KIERKEGAARD, SØREN

KIERKEGAARD, SØREN (1813–1855), Danish philosopher.

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard is often referred to as the father of twentieth-century existentialism, though his reputation in his own time was that of a writer and culture critic. The legacy of Kierkegaard's writing took time to expand beyond its local origins, for while most of his illustrious contemporaries in the "golden age" of Danish art, letters, and science sought a response in German culture, he himself, like his contemporary Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) addressed a native readership, writing exclusively in Danish, a language he claimed was particularly well suited to his creative powers. Presenting himself as a "poet" or writer rather than a scholar, Kierkegaard combines many authorial categories, defying conventional boundaries between philosophy, theology, psychology, literary criticism, and fiction. His writings display considerable erudition as well as a wealth of original psychological insight.

Born in Copenhagen, Kierkegaard was the youngest of seven children, five of whom, along with their mother, died before he was twenty-one. Kierkegaard was brought up strictly both at school and at home, where his father, once in feudal bondage but having at the age of forty-one retired as a highly successful tradesman, attended personally to his family's upbringing. After his father's death in 1838, Kierkegaard and his surviving elder brother inherited a considerable fortune. Kierkegaard completed his long-delayed theological studies, became engaged, and received his doctorate with a dissertation On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates (1841). Immediately afterward he broke off his engagement and, renouncing an academic career, left for Berlin where, on the first of four visits to that city, he began the pseudonymous authorship on which his international fame chiefly rests.

Apart from a first publication, From the Papers of One Still Living (1838), in which he criticizes a novel by Hans Christian Andersen, and the doctoral dissertation three years later, Kierkegaard's main authorship is divided into two series: the pseudonymous works and the signed religious discourses, which he entitled "edifying" (or "up-building") and, later, "Christian." The two series were written in parallel, at times works from both being published simultaneously. Kierkegaard's first pseudonymous work, Either/Or, published in 1843, was an immediate success. It was quickly followed by Repetition and Fear and Trembling, both published in that same year. In 1844 there followed Philosophical Fragments and The Concept of Anxiety, and in 1845 Stages on Life's Way. Kierkegaard intended to bring the pseudonymous series to a close with the lengthy Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments (1846).

Following a famous self-provoked feud with a satirical weekly, and dropping vague plans of retirement to a country pastorate, Kierkegaard took up his pen once more. Notable among the several publications that ensued were the signed Works of Love (1847) and two further pseudonymous works. The former expounds an ideal of unselfish, Christian love, while the first of the latter two, The Sickness unto Death (1849), offers a systematic analysis of progressively deliberate renunciations of a Christian form of human fulfilment, all of them characterized as forms first of despair and then of sin. Practice in Christianity (1850) resumes the theme of the paradox of the Incarnation (that the eternal should have become historical), central in the earlier Philosophical Fragments. Through its emphasis on the degradation suffered by Christ, and against the background of what Kierkegaard saw as an absence of any corresponding self-denial in the Danish clergy, this reworking of the paradox theme paved the way for an open attack on the Danish state church, provoking a conflict that was at its peak at the time of Kierkegaard's death, in 1855, at the age of forty-two.

works

The lengthy Postscript (whose pseudonymous author, Johannes Climacus, is also the author of

the much shorter Philosophical Fragments) is the most explicitly philosophical of the pseudonymous works. Often regarded as a locus classicus of anti-Hegelianism, Concluding Unscientific Postscript can also be read as a polemic against the German Romantics. Protagonists of the Romantic movement opposed a tradition based on a belief in the superiority of reason as a guide to all knowledge as too abstract and formal to fully capture reality. They sought a richer experience of reality through artistically creative but also religious experience, with an emphasis on subjectivity. Focused on Christianity, Postscript aims to demolish any belief in the possibility of arriving at a saving truth, whether achieved through objective means (history, idealist philosophy, or the mere test of time) or in the form of some truth-guaranteeing quality of experience (subjectivity). Although Christian truth is indeed available only to the individual as such, or to someone who can think subjectively (the person who, in philosophical reflection, does not forget or abstract from the fact that he or she is an existing individual confined to time and facing an open future), grasping that truth requires an act of faith that has no support in any form of evidence or authority, objective or subjective. The true believer is one who, willingly and passionately embracing the paradox of the Incarnation, personally bears the burden of responsibility for acknowledging its revelation.

The pseudonymous works from Either/Or to Postscript appear to be measuring out the steps that need to be taken, and the distance in self-understanding traversed, before a person arrives at a point where his or her situation calls genuinely for a religious solution and thus for the faith outlined in Postscript. Readers familiar with the facts of Kierkegaard's own life will readily detect the relevance of these for the themes that emerge in these works, among them Either/Or's "choice of oneself" and Fear and Trembling's "suspension of the ethical." The notion of a life-view is central. It is to be found in Kierkegaard's earliest publication and later developed into that of the three stages, presented in Stages on Life's Way and defined in later sections of Postscript. The aesthetic and ethical stages are first presented in Either/Or and offered as alternative life-views for the reader to choose between. These are gradually supplemented in the later works by the religious stage (in fact two stages, referred to as A and B).

Postscript indicates for the subjective thinker where one must stand to find the object of a faith that is specifically Christian (the paradoxical religiousness B), but at the same time makes it clear that someone truthfully adopting a Christian point of view can no longer use a shared language to convey what it means to adopt it. This might indicate that little or nothing can be said from the point of view of religiousness B itself. The requirements of a religious and of a Christian life-view are nevertheless cogently and movingly expressed in the edifying and Christian discourses published in parallel with the pseudonyms. By conveying the distance between shallow and conciliatory readings of scripture and the hardness of their teaching when literally interpreted, these, too, bear witness to a dialectical aspect in Kierkegaard's writings. Thus, in its more than three hundred and fifty pages, Works of Love presents a paradigm of unselfish love that makes ordinary human attachments appear self-serving and therefore not properly forms of love at all.

Kierkegaard's reputation as one of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's (1770–1831) most devastating critics rests on certain isolated but crucial passages including that, in the early part of Postscript, where the author rejects the possibility of an "existential system" on the grounds that it cannot capture the forward movement of existence (Tilværelse—a Danish near-equivalent of the German Dasein, made famous in the early work of Martin Heidegger). Kierkegaard is said to have had Hegelian sympathies in his student days and his later thought owes much both in structure and substance to Hegel. In this he resembles that other reputed archcritic of Hegel, Karl Marx (1818–1883), who also had a Hegelian past, and whose covertly Hegelian background of his later thought first came clearly to light with the late discovery of his early writings. In broad philosophical terms Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Marx can all be labeled "dialectical" thinkers. For them, reality reveals itself most cogently and truthfully in the form of opposites, or "contradictions," whose resolution it is then the task of such a thinker to formulate and help us to envisage as humankind's proper goal. For Hegel such resolutions occur in our understanding as it converges ideally on a vision of absolute knowledge as reason. For Marx the tensions are to be found in the working arrangements of society, and the corresponding resolutions require political action on the part of those collectives best placed to bring them about. The tensions that Kierkegaard brings to mind concern dilemmas faced by individuals in their confrontation with life, independently of the political situation (though it may be argued that they become salient only under certain political conditions).

Kierkegaard's influence on European thought came late. Where Marx's writings led quickly to revolutionary politics and to an explosive development in the field of social economics, the impact of Kierkegaard's writings was first felt in the comparatively esoteric circles of "dialectical theology," in which Karl Barth (1886–1968) and others stressed human isolation from God and the need for grace. In the early 1920s Kierkegaard was translated into several languages, including Russian, and was widely read in both academic and literary circles in Germany, where as a student the Hungarian and later communist apologist György Lukács (1885–1971) was an admirer (and later critic). But it was not until the 1920s and 1930s, through the intermediaries of Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), the second of whom is heavily indebted to the Danish thinker, that Kierkegaard became a familiar point of reference among intellectuals and was heralded as the "father of existentialism."

By the end of the twentieth century, having long been cultivated on the American side of the Atlantic, not least by Lutheran academics in the Midwest, Kierkegaard had attracted a new audience, more perceptive to his focus on and deployment of irony. Some commentators have been inclined to read Kierkegaard as a prophet of post-modernism, though others will claim that his authorship is modernist at core. In his campaigning for what he called "Christianity within Christendom," the latter read Kierkegaard as replacing the Hegelian absolute with another (kind of) single truth upon which all understandings converge. Yet it cannot be denied that, with their diverse vantage points and differently shaded vantage points and "life-views," Kierkegaard's pseudonymous writings show considerable affinity with postmodern styles and attitudes.

influence

In a posthumously published work (The Point of View for My Activity as an Author; 1859) Kierkegaard claimed to have been "from first to last" a religious writer. Although the claim can be (and has been) questioned as an attempt to stage-manage his own future reputation, given a generous interpretation it is one that finds corroboration in the journals as well as in the texts themselves. If to some present-day admirers Kierkegaard's declared religious intention reduces the general relevance of the content of the writings themselves, others may see in him a resource for a regeneration of religiosity beyond postmodernism. Thus recourse to the "dialectic" that inspired Barthian theology, with its emphasis on God's "otherness," can help to break anthropomorphic habits of thought, such as incline us to believe that God must have a "cause" that we can serve, and that since (as many have claimed) human reason is inherently goal-directed, then any idea we have of being in God's service must be one of fulfilling a divine "purpose," rather than, say, that of performing daily tasks and fulfilling normal obligations in God's spirit and presence. The question of whether or how far such suggestions are in Kierkegaard's spirit must remain a matter of textual interpretation, but its doing so would testify to the continuing power of the thought of a writer whom the twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once described as the nineteenth century's "most profound thinker."

See alsoDenmark; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich; Marx, Karl.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Kierkegaard, Søren. Kierkegaard's Writings. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong, Edna H. Hong, Henrik Rosenmeier, Reidar Thomte, et al. Projected 26 volumes. Princeton, N.J., 1978–1997.

——. Fear and Trembling. Translated by Alastair Hannay. New York, 1985.

——. The Sickness unto Death. Translated by Alastair Hannay. New York, 1989.

——. Either/Or: A Fragment of Life. Translated by Alastair Hannay. New York, 1992.

——. Papers and Journals: A Selection. Translated by Alastair Hannay. New York, 1996.

——. A Literary Review. Translated by Alastair Hannay. New York, 2001.

——. Kierkegaard's Journals and Notebooks. 11 vols. Edited by Alastair Hannay et al. Princeton, N.J., 2005–.

Secondary Sources

Garff, Joakim. Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography. Translated by Bruce M. Kirmmse. Princeton, N.J., 2005.

Hannay, Alastair. Kierkegaard: A Biography. New York, 2001.

Hannay, Alastair, and Gordon D. Marino, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard. New York, 1998.

Kirmmse, Bruce H. Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark. Bloomington, Ind., 1990.

Kirmmse, Bruce H., ed. Encounters with Kierkegaard: A Life as Seen by His Contemporaries. Translated by Bruce H. Kirmmse and Virginia R. Laursen. Princeton, N.J., 1996.

Matust?k, Martin J., and Merold Westphal, eds. Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity. Bloomington, Ind., 1995.

Rée, Jonathan, and Jane Chamberlain, eds. Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader. Malden, Mass., 1998.

Stewart, Jon. Kierkegaard's Relations to Hegel Reconsidered. New York, 2003.

Alastair Hannay