Context
Søren Kierkegaard lived the majority of his
life alone. He left his native Copenhagen only three times—each
time to visit Berlin—and never married, though he was engaged for
a short time. Despite his solitary existence, Kierkegaard’s writings
are some of the most impassioned and controversial in all of philosophy.
He is sometimes called a “poet-philosopher” in honor of both his
passion and his highly literary experiments in style and form. Kierkegaard
is known for his critiques of Hegel, for his fervent analysis of
the Christian faith, and for being an early precursor to the existentialists.
Kierkegaard was born in 1813, the year Denmark went bankrupt.
Although Kierkegaard’s father had personally managed to escape financial
ruin, Denmark as a nation struggled for much of the early to mid-1800s.
The people put increasing pressure on the monarchs to institute
a democracy, and a free constitution was finally established in
1848. The changes leading up to the governmental restructuring resulted
in an explosion of wealth and learning and afforded citizens like
Kierkegaard the leisure and environment necessary to pursue a life
of writing and thinking. However, democratization also helped inspire
one of Kierkegaard’s most enduring philosophical themes: freedom
could actually lead to fear. While the new religious and social
freedoms available in Denmark brought many positive changes, they
also had psychological repercussions that deeply concerned Kierkegaard.
He felt that having the freedom to choose inevitably involved feeling
anxiety over which path to choose, even as it simultaneously
inspired joy. Kierkegaard also worried that too many people squandered
that freedom by blindly following public opinion. Kierkegaard was
born into a wealthy and respected family, the youngest of seven
siblings. His mother was an unassuming figure: quiet, plain, and
not formally educated. Kierkegaard’s father, on the other hand,
was melancholic, anxious, deeply pious, and fiercely intelligent.
Kierkegaard’s father believed that a youthful denunciation of God
had brought a curse upon his family and that all his children would
die before the age of thirty-four (a fate that only Søren and his
brother Peter escaped). Kierkegaard ended up inheriting a great
deal of his own intellectual and psychological character from his
father. In 1830, he enrolled at Copenhagen University and began
to study theology, per his father’s wishes. His mother died while
he was at university, and despite keeping a remarkably detailed
set of journals, Kierkegaard never mentioned her death. He didn’t
take his theological studies very seriously, though he was reading
a great deal of literature and philosophy. Kierkegaard was highly
social during this period, attending dinners, concerts, and the
theater, and becoming well known for his wit and good humor. When
his father died in 1838, however, Kierkegaard settled down and devoted
himself to the study of theology.
Kierkegaard received his doctoral degree in theology in
1840. He had inherited a large sum of money from his father, and
as a rich, accomplished, young man, Kierkegaard was considered one
of Copenhagen’s most eligible bachelors. He became engaged to the beautiful
Regine Olsen, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a politician, but
later broke their engagement. Despite their deep love for one another,
Kierkegaard apparently believed that his life as a thinker made
him unsuitable for marriage, particularly to a young, inexperienced
girl. Kierkegaard had strong feelings for Olsen throughout his life,
despite her having married another man and leaving Copenhagen with
him. His relationship with Olsen—like his relationship with his
father—is a major biographical influence on his philosophical work.
After breaking his engagement with Olsen, Kierkegaard
retired to a solitary life of writing, publishing a prodigious amount
of work over the next several years. At first he felt that his books
weren’t being noticed outside elite literary circles, which was
rendering his work politically and socially ineffectual. To bring
attention to his books, he tried to provoke the satirical paper The
Corsair to attack him in its pages. Kierkegaard succeeded
in 1945, though The Corsair focused their criticisms
mainly on his personal rather than intellectual life. Kierkegaard
was lampooned in The Corsair for years, which significantly
damaged his social standing. It did, however, spur him into a highly
productive phase of writing and publishing. Kierkegaard published
his first major book, Either/Or, in 1843 and his
last, The Changelessness of God, in 1855, the year
of his death. Between these two books, Kierkegaard produced over
30 volumes of philosophy, theology, and criticism.
One of the driving forces behind Kierkegaard’s work was
a desire to refute the tenets of Hegelian philosophy. Hegel was
a German philosopher who wrote during the late 1700s and the early
to mid-1800s and whose work had come to dominate European philosophical
thought. Hegel’s major philosophical project was developing the
notion of a “historical dialectic.” Generally speaking, the dialectic
is a logical, argumentative method that philosophers like Plato and
Socrates employed in their attempts to ascertain the truth. In the dialectic,
one person proposes an idea or belief. His or her partner refutes
that idea, pointing out the argument’s flaws. This allows a new,
more convincing argument to be advanced. The process continues until
all misconception has been cleared away and only the truth remains.
Hegel believed that the evolution of human societies could be explained
according to the dialectical model. According to him, societies’
ideas develop collectively. Society begins with one notion of the
world and eventually comes to refute it, leading to a new, collectively
accepted model. A culture’s ideas naturally and inevitably progress
according to this dialectical pattern. The historical dialectic
would eventually lead a culture to God, who was, according to Hegel,
the foundation of the logical structure of the universe. (See
chapter 12, Hegel.)
Kierkegaard, on the other hand, didn’t think that God
could be understood or reached through logic. God was greater than,
not equivalent to, logic. The only way to reach God, according to Kierkegaard,
was through faith—the opposite of reason—for it requires one to
embrace the absurd and the unexplainable. While Hegel spent his
life trying to explain how to reach God, Kierkegaard spent his life
obscuring the path to prove to people that God was beyond intelligence.
Kierkegaard greatly admired Hegel but believed Hegel had committed
a great wrong by claiming to have genuinely reached the truth.
In addition to his attacks on Hegelianism, Kierkegaard
is often noted as being the “father of existentialism,” though his
work long predates the term itself. Briefly, existentialism is the
belief that the world has no intrinsic meaning or purpose and, consequently,
that individuals alone bear the responsibility for their actions
and decisions. Kierkegaard rejected Hegel’s historical dialectic,
which Kierkegaard felt was overly systematic and deterministic.
Kierkegaard—like the existentialists who followed him—stressed that
each individual must negotiate his or her own relationship with
God without any mediation from the church, the government, or other thinkers
(including himself) (see chapter 19, Sartre).
Kierkegaard was heavily influenced by the ancient Greek
philosophers Plato and Socrates and by the rhetorical methods they adopted
to convey their arguments. Socrates believed that the knowledge
of most “experts” and “wise men” was based on poor reasoning. To
expose these misconceptions, Socrates would pretend not to understand
them, forcing these wise men to explain and examine their own beliefs.
Often, when applying this tactic, Socrates would find that these
people had simply adopted the dogma from earlier generations without
properly questioning this received wisdom. In this way, Socrates
highlighted the discrepancy between the appearance of possessing
wisdom and actually possessing it. In his texts, Plato often employed
dialogues, wherein various characters would debate all sides of
an issue, often not coming to a coherent conclusion. The purpose
of Plato’s dialogues was much the same as Socrates’ method of relentless
questioning: to get readers or listeners to consider the issue for
themselves. Instead of claiming to know the answers, Plato and Socrates
sought to find the proper questions. Kierkegaard employed similar
tactics in his writing. He didn’t believe he had all the answers,
but he wanted to engage and provoke his readers so that they, in
turn, would seek answers for themselves. Kierkegaard employed satire,
parody, and irony in his writing as well as techniques that disoriented
and potentially confused readers. Kierkegaard wanted his readers
to question his authority as much as anyone else’s.
