Imagine an educated, affluent European in his late twenties, seemingly one of fortune’s favored, who suffers from crippling feelings of despair and guilt. For no apparent reason, he breaks up with the woman everyone thought he was going to marry—not because he loves someone else but out of a sudden conviction that he is incapable of marriage and can only make her miserable. He abandons the career for which he has been studying for ten years and holes up in his apartment, where a kind of graphomania compels him to stay up all night writing at a frantic pace. His activity is so relentless that, in a few short years, he has accumulated many volumes’ worth of manuscripts.
If this happened today—say, in Denmark, the standard example of a rational modern society—the man would sooner or later end up in a psychiatrist’s office, where he would probably be given a diagnosis of depression or bipolar disorder. He would start seeing a therapist and might be prescribed medication. The goal would be to get him back to normal, as the world defines “normal”: able to take pleasure in life, to form relationships, to meet his obligations as a family member, friend, and citizen. The man would seek professional help, because, in the twenty-first century, he would recognize his propensities as symptoms—evidence of a psychological problem.
But when Søren Kierkegaard underwent these experiences in the Denmark of the eighteen-forties they had a different meaning. “At times, there is such a noise in my head that it is as though my cranium were being lifted up, it is exactly like when the hobgoblins lift a mountain up a little and then hold a ball and make merry inside,” he wrote in his journal in February, 1838, when he was twenty-four. But Kierkegaard had learned from Romantic literature that wild emotion was a sign of genius, especially when it was painful. “Real depression, like the ‘vapors,’ is found only in the highest circles, in the former case understood in a spiritual sense,” he wrote two months later. He considered his “melancholy” not a disease but a “close confidant . . . the most faithful mistress I have known.”
Side by side with this fashionable style of feeling, Kierkegaard inherited from his ancestors a rigorously introspective Protestantism. His father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, had grown up poor in the countryside, moved to Copenhagen to become a merchant, and ended up as one of the city’s richest men. Michael Pedersen raised his seven children, of whom Søren was the youngest, under strict religious discipline, instilling a sense of fear and guilt that never left them. “Oh, how frightful it is when for a moment I think of the dark background of my life, right from the earliest days!” Kierkegaard recalled. “The anxiety with which my father filled my soul, his own frightful melancholy.”
For Kierkegaard, unhappiness became not a condition but a vocation. In a new biography, “Philosopher of the Heart” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), the British scholar Clare Carlisle shows that this calling consumed his life. After leaving school, at the age of seventeen, in 1830, he enrolled as a theology student at the University of Copenhagen, in order to prepare for a career in the church. But it took him ten years to complete his degree, and he never became a pastor or had any other kind of job. He never got married or had children. Other than a few visits to Berlin, then the capital of philosophy, and one trip to Sweden, Kierkegaard never left Denmark. He took no interest in politics. In 1848, the liberal revolutions sweeping Europe reached Denmark, as protests forced the king to promise a new constitution and parliament; but Kierkegaard was indifferent. “So the king flees—and so there is a republic,” he wrote in his journal that year. “Piffle.”
What he did instead was write. Until his death, in 1855, at the age of forty-two, Kierkegaard lived off his inheritance and produced a stream of unclassifiable books—hybrids of philosophy, autobiography, fiction, and sermon. Advancing deeper and deeper into the experience of suffering, he emerged with a profoundly new way of thinking about human existence. The dark exigency of Kierkegaard’s books, which he sometimes published two or even four at a time, is plain from their titles: “Fear and Trembling,” “The Concept of Anxiety,” “The Sickness Unto Death.”
In that last book, which appeared in 1849, Kierkegaard offers an uncompromising diagnosis of the human condition. “There is not a single human being who does not despair at least a little, in whose innermost being there does not dwell an uneasiness, an unquiet, a discordance, an anxiety in the face of an unknown something,” he writes. If you don’t think you are in despair, you are lying to yourself, which is an even worse form of despair. Only by acknowledging our condition, he says, can we begin to understand that the true name of despair is sin, defiance of God. We are freed from it only when we accept that “a human self is under an obligation to obey God—in its every secret desire and thought.”
This understanding of sin and redemption wasn’t Kierkegaard’s invention. Something like it was preached in Denmark’s Lutheran churches every Sunday. What made his work explosive was his insistence that those very churches had become the chief obstacles to genuine Christian belief. Nineteenth-century Europeans took for granted that they were Christians simply because they were living in “Christendom,” in countries where there were “just as many Christians as there are people,” he wrote. But a Christian, for Kierkegaard, isn’t something you are born; it is something you have to become through terrific inner effort. His “authorship,” as he called it, was meant as an alarm bell to wake the modern world from its spiritual slumber.
Kierkegaard published his books at his own expense, and they initially had a tiny readership: the most popular, “Either/Or,” didn’t sell out its first edition of five hundred and twenty-five copies for three years. Nevertheless, he became a local celebrity, thanks mainly to his eccentricities and his penchant for public feuds. The editor of one Copenhagen paper, the Corsair, observed that, in “Kierkegaard’s entire personal appearance and manner, there was something that verged on the comic.” When the Corsair portrayed him in a series of mocking caricatures, in 1846, he became even more notorious. “Every kitchen boy feels justified in almost insulting me . . . young students titter and grin and are happy to see a prominent person trampled on,” he complained.
When he died—probably of tuberculosis, though the diagnosis remains unclear—Kierkegaard had few if any readers outside Denmark. That didn’t begin to change until he found an influential champion in the Danish literary critic Georg Brandes, who, in 1877, wrote the first book about Kierkegaard and brought him to the attention of a wider European audience. (Later, Brandes did the same for Nietzsche.) The first English translations of Kierkegaard appeared in the nineteen-thirties, and it wasn’t until the sixties, more than a century after his death, that the translators Howard and Edna Hong began to produce a complete English edition of his works.
By that time, the Copenhagen eccentric had become one of the most important influences on twentieth-century theology and philosophy. Although the term “existentialism” wasn’t coined until the nineteen-forties, in retrospect Kierkegaard appears as the first existentialist, thanks to his insistence that life’s most important questions—How should I act? What must I believe?—can’t be resolved by abstract reasoning. They present themselves as urgent problems for each individual, demanding commitment and action. “To be entirely present to oneself is the highest thing and the highest task for the personal life,” he wrote.
The intimate connection between Kierkegaard’s thought and his personal life has made him a compelling subject for biographers. Reading the “Critique of Pure Reason” won’t tell you the first thing about Immanuel Kant, nor do you need to know anything about Kant’s life to understand it. But Kierkegaard’s work emerged, in complex yet unmistakable ways, from his own experiences. Other great thinkers specialize in technical fields such as logic or metaphysics, but Kierkegaard, as Carlisle’s title has it, was a philosopher of the heart, “an expert on love and suffering, humor and anxiety, despair and courage.”
Yet Kierkegaard also resists biography. The genre is inherently opposed to the way he thought about human existence. One of the best-known Kierkegaardian sayings, paraphrased from an entry in his journal, is that life can only be understood backward, but it has to be lived forward. In other words, at every moment, we are making a decision about how to live, one that can’t be made for us by history, society, or even religion—any of the causes that might emerge when we try to analyze the course of our lives in retrospect. My future is no one’s responsibility but my own. This is what Kierkegaard calls “the dizziness of freedom,” which he compares to the vertigo we feel when looking into a “yawning abyss.”
Biography, however, is necessarily written backward. It deals with life as a known quantity, obscuring the reality of contingency and choice. Carlisle, who has published three previous books about Kierkegaard, has tried to avoid this problem by writing what she calls “a Kierkegaardian biography of Kierkegaard,” one that “does not consider Kierkegaard’s life from a remote, knowing perspective, but joins him on his journey and confronts its uncertainties with him.”
In practice, this means that Carlisle tells the story out of chronological order and adds passages of novel-like scene-setting. “Never before has he moved so quickly! And yet he is sitting quite still, not uncomfortably—resting, even—in a ‘marvelous armchair,’ ” the first of the book’s three sections begins. We are with Kierkegaard in 1843 as he takes a train, that new invention, from Berlin to Copenhagen. Carlisle then fills in his story up to 1843, before jumping ahead, in the next section, to 1848 and again filling in the missing years—a cumbersome and sometimes confusing method.
The vignettes feel like packaging that the reader must unwrap to get to what is really excellent in the book: Carlisle’s analysis of Kierkegaard’s intellectual milieu. Copenhagen in the eighteen-forties was a small city of about a hundred and twenty thousand people, but the academic and clerical circles in which Kierkegaard moved were much smaller. His world, Carlisle writes, was “parochial, full of familiar faces”: many of Denmark’s leading clergymen, professors, and writers were his former schoolmates or family friends. And Carlisle shows that Kierkegaard’s books partly emerged out of arguments with these figures—for instance, Bishop Mynster, the head of Denmark’s state church, who became a symbol of everything Kierkegaard detested about official Christianity.
Kierkegaard didn’t seem sure whether he wanted to stand out in this sedate, provincial community or to hide from it. He published under several Latin pseudonyms, which suggests a desire for concealment, but the names were so flamboyantly odd—Johannes de Silentio, Constantin Constantius, Vigilius Haufniensis (that is, “the watchman of Copenhagen”)—that he may well have wanted to draw attention to his authorship.
His identity couldn’t have been concealed for long anyway, since he wrote repeatedly about the one real drama in his life. In October, 1841, when he was twenty-eight, Kierkegaard broke off his year-long engagement to Regine Olsen, a nineteen-year-old from a highly respectable family. His sudden change of heart left her confused and miserable. “So after all, you have played a terrible game with me,” Regine told him when they parted. The public rejection threatened to ruin her future marriage prospects. Carlisle quotes Kierkegaard’s nephew’s recollection of the affair: “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. . . . Harsh judgments were unanimously voiced against him.”
Imagine the reaction of local society, then, when, just over a year later, Kierkegaard published “Either/Or,” a long book whose most attention-grabbing section, “The Seducer’s Diary,” is a first-person account of a man’s callous pursuit of a young girl, whom he manipulates into submission and then discards. “Now it is over and I want never to see her again. Once a girl has given away everything, she is weak, she has lost everything,” the seducer writes in his last entry. “I do not wish to be reminded of my relation to her; she has lost her fragrance.”
All this made “Either/Or” a succès de scandale: one reader observed, “I think no book has caused such a stir with the reading public since Rousseau placed his ‘Confessions’ on the altar.” But Kierkegaard’s method was the opposite of the one chosen by Rousseau, who said that when he appeared before God on Judgment Day he would present a copy of his “Confessions” and declare, “Thus have I acted; these were my thoughts; such was I.” For Kierkegaard, straightforward autobiography couldn’t do justice to the truth of his experience, which was full of ambiguity, self-division, and doubt.
Instead, he concocted a series of nested narratives, defying the reader to say where Kierkegaard himself can be found. The introduction to “Either/Or” recounts how the book’s “editor,” Victor Eremita, accidentally discovered a bundle of manuscripts in a secondhand desk. By the handwriting, he could tell that they were the work of two unknown authors; accordingly, the book is divided into two parts, attributed to “A” and “B.” Eremita even says that he is placing the author’s fee in an interest-bearing account for A or B to claim, should they ever appear.
The putative manuscripts encompass critical essays, the seduction diary, aphorisms, letters. Taken together, they illustrate the contrasting “life-views” of A and B, which Kierkegaard describes as the aesthetic versus the ethical. For A, life should be nothing but a series of interesting sensations. “How terrible is tedium—how terribly tedious,” he muses. The seducer’s diary shows how love is deformed when it is treated as just another trick for avoiding boredom. B is an older, married man who writes a series of letters to A chastising his frivolity. B argues that marriage represents not the death of romantic love but its fulfillment on a higher, more serious plane. “You talk so much of the erotic embrace, but what is it compared with the matrimonial!” he proclaims.
The title “Either/Or” implies that one must choose between these two ways of life, but that is just what Kierkegaard did not do. Whatever his readers may have imagined, he was not a cynical sensualist like A. He had courted Regine with the utmost propriety and was devastated by the end of their relationship. He never loved another woman, and when “Either/Or” was published he had two copies printed on vellum—“one for her, and one for me”—which he kept in a specially made cupboard.
But Kierkegaard could not become a contented husband like B. He left Regine, Carlisle argues, because marriage would mean sacrificing the freedom, the open-endedness, that he saw as the essence of an authentic life. “His life would be understood—it would be measured and judged—according to a well-established way of being in the world, shaped by a precise configuration of duties, customs, expectations,” Carlisle writes. Kierkegaard preferred to remain dizzily suspended over the abyss of his own freedom, the only position that allowed him to keep writing.
In a typically dialectical fashion—“dialectical” is one of Kierkegaard’s favorite words—he used this freedom to think about the nature of commitment. He believed that the most important commitment we can make is to God, and his work grew increasingly concerned with religious faith. Eight months after “Either/Or” appeared, Kierkegaard published “Fear and Trembling,” probably his best-known book today, which begins with the proposition that a human being becomes great “in proportion to the greatness of that which he loved.” There is no greater object of love than God, Kierkegaard writes, and the Bible’s most powerful example of what it means to love God is the story of Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac, which he subjects to a powerful and dramatic analysis.
When God commanded Abraham to take Isaac—“your son, your only son, whom you love,” the text emphasizes in Genesis 22—and slaughter him with a knife on top of Mt. Moriah, it was contrary to every natural feeling and ethical principle. It was even contrary to God’s own earlier promise that Abraham would become, through Isaac, the father of a great nation. Yet Abraham obeyed—and his reward was to see Isaac saved at the last minute, when an angel appeared and told him he had passed God’s test.
Because the story is so familiar, it is easy to glide past its transgressive implications. Imagine, Kierkegaard writes, that a Danish pastor in the nineteenth century made the sacrifice of Isaac the subject of a Sunday sermon, and one of his congregants was inspired to go home and murder his own son for the sake of God. If the pastor found out, he would surely go to the man’s house and exhort him not to do it—and this exhortation would be far more earnest and passionate than the original sermon, showing where his real conviction lay. Abraham had a kind of faith that even the most religious people lack: he believed that God had the power to suspend morality. More, he trusted that somehow God would make it possible for him to kill Isaac and still keep him, which is logically impossible. True faith, Kierkegaard insists, believes “by virtue of the absurd”—which is why almost no one has it.
The only reason we are able to praise Abraham for doing something that would horrify us in actuality is that we make excuses: Abraham was a great man, he lived a long time ago, things were somehow different for him than they would be for us. But Kierkegaard insists that there is no difference between the past and the present, between Abraham and you. The responsibility of choice—to believe or not to believe, to act or not to act—is always individual. “It is repugnant to me to do as so often is done, namely, to speak inhumanly about a great deed, as though some thousands of years were an immense distance,” he writes in “Fear and Trembling.” “I would rather speak humanly about it, as though it had occurred yesterday.”
During the next six years, Kierkegaard pursued the dialectic of belief through thousands of pages. His collected work in Danish fills twenty-eight volumes, almost all of it produced between 1843, the year of “Either/Or” and “Fear and Trembling,” and 1849, when “The Sickness Unto Death” appeared. Then he mostly stopped writing. The final part of “Philosopher of the Heart,” covering his last six years, reads almost like a coda. By the age of forty, Carlisle writes, Kierkegaard had become “a frail figure: more stooped and slender than ever, his hair thin, his face tired.”
He didn’t seem to miss his life of feverish productivity. In one of his last major books, the posthumously published “The Point of View for My Work as an Author,” Kierkegaard summarized the “movement” of his authorship as a journey away from cleverness and complexity. “Christianly, one does not proceed from the simple in order then to become interesting, witty, profound, a poet, a philosopher,” he writes. “No, it is just the opposite; here one begins and then becomes more and more simple.” The final simplicity is silence, and in his last years Kierkegaard truly earned the pseudonym under which he had published “Fear and Trembling,” Johannes de Silentio—John of the Silence.
When he became seriously ill, in 1855, he seemed content to die, even though he was only forty-two. The money he had inherited from his father was about to run out—he had spent much of it on the publication of his books—and he might well have felt that the timing was providential. Kierkegaard’s niece visited him in the hospital shortly before he died, and observed that “a feeling of victory was mixed in with the pain and the sadness.” One of the last things he wrote was a letter to his brother about the disposition of his estate: everything he owned was to go to Regine, “exactly as if I had been married to her.” ♦
