Kierkegaard

Existence and Identity in a Post-Secular World

Alastair Hannay

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350144705
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Existentialisme en philosophie

In his perceptive and provocative new book, Alastair Hannay contests two prejudices that have dogged the appreciation of Soren Kierkegaard's writings. These are that to grasp their contemporary impact, the religious focus must be referred to his personal background, and that their varied voices mirror a fragmentation in his own relationship to self and society. It was for paying lip-service to their own values that Kierkegaard castigated his society, his diagnosis being that this was one of many ways in which more pressing and disturbing questions of existence were typically evaded. It is in the renowned thinker's own struggle for selfhood that Hannay sees his prescient anticipation of the current focus on issues relating to integration, acceptance and identity. By cultivating a role as the social misfit within his innate exceptionality Kierkegaard deliberately exposed himself to the problems to which an age gripped by 'identity politics' is now responding. By cleverly examining the relation between his richly conceived polemics and Kierkegaard's own preoccupation with identity, Hannay has written an essential new text for Kierkegaard scholars and students of Continental philosophy and existentialism.

1

The message and the messenger

I feel well only when productive. Happy and at home in my thoughts, I then forget all that is disagreeable in life … I need stop only for a few days instantly to become unwell, overwhelmed and troubled … If these great riches of thought still latent in my soul are to be repressed, it will be anguish and torture, and myself totally useless.

SØREN KIERKEGAARD, Papers and Journals: A Selection (London: Penguin Books, 1996), pp. 243–4

For several contemporaries Kierkegaard was evil incarnate. Others spoke of insanity; an anonymous medical expert recommended a journey twenty-five miles out of town, the distance to a well-known psychiatric hospital.¹ Rumours had it that a form of epilepsy kept Søren’s pen busy.² His elder brother Peter, a future bishop, used the Danish word for ‘exalted’ – in a biblical sense ‘lifted up’ but not far from the drug user’s ‘high’. ‘Ecstasy’ and ‘intoxication’ were the contributions of a Danish primate who, after his church-baiting opponent had found some posthumous support, could bestow on this literary sharpshooter a gun-spiking benediction: Kierkegaard’s ‘greatly talented’ but ‘strongly one-sided’ apologia for individualism formed ‘a remarkable episode in Danish literature’.³

Attitudes to outsiders are mixed. Eccentrics, misfits, malcontents and dropouts offend our protective proprieties, but a maverick can leave us feeling we are just running with the herd. A serious troublemaker may face social sanctions, but the more memorable misfits often end up as harmless legends. If their message is too disturbing, the name can still be cast in stone while the message is buried along with the messenger. When the medium is literary and the writer innovative, a handy burial ground is the medium itself.

Literary theorists and young writers were the first to applaud the literary novelty. Yet innovation in any field was nowhere near the front of Kierkegaard’s quite unintentionally radical mind. The criticism of his fellow citizens and the clergy (for their ‘mitigating accommodation’)⁴ was that they merely mouthed their convictions. Kierkegaard’s platform became an unassailable belief in his own insight into the true nature of the faith that they so effortlessly proclaimed. His critics’ response was to ask what authority this single man had to unsettle habits of belief held and honed through the centuries. The originator of Great Britain’s pre-paid penny postal system, and Kierkegaard’s senior English contemporary, had one answer. He, Rowland Hill, remarked that ‘[t]he men to detect blemishes and defects are among those who have not, by long familiarity, been made insensible of them’.⁵ But while the contribution of this dissatisfied post-office customer led in 1840 to a welcome social reform and a knighthood for services to the nation, the message of spiritual decay that Kierkegaard delivered was a direct insult to an uncomprehending elite proud of a small nation’s widely applauded contribution to European culture and science. It was no wonder that Magister Kierkegaard’s name should not be among those of the elect in the Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters.

We may wonder, then, since the name is now on so many lips, if that message is the one that we hear. As for what is often called the religious ‘premise’ of Kierkegaard’s authorship, are we not inclined to speculate that it was the historical contingency of Kierkegaard’s pietistic background that made his both questioning and unquestioning grip on religion a conditioned response in one brought up in a tradition of beliefs that our era no longer does sustain or needs to? To put it crudely, what has Kierkegaard to say to those who share Richard Dawkins’s prophecy that ‘a final scientific enlightenment’ will ‘deal an overdue death blow to religion and other juvenile superstitions’?⁶

An article celebrating the bicentenary in 2013 of Kierkegaard’s birth bore the heading ‘an octopus with many tentacles’ (or more accurately ‘arms’).⁷ It praised the diversity of a man now lauded as a source of insight into not only literary theory but also aesthetics, pedagogy, innovative ethics, politics and the social order, not to mention moral psychology and, yes, ‘negative’ theology. The metaphor may seem rather too apt: not only do an octopus’s tentacles tap into a diverse world, they report back to more than one brain. We may nevertheless read the metaphor as not just an expression of diversity but a corrective to the common view that in speaking with many voices Kierkegaard was able to keep his own silent.

Let us then listen to the Kierkegaard who suggested that what would interest posterity was his ‘life’ and, as he puts it, ‘the devious secret of the whole machinery’. It was this and ‘not only my writings’ that would ‘one day be studied and studied’.⁸ And why after all should we occupy ourselves with a local feud with contemporaries who had little in common with us, and when it comes down to it, what use does each of us have for the history of literature and for literary theory? Far more likely to catch the attention of a postmodern world like ours is the way in which the working parts of a life can be geared to the hard task of becoming an actively unified self.

In 1938, Douglas Steere, an early English-language translator, wrote in his introduction to Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, that, ‘in a strangely universal way, Kierkegaard is both ancient and modern, both a fierce desert prophet and a metropolitan sophisticate who is all too well schooled in the artifices of modern life to be deceived by them’.⁹ An expanded version of the dichotomy appears in the Faroese novelist William Heinesen’s De fortapte spillemenn (The Doomed Fiddlers). We read:

As a spiritual type, in a wide sense, Kierkegaard belongs to the Mephistopheles category. Like that devil’s chargé d’affaires in Goethe, he is possessed of a superior intellect, which he deploys with the same supple facility and tirelessness. They are both, in their at once witty, impudent, and dazzling ways, irresistible. In fact, Kierkegaard goes one better than the devil, being without rival in the art of attacking reason with its own weapons. He is not just Mephistopheles, he is at the same time Mephistopheles’s victim, man, Faust. It is not only against others that he turns his weapons, in the end he turns them without mercy on himself … [While] Mephistopheles simply dissolves in a smoke of brilliant conversation … Kierkegaard is the dire sufferer of his own Satanism. He is, one might say, the tragic Satan …¹⁰

In what he calls ‘Kierkegaard’s journey to Kierkegaard’, Joakim Garff suggests that the ‘categorical Either/Or for which Kierkegaard became world famous should have been both/and …’:

Thus he became both melancholy’s theologian and irony’s Magister, both edifying author and merciless prophet, both rhetorical artist and critic of the aesthetic, both the paradoxical thinker and the teller of simple tales, both Copenhagen’s dandy millionaire and modernity’s martyr, both the epitome of anxiety and the fearless polemicist, both a self-effacing penitent and monumentally self-aware, both the refined aristocrat and the open-handed street preacher, both a classical master-thinker and a teasing deconstructionist, both the pious monk and the devil-may-care enjoyer of life, both absolutely unmarried and yet betrothed for all eternity to the love of his youth.¹¹

What greater imaginable disunity? Some inconsistencies vanish when the life is looked at diachronically and several may be merely acoustic. But then some will surely say, if ‘both-and’ is really more in keeping with what Garff calls Kierkegaard’s ‘dialectical nature’, might not any real opposites here also be open to resolution in a higher biographical unity? Garff in his own Kierkegaard biography has described Hilarius Bogbinder’s Stages on Life’s Way as a ‘counterfeit’ because it is composed of two books that Kierkegaard decided at the last moment to publish as one. But as Edward Mooney points out, it is an artist’s prerogative to make one out of two,¹² and any reader who needs to be told that they were once two will already possess a more embracing perspective.

The cocktail offered by a third author looks at first sight harder to blend. Here Kierkegaard was:

… a schizophrenic … the greatest Dane … the difficult Dane … the gloomy Dane … the greatest Christian of the century … [whose] aim was the destruction of the historic Christian faith … he was the Knight of Faith … [who] never found faith … [he] possessed the truth … [and] was one of the damned.

On what reads like a collection of pseudonymous perspectives and commentators’ verdicts, one additional item on the bartender’s list – indeed the first – is nevertheless of special interest even when taken in the same quasi-ironic vein. This schizophrenic is labelled ‘the sanest man of his generation’.¹³

To readers of the journals and notebooks the sanity is real enough and confirmed in many other ways. Not least of these is Kierkegaard’s appreciation of other writers, conspicuously among them the level-headed Montaigne. A comparison with the ‘French Seneca’ may seem surprising. Montaigne had strong Stoical leanings that spoke of self-sufficiency and religious scepticism. But these two writers shared both circumstances and points of view: the best-known work of each was written in a sta...