Kierkagaard

SÐ"Ñ'ren Kierkegaard

SÐ"Ñ'ren Aabye Kierkegaard (b.1813, d. 1855) was a profound and prolific writer in the Danish "golden age" of intellectual and artistic activity. His work crosses the boundaries of philosophy, theology, psychology, literary criticism, devotional literature and fiction. Kierkegaard brought this potent mixture of discourses to bear as social critique and for the purpose of renewing Christian faith within Christendom. At the same time he made many original conceptual contributions to each of the disciplines he employed. He is known as the "father of existentialism", but at least as important are his critiques of Hegel and of the German romantics, his contributions to the development of modernism, his literary experimentation, his vivid re-presentation of biblical figures to bring out their modern relevance, his invention of key concepts which have been explored and redeployed by thinkers ever since, his interventions in contemporary Danish church politics, and his fervent attempts to analyse and revitalise Christian faith. Kierkegaard burned with the passion of a religious poet, was armed with extraordinary dialectical talent, and drew on vast resources of erudition.

Kierkegaard's Life

Kierkegaard led a somewhat uneventful life. He rarely left his hometown of Copenhagen, and travelled abroad only three times - to Berlin. His prime recreational activities were attending the theatre, walking the streets of Copenhagen to chat with ordinary people, and taking brief carriage jaunts into the surrounding countryside. He was educated at a prestigious boys' school (Borgedydskolen), then attended Copenhagen University where he studied philosophy and theology. His teachers at the university included F.C. Sibbern, Poul Martin MÐ"Ñ'ller, and H.L. Martensen.

Sibbern and MÐ"Ñ'ller were both philosophers who also wrote fiction. The latter in particular had a great influence on Kierkegaard's philosophico-literary development. Martensen also had a profound effect on Kierkegaard, but largely in a negative manner. Martensen was a champion of Hegelianism, and when he became Bishop Primate of the Danish People's Church, Kierkegaard published a vitriolic attack on Martensen's theological views. Kierkegaard's brother Peter, on the other hand, was an adherent of Martensen and himself became a bishop in the church.

Another very important figure in Kierkegaard's life was J.L. Heiberg, the doyen of Copenhagen's literati. Heiberg, more than any other person, was responsible for introducing Hegelianism into Denmark. Kierkegaard spent a good deal of energy trying to break into the Heiberg literary circle, but desisted once he had found his own voice in The Concept of Irony. Kierkegaard's first major publication, From the Papers of One Still Living, is largely an attempt to articulate a Heibergian aesthetics - which is a modified version of Hegel's aesthetics. In From the Papers of One Still Living, which is a critical review of Hans Christian Andersen's novel Only A Fiddler, Kierkegaard attacks Andersen for lacking life-development (Livs-Udvikling) and a life-view (Livs-Anskuelse) both of which Kierkegaard deemed necessary for someone to be a genuine novelist (Romandigter).

Kierkegaard's life is more relevant to his work than is the case for many writers. Much of the thrust of his critique of Hegelianism is that its system of thought is abstracted from the everyday lives of its proponents. This existential critique consists in demonstrating how the life and work of a philosopher contradict one another. Kierkegaard derived this form of critique from the Greek notion of judging philosophers by their lives rather than simply by their intellectual artefacts. The Christian ideal, according to Kierkegaard, is even more exacting since the totality of an individual's existence is the artefact on the basis of which s/he is judged by God for h/er eternal validity. Of course a writer's work is an important part of h/er existence, but for the purpose of judgement we should focus on the whole life not just on one part.

In a less abstract manner, an understanding of Kierkegaard's biography is important for an understanding of his writing because his life was the source of many of the preoccupations and repetitions within his oeuvre. Because of his existentialist orientation, most of his interventions in contemporary theory do double duty as means of working through events from his own life. In particular Kierkegaard's relations to his mother, his father, and his fiancÐ"©e Regine Olsen pervade his work.

Kierkegaard's relation to his mother is the least frequently commented upon since it is invisible in his work. His mother does not rate a direct mention in his published works, or in his diaries - not even on the day she died. However, for a writer who places so much emphasis on indirect communication, and on the semiotics of invisibility, we should regard this absence as significant. Johannes Climacus in Concluding Unscientific Postscript remarks, "... how deceptive then, that an omnipresent being should be recognisable precisely by being invisible." Kierkegaard's mother, who was not well educated, is represented in his writings by the mother-tongue (Danish). Kierkegaard was deeply enamoured of the Danish language and worked throughout his writings to assert the strengths of his mother-tongue over the invasive, imperialistic influences of Latin and German. With respect to the former, Kierkegaard had to petition the king to be allowed to write his philosophy dissertation On the Concept of Irony with constant reference to Socrates in Danish. Even though permission was granted he was still required to defend his dissertation publicly in Latin. Latin had been the pan-European language of science and scholarship. In Denmark, in Kierkegaard's time, German language and culture were at least as dominant as Latin in the production of knowledge. In defiance of this, Kierkegaard revelled in his mother-tongue and created some of the most beautifully poetic prose in the Danish language - including a paeon to his mother-tongue in Stages On Life's Way. In Repetition Constantin Constantius congratulates the Danish language on providing the word for an important new philosophical concept, viz. Gjentagelse (repetition), to replace the foreign word "mediation". In general, the Danish language is Kierkegaard's umbilical attachment to the mother whereas Latin and German represent the law of the father, especially when employed in systematic scholarship (Videnskab).

The influence of Kierkegaard's father on his work has been frequently noted.