Philosopher of the Heart

Looking back, it seems that I’ve spent a good deal of my adult life NOT reading the works of Søren Kierkegaard. As I combed the shelves today, I found paperback editions of The Present Age, Fear and Trembling, Philosophical Fragments, and Concluding Unscientific Postscript, along with hardcover copies of The Sickness Unto Death, an abridgement of Either/Or, and a collection of reminiscences by his relatives, friends, and neighbors called Encounters with Kierkegaard.

Have I read any of these books? No. Well, I’ve dipped into one or two of them. Here and there ...

Kierkegaard is considered easy reading in comparison with predecessors such as Hegel, say, or Kant. One historian of the period, Terry Pinkard, notes that even to call Kierkegaard a philoso­pher would be to “break with his own self-understanding and to classify him in a way that is not only controversial, but, so many would ar­gue, downright misleading. Kierkegaard is more of a literary figure than what is recognizable nowadays as an academic philosopher (a character­ization that would not bother him in the slightest).”

I ought to mention here that academic philosophy was a relatively new thing in Kierkegaard’s time. No one thinks of Hume, or Spinoza, or Gassendi as academics. Many of Kierkegaard’s contemporaries and immediate predecessors were the sons of Protestant ministers or otherwise seriously devout individuals.

But if we grant that Kierkegaard made an effort to express himself in ordinary language, rather than working to construct a grand and convoluted “system,” the fact remains that he was seldom content to flesh out his “position,” whatever it happened to be, simply or directly. No sooner does he make a point than he considers the opposite position, brings up qualifications and counter-examples, and generally “muddies the waters” to the point where the reader could be forgiven who gives up in despair, convinced that he’ll never figure out precisely what Kierkegaard is trying to say. To further compound the mess, Kierkegaard often published his works under pseudonyms (sometimes “edited by S. Kierkegaard”) and concocted imaginary conversations, a la Plato’s dialogues. At other times he described his works as “thought experiments,” not to be taken entirely seriously. In short, it isn’t easy determining whether Kierkegaard is being serious, ironic, or dialectical at any given point.

Such literary “strategies” may seem evasive, but they have been described by scholars as attempts by Kierkegaard to move the minds of his readers into a new place beyond concepts and theories, in the same way that Socrates engaged his interlocutors in seemingly simple chains of reasoning in order to help them to see, and admit to themselves, that the values and attitudes they took for granted were in need of revision.

To the average reader like me, it all soon grows a little tiresome.

One of the pleasures of Philosopher of the Heart, Clare Carlisle’s new biography of Kierkegaard, is that it moves forward calmly, pleasantly, with none of the feverish adumbrations, elaborations, dithering, counter-thoughts, and clever (but irrelevant and often slightly jejune) asides that make Kierkegaard’s own works so difficult to stick with. Carlisle gives every sign of being confident that she knows what Kierkegaard was thinking at every point in his career, even to the point of asserting things for which there is no evidence whatsoever. For example:

Yet in all his writings, published and unpublished, Kierkegaard has never mentioned his mother. This is not because he had forgotten her; it is the silence owed to something sacred, which held him long before he knew how to speak.

No one, I think, would call Philosopher of the Heart a “critical” biography. Rather, it reads like a narrative that Kierkegaard’s mother might have written, had she been deeply familiar with her son’s work. (She wasn’t.) At no point that I can recall does Carlisle make an effort to identify a concept that Kierkegaard added to the repertoire of modern thought that might justify our sustained attention. She seems confident that her subject’s confused and mercurial personality, his vanity, his anguish, his delusions of grandeur, his spats with the bishop and the local press, and other dimensions of his life make a story worth telling. And it’s hard to doubt the sincerity of Kierkegaard’s desire to bring solitary depth and inwardness to his practice of Christianity. Even considered along these lines, however, several questions remain to be answered: Is such an emphasis on inwardness fully warranted by Scripture? Did Kierkegaard succeed in this solitary quest for personal depth? Can we learn anything worthwhile from his writings, or his example?

Carlisle does a good job of extracting short passages from Kierkegaard’s voluminous journals and publications, thus saving us the trouble of wading through it all ourselves, and her quotations, renderings, and paraphrases have the virtue of being simple and direct. Of equal interest, however, are the comments she includes from Kierkegaard’s friends, relatives, neighbors, professors, and professional rivals, because these views reinforce impressions we may be developing about some of the less attractive elements of Kierkegaard’s character. For example, Kierkegaard wrote a 330-page thesis on irony as part of his advanced degree program, which “made a generally unpleasant impression” on one of the examiners because of its “verbosity and affectation.”

This same criticism could probably be leveled against any one of Kierkegaard’s later works.

In the course of describing the trauma that accompanied Kierkegaard’s decision to break off his long-standing engagement to Regine Olsen, Carlisle mentions the philosopher Frederik Sibbern, who knew both parties well. She writes:

“After the break-up, when [Regine] confided her ‘deep indignation’ at how Kierkegaard had ‘mistreated her soul!’ Sibbern told her that it would be worse if they were married, ‘for [Kierkegaard’s] spirit was continually preoccupied with itself.’”

Such introspection was facilitated by the fact that Kierkegaard’s father had made a fortune in the wool trade and bequeathed his son a legacy sufficient both to sustain him throughout his life and also to finance the publication of his numerous books and pamphlets. Kierkegaard spent his days walking the streets of Copenhagen like a later-day Socrates, engaging passers-by in conversation, and then returning home to write and read, untroubled by the need to earn a living, but also un-enriched by the social contacts and challenges that any workplace provides. P. L. Møller, the editor of a local journal called The Corsair, made note of this fact in the course of a critical appraisal of one of Kierkegaard’s later works:

Despite all his intelligence, reflection for [Kierkegaard] has become a severe sickness; his religiousness, which renounces the whole world in order to be occupied with itself, appears to me to be a pusillanimity at which our Lord and his angels must laugh ... If he had lived under conditions that forced him to concern himself with something other than his own whims, he no doubt would have developed his talents to a high degree.

I suppose it would be underscoring the obvious to add that the works of P. L. Møller have long since vanished from sight while Kierkegaard’s works, almost 200 years later, continue to appear in new translations, supporting the academic research of countless scholars and also attracting the attention of graduate students and  curious readers like me.

Kierkegaard himself was deeply stung by  Møller’s review and by a spate of similarly unflattering comic jibes that followed in subsequent issues of the Corsair. Though he was tormented throughout his adult life by anguish, anxiety, dread, and other “existential” feelings avant la lettre, it appears that they arose in response not only to a Christian God that seemed cruelly remote and evasive, but also to a Danish society that didn’t understand his work and increasing took him to be a laughingstock.

Alongside Carlisle’s narrative of Kierkegaard’s life and habits, she frequently adds brief, even-tempered spurts of Kierkegaardian philosophy, as in this passage, which appears near the start of the book:

“A true human life, [Kierkegaard] suggests, is ‘the apotheosis of finitude.’ This fulfillment is a spiritual elevation, but it does not mean steal out of finitude to become volatilized and evaporated on the way to heaven, but rather that the divine inhabits the finite and finds its way in it.”

That’s a point well taken, I think, but readers might easily find themselves asking: How is this concept different from Hegel’s notion of the Concrete Universal? And what does Kierkegaard mean, specifically, by “finds it way”?

Isn’t this the crucial question, even within the framework of Christianity? How do we find our way? How do we “participate” in the divine? Hegel (who, like Kierkegaard, considered himself a Christian) offers an elaborate analysis of dialectical development, in the course of which “spirit” spurs purposeful action, after which a reevaluation takes place, which leads to a new and improved idea of what action is required to elevate a situation and enliven it with further spirit—thus making it more “real.”

Kierkegaard offers no such theory, but it seems pretty clear that “doing good” isn’t really his concern. Though Carlisle offers an adequate two-page synopsis of Hegel’s views midway through the book, she doesn’t feel the need to compare them to those of her chosen subject, or in any other way place Kierkegaard’s views within the wider context of European thought.

Near the end of his life Kierkegaard published an article in a local journal in which he spelled out the essentially quietistic character of his “philosophy”:

“I have from the beginning understood Christianity to be inwardness and my task to be the inward deepening of Christianity. I have scrupulously seen to it that not a passage, not a sentence, not a line, not a word, not a letter has slipped in suggesting a proposal for external change.”

In short, though he had plenty of friends and acquaintances, and was a favorite of some of his nieces and nephews, social life meant relatively little to Kierkegaard. It was his relationship with God that obsessed him. And his motto was: The closer to God, the more suffering.

*  *  *

But if other people didn’t mean much to Kierkegaard, in the course of time his work has come to mean a lot to other people. A hundred years after his death, one scholar of the era put it like this:

“As the nineteenth century recedes, the foothills that, close up, had seemed to tower, fall into proper perspective and the true heights rise more starkly. More and more, for us today, Kierkegaard begins to be visible above his century, a solitary peak but central to the whole chain.” That assessment would strike many today as somewhat exaggerated, but few would deny that Kierkegaard has earned a place somewhere in the pantheon of modernist intellectual figures.

Why? Carlisle never poses that question directly, because her work is a sympathetic portrait rather than a critical analysis. But it’s reasonable to suppose that the source of his appeal for modern readers lies in the fact I just mentioned: that Kierkegaard eschewed social issues for the most part, probing instead the individual psyche that struggles in solitude to find some sort of transcendental significance or connection, beyond the world of social norms and historical forces alike. A potted “philosophical history” of his era might include reference to Shaftesbury’s concept of the moral sense, Kant’s emphasis on duty and the categorical imperative, and Hegel’s identification of spirit with dialectical development and the formation of the bourgeois state. But all of these notions are social, interpersonal, and “of the world.” The concepts for which Kierkegaard is best known—anxiety, despair, dread—refer to states of mind which follow upon the antisocial and alienated situation out of which they arose.

 But they also imply the reality of a god through which one might shake off the “existential blues” and become reconciled to the vagaries and contingencies of human life.

And the notion with which Kierkegaard suggests we might bring about such a reorientation of personality, faith, has a different ring altogether.

Carlisle discusses Kierkegaard’s conception of faith at many points in the book, but it’s an elusive topic, and it immediately raises the question, “faith in WHAT?” In one especially felicitous passage in her treatment of Fear and Trembling, Carlisle writes:

Kierkegaard imagines the movements of this faith as the light, graceful leaps of a ballet dancer—repeated again and again, each time a little different, and as arduous to perform as they are delightful to watch. The soul’s dance expresses its longing for God, for eternity, for an unknown infinity. Most people are ‘wallflowers’ who do not take part in this dance; the knights of resignation ‘are dancers, and possess elevation’ —but when they land, they falter, showing that they cannot be at home in the world.

This kind of prose elevates Carlisle well above the level of academic philosophy per se. It's clear she’s trying to put the best face on Kierkegaard’s macaronic theorizing, but why not? She goes on the paraphrase how the knight of true faith differs from the “knights of resignation”: 

  A knight of faith, however, lands as easily as he leapt, ‘transforming the leap of life into a walk.’ He makes existence look so easy that there is nothing to tell him apart from the most unreflective, spiritless person who, immersed in everyday concerns, sees no significance in life beyond its immediate satisfactions and disappointments. The knight of faith’s relationship to God is entirely inward, hidden from public view. A divine grace sustains each step of his journey through the world, but he receives this gift secretly, in silence.

What Carlisle fails to note is that a relationship that’s “entirely inward” is not much worth talking, or writing, about. No one will believe it, or learn anything from it, unless it manifests itself in some way.

In the last chapter of her biography, Carlisle wanders through the halls of the Kierkegaard Research Centre in Copenhagen, which has a dozen scholars on its full-time staff. After a morning spent–her “heart racing”—reading the letters exchanged between Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen during their engagement, Carlisle takes a break for lunch at the library’s modernist cafe, The Glance of an Eye, named after one of Kierkegaard’s last publishing efforts.

She admits a few pages later that Kierkegaard “remains endlessly interesting to me.” Why? “Because he spoke of, and to, a deep need for God within the human heart—a need for love, for wisdom, for peace—and he did so with a rare and passionate urgency.”

I don’t get that kind of feeling from Kierkegaard’s writing. I hear the voice of a man deeply concerned about HIS OWN ultimate fate, and endlessly fascinated by the feverish turns of his own mind, but not terribly appreciative of his neighbors’ lives, ideas, or affections.

That may explain why I found Carlisle’s generous and even-tempered portrait of Kierkegaard more interesting, and more fun to read, than anything by Kierkegaard himself that I’ve attempted. And the bits and pieces of his thought that she brings to the surface of her flowing narrative make it easier to gauge the range and depth of his focus.

I'm now better prepared to give the sage (or the Diogenes) of Copenhagen another shot. And if I don’t quite see the point of a given line of reasoning or a frivolous aside, it won’t bother me so much. Kierkegaard is probably only joking.