not want to be seen. That would never do. It is of paramount importance that the newspapers record that the newly minted Bishop of all Denmark, Hans L. Martensen, shepherd to the nation, was not present at the burial of his former student, now scourge of all Christendom, Søren Kierkegaard.

  Martensen frowns and returns to his writing desk, where perhaps he has begun to sketch his memoirs. “We may regard it as felicitous that he died when he did,” he writes, “or the whole thing might have ended up by being extremely annoying.”

  Afterword

  Kierkegaardians are well aware there are a handful of fault lines in the schools of interpretation. Some of the key questions include whether his pseudonyms are reliable sources of biographical information; whether Kierkegaard’s claim of a Christian direction to his work is credible; and whether he ever fully abandoned “indirect communication,” even when writing under his own name. To those questions I answer No, Yes, and No and have written this biography as such. I am well aware of the larger academic discussion around these questions, but this is not the place for such a conversation. For those interested in the arguments I would refer them to my other published books and articles on Kierkegaard. These publications also contain the fullest indication of secondary sources I have drawn from over the years. A quick note on sources: translations of Kierkegaard are an ongoing project. For the sake of standardisation and ease of access, unless otherwise indicated, all primary quotes are from the complete and currently academic standard Kierkegaard’s Writings published by Princeton University Press with Howard and Edna Hong as series editors and translators. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Kierkegaard’s letters and journals are taken from the English translation, Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers (eds. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, seven volumes). Following the Hong’s convention, this JP material is cross-referenced against the Danish language Søren Kierkegaards Papirer (eds. P. A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr and E. Torsting, N. Thulstrup, thirteen volumes). Regarding the views and comments of Kierkegaard’s contemporaries: unless otherwise indicated, this material is largely drawn from Encounters with Kierkegaard, translator Bruce Kirmmse’s peerless compendium of extant eyewitness letters and memoirs. Apart from quoting Kierkegaard’s contemporaries, I have avoided excessive footnoting of secondary authors, all of whom appear in any case in the bibliography.

  As well as a student of Kierkegaard, I am a social and political theologian. For this reason I am drawn to those places where Kierkegaard’s theology abuts against social and political factors. Fortunately for me, Kierkegaard’s oft-stated aim to “reintroduce Christianity into Christendom” provides plenty of those places. “Christendom,” after all, is nothing if not a theological, social, and political phenomenon. For those who think there is an easy separation between “politics” and “religion,” I can only suggest this says more about their anaemic understanding of both church and state than it does about the reality of these phenomena. The earliest Christians at least did not think their new citizenship, kingdom, or Lord was operating in an apolitical vacuum, and neither did Kierkegaard, who once wrote, “The religious is the transfigured rendition of what a politician, provided he actually loves being a human being and loves humankind, has thought in his most blissful moment.” To my knowledge, Kierkegaard did not talk about Christianity as an “alternative politics.” Yet his strategy of drawing single individuals out of their crowds in order that they might be reformed in Christ’s image and in relation to each other suggests he would have appreciated this way of speaking about
a movement that has massive implications for nationhood and neighbourhood while at the same time resists easy co-option by the partisan politics of the left or of the right.

  The conflict about Christianity will no longer be doctrinal conflict (this is the conflict between orthodoxy and heterodoxy). The conflict (occasioned also by the social and communistic movements) will be about Christianity as an existence. The problem will become that of loving the “neighbour”; attention will be directed to Christ’s life, and Christianity will also become essentially accentuated in the direction of conformity to his life. The world has gradually consumed those masses of illusions and insulating walls with which we have protected ourselves so that the question remained simply one of Christianity as doctrine. The rebellion in the world shouts: We want to see action!

  Overviews of the Works of Søren Kierkegaard

  From the Papers of One Still Living

  September 7, 1838

  Søren Kierkegaard

  This, Søren’s first major published piece, is a critical review not only of Hans Christian Andersen’s novel Only a Fiddler but of Andersen himself. The work contains a number of themes and ideas that are to become standard for Kierkegaard: an attempt to connect the subject matter with Hegel and with an overarching view of the mood of the historical age; an obsession with art, poetry, and genius; a focus on the individual person as having a value that transcends any group or circumstance to which that person belongs; an emphasis on “authenticity.” Following the pattern for much of what will follow in Kierkegaard’s authorship, the piece is obscure and complicated. Also, it was not a hit with the public. In his autobiography, Andersen commented that only two people read it straight through—the one who wrote it and the one about whom it was written!