KIERKEGAARD - Assets - Cambridge University Pressassets.cambridge.org/97805215/31818/frontmatter/9780521531818... · Kierkegaard, Soren, - . . ... as in Kierkegaard’s case, as that

KIERKEGAARD

Written by one of the world’s preeminent authorities on Kierkegaard, thisbiography is the first to reveal the delicate imbrication of Kierkegaard’s lifeand thought. To grasp the importance and influence of Kierkegaard’sthought far beyond his native Denmark, it is necessary to trace the manyfactors that led this gifted but (according to his headmaster) “exceedinglychildish youth” to grapple with traditional philosophical problems andreligious themes in a way that later generations would recognize as amount-ing to a philosophical revolution.

Although Kierkegaard’s works are widely tapped and cited, they areseldom placed in context. Nor is due attention paid to their chronology.However, perhaps more than the work of any other contributor to theWestern philosophical tradition, these writings are so closely meshed withthe background and details of the author’s life that knowledge of this isindispensable to their content.

Alastair Hannay solves these problems by following the chronologicalsequence of events and focusing on the formative stages of Kierkegaard’scareer, from the success of his first pseudonymous work, Either/Or,through to The Sickness unto Death and Practice in Christianity.

This book offers a powerful narrative account that will be of particularinterest to philosophers, literary theorists, intellectual historians, and schol-ars of religious studies as well as to any nonspecialist looking for an author-itative guide to the life and work of one of the most original and fascinatingfigures in Western philosophy.

Alastair Hannay is Professor Emeritus in the department of philosophy atthe University of Oslo. He is the author of Mental Images – A Defense(1971), Kierkegaard (1982), and Human Consciousness (1990). He has trans-lated several works by Kierkegaard in the Penguin Classics series.

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KierkegaardA Biography

Alastair HannayUniversity of Oslo






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© Alastair Hannay

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Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication DataHannay, Alastair.

Kierkegaard : a biography / Alastair Hannay.p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN ---

. Kierkegaard, Soren, -. . Philosophers Denmark Biography. .Theologians Denmark Biography. . Title.

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v

Contents

Preface page vii

Acknowledgements xv

1 From Street to Salon: First Blood 12 The Matter with Søren 303 A Faustian Phase 584 The Wild Geese Fly 885 The Dead and the Living: Debut 1016 Serious about Irony: The Dissertation 1277 The Breach and Berlin: Either/Or 1548 Faith and Tragic Heroism 1809 More to Being 207

10 Notabene’s Meditation 24411 Completing the Stages 25812 Concluding Business 27713 Reviewing the Age 31714 Refashioning the Exterior 34215 Works of Love 35716 Defining the Deed 36917 Mischievous Martyr 38718 ‘Poor Kierkegaard’? 420

Notes 443

Index 490











vii

Preface

ONE AIM of a biography of a famous intellectual figure is to place itssubject’s works in their historical and cultural context. Another, closerto home, is to see the works in the context of their author’s ownintellectual development. But we must bear in mind that it is the bios ofthe subject, and not of the works, that the biographer must focus on.Obviously enough, for it is just because the works themselves are stillalive, and so don’t qualify for biography, that we are interested in theirauthor. Yet it is because they still live that we are curious about the lifeof their author.

What is the precise link between works and a life that allows biogra-phy to be at once both intellectual and biography? Must the biogra-pher’s interest in a writer and thinker be confined to those aspects ofthe life that as it were produce the works? Perhaps, but then of coursethe actual origins of a thinker’s ideas go much further back than to thewriter’s schooldays or birth; they can be traced as far back as the earlyhistories of the ideas which the works embody. And if the intellectualbiographer’s task is conceived more particularly, as in Kierkegaard’scase, as that of finding out and describing how an intellectual traditionhas come to be renewed or transformed by a great thinker, then al-though the contingencies of time, place, talent, and opportunity that arepart of the thinker’s biography will enter quite naturally into an accountof the genesis of the works, this still doesn’t explain why it should benecessary to write a full-blown biography.

Still, it is doubtful whether an academic curiosity about origins is thereal reason for the genre. Behind or beside that we may find a simplefascination with history. But other motivations too can make us hankerafter biography. Isn’t there a more particular curiosity, when it comesdown to it, that intellectual biography caters to, a desire to uncover the






viii Preface

secret of the person ‘behind’ the works? Divine spark? Lucky break?Noble mind? Feet of clay? Maybe even a personal fascination withcreativity itself, an interest in calculating just how far from Olympus orParnassus we ourselves are, or how close.

An intellectual biography is not then simply the biography of anintellectual. For reasons of the kind just hinted at it should, as biogra-phy, by rights be something less, but on the intellectual side perhapssomething more. Calling a biography of a writer ‘intellectual’ signals thefact that what we have been bequeathed is an edifice of thought. Ratherstrangely, if the same grounds were given for categorizing a biographyof, say, Beethoven or Wordsworth, we would be made to expect in theirrespective cases a ‘musical’ and a ‘poetic’ biography. Apparently, then,as a genre intellectual biography must be in some way sui generis withregard to the nature of its subject’s special contribution.

We can say that the biography is intellectual not just because itssubject was that too, but because through that very fact suitably attunedreaders are helped by a suitably erudite biographer to grasp in recapit-ulation the genesis and substance of the subject’s intellectual achieve-ment. Erudition here requires entering somehow into the world of thesubject’s thought, something which requires in turn a mastery of thewords and concepts from the tradition to which the subject has made asignificant contribution. The very ability to write and to read such abiography might therefore be taken not only as some indication of thefact that the works do in fact continue to live but also as a measure ofthe success of the thinker’s achievement. We owe it to him or to herthat we have or still have the tools to rehearse and appreciate that life’sachievement.

That there is still a question, however, of the relationship between aninterest in the life and an interest in the works can be seen by askingwhat would be achieved in regard to the one by simply beginning andending with the other. Suppose you take your point of departure in thewritings. As far as a writer’s works are concerned it is only so far as aonce-living creator can be revealed in the still-living works that a re-hearsal of the history of the works will yield its creator and providematerial for that creator’s own biography. But then facts of biographyimportant enough in the subject’s life may have very little bearing ornone at all on what we find significant in that subject’s works, particu-larly so, one would think, in the case of those whose contributions are






Preface ix

intellectual, unlike warriors, politicians, and statesmen. Not only maythere be very few facts of note to relate in any case, writers’ lives tendingin general to be quite dull – and those of thinkers are hardly likely tobe less so – those worth telling may take us no further than explaininghow the thinker got started and what sustained him. Suppose, however,that we started and ended with the narrative of a creative writer’s orthinker’s life. We would risk never getting to the works at all. One needonly think of the films and documentaries about famous authors thatwin audiences and prizes but without, beyond a few ritual quotationsout of context, telling their audience anything about the contents oftheir works.

Some today will say, well and good, let’s forget the biographicalincident and get on with the works, adding that if you are looking forthe life of the author there if anywhere is where you will find it, a lifethat we note can now even be thought of as still being lived. Followersof Barthes and Foucault would claim, conveniently enough, though in arather backhanded way, for the credibility of the intellectual biographyas a genre, that any biography of a writer can only begin and end withthe text. A writer’s real life, after all, his or her immortality, is in thetext. From that point of view, all readings of Kierkegaard, and they arelegion, are ‘biographies’. Taken as it were from the top, there are asmany biographies, as many lives, as there are readings. The many-livesparadox that this implies is one that many in our age will take in theirstride. They will also point to the commonplace that for a writer soconcerned about life, Kierkegaard’s own life was a conspicuously un-eventful one. So a biographer choosing not to read Kierkegaard’s bios inhis grafe is left having to reconstruct any bios from hearsay or correspon-dence about such insignificant remainders as the private person bentover his desk, getting tired, taking a stroll in a city park, looking at thescenery from a carriage, visiting coffee-houses, restaurants, the theatre,baiting his contemporaries, having fleeting thoughts, feelings, and soon.

There is good reason for saying that when looking for the life of theauthor, in Kierkegaard’s case the writings are the place to look. This issometimes obscured by superficial references to the pseudonymity ofthe works most likely to provide the source. The fashionable view hasalways been that the pseudonyms are covers behind which the realKierkegaard, however large or small, coherent or incoherent a person-






x Preface

ality himself, lurks. But pseudonymity can just as well be an effectivemeans of exposure, the disguise of a disguise that allows an author tospill more of himself onto his pages than would be prudent or proper ifthe works were signed. A biographer may be encouraged by this thoughtto expect to find a good deal of bios in the grafe. Kierkegaard gives somesupport to this too, claiming once that he had become as much aproduct of his writings as they were of him. So if the art of disguisethat Kierkegaard is said by so many to have perfected was in fact theart of the disguise of disguise, there would be a distinct possibility thatwhat we find in the pseudonymous works is something very close to theman himself and his inner life.

There are, however, some difficulties with this. Kierkegaard was asmuch a writer as a thinker. In fact although the description of hismental or spiritual development as ‘intellectual’ is apt enough, it alsohad, as we know, its aesthetic (poetic) and religious sides. Not only that,it is unclear that the word ‘intellectual’ is really all that apt for what heintended even his most convincingly intellectual works both to representand to convey, just as by the same token it is unclear that he wanted tobe thought of as, in any conventional sense, a philosopher. His works,he insisted, were not attempts to put across or defend any set ofpropositions but were something much closer to poetry – though notexactly that either, because the poetry or literary form had a religiouspurpose and focus. In one respect you might think this spoke in favourof the view that his works disclose him, insofar as poetry is said to speakfrom the heart and not (just) the more or less disembodied head.However, this matter of poetic disclosure is not so straightforward, andwe should bear in mind W. B. Yeats’s observation that the self-imagesconveyed by the writings of a poet are as a rule the reverse of the truth,even of the truth as the poet sees it. And it does seem plausible tosuppose that a main motivation behind the huge effort that writers putinto their poetic products stems often from a sense of lacking in them-selves the very substance that their works appear to convey.

Besides reasons of this kind for finding the biography in the text,whether that details of the actual life are inessential because trivialcompared with the writer’s true deed or that a writer’s life is somehowtaken over by the writings, there are also reasons of a more traditionalsort that can be invoked for coming to the same conclusion. A lifebehind the texts will be just plainly elusive, not just for lack of evidence






Preface xi

but by the very nature of evidence itself and the appeal to it. Thesereasons apply quite generally to anything historical, and even more tothe attitudes, beliefs, fears, hopes, and plans of someone long sincedead. What could ever confirm or disconfirm hypotheses about whatsomeone was actually thinking when plying pen to paper? And com-pared to the text in our hands, what would be the use of confirmationin such matters anyway? Does it even make sense to speak of facts ofthe matter of what the author had in mind? Once again it seems that itis to the text and to the possibilities of interpretation that we must look.

Given the complexities of human psychology and their power tomake even autobiographical judgments suspect, there is surely somepoint to this. There may also be more than a grain of truth in whatBarthes and Foucault say in favour of what we have, namely the texts.As for the biography offered here, it ‘solves’ these more traditionalproblems simply by riding resolutely, though some may say slipshod,over the disjunction that gives rise to them: either elusive biographicalincident or available text. The justification for doing so is simply thecommonsense intuition that there is no good reason to suppose that theway to Kierkegaard’s life, to the man of and to whatever extent in theworks, is exclusively through the works themselves. An artist’s work,fleeting or subsistent, can be linked in many ways with his or her personand life. Not all artists produce themselves in their work, some standfairly still, or apart, while others go through early, middle, and lateperiods, even periods of decline, as many claim was the case of Nietz-sche, and was widely held regarding Kierkegaard by surviving contem-poraries. In their periods of growth they develop their language, theirpalette, their powers of emotional expression, the range or depth ofwhat it is they try to express. But even in the case of what they bringto expression, the range and depth do not always apply equally to thepersonality of the creator. In this respect Anton Bruckner’s opus is notautobiographical in the way that Gustav Mahler’s is. With Kierkegaardthe autobiographical aspect is undeniably present in terms both of hisown development as an artist and, in a way that seldom applies tocomposers, of the impact his works had on the environment of whichhe became a salient part. It is impossible to read Kierkegaard properlywithout knowing where he stood in relation to his time, its culture, evenlife in general, and as I anticipate the reader will come to agree, it wouldbe ridiculous to suppose that the life can tell us nothing about how the






xii Preface

texts are to be understood. The story told here is one of a struggle, acompetition, a combat even, a conflict which Kierkegaard waged withhimself and his surroundings.

One main leitmotif of the story as told will be that as the conflictdeveloped Kierkegaard came consciously to present his own life in theform of a drama. Its plot was set primarily in a small city, Copenhagen,and it was only very indirectly that he saw himself as a player in agreater drama unfolding on the European and world-historical stage.But that he saw the significance of his own local drama in terms of itsopposition to what was unfolding there is certainly true. If life was histopic, it was primarily his own life that provided the source material,and that life then became a self-written and self-produced stage-piecein which his own writings were the lines, and in the writing of whichhis own role, as he wrote it, became ever more clearly drawn. That thewritings were later to occupy the centre of a European cultural stagewith actors playing parts not all of which he himself may have envisagedis another matter. But a work like the present one, by going back to theprocess of production, can help, among other things, to point out theextent to which, to make them amenable to commentators and stagedirectors of a later generation, the lines have had to be reworked andtheir link with the processes of their production to a degree severed.

By publishing his writings, and despite the pseudonyms, Kierkegaarddeliberately and in the end provocatively exposed himself to the reac-tions of his contemporaries, many of whom firmly believed they didindeed see him in his texts. It is as if, somewhere along the way, seeingthe inevitability of the denouement of his own story, Kierkegaard triedto take control of the endgame and assist in the inevitable. The plot,due partly to the sense of drama that went into its making, is not hardto reconstruct. Thanks to the acuity of this very alert and self-awareactor on the local stage, the unities are there for the biographer to seeand to reproduce.

Since the biography here is an intellectual one and for reasons dis-cussed its topics do not easily coincide with the biological chronologyof the protagonist, I have not felt bound to follow a strictly chronologi-cal order. The actual story begins at a moment in the latter’s bios whenthe ideas that came to invest his works first made their entry on thepublic scene. The intellectual story, although already begun, first getsproperly going in a youthful speech which seemed carefully crafted to






Preface xiii

put Kierkegaard in good odour with people whose approval at the timemeant much to him. The occasion allows us to sketch in en passant thepolitical and cultural background of the city and of the country in whichKierkegaard was born. The details of the family and its life, and of theeducation that had brought him to the point of making this, his firstand only, public speech are presented in the second chapter. Kierke-gaard’s story ended only twenty years later when, self-cast in the role ofmartyr, and having it seems deliberately worked himself into a culturalcorner from which the only way out was up, and perfectly on cue, hefell ill and died.

There are many interesting perspectives on this. One such sees in itan outcome Kierkegaard would have wanted to avoid, the consequenceof his disastrous decision to put to public use a self-image created inthe poetic privacy of the pseudonyms. So what we have is anotherdrama, the tragedy of a person who tries fatefully to write himself intoa drama and then substitutes it for reality. The drama’s plot goessomething like this: when at last Kierkegaard strode actively out of histexts and onto the real stage, or when, as some might say, the privatelynursed narrative hit the world-historical fan, Kierkegaard lost the powerto ‘dictate’ the continuation, the pages flew apart, and the end was afiasco. From another perspective, however, it was all carefully consid-ered if not from the start at least well before the end, and the end itselfwas one that Kierkegaard consistently welcomed. Readers of the follow-ing narrative are invited to test these views and any others for them-selves. They may also want to test Kierkegaard’s own claims, especiallythe one quite early in his journal that after his death no one would finda single word about what ‘filled his life’, the ‘script’ or ‘cipher’ perhaps,in ‘my inmost being that explains everything and which for me oftenmakes into matters of huge moment what people would call trifles, andwhich I consider of no importance once I remove the secret note thatexplains it’.1 Do the subsequent entries, does the later course of the life,does even the aftermath itself betray the secret, if indeed there was one?The author’s hope is, in the spirit of one of his subject’s pseudonyms,to have provided at least enough biographical and expository materialto make the task of arriving at final judgments in all such matters notso much easier as more difficult, and therefore more rewarding.

Although Kierkegaard’s own story ended with his death, the story ofKierkegaard, naturally enough, still continues. Since our own story






xiv Preface

must end somewhere it concludes with a short account of the impact,first, of his life and death upon his contemporaries and immediatesuccessors and, second, of his writings when they began to becomeavailable in German and then in French translation during the earlypart of the twentieth century. At the very end I offer some concludingreflections on the reception more generally.






xv

Acknowledgements

THIS WORK is the result of two bouts of concentrated writing and oneof detailed revision, all in a period of two and a half years. It wouldhave been impossible without resources available to the Kierkegaardscholar due to those who have devoted infinitely more labour and timeto assembling the relevant texts and records. Beyond the Danish biog-raphers mentioned in the references, and not least the editors of Kier-kegaard’s journals and papers, to say nothing of contributors to thecommentaries in the new edition of Kierkegaard’s works, the specialdebt I owe to Bruce Kirmmse will be obvious. Without his Kierkegaardin Golden Age Denmark, a detailed account of the broad background toKierkegaard’s writings, and Encounters with Kierkegaard: A Life Seen byHis Contemporaries, a much-expanded version of Steen Johansen’s Er-indringer om Søren Kierkegaard, my own work could not have begun letalone been completed. Thanks are due, too, to Niels Jørgen Cappelørn,director of the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, for putting me ontrack at the start but also for his own meticulous contributions to thehistorical records. I owe thanks to Jon Stewart for his encouragementand many helpful comments and corrections, but also for the benefit ofhis thorough research into the philosophical writings of Kierkegaard’sDanish contemporaries. For support, encouragement, and comment Iam grateful to Camilla Serck-Hanssen, and to Brit Berggreen for usefulreferences. The period of revision was devoted almost entirely to fillinggaps pointed out to me by George Pattison, whose much greater exper-tise in certain areas of Kierkegaard’s background also helped in thefilling of them. I acknowledge my gratitude to the editors and publishersof four essays, passages from which are reproduced (slightly revised)and others paraphrased, for allowing me to use that material. The essaysare: ‘Two Ways of Coming Back to Reality: Kierkegaard and Lukacs’,






xvi Acknowledgements

Journal of the History of European Ideas 20 (1995), nos. 1–3; ‘Kierke-gaard’s Levellings and the Review’, in Niels Jørgen Cappelørn andHermann Deuser (eds), Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1999, Berlin andNew York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999; ‘The Judge in the Light of Kier-kegaard’s Own Either/Or’ and ‘Having Lessing on One’s Side’, inRobert L. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary, Macon,GA: Mercer University Press, vols. 4 and 12 (1995 and 1997 respec-tively). Not least, I must thank the Norwegian Research Council forgenerously supporting my work with a senior research fellowship.






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KIERKEGAARD - Assets - Cambridge University Pressassets.cambridge.org/97805215/31818/frontmatter/9780521531818... · Kierkegaard, Soren, - . . ... as in Kierkegaard’s case, as that