John McConnico for the New York Times Tourists and residents stroll along Kobmagergade in Copenhagen. Kierkegaard was confirmed in a church just down the street.
For years, visitors to the Copenhagen City Museum wandered into a
modest room that contains a few artifacts from the Danish philosopher
Soren Kierkegaard’s life: portraits, meerschaum pipes, first editions
and, best of all, the desk where he stood and produced with
preternatural speed a series of original and difficult works, many of
them written pseudonymously and published in editions that numbered in
the hundreds — among them “Either-Or,” “Fear and Trembling,” “The
Concept of Dread” and “Repetition.” The exhibit has been refreshed to
mark Kierkegaard’s 200th birthday on May 5th. His belongings — a large
library, furniture, paintings, and knickknacks —were pretty well
dispersed after his death in 1855, but the expanded version will add an
“outer circle” of relevant material. Manuscripts and papers from the
Kierkegaard archives will be on display at the Royal Library.
Kierkegaard’s use of pseudonyms helped express the spiritual and deeply personal.
The philosopher’s grave is fairly close by, in Assistens
Kirkegaard—his forbidding name is a variation of the Danish word for
cemetery — in the Norrebro district, which is also the burial ground of
many other notable figures, including Hans Christian Andersen, Niels
Bohr and the American tenor saxophonist Ben Webster.
Though in death he rests in this distinguished company, Kierkegaard was
markedly less revered in life. His contemporaries saw him as a
troublesome, quarrelsome figure. He was a familiar sight, strolling
about the Old City, where he created the illusion that he was merely an
underemployed gentleman. The satirical weekly Corsair published nasty
caricatures of him and mocked his writing and pseudonymous disguises. He
was gossiped about when he broke his engagement to the 18-year-old
Regine Olsen, and was feared by his targets, among them, Hans Christian
Andersen, whose early novels Kierkegaard eviscerated in his 1838 debut,
“From the Papers of One Still Living.” Shortly before he died at age 42,
he began a bitter ground war with the state Lutheran church. For his
biographers and interpreters, his private life remains a nest of
secrets.
For all his well-known existential explorations — his fascination
with life’s dreadful uncertainties and his belief, set forth in “The
Sickness Unto Death,” that despair is central to the human condition —
Kierkegaard will forever be associated with the “leap,” an exertion of
faith that helped him accept what he saw as the absurd idea that Jesus
was simultaneously divine and yet much like other young men of his time;
the question obsessed and perplexed him. As he put it in his major 1846
book “Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophic Fragments,”
“The Absurd is that the eternal truth has come to exist, that God has
come to exist, is born, has grown up and so on, and has become just like
a person, impossible to tell apart from another person.” Kierkegaard
called this “the Absolute Paradox.”
These were awkward questions for discussion in a public forum —
particularly in a small 19th-century monarchy with a dominant church.
Kierkegaard came to realize that the subjects he cared most about —
spiritual, deeply personal, wordless even — did not lend themselves to
straightforward discourse. So he found a new way to communicate, letting
his various pseudonymous “authors” say what a pedagogical doctor of
theology could not. This was the Socratic method in epic form. It
allowed Constantin Constantius in “Repetition” to hint that life might
indeed be lived over; and it let Johannes de Silentio in “Fear and
Trembling” retell the biblical story of Abraham preparing to sacrifice
his son Isaac and to introduce what he called the “teleological
suspension of the ethical,” the idea that one could disregard society’s
legal and ethical boundaries in favor of a higher law. It was a dazzling
thought experiment, and somewhat frightening, especially when you
consider its extreme, all-too-familiar modern-day applications.
Related
Read previous contributions to this series.
This subversive approach — “indirect communication” was the term he
used repeatedly in “Concluding Unscientific Postscript” — was a way of
saying: “Here is a secret that I cannot tell you — in fact, to say it
outright would ruin it. Yet even without saying it, I think you get the
idea.” Perceptive readers did get the idea without being told explicitly
what it was.
This technique is familiar today; it’s what we experience in public
debate, more widely with every advance in communications technology. The
best commercial and political advertisements demonstrate it. Political
candidates know that speaking directly to voters, telling them precisely
what they stand for, may only be asking for trouble and that there are
more effective ways to broadcast their views. The “dog-whistling” of
modern campaigns —seemingly innocuous language used by surrogates and
press officers to spread unruly opinions — is a method that Johannes
Climacus, the “author” of the “Postscript,” would recognize.
Subjectivity (“inderlighed”), Kierkegaard wrote —in an almost
contemptuous dismissal of the rational systems of 19th-century German
philosophy — is truth. Yet inwardness and subjective reflection doesn’t
leave much room for open discussion. Thus, he became the poet of the
unsaid, the inexpressible — an artist-philosopher drawn to the mystery
of powerful silence. It is a cliché to say that ideas matter, but they
may matter more, and may be far more effective when they are
communicated, as Kierkegaard suggested, without the intrusive voice of
an insistent author. That’s one reason why, 200 years after his birth,
in ways that are not always immediately apparent, Kierkegaard still
matters.
Jeffrey Frank is the author of “Ike and Dick: Portrait of a
Strange Political Marriage” and a co-translator from the Danish of “The
Stories of Hans Christian Andersen.”
////
Op-Ed Contributor
Kierkegaard at 200
By
GORDON MARINO
Published: May 3, 2013
Northfield, Minnesota
THE intellectual immortal Soren Kierkegaard turns 200 on Sunday. The
lyrical Danish philosopher is widely regarded as the father of
existentialism, a philosophical and literary movement that emphasizes
the category of the individual and meditates on such gauzy questions as,
Is there a meaning to life?
Not surprisingly, existentialism hit its zenith after humanity got a
good look at itself in the mirror of the Holocaust, but then memories
faded and economies boomed and existentialism began to seem a little
overwrought.
Still, throughout the ups and downs of the scholarly market, the
intellectual world has remained bullish on Kierkegaard, in part because
the Dane, unlike other members of the Socrates guild, always addressed
what human beings are really up against in themselves, namely, anxiety,
depression, despair and the flow of time.
There are at least a dozen scholarly fests going on around the globe to
celebrate Kierkegaard’s bicentennial, and here at the Hong Kierkegaard
Library at St. Olaf College we are expecting over 100 international
participants at our birthday bash.
In his youth, Kierkegaard earned the nickname “gaflen,” or “the fork,”
for his ability to discern the weaknesses in other people and to stick
it to them. All his writing life, Kierkegaard wielded his red-hot stylus
to stick it to bourgeois Christendom. His life was a meditation on what
it means to have faith.
Although Kierkegaard never used the exact phrase, “the leap of faith,”
those words have become his shibboleth. A Lutheran raised in a pietistic
environment, Kierkegaard insisted that there was no being born into the
fold; no easy passage, no clattering up a series of syllogisms to
faith. For Kierkegaard, faith involved a collision with the
understanding and a radical choice, or to use the terms of his singular
best seller, life and faith demands an “Either/Or.” Believe or don’t
believe, but don’t imagine you can have it both ways. As the mostly
empty pews attest, much of Europe has taken Kierkegaard up on his
challenge.
But Kierkegaard was more than a Luther of his Lutheran tradition; his
writings bristle with insights about culture and humanity that can be
redeemed in the currency of secularism.
For instance, Kierkegaard flourished at the inception of mass media.
Daily and weekly journals and newspapers were just beginning to
circulate widely. As though he could feel Facebook and Twitter coming
down the line, he anticipated a time when communication would become
instantaneous, but no one would have anything to say; or again, a time
when everyone was obsessed with finding their voice but without much
substance or “inwardness” behind their eruptions and blogposts.
In one of his books Kierkegaard moans, “The present age is an age of
publicity, the age of miscellaneous announcements: Nothing happens but
still there is instant publicity.” In the end, Kierkegaard was concerned
about the power of the press to foment and form public opinion and in
the process relieve of us of the need to think matters through on our
own.
Over a 17-year span, Kierkegaard published a score of books and compiled
thousand of pages of journal entries. Like Nietzsche and other geniuses
who were more than less immolated by the fiery force of their own
ideas, Kierkegaard sacrificed his body to dance out the riches of his
thoughts. Self-conscious of his own preternatural powers, he wrote,
“Geniuses are like thunderstorms. They go against the wind, terrify
people, cleanse the air.”
Of course, we have all known hours of inspiration, but to live with the
Muse on one’s shoulders year after year is to be able to abide close to
the borders of what must sometimes feel like madness. Not an easy task.
Just to pluck a couple of plums from the sprawling tree of Kierkegaard’s
extraordinary oeuvre: He was not what we would term an ethicist. He did
not devote his energies to trying to find a rational basis for ethics,
nor was he occupied with teasing out moral puzzles. And yet, he has
something very significant to say about ethics.
According to Kierkegaard, it is not more knowledge or skills of analysis
that is required to lead dutiful lives. If knowledge were the issue,
then ethics would be a kind of talent. Some people would be born moral
geniuses and others moral dolts. And yet so far as he and Kant were
concerned, when it comes to good and evil we are all on an equal
footing.
Contrary to the ethics industry that is thrumming today, Kierkegaard
believed that the prime task is to hold on to what we know, to refrain
from pulling the wool over our own eyes because we aren’t keen on the
sacrifices that doing the right thing is likely to require. As
Kierkegaard put it, when we find ourselves in a moral pinch we don’t
just take the easy way out. Instead, he writes, “Willing allows some
time to elapse, an interim called: We shall look at it tomorrow.”
And by the day after tomorrow, we usually decide that the right way was,
after all, the easy way. And so the gadfly of Copenhagen concludes,
“And this is how perhaps the great majority of men live: They work
gradually at eclipsing their ethical and ethical-religious
comprehension, which would lead them out into decisions and conclusions
that their lower nature does not much care for.”
There are epiphanies in every nook and cranny of Kierkegaard’s
authorship, but paradoxically enough, from the beginning to the end, the
man who seemed to know just about everything, was gently emphatic: “The
majority of men ... live and die under the impression that life is
simply a matter of understanding more and more, and that if it were
granted to them to live longer, that life would continue to be one long
continuous growth in understanding. How many of them ever experience the
maturity of discovering that there comes a critical moment where
everything is reversed, after which the point becomes to understand more
and more that there is something which cannot be understood.”
And what might it mean to understand that there is something of vital
importance in life that cannot be understood? With the indirection of a
Zen master, our Birthday Boy helps us unlock this and other koans that
strike to the marrow of the question of what it means to be a human
being.
Gordon Marino is a professor of philosophy and the director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College. His most recent book “The Quotable Kierkegaard” will be published in the fall.
