Søren Kierkegaard: The blessing of despair

Clare Carlisle surveys the ‘slippery, often baffling’ writings of a philosopher ‘remarkably sensitive to the perversity, paradoxes and irony of the human condition’

CLARE CARLISLE

Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) thought, wrote and lived as both a philosopher and a spiritual seeker.  His century saw the growth of modern universities, and an increasing professionalization of intellectual labour. During the 1830s Kierkegaard was a theology student at the University of Copenhagen, where he received a broad education, discovering Romanticism and German Idealism as well as studying Christian theology and biblical exegesis.  Yet he criticized academic philosophy as an abstract, overly rationalistic approach to the deep questions that arise from the human condition.  In 1835, he wrote in his journal, “I still accept an imperative of knowledge, through which men may be influenced, but then it must come alive in me, and this is what I now recognize as the most important of all. This is what my soul thirsts for as the African deserts thirst for water. This is what I need to live, a completely human life and not merely one of knowledge”.  Displaying the profound influence of Socrates on his intellectual formation, he added that “a man must first learn to know himself before knowing anything else”.  His first substantial work, completed in 1840, was his graduate dissertation On the Concept of Irony With Continual Reference to Socrates, and Socrates remained Kierkegaard’s chief philosophical inspiration until his death in Copenhagen’s Royal Hospital at the age of forty-two.
All philosophers ask questions, but Socrates’ questions were peculiar, designed to produce confusion rather than answers. While everyone else in ancient Athens was, as Kierkegaard put it, “fully assured of their humanity, sure that they knew what it is to be a human being”, Socrates devoted himself to the question, What does it mean to be human?  From this question flowed many others: What is justice?  What is courage?  Where does our knowledge come from?  Cultured Athenians had ready answers to these questions, but Socrates’ inquiries led in a new direction, away from what the world recognized as wisdom, and towards a higher truth. Kierkegaard also found a critique of worldly wisdom in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians: “I did not come with lofty words or human wisdom (sophia) as I proclaimed to you the mystery of God”, Paul wrote to these Greeks: “I came to you in weakness and much fear and trembling”. Paul urged the Christians in first-century Corinth – a city where, as in ancient Athens, many philosophers and rhetoricians peddled their pedagogic wares – to rest their faith “not on human wisdom but on the power of God”.
Inspired by these examples, Kierkegaard interrogated the assumptions of his own cultured contemporaries in nineteenth-century Denmark. They too appeared “fully assured of their humanity”, and Kierkegaard perceived that they were also, as citizens of a Lutheran nation and members of the Danish State Church, too secure in their Christian identity.  In order to challenge the spiritual complacency of his age, Kierkegaard forged a new philosophical style – while other thinkers deduced propositions and built systems, he created satirical, elusive, undogmatic, lyrical, soul-searching, unsystematic works which eventually earned him a reputation as the “father of existentialism”.  These works influenced some of the most significant philosophers of the last century, including Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Ludwig Wittgenstein.  During Kierkegaard’s lifetime, however, the feminist writer Fredrica Bremer aptly described him as a “philosopher of the heart”.  His extraordinary writing was rooted in the urgent inward drama of being human, eschewing the more objective, systematic efforts to understand the natural world and global history that characterized nineteenth-century philosophy and science.
Kierkegaard’s first book, Either/Or (1843) was – and probably still is – best-known for its provocative “Seducer’s Diary”.  This fictional work chronicles the pursuit of a young woman, Cordelia, through the streets and lanes of Copenhagen; the Seducer lures Cordelia into a weird psychological courtship, then ambiguously ends the affair, leaving her heartborken.  “I am intoxicated by the thought that she is in my power . . .  now she is going to learn what a powerful force love is”, the character declares gleefully. Readers were scandalized by his immorality, yet the book was a bestseller and was critically acclaimed as well as denounced.  Less notoriously, the book ends with a rousing sermon that distils the spirit of Kierkegaardian philosophy:
Perhaps my voice does not have enough power and intensity; perhaps it cannot penetrate into your innermost thought – Oh, but ask yourself, ask yourself with the solemn uncertainty with which you would turn to someone who you knew could determine your life’s happiness with a single word, ask yourself even more earnestly – because in very truth it is a matter of salvation.  Do not interrupt the flight of your soul; do not distress what is best in you; do not enfeeble your spirit with half wishes and half thoughts.  Ask yourself and keep on asking until you find the answer, for one may have known something many times, acknowledged it; one may have willed something many times, attempted it – and yet, only with the deep inner motion, only the heart’s indescribable emotion, only that will convince you that what you have acknowledged belongs to you, that no power can take it from you – for only the truth that edifies you is true for you.
This idea of edification – meaning spiritual empowerment, inward deepening, “strengthening in the inner being” – was central to Kierkegaard’s authorship.  He learned from Romantic authors to experiment with a variety of literary genres in order to edify his readers.  At the same time, he saw it as his peculiar, Socratic task to make life, and especially spiritual life, more difficult for his fellow-Christians. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) Kierkegaard described a philosopher in his early thirties – a figure very much like himself – sitting in the Frederiksberg Gardens, smoking a cigar and meditating on his place in the world:
You are getting on, I said to myself, and becoming an old man without being anything . . .  Wherever you look about you on the other hand, in literature or in life, you see the names and figures of the celebrities, the prized and acclaimed making their appearances or being talked about, the many benefactors of the age who know how to make life more and more easy, some with railways, others with omnibuses and steamships, others with the telegraph, others through easily grasped surveys and brief reports on everything worth knowing.
He reflected that spiritual life was also being made easier by philosophical systems that elucidated the Christian faith, and demonstrated its moral value to society.  “And what are you doing?” he asked himself –
Here my soliloquy was interrupted, for my cigar was finished and a new one had to be lit.  So I smoked again, and then suddenly this thought flashed through my mind: You must do something, but since with your limited abilities it will be impossible to make anything easier than it has become, you must, with the same humanitarian enthusiasm as the others, take it upon yourself to make something more difficult.  This notion pleased me immensely, and at the same time it flattered me to think that I would be loved and esteemed for this effort by the whole community.
Kierkegaard wrote these words not long after he was cruelly caricatured in several issues of Copenhagen’s satirical weekly The Corsair.  For several weeks in 1846, Peter Klaestrup’s cartoons mocked Kierkegaard’s precious, imperious attitude to the reading public while exaggerating his thin legs and hunched back; more darkly, some images referenced his failed engagement to Regine Olsen several years earlier, presenting him as at once exploitative and unmanly.  Even Kierkegaard’s most devoted readers find that his commitment to deepening the difficulty of being human produced a slippery, often baffling series of writings, stubbornly resistant to summary and paraphrase, since so much is compressed between their lines. Within many of these texts, different narrative voices perform conflicts between life-views, with no clear resolution; they exhibit errors and misunderstandings as often as they proclaim truths. For Kierkegaard, the work of philosophy was not a swift trade in ready-to-wear ideas, but the production of deep spiritual effects that would penetrate his readers’ hearts, and change them.
His career as a philosopher was inseparable from his own change of heart: when he ended his engagement to Regine Olsen in 1841, Regine was devastated and Kierkegaard’s reputation was in tatters. “It was an insulting break, which not only called forth curiosity and gossip but also absolutely required that every decent person take the side of the injured party . . . here at home harsh judgements were unanimously voiced against him.  Disapproval, anger, and shame were as strong among those closest to him as anywhere”, one of his nephews later recalled.  The engagement was a fork in Kierkegaard’s path through life; as he hinted in his weird semi-autobiographical philosophical novella Repetition (1843), breaking up with Regine made him into an author.  Instead of becoming a family man and a professional theologian or pastor in the Danish State Church – in short, an upstanding bourgeois citizen – he travelled to Berlin to pursue his philosophical studies, and began to write Either/Or.
This rambling, witty, extraordinarily sophisticated work drew directly on Kierkegaard’s personal experience to explore three different attitudes to life and love: the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. Put very simply, the aesthetic Seducer, who pursues his own pleasure, loves only himself; the ethical person, represented by a married judge, loves another human being, namely his wife; the religious person loves God, who is the ground of all his human relationships. Through these three characters Kierkegaard probed the philosophical and religious significance of marriage, the issue that had been the turning-point in his own life.  At the same time, Either/Or was a polemical book. It undermined the fashionable Hegelian ideas of Kierkegaard’s rival Hans Lassen Martensen, a successful professor of theology, and also subtly criticized the homely ethical Christianity taught by Bishop Mynster, the head of the Danish Church.
In the wake of Kierkegaard’s broken engagement, Either/Or asked whether there can be a higher calling that justifies causing suffering to others and breaking with ethical norms. In other words, is there any claim on human beings beyond the moral law?  (Kant and Hegel had both offered interpretations of Christianity based on the principle that there is not, though they had different accounts of morality.) In Fear and Trembling (1843), Kierkegaard pursued this question further by means of an experimental “dialectical lyric” on the biblical story of Abraham’s journey to Mount Moriah to sacrifice his son Isaac.  From this famous work – now a staple of the undergraduate philosophy curriculum – emerged an account of religious faith which emphasized its grave ethical stakes and high personal cost. Living in relation to God, argued Kierkegaard, risks “the distress, the anxiety” of being misunderstood and shunned by other people. “Knights of faith” like Abraham (and also Mary, the mother of Jesus) were not heroes in any worldly sense, though they came to be viewed as exemplars by later generations, once history had proved their sacrifices worthwhile.
Yet Kierkegaard also criticized the other-worldly, ascetic, life-denying form of religion, represented most visibly in the renunciations of monks and hermits, which Friedrich Nietzsche would excoriate a few decades later.  Fear and Trembling depicts a “knight of faith” who performs a miraculous “double movement”: he renounces the world and then returns to it, receiving it back as a gift from God. This movement echoes both Abraham’s journey up and down Mount Moriah, and the Socratic philosopher’s ascent from and return to the dark cave of ordinary social life. Kierkegaard’s preferred spiritual archetype, however, is a ballet dancer, who leaps up away from the Earth (towards God) then descends just as gracefully, finding her balance in the world.  “To be able to fall down in such a way that the same moment it looks as if one were standing and walking, to transform the leap of life into a walk – that only the knight of faith can do”, he wrote in Fear and Trembling.
Monasticism and marriage are two thematic poles in Kierkegaard’s philosophy of religious life – two imaginative possibilities, neither of which he could live out himself.  Denmark’s monasteries were dissolved following the Reformation; though Kierkegaard’s reasons for refusing to marry Regine remain ambiguous, it seems clear that the difficulty lay with marriage itself, rather than Regine, whom Kierkegaard continued to love, albeit in a rather idiosyncratic manner. As an historical figure, Kierkegaard is an interesting counterpoint to Martin Luther, who, unusually, was both a monk and a married man (though not at the same time).  Indeed, one of the most significant consequences of Luther’s Reformation was a shift from monasticism to marriage as the primary model of Christian life, exemplified by Luther’s own life-choices.  Kierkegaard obsessively explored both these possibilities through his writing: several of his works are attributed to pseudonyms who are monks or hermits, while his cast of characters includes faithful husbands who reflect on their marriages, and fiancés who break their engagements. While he also investigated traditional metaphysical topics, such as time, change and personal identity, it is striking that he was most gripped by questions about how to live in the world – summed up, for him, in the dilemma between marriage and monasticism.  We now call these “existential questions”; we probably owe the very concepts of an existential question, and an existential crisis, to Kierkegaard, although existentialism did not emerge as a recognizable philosophical movement until the mid-twentieth century.
In 1844 Kierkegaard turned away from the theme of romantic love to write two ground-breaking theological works: Philosophical Fragmentsand The Concept of Anxiety. Unlike his earlier published books, these are academic treatises. Philosophical Fragments argues that the Church’s teaching that the eternal God became incarnate in the historical Jesus is an “absolute paradox”, which human reason cannot penetrate.  Faced with this doctrine, our rational minds must either reject it, or surrender before it.  Here again, Kierkegaard offered a philosophical polemic against his contemporaries who sought to rationalize Christian faith, either by marshalling historical evidence in support of the Incarnation, or by showing that it made logical sense.  In the Concept of Anxiety his analysis is more recognizably “existential”, though the subject of this treatise is the doctrine of original sin. Contrary to the orthodox position, taught by Augustine, that human beings inherit sinfulness biologically from Adam, who himself fell into sin through his free choice to disobey God, Kierkegaard suggested that every sin, like Adam’s first sin, arises in freedom.  Displaying acute psychological insight, he argued that anxiety is a ubiquitous response to our consciousness of our own freedom – and that sin constantly re-emerges in our attempts to flee from this anxiety.
Kierkegaard returned to the story of his broken engagement in the voluminous Stages on Life’s Way (1845), which reprised the complex literary strategies as well as the subject-matter of Either/Or.  He was a compulsive writer, though he agonized about publishing his works; more large books quickly followed, including Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), Works of Love (1847), and Christian Discourses(1848).  Among the most significant in its lasting impact is The Sickness Unto Death (1849), a philosophical diagnostic manual for lost souls.  This book explores in detail the spiritual condition of despair, defined as losing oneself through turning away from God.  Here Kierkegaard argued that human beings are not just bodies and minds, but spiritual beings, related to a higher power – yet we all face the task of becoming ourselves.  “Becoming oneself” is a slippery and perhaps paradoxical idea: for Kierkegaard, it means consciously living out one’s dependence on God; becoming aware of this reality instead of denying it, and therefore being true to it:
There is so much talk about wasting a life, but only that person’s life was wasted who went on living so deceived by life’s joys or its sorrows that he never became decisively and eternally conscious as spirit, as a self – or, what amounts to the same thing, never became aware in the deepest sense that there is a God and that he, he himself, exists before this God – an infinite benefaction that is never to be gained except through despair.
Most people, Kierkegaard observed, lose themselves in this world without even realizing it, and without anyone else noticing. Indeed, this spiritual carelessness can appear to be the ease of a happy, successful life:
Just by losing himself in this way, such a man has gained an increasing capacity for going along superbly in business and social life, for making a great success in the world.  Here there is no delay, no difficulty with his self and its infinite movements; he is as smooth as a rolling stone, as courant as a circulating coin.  He is so far from being regarded as a person in despair that he is just what a human being is supposed to be.
According to Kierkegaard, despair is a blessing, for it is the sign of a human being’s connection to God, his highest possibility. Yet it is also a curse, for the depth of the human soul is measured by the intensity of its suffering.  This ambivalent analysis is typical of Kierkegaard’s philosophical gestalt: he was remarkably sensitive to the perversity, paradoxes and irony of the human condition.
All these ideas – about anxiety and despair, the Incarnation and original sin, faith and ethics – deeply influenced philosophy and theology through the twentieth century, and they continue to be debated today. Perhaps even more significant, however, is Kierkegaard’s distinctive philosophical style, reflecting the way his intellectual work drew directly from his personal experience.  We glimpse the extraordinary power of his thinking in a heartfelt letter from an unknown reader, who wrote to him in 1851 after hearing him deliver a sermon in the Citadel Church by Copenhagen’s harbour – one of a handful of occasions on which he preached in a church. “From the very outset when you began to publish your pseudonymous works”, this woman wrote:
I have pricked up my ears and listened lest I should miss any sound, even the faintest, of these magnificent harmonies, for everything resounded in my heart.  This was what needed to be said – here I found answers to all my questions; nothing was omitted of that which interested me most profoundly . . . . I doubt that there is a single string in the human heart that you do not know how to pluck, any recess that you have not penetrated . . . I am never lonely, even when I am by myself for long periods of time, provided only that I have the company of these books, for they are, of all books, those that most closely resemble the company of a living person.
Clare Carlisle is Reader in Philosophy and Theology at King’s College London. Her biography Philosopher of the Heart: The restless life of Søren Kierkegaard will be published in April.