Read an Excerpt
KIERKEGAARD FOR BEGINNERS
By DONALD D. PALMER For Beginners LLC
Copyright © 1996 Donald D. Palmer
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-939994-12-7
CHAPTER 1
SØREN KIERKEGAARD (1813-1855)
lived only forty-two years. Yet in his short life, he wrote more than twenty-five books. After his death, his works slipped into obscurity.
When they were rediscovered in the twentieth century they revolutionized European thinking and produced the philosophy that came to be known as
EXISTENTIALISM.
Who was this man, and what did he have to say?
In one way, it's surprising anybody reads him, because al his writings are about himself, his father, and his girlfriend.
Let's start our story by talking Søren's father, Michael.
MICHAEL PEDERSEN
KIERKEGAARD (1756-1838) had spent his youth in dire poverty in Denmark's windswept sand dune country of Northern Jutland, where at one moment in his childish despair while tending sheep out on the barren heathland he had raised his little fist to heaven and had cursed God, a major sin in the Lutheran Pietism in which he had been raised.
As a young man he had come to Copenhagen and parlayed a small saving into a sizeable wealth, steeping himself in books and making smart social connections
Søren Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen on May 5,1513, the last of seven children. His mother, Anne Lund Kierkegaard, was his old father's second wife and had been the maid of the first Mrs. Kierkegaard during the period of her final illness.
There remains the hint of a sexual impropriety between Michael and the maid during the last months of the life of the terminally ill Mrs. Kierkegaard. This sin or some other (perhaps the one from Michael's childhood) had made the old man an overbearing religious penitent who was morbidly fanatical in his belief that he had offended God.
In a certain sense, young Søren was sacrificed on the altar of his fathers religiosity, or he almost was, just as young Isaac of the Biblical story was almost sacrificed on his father's altar.
It is no mere coincidence that Kierkegaard was fascinated by the story of Abraham and Isaac all his life. This story, taken as a metaphor, illuminates much of Kierkegaard's adult behavior.
Despite his morbid obsession, Michael recognized his son's genius and tried to nurture it. Even though Michael was self-educated, he was very knowledgeable, and he took much of young Søren's instruction into his own hands.
He would have the boy eavesdrop on his dinner parties with the elite of Copenhagen, and afterward he would make Søren sit in the empty chair of each guest and set forth the argument which that person had espoused during the dinner.
He would teach Søren geography by taking his hand and strolling through the living room with him pretending it was a foreign country and making him name famous sights that they would "see" in that country. Søren was sent to Latin School with instructions from his father to bring home the third best grade.
His father would show the little boy colored illustrations from a stack of cards depicting famous people and events, such as Napoleon riding on his steed, or William Tell shooting an apple from his son's head. Søren would ask questions: Who is that? What did he do? Then from the middle of the pile Søren's father produces a picture of Jesus on the cross. The boy asks, "Who is it? What did he do? Tell me....
Why were people so bad to him?" The father tells his son, "This is the Saviour of the world. He was killed by those whom he would save." Years later Kierkegaard wrote, "As a child I was sternly and seriously brought up in Christianity. Humanly speaking, it was a crazy upbringing."
There is a passage in the Bible according to which
"the sins of the father will be visited upon the sons."
The Kierkegaard family mythology interpreted this as morbidly as possible to mean that as payment for his sins, old Michael would have to bury all seven of his children before his own death. (The number seven has always had a mystical significance in the Bible.) And sure enough, one by one, the children died off, leaving only Søren and his brother, Peter. Therefore Søren was totally amazed when at two A.M. on August 9,1333, his father died at eighty-two years of age. Søren had simply assumed that he would die young and had made no plans for his life. His first published work was called,
"Papers from One Surviving."
Partially liberated from his morbid past, one of the first things Kierkegaard did was fail in love and become engaged. Most people who read about his romance with his fiancée, Regina Olsen, do not like the way he comported himself with her. He met her when he was twenty-one and she was fourteen, that is to say, three years before he could properly court her. He spent those three years well, ingratiating himself with her family, finding out everything about her he could, placing himself in a position to influence her aesthetic taste, and even befriending her boyfriend, Fritz Schlegel, using his position of confidence to undermine poor Fritz.
In his pseudonymous fictional story, "Diary of a Seducer," Kierkegaard tells of the seduction of a young woman by a man who studies her every gesture. The reader of the story realizes that the woman is doomed because of the totality of the seducer's plan. Similarly, those who know the thoroughness of Kierkegaard's plotting to win Regina feel that she, too, was snared before she had a chance to react. Sure enough, when Regina turned seventeen, Søren wooed her and won her. The engagement party took place, and the announcement was published.
Kierkegaard seemed happy with his victory and was well on his way to becoming a solidly entrenched member of the bourgeois establishment, when suddenly for no reason he shared with anyone else, he broke the engagement. In his diary he wrote that he had done so because "God had vetoed the marriage." Regina was heartbroken and begged him to return to her. Her father humiliated himself pleading Regina's case. Kierkegaard was intractable and cold. He allowed himself to be seen frolicking in questionable neighborhoods of Copenhagen.
Then he disappeared from Denmark and sneaked off to Berlin, where he enrolled at the University in a course on Hegelian philosophy under the prominent Professor Schelling, and where his classmates included none other than Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and Michael Bukunin—each of whom would later exert a powerful influence on European thought.
After the termination of the academic quarter, he returned to Copenhagen, but when he thought he saw Regina nod at him in church, he fled to Berlin again. While in Berlin this second time he wrote one of his greatest books, Fear and Trembling, his book about Abraham and Isaac, and it contained a secret message for Regina.
In one of the book's many interpretations of Abraham's story, Kierkegaard imagines Abraham as pretending before Isaac that it was not God who had demanded Isaac's death, but that Abraham himself desired it because he was an idolater and a murderer. Abraham feigns being a criminal so that Isaac, with his dying breath, would curse Abraham and not God. So, Kierkegaard had acted like a cad in order that Regina would not blame God for the sacrifice of the love between her and Søren!
Moreover, Kierkegaard wrote in his diary that by assuming responsibility for the break, he would free Regina to love again. Yet, when he returned from Berlin and discovered that she was engaged to Fritz Schlegel, Kierkegaard was beside himself with jealousy and a sense of loss. Some time later he wrote in his journal,
He went to his grave still love-sick.
(Regina married Schlegel, who was made governor of the Danish Virgin Islands. He and Regino had a good life there. But after Schlegel's death, Regina made it clear that she still loved the now longdead Kierkegaard.)
It seems that Kierkegaard had only three significant human relationships that had a major impact on his life:
one with his father, one with Regina Olsen, and one with the editor of the popular comical newspaper, The Corsair.
This was a vulgar satirical journal that purported to serve liberal political causes by mocking the haute-bourgeoisie of Copenhagen. In fact, it was at least as much of a titillating peep-show for the gossip-mongering voyeurs and would-be imitators of the upper-middle class that the newspaper parodied. Its editor, Meïr Goldschmidt, spared no one his barbs, except Søren Kierkegaard, whom he greatly admired.
When one of Kierkegaard's books was reviewed favorably in The Corsair, Kierkegaard wrote a sarcastic letter to the editor, saying that being praised in The Corsair was a major insult, and that he would much more prefer to have his book attacked, which would be tantamount to a compliment. The humiliated Goldschmidt began a daily attack on poor Kierkegaard, which was relentless and devastating.
By then Kierkegaard's weak spine had given him stooped posture and his skinny legs with cuffs that were too high to be stylish made him an easy target for the caricaturist's pen.
He became a laughing stock throughout Denmark and was sneered at by the genteel folk and insulted by street urchins and louts wherever he went. Goldschmidt became ashamed of himself, but the mockery he began lasted long after The Corsair folded. Kierkegaard tried to put a brave face on it, but the "Corsair affair" was surely the second-most painful event in his life.
In his last years, Kierkegaard abandoned his "indirect communication" and attacked the official Danish Lutheran Church in a most direct manner, further alienating what few friends and supporters he had.
According to Kierkegaard, primitive Christianity had been a spiritual revolution that had challenged the status quo and had therefore been an offense to all complacency. But the contemporary Church was the very symbol of self-satisfied bourgeois smugness, so he criticized it relentlessly at every occasion.
He called what the Church was preaching "lemonade twaddle." He eventually printed pamphlets at his own expense and passed them out the way religious zealots often do in the streets of our own cities. (The pamphlets, however, were much more articulate than those of today's typical religious pamphleteer, and all the words were spelled correctly!)
Here are some short examples:
Kierkegaard was passionately involved in this polemic when, on October 2,1855, he fell to the street paralyzed. A month and a half later he was dead. There was a near riot at his funeral, as a number of angry theology students at the university were outraged at the way the Church tried to take over in death the man who had opposed it so bitterly with his last breath.
He had wanted to have written on his tombstone simply,
"The Individual,"
but instead his stone reads,
"Søren Aabne Kierkegaard Born the 5th of May, 1813 Died the 11th of November 1855."
At least the last name is appropriate. In Danish it means "graveyard."
CHAPTER 2
Indirect Communication
Kierkegaard's final illness coincided with the moment that he had exhausted the last of his dead father's money. Kierkegaard never really held down a job in his life, but perhaps we can call him a professional writer. He seems to have spent the greatest part of his waking life at his writing desk, and he certainly produced a large number of books in the few years that he lived. (However, it's lucky his father left him a large sum to live off of, because his books were not exactly best sellers.)
What did Kierkegaard write about? About a certain kind of TRUTH that he called "subjective truth" or "existential truth." This truth is, according too him, the most important kind of truth, but unfortunately it cannot be communicated directly. It is composed of deep insights or revelations or choices about an individual's life, and they are different in the case of each individual. Kierkegaard finds himself in the paradoxical position of wanting to write books about these truths—that is, of wanting to communicate that which cannot be communicated. Therefore, he develops and employs a theory of indirect communication.
Kierkegaard derives much of his inspiration for this theory from his favorite philosopher, old Socrates of Athens (469-399 B.C.) In his discussions, ostensibly recorded by his disciple Plato, Socrates' form of communication is seen to be one of IRONY.
He overstates, understates, misstates, poeticizes, and mythologizes. The classical example of Socrates' irony was his assertion of his own ignorance.
When informed that the oracle at Delphi (spokesperson for the gods) had called Socrates the wisest man in Athens, Socrates claimed to be stunned. How could he be the wisest man in Athens if he knew nothing? However, upon consideration, Socrates concluded that he was indeed wiser than other people because, though he knew nothing, he knew that he knew nothing.
Other people also knew nothing, but thought they knew something. Socrates' ironic claim of ignorance was used, of course, to undermine the arrogant pretense to knowledge by his opponents. We know how devastating his irony could be. By the middle of one of the Platonic dialogues, Alcibiades. Socrates has reduced one of his adversaries to tears. Alcibiades asks,
"SOCRATES, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME? I NO LONGER KNOW WHO I AM."
According to Kierkegaard Socrates "approached each man individually, deprived him of everything, and sent him away empty handed." What Socrates taught had no objective content, rather, Socrates became the negative condition whereby learners learned something about themselves. Kierkegaard wrote his Master's thesis (really equivalent to our Doctoral dissertation) on Socrates, and he called it The Concept of Irony.
Once he had received the Master's degree, he liked to think of himself as "the Master of Irony."
Kierkegaard and Socrates were not the only ones who had "mastered irony." So had the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke). It is noteworthy that in the first three Gospels Jesus rarely ever "tells it like it is," rather he preaches using an indirect form of communication that Kierkegaard takes to be essential and not just incidental to his teaching. For example, whenever Jesus is asked about the kingdom of God, he speaks in parables. In Matthew 13 alone, there are six such parables.
(Heaven is like a farmer planting crops, it is like yeast in bread, it is like a treasure hidden in a field, it is like a buyer of pearls, it is like a fisherman's net.)
Jesus uses indirect communication in a marvelous variety of ways. Not only do we see it in the parables
"The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed."
but in the harsh sayings
"Let the dead bury their dead",
the sarcasm
'It is as possible for a rich man to enter paradise as it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle",
in the bizarre actions
the condemnation of the fig tree: "Let no man eat fruit of thee forever more",
and in the poetry
"The kingdom of god is within you"
According to Kierkegaard, Jesus's method of communicating is unbalancing. It destabilizes the smug complacency that stands between the individual and the truth. Jesus's method is essential to his goal. What Jesus "teaches" cannot be taught in some other more objective manner. The listener is forced to confront the full paradoxical power of "the lesson" and, in doing so, is forced to confront himself or herself. So it was with old Socrates too.
Kierkegaard imitates the methods of Socrates and Jesus in choosing to communicate indirectly and ironically.
He does so by writing all of his philosophical works secretly, publishing them under pseudonyms and then disclaiming all responsibility for their content. Kierkegaard employs fourteen different pseudonyms in his work, including names like "Victor Eremita" (Victor the Hermit), "Johannes de silentio" (John the Silent), "Constantin Constantius" (Constantin the Constant), "Johannes Climacus" (John Climax or John the Ladder), "Anti-Climacus" (Anticlimax), "Nicolaus Notabene" (Nicolaus Note-well), and "Hilarius Bookbinder." Each of these authors has his own personality, style, and outlook on life. When Kierkegaard finally admitted (what everyone knew by then) that he was the author of the pseudonymous works, he claimed:
IN THE PSEUDONYMOUS WORKS THERE IS NOT A SINGLE WORD WHICH IS MINE. I HAVE NO OPINION ABOUT THESE WORKS EXCEPT AS A THIRD PERSON, NO KNOWLEDGE OF THEIR MEANING EXCEPT AS A READER, NOT THE REMOTEST PRIVATE RELATION TO THEM.
Yet most scholars ignore Kierkegaard's disclaimer for all practical purposes. That is because his slightly twisted shadow falls across every page of the pseudonymous works, and because they are all part of his grandiose plan to deceive his readers into the truth, that is to say to communicate a subjective truth indirectly.
In fact, Kierkegaard's pseudonymous works don't communicate any objective truths at all, not even any concepts. Rather than being knowledge, they are anti-knowledge. This is because knowledge, as Kierkegaard construes it, is always abstract, and existence is always concrete.
As Kierkegaard's wayward disciple Jean-Paul Sartre says, Kierkegaard's works are forms of non-knowledge that masquerade as knowledge at the same time that they indict knowledge. Kierkegaard's words self-destruct before our eyes.
As Sartre says, "Reading Kierkegaard, I climb back as far as myself. I want to catch hold of him, and it is myself I catch. This non-conceptual work is an invitation to understand myself as the source of all concepts."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from KIERKEGAARD FOR BEGINNERS by DONALD D. PALMER. Copyright © 1996 Donald D. Palmer. Excerpted by permission of For Beginners LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
