Kierkegaard: Master of Masks [Soren Kierkegaard]
Part One
Life as a Pseudonym
Let’s say your name is Worry Churchyard [a literal translation of Soren Kierkegaard] . If there’s anything you need, it’s a pseudonym, and you’ve got a bunch of them to hide behind: Johannes de Silentio, Constantine Constantinius, Victor Eremita, Johannes Climacus, Nicolaus Notabene, and William Afham (Danish for “himself”). This makes you an exponent of silence, a loyal friend, a hermit, a seducer, and a Latin imperative. You fancy yourself an aristocratic dandy. You will always be a master of irony though you mean to serve God and subvert the conventional pieties of nineteenth-century Denmark. You are, for want of a better word, a philosopher, who contemplates ultimate truths and renders them with the rhetorical complexity of a poet.
You were born on May 5, 1813, and are a Taurus with your Venus in Taurus, your Mars in Capricorn, and your moon in Cancer. It’s the chart of a great man except there is no air in the chart: 47.7% is earth, 32 % water, and a mere 20,3% in fire. No air at all. You share your birthday with Ann Boleyn, which doesn’t reassure you. What you need is oxygen. What you settle for are masks. You come from an affluent family, but you look funny, dress funny, walk with a limp, and as a lad your father stood atop a hill and, cold and hungry, cursed God and passed the guilt to his son.
With your Mars in Capricorn and your Venus in Taurus, you are one stubborn fellow. But you’ve known all along that you must escape the crowd. The crowd is full of two kinds of ignoramuses: those who believe lies and those who disbelieve the truth. The crowd is death. Some of your best aphorisms condemn the crowd, the public: “People settle for a level of despair they can tolerate and call it happiness.” “People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.” Auden, who admired Kierkegaard enormously, wrote, “Ironic Kierkegaard stared long / And muttered ‘All are in the wrong.’ “
No one hates reviewers more than you. Critics are bandits, gossipmongers, haughty beggar kings. Where envy and malice reign, reviewers “put forth the misunderstanding that the relation between author and public is as follows. The author is a poor wretch who knows nothing and understands nothing but awaits with dread and horror the severe judge, the esteemed public’s wise and astute verdict.”
There are very few defenses against the crowd. In your years as a romantic dandy, you’d have opted to shut out the noise and listen to Leporello’s “catalogue aria” or the Don’s staccato “champagne aria” in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Quixotic as you have become now that you have discarded your pen names, you have chosen to insult the mediocrities of the media and you must suffer the consequences. The Copenhagen journal The Corsair mocks you as heartless kindergartners make fun of an immigrant kid who speaks a foreign language and stammers when he talks.
You will never lose your love of walking. “Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill, whereas if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.” You were never more sincere.
At the University of Copenhagen, you spend your time with Don Juan, the Wandering Jew, and Faust, to determine, by dialectical reasoning, who’s the real you. With your belief that “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards,” you’re as melancholic a Dane as Hamlet and you’re just like him: capable of action, surprising everyone, yet seeming indecisive, feigning madness, tossing off brilliant surrealist poems to confuse potential fathers-in-law.
Part Two
The Concept of Irony
The Corsair printed a caricature at the center of a wheel; the caption explained that “the heavens, the sun, the planets, the earth, Europe, and Copenhagen revolve around Soren Kierkegaard, who stands silently in the center and does not even remove his hat for the honor being shown him.” As a joke this was unintentionally profound, John Updike writes, for “Kierkegaard’s great contribution to Western philosophy was to assert, or to reassert with Romantic urgency, that, subjectively speaking, each existence is the center of the universe.”[1]
The title of Kierkegaard’s doctoral thesis is The Concept of Irony. It is not an easy read. Irony, the philosopher says,” has no purpose, its purpose is immanent in itself, a metaphysical purpose.” It “is self-purposive.” Irony, which involves a discrepancy between truth and speech, is not hypocrisy, for hypocrisy exists in the moral sphere, whereas irony operates in the metaphysical one. It is through irony that one can feel free. To distinguish the ironic from the deceitful therefore becomes a nearly insoluble problem that demands study unless one is willing to suspend reason in favor of a higher subjective truth. Is it possible that the author of The Concept of Irony is being ironic? Undoubtedly, but then, don’t be so sure. Modern linguistics teaches us that you can’t believe anything anyone says.
Kierkegard told Judge Vilhelm that one should take him seriously only when he seems not to be taking himself seriously. Take, for example, his belief that “no love affair should last more than six months at the most.” The affair should end as soon as one has had “the ultimate enjoyment,” because at this point you have nothing to gain and everything to lose. If both romantic love and conjugal love (there is a difference) are illusory, then, as Byron put it, love is heaven and marriage is hell. “Marry or don’t marry,” Kierkegaard wrote. “You’ll regret it either way.”[2] Kierkegaard was on the same page as Tiresias, the blind prophet, who, according to Horace’s Satires, said, “What I predict will either happen or it won’t happen -for Apollo has granted me the gift of prophecy.”[3]
At a party full of beautiful Primavera women as Botticelli painted them, Kierkegaard met Regine Olsen. She was fifteen and he was nine years older. When the time was right, he stunned her with a marriage proposal. After he obtained her father’s consent, she agreed, and at that very moment Kierkegaard’s doubts materialized. Didn’t one lose all one’s liberty upon getting married? In 1841, he ended the eleven-month engagement, sent back her ring, lost her, and immediately wrote a plethora of brilliant books, a monument to Regine and to his renunciation of her. When she married a rival, she pissed him off. But it was as if he could either be a husband or a writer, not both, and Kierkegaard chose the life of words, suspecting that he “was incapable of making a girl happy.” Was he an epileptic, as rumor had it? Or did his “thorn in the flesh,” as he called it, prevent him from entering into an “ordinary” relationship?[4]
Like Antigone, Regine was, in the philosopher’s mind, a sexualized Madonna. He built his philosophy around his renunciation of the bride. Sacrificing her was like the bible’s Abraham binding his son, his only son, whom he loved, at the top of Mount Moriah. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard gets into the mind of Abraham in Genesis 22. The analysis is brilliant, and the distinction between Abraham as “the knight of infinite resignation” and Abraham as “the knight of faith” is so subtle that, if it were a chess move, it would be annotated with a double exclamation point. Kierkegaard wins over the reader by saying that if he doesn’t understand Hegel, it may be Hegel’s fault; whereas the fault in his failure to understand Abraham is his own.
Philosophers who construct systems, Hegel for one, are like architects who design a magnificent castle but live in a shack near the shore. In his disapproval of Hegel, Kierkegaard came up with a dialectic of his own. There were three primary stages on life’s way, though they do not necessarily occur in a linear pattern with one following the other; rather they are like floors of a department store with easy access among them. The three are the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious.
The aesthetic way is the “either” of Either / Or. It is life in the present. Boredom is the root of all evil, and the categories to judge experience are strong and weak, fortunate and unfortunate, beautiful and ugly, along the lines of the Greek gods.
The ethical, the “or” of Either / Or, replaces these values with good and evil, right and wrong, knowledge and ignorance, as the Greek philosophers instruct. But Greek ethics attribute the good to reason and are helpless to account for the will, which can, after all, yield to temptation.
The third stage, the religious, is the hardest to define but begins with the acknowledgment of your own sinfulness and the importance of your own will. It requires a leap across a wide abyss from a crumbling cliff to a promontory composed of clouds. It’s a matter of faith. You had (as Auden put it) to “leap before you look.”
The orthodox view holds that Adam and Eve’s sin in the Garden of Eden dooms all who follow, as if original sin were an inherited trait. Kierkegaard held the radical belief that each of us is given the chance to repeat the fall, though not in as idyllic a setting. He rejected the Communist Manifesto when it appeared in 1848 and was disgusted to learn that Karl Marx shared his May 5th birthday.
Martyrs are born when they die on November 11, 1855. The graveyard is adjacent to the church in which the devout think they are Christian but that’s an illusion. If Christ came, they would ridicule Him, or worse. Kierkegaard anticipated Dostoevsky on the subject, and the Existentialists will claim the former as one of their own if only because he was preoccupied with dread, irony, anxiety, authenticity, and the idea that today erases yesterday and you’re always on the verge of becoming, rather than being.
The struggle to maintain the religious and spiritual belief was a dominant theme among nineteenth-century intellectuals who feared anarchy and suspected that neither politics nor art could take the place of an absent divinity. William Barrett, in his study Irrational Man, summarizes two approaches. “England had one great religious writer in the nineteenth century—[John Henry, Cardinal] Newman—while his contemporary on the continent is Kierkegaard. Within the Christian fold there could hardly be a greater difference than between these two. Newman is encased in the tradition of the Church, and his quest is to seek out and embed himself in what he comes to believe is the deeper and more authentic stream of that tradition. Kierkegaard attacks the institution of the Danish Church ferociously; he gives us the naked individual facing the extreme and ultimate questions in their anguish and desperation, and does so with a boldness and inventiveness of mind that would have scandalized the Englishman.” By the time Freud wrote Civilization and Its Discontents, the secular world’s erasure of God looked inevitable in spite of the efforts of a T. S. Eliot or a W. H. Auden, who did their best to show an affirming flame. Can one still take Kierkegaard’s leap? Perhaps, when listening, eyes shut, to Beethoven’s ninth symphony: Muss ein lieber Vater wohnen.
Consider Kierkegaard as a lyric writer (as opposed to a theologian), a genius (who has the power to compel) as well as an ironist (who meets the decisive moment with a paralyzing anxiety). He wrote a book consisting entirely of Prefaces because the persona he adopted is married; his shrewish wife regards the writing of a book as a major infidelity, and by writing prefaces to nonexistent books he can technically obey her and yet give vent to his literary impulses.
Why write a preface (to a non-existent book, presumably)? To answer the question, Kierkegaard reels off a remarkable succession of sentences, each bursting with similes. Here are two such: “Writing a preface is like ringing someone’s doorbell to trick him; like walking by a young lady’s window and gazing at the cobblestones; it is like swinging one’s cane in the air to hit the wind, like tipping one’s hat although one is greeting nobody. Writing a preface is like having done something that entitles one to a certain amount of certain attention; like having a secret in one’s conscience that one is tempted to reveal; like bowing in an invitation to dance, then not moving; although one does not move, like pressing hard with the left leg, pulling the reins to the right, hearing the steed say “Pst”, and not giving a hoot; it is like being alone without having the slightest inconvenience of being alone, like standing on Valby Hill and gazing at the wild geese.”
[1] John Updike, “Incommensurability,” in Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism (New York: Knopf, 2007), p. 512
[2] The quotation has also been given as “Hang yourself, and you will regret it. Do not hang yourself, and you will also regret it.” See David Mason, “Kierkegard’s Leap,” The Hudson Review (2019). https://hudsonreview.com/2019/10/kierkegaards-leap/
[3] Kierkegaard uses the quote as the epigraph of a chapter of Prefaces. John Svarlien’s translation of the lines is: “What I say, / Laertes’ son, will come to be or not. / Great Apollo’s gift made me a prophet.” David Mankin points out that “in most accounts Tiresias received his gift either from Athena (Minerva) or Zeus (Jupiter) not from Apollo.” See Horace, Satires (Hackett, 2012).
[4] See John Updike, More Matter: Essays and Criticism (Knopf,1999), p. 141.