Søren Kierkegaard
Danish philosopher
in full Søren Aabye Kierkegaard
born May 5, 1813, Copenhagen, Den.
died Nov. 11, 1855, Copenhagen
Main
Danish philosopher, theologian, and cultural critic who was a major
influence on existentialism and Protestant theology in the 20th century.
He attacked the literary, philosophical, and ecclesiastical
establishments of his day for misrepresenting the highest task of human
existence—namely, becoming oneself in an ethical and religious sense—as
something so easy that it could seem already accomplished even when it
had not even been undertaken. Positively, the heart of his work lay in
the infinite requirement and strenuous difficulty of religious existence
in general and Christian faith in particular.
A life of collisions
Kierkegaard’s life has been called uneventful, but it was hardly that.
The story of his life is a drama in four overlapping acts, each with its
own distinctive crisis or “collision,” as he often referred to these
events. His father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, was a prosperous but
retired businessman who devoted the later years of his life to raising
his children. He was a man of deep but gloomy and guilt-ridden piety who
was haunted by the memory of having once cursed God as a boy and of
having begun his family by getting his maid pregnant—and then marrying
her—shortly after the death of his first wife. His domineering presence
stimulated young Søren’s imaginative and intellectual gifts but, as his
son would later bear witness, made a normal childhood impossible.
Kierkegaard enrolled at the University of Copenhagen in 1830 but did
not complete his studies until 1841. Like the German philosopher Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), whose system he would severely
criticize, Kierkegaard entered university in order to study theology but
devoted himself to literature and philosophy instead. His thinking
during this period is revealed in an 1835 journal entry, which is often
cited as containing the germ of his later work:
The thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea
for which I can live and die.…What is truth but to live for an idea?
While a student at the university, Kierkegaard explored the literary
figures of Don Juan, the wandering Jew, and especially Faust, looking
for existential models for his own life.
The first collision occurred during his student days: he became
estranged both from his father and from the faith in which he had been
brought up, and he moved out of the family home. But by 1838, just
before his father’s death, he was reconciled both to his father and to
the Christian faith; the latter became the idea for which he would live
and die. Despite his reference to an experience of “indescribable joy”
in May of that year, it should not be assumed that his conversion was
instantaneous. On the one hand, he often seemed to be moving away from
the faith of his father and back toward it at virtually the same time.
On the other hand, he often stressed that conversion is a long process.
He saw becoming a Christian as the task of a lifetime. Accordingly, he
decided to publish Sygdommen til døden (1849; Sickness unto Death) under
a pseudonym (as he had done with several previous works), lest anyone
think he lived up to the ideal he there presented; likewise, the
pseudonymous authors of his other works often denied that they possessed
the faith they talked about. Although in the last year of his life he
wrote, “I dare not call myself a Christian,” throughout his career it
was Christianity that he sought to defend by rescuing it from cultural
captivity, and it was a Christian person that he sought to become.
After his father’s death, Kierkegaard became serious about finishing
his formal education. He took his doctoral exams and wrote his
dissertation, Om begrebet ironi med stadigt hensyn til Socrates (On the
Concept of Irony, with Constant Reference to Socrates), completing it in
June of 1841 and defending it in September. In between, he broke his
engagement with Regine Olsen, thus initiating the second major collision
of his life. They had met in 1837, when she was only 15 years old, and
had become engaged in 1840. Now, less than one year later, he returned
her ring, saying he “could not make a girl happy.” The reasons for this
action are far from clear.
What is clear is that this relationship haunted him for the rest of
his life. Saying in his will that he considered engagement as binding as
marriage, he left all his possessions to Regine (she did not accept
them, however, since she had married long before Kierkegaard died). It
is also clear that this crisis triggered a period of astonishing
literary productivity, during which Kierkegaard published many of the
works for which he is best known: Enten-Eller: et livs-fragment (1843;
Either/Or: A Fragment of Life), Gjentagelsen (1843; Repetition), Frygt
og baeven (1843; Fear and Trembling), Philosophiske smuler (1844;
Philosophical Fragments), Begrebet angest (1844; The Concept of
Anxiety), Stadier paa livets vei (1845; Stages on Life’s Way), and
Afsluttende uvidenskabelig efterskrift (1846; Concluding Unscientific
Postscript). Even after acknowledging that he had written these works,
however, Kierkegaard insisted that they continue to be attributed to
their pseudonymous authors. The pseudonyms are best understood by
analogy with characters in a novel, created by the actual author to
embody distinctive worldviews; it is left to the reader to decide what
to make of each one.
Kierkegaard had intended to cease writing at this point and become a
country pastor. But it was not to be. The first period of literary
activity (1843–46) was followed by a second (1847–55). Instead of
retiring, he picked a quarrel with The Corsair, a newspaper known for
its liberal political sympathies but more famous as a scandal sheet that
used satire to skewer the establishment. Although The Corsair had
praised some of the pseudonymous works, Kierkegaard did not wish to see
his own project confused with that of the newspaper, so he turned his
satirical skills against it. The Corsair took the bait, and for months
Kierkegaard was the target of raucous ridicule, the greatest butt of
jokes in Copenhagen. Better at giving than at taking, he was deeply
wounded, and indeed he never fully recovered. If the broken engagement
was the cloud that hung over the first literary period, the Corsair
debacle was the ghost that haunted the second.
The final collision was with the Church of Denmark (Lutheran) and its
leaders, the bishops J.P. Mynster and H.L. Martensen. In his journals
Kierkegaard called Sickness unto Death an “attack upon Christendom.” In
a similar vein, Anti-Climacus, the pseudonymous author of Indøvelse i
Christendom (1850; Training in Christianity), declared the need “again
to introduce Christianity into Christendom.” This theme became more and
more explicit as Kierkegaard resumed his writing career. As long as
Mynster, the family pastor from his childhood, was alive, Kierkegaard
refrained from personal attacks. But at Mynster’s funeral Martensen, who
had succeeded to the leadership of the Danish church, eulogized his
predecessor as a “witness to the truth,” linking him to the martyrs of
the faith; after this Kierkegaard could no longer keep silent. In
December 1854 he began to publish dozens of short, shrill pieces
insisting that what passed as Christianity in Denmark was counterfeit
and making clear that Mynster and Martensen were responsible for
reducing the religion to “leniency.” The last of these pieces was found
on Kierkegaard’s desk after he collapsed in the street in October 1855.
Stages on life’s way
In the pseudonymous works of Kierkegaard’s first literary period, three
stages on life’s way, or three spheres of existence, are distinguished:
the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. These are not
developmental stages in a biological or psychological sense—a natural
and all-but-automatic unfolding according to some DNA of the spirit. It
is all too possible to live one’s life below the ethical and the
religious levels. But there is a directionality in the sense that the
earlier stages have the later ones as their telos, or goal, while the
later stages both presuppose and include the earlier ones as important
but subordinate moments. Kierkegaard’s writings taken as a whole,
whether pseudonymous or not, focus overwhelmingly on the religious
stage, giving credence to his own retrospective judgment that the entire
corpus is ultimately about the religious life.
The personages Kierkegaard creates to embody the aesthetic stage have
two preoccupations, the arts and the erotic. It is tempting to see the
aesthete as a cultured hedonist—a fairly obvious offshoot of the
Romantic movement—who accepts the distinction made by Immanuel Kant
(1724–1804) between artistic and sensuous pleasure while combining them
in a single existential project. But in one of the essays of Either/Or,
the aesthete sees boredom as the root of all evil and is preoccupied
with making life interesting; and the famous seducer in the same volume
seems less concerned with sex than with the fascinating spectacle of
watching himself seduce his victim.
This clue helps one both to define the aesthetic stage and to see
what a stage or sphere of existence in general is. What the various
goals of aesthetic existence have in common is that they have nothing to
do with right and wrong. The criteria by which the good life is defined
are premoral, unconcerned with good and evil. A stage or sphere of
existence, then, is a fundamental project, a form of life, a mode of
being-in-the-world that defines success in life by its own distinctive
criteria.
What might motivate an aesthete to choose the ethical? The mere
presence of guardians of the good, who are willing to scold the
aesthete’s amorality as immorality, is too external, too easily
dismissed as bourgeois phariseeism. Judge William, the representative of
the ethical in Either/Or, tries another tack. The aesthete, he argues,
fails to become a self at all but becomes, by choice, what David Hume
(1711–76) said the self inevitably is: a bundle of events without an
inner core to constitute identity or cohesion over time. Moreover, the
aesthete fails to see that in the ethical the aesthetic is not abolished
but ennobled. Judge William presents marriage as the scene of this
transformation, in which, through commitment, the self acquires temporal
continuity and, following Hegel, the sensuous is raised to the level of
spirit.
In Fear and Trembling this ethical stage is teleologically suspended
in the religious, which means not that it is abolished but that it is
reduced to relative validity in relation to something absolute, which is
its proper goal. For Plato (c. 428–c. 348 bc) and Kant, ethics is a
matter of pure reason gaining pure insight into eternal truth. But Hegel
argued that human beings are too deeply embedded in history to attain
such purity and that their grasp of the right and the good is mediated
by the laws and customs of the societies in which they live. It is this
Hegelian ethics of socialization that preoccupies Judge William and that
gets relativized in Fear and Trembling. By retelling the story of
Abraham, it presents the religious stage as the choice not to allow the
laws and customs of one’s people to be one’s highest norm—not to equate
socialization with sanctity and salvation but to be open to a voice of
greater authority, namely God.
This higher normativity does not arise from reason, as Plato and Kant
would have it, but is, from reason’s point of view, absurd, paradoxical,
even mad. These labels do not bother Kierkegaard, because he interprets
reason as human, all too human—as the rationale of the current social
order, which knows nothing higher than itself. In the language of Karl
Marx (1818–83), what presents itself as reason is in fact ideology.
Kierkegaard interprets Abrahamic faith as agreeing with Hegel and Marx
about this historical finitude of reason, and, precisely because of
this, he insists that the voice of God is an authority that is higher
than the rationality of either the current establishment (Hegel) or the
revolution (Marx). Against both Hegel and Marx, Kierkegaard holds that
history is not the scene in which human reason overcomes this finitude
and becomes the ultimate standard of truth.
Three dimensions of the religious life
The simple scheme of the three stages becomes more complex in Concluding
Unscientific Postscript. The fundamental distinction is now between
objectivity and subjectivity, with two examples of each. Objectivity is
the name for occupying oneself with what is “out there” in such a way as
to exempt oneself from the strenuous inward task of becoming a self in
the ethico-religious sense. One example is the aesthetic posture,
presented in earlier work; the other is the project of speculative
philosophy, to which this text devotes major attention. The target is
Hegelian philosophy, which takes the achievement of comprehensive,
absolute knowledge to be the highest human task.
But, it is argued in the first place, speculative philosophy cannot
even keep its own promises. It purports to begin without presuppositions
and to conclude with a final, all-encompassing system. The very idea
that thought should be without presuppositions, however, is itself a
presupposition, and thus the system is never quite able to complete
itself. The goal of objective knowledge is legitimate, but it can never
be more than approximately accomplished. Reality may well be a system
for God, but not for any human knower.
Secondly, even if speculative philosophy could deliver what it
promises, it would have forgotten that the highest human task is not
cognition but rather the personal appropriation or embodiment of
whatever insights into the good and the right one is able to achieve.
Becoming a self in this way is called existence, inwardness, and
subjectivity. This use of existence as a technical term for the finite,
human self that is always in the process of becoming can be seen as the
birth of existentialism.
The two modes of subjectivity are not, as one might expect, the
ethical and the religious stages. One does not become a self simply
through successful socialization. Besides, in the Concluding
Unscientific Postscript, ethics is treated as already recontextualized
in a religious rather than merely a social context. So the two modes of
ethico-religious subjectivity are “Religiousness A” and “Religiousness
B.” The fact that the latter turns out to be Christianity should not
lead one to think that the former is some other world religion. It is
rather the generic necessary condition for any particular religion and,
as such, is available apart from dependence on the revelation to be
found in any particular religion’s sacred scriptures. Socrates (c.
470–399 bc), here distinguished from the speculative Plato, is the
paradigm of Religiousness A.
Religiousness A is defined not in terms of beliefs about what is “out
there,” such as God or the soul, but rather in terms of the complex
tasks of becoming a self, summarized as the task of being simultaneously
related “relatively” to relative goods and “absolutely” to the absolute
good. Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms refer to the absolute good
variously as the Idea, the Eternal, or God. As the generic form of the
religious stage, Religiousness A abstracts from the “what” of belief to
focus on the “how” that must accompany any “what.” The Hegelian system
purports to be the highest form of the highest religion, namely
Christianity, but in fact, by virtue of its merely objective “how,” it
belongs to a completely different genus. It could not be the highest
form of Christianity, no more than a dog could be the world’s prettiest
cat.
There is something paradoxical about Religiousness A. Socratic
ignorance—the claim of Socrates that he is the wisest of men because,
while others think that they know, he knows that he does not—reflects
the realization that the relation of the existing, and thus temporal,
individual to the eternal does not fit neatly into human conceptual
frameworks. But Christianity, as Religiousness B, is more radically
paradoxical, for the eternal itself has become paradoxical as the
insertion of God in time. In this way the task of relating absolutely to
the absolute becomes even more strenuous, for human reason is
overwhelmed, even offended, by the claim that Jesus is fully human and
fully divine. In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript there is an echo
of Kant’s admission, “I have therefore found it necessary to deny
knowledge in order to make room for faith”—though Kantian faith has a
very different “what.”
Some writings of Kierkegaard’s second literary period extend the
analyses of the first. For example, the two halves of Sickness unto
Death can be read as reprising Religiousness A and B, respectively, in a
different voice. But several texts, most notably Kjerlighedens
gjerninger (1847; Works of Love), Training in Christianity, Til
selvprøvelse (1851; For Self-Examination), and Dømmer selv! (1851; Judge
for Yourselves!), go beyond Religiousness B to what might be called
“Religiousness C.” The focus is still on Christianity, but now Christ is
no longer just the paradox to be believed but also the paradigm or
prototype to be imitated.
These works present the second, specifically Christian, ethics that
had been promised as far back as The Concept of Anxiety. They go beyond
Hegelian ethics, which only asks one to conform to the laws and customs
of one’s society. They also go beyond the religion of hidden inwardness,
whether A or B, in which the relation between God and the soul takes
place out of public view. They are Kierkegaard’s answer to the charge
that religion according to his view is so personal and so private as to
be socially irresponsible. Faith, the inward God-relation, must show
itself outwardly in works of love.
The first half of Works of Love is a sustained reflection on the
biblical commandment “You shall love your neighbour as yourself”
(Matthew 22:36). This commanded love is contrasted with erotic love and
friendship. Through its poets, society celebrates these two forms of
love, but only God dares to command the love of neighbours. The
celebrated loves are spontaneous: they come naturally, by inclination,
and thus not by duty. Children do not have to be taught to seek friends;
nor, at puberty, do they need to be commanded to fall in love. The
celebrated loves are also preferential: one is drawn to this person but
not to that one as friend or lover; something in the other is attractive
or would satisfy one’s desire if the relation could be established.
Because they are spontaneous and preferential, Kierkegaard calls the
celebrated loves forms of “self-love.”
This is not to say that every friend or lover is selfish. But, by
their exclusionary nature, such relations are the self-love of the “We,”
even when the “I” is not selfish in the relation. Here one sees the
political ramifications of commanded love, for an ethics that restricts
benevolence to one’s own family, tribe, nation, race, or class expresses
only the self-love of the We.
By contrast, commanded love is not spontaneous, and it needs to be
commanded precisely because it is not preferential. Another person need
not be attractive or belong to the same We to be one’s neighbour, whom
one is to love. Even one’s enemy can be one’s neighbour, which is a
reason why society never dares to require that people love their
neighbours as they do themselves. For the Christian, this command comes
from Christ, who is himself its embodiment to be imitated.
One could hardly expect the literary and philosophical elite to focus
on the strenuousness of faith as a personal relation to God unsupported
by reason, or on the strenuousness of love as responsibility to and for
one’s neighbour unsupported by society’s ethos. That task was the
responsibility of the church—a responsibility that, in Kierkegaard’s
view, the church had spectacularly failed to fulfill. As these themes
came more clearly into focus in his writings, the attack upon
Christendom with which his life ended became inevitable.
Kierkegaard says that his writings as a whole are religious. They are
best seen as belonging to the prophetic traditions, in which religious
beliefs become the basis for a critique of the religious communities
that profess them. The 20th-century theologies that were influenced by
Kierkegaard go beyond the tasks of metaphysical affirmation and ethical
instruction to a critique of complacent piety. In existential
philosophies—which are often less overtly theological and sometimes
entirely secular—this element of critique is retained but is directed
against forms of personal and social life that do not take the tasks of
human existence seriously enough. Thus, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
complains that his secular contemporaries do not take the death of God
seriously enough, just as Kierkegaard complains that his Christian
contemporaries do not take God seriously enough. Likewise, the German
existential phenomenologist Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) describes how
people make life too easy for themselves by thinking and doing just what
“they” think and do. And Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), the leading
representative of atheistic existentialism in France, calls attention to
the ways in which people indulge in self-deceiving “bad faith” in order
to think more highly of themselves than the facts warrant.
Merold Westphal
