3 In Defiance of Pseudo-Philosophers

After the comfort and seclusion of the train’s first-class carriage, the stagecoach is grim. And it is a long, rattling ride: Kierkegaard will be in this cramped coach all the way to the port of Stralsund, still more than a hundred miles north. On the train he had only his thoughts to contend with; now his body is putting up a fight as well.

He has analysed the ordeal of the stagecoach in Repetition, the finished manuscript in his bag: ‘There is a difference of opinion among the learned as to which seat in a stagecoach is the most comfortable. My view is the following: they are all equally terrible.’ Repetition ’s narrator Constantin Constantius recalls that on his first journey to Berlin he had ‘one of the outer seats towards the front of the vehicle (this is considered by many to be a great coup) and was for thirty-six hours, together with those near me, so violently tossed about that I nearly lost not only my mind, but also my legs. The six of us who sat in this vehicle were worked together for these thirty-six hours so that we became one body, unable to recognize which legs were our own.’ When Constantin returns to Berlin for his second visit, he chooses a seat in the coupé. Nevertheless, ‘everything repeated itself. The coachman blew the horn, I closed my eyes, surrendered to despair, and thought, as I am wont to do on such occasions: God knows whether you will be able to endure this, whether you will actually reach Berlin, and if so, whether you will ever be human again, able to free yourself in the singularity of isolation, or whether you will forever carry this memory that you are a limb of a huge body.’

Like Either/Or, Repetition presents a ground-breaking philosophy of human freedom and responsibility, conveyed by characters immersed in romantic struggles and wrestling with questions about fidelity and marriage. Both books ask how a human being can live with others, keep his promises, and conform to social expectations, while remaining true to himself. And both blend philosophy with autobiography: Repetition carries a new message for Regine, named only as ‘that single individual’, exposing Kierkegaard’s former strategy of romantic deception and offering different reasons why he could not marry her.

Writing in the wake of his broken love affair and seeking, however indirectly, to explain his change of heart to Regine, Kierkegaard has found a new way of doing philosophy. In addressing one particular human being in a singular situation, he has tapped into something universal – for the idea that ‘every human being is the single individual’ is becoming more and more powerful within his work. He is creating a philosophy anchored in experience, in those questions made vivid by life’s uncertainties and decisions; his concepts and arguments arise from the compelling drama of being human that unfolds within every person. A century later, his insight into the philosophical significance of ‘the single individual’ will inspire an entire generation of ‘existentialists’ to argue that human nature is not a fixed, timeless essence, nor a biological necessity, but a creative task for each individual life.

Stuck in this crowded stagecoach, Kierkegaard imagines himself towering above his peers – like Simeon Stylites, the fifth-century Syrian saint who lived on top of a pillar, conspicuously devoted to prayer, for more than three decades. People wondered whether he did it out of humility or pride: was he looking down on them from his superior height, or had he raised himself up like Jesus on his cross, held aloft in all his fragility, willing to be mocked and scorned? Simeon Stylites, the celebrity recluse: the paradox is irresistible; perhaps this should be his next pseudonym?

Last time he travelled home from Berlin, his honour still in question following the broken engagement, and Either/Or only half-written, he had yet to prove himself. Now that book is out, he is on his way to literary fame, an acclaimed author, whose talents will eclipse the most esteemed writers and scholars of his home town. He is already something of a celebrity: in these last three months Either/Or has been reviewed, debated and gossiped about everywhere. ‘The entire press, from Dagen to Aftenbladet, from Berlingske to Intelligensblade, let out a cry of amazement, said a few words about it, of course, but began and ended by saying: My goodness, what a thick book,’ wrote Meïr Aron Goldschmidt in his satirical weekly The Corsair. Heiberg himself reviewed Either/Or in his journal Intelligensblade – he called it ‘a monster of a book’, mainly on account of its 838 closely printed octavo pages, but also because ‘one is disgusted, one is nauseated, one is revolted’ by the Seducer’s Diary.

Johan Ludvig Heiberg – playwright, critic, editor, aesthetician, whose passion for Goethe and Hegel has elevated Copenhagen’s literary scene – was for years the person Kierkegaard most wanted to impress. He still wants to impress him, of course, even though he now disdains his opinion. He knows by heart that review of Either/Or: Heiberg found in the book ‘bolts of intellectual lightning, which suddenly clarified entire spheres of existence’, but regretted that ‘the author’s exceptional brilliance, learning and stylistic sophistication have not been combined with an organizational ability that would allow the ideas to emerge properly formed.’ For days afterwards Kierkegaard drafted and re-drafted sardonic responses. Writing as Victor Eremita, he published a contemptuous ‘Thank You’ note in the newspaper The Fatherland. ‘The Lord bless thy coming in, Prof. Heiberg! I will surely see to thy going out,’ he wrote in his journal.

While readers of Either/Or are shocked and fascinated by the seducer’s immorality, few grasp the book’s deeper philosophical meaning or see the point of its intricate structure. Yet it has brought Kierkegaard the attention he craved, acclaim as well as notoriety; it has given him an expectant audience – and now, returning from Berlin a second time, it is time to consolidate his place as an author. After the scandalous success of Either/Or he must prove that he is not merely the gifted but frivolous stylist many take him to be. The day before he left Berlin this time, Kierkegaard wrote to Emil Boesen back in Copenhagen, telling him that he had finished Repetition and begun another book, Fear and Trembling. He did not mention in his letter that these two new works are written with Regine in mind. Instead he focused on their polemical impact: ‘I shall never forget to employ the passion of irony in justified defiance of non-human pseudo-philosophers who understand neither this nor that, and whose whole skill consists in scribbling German compendia and in defiling that which has a worthier origin by talking nonsense about it.’

Emil would know exactly which ‘pseudo-philosophers’ his friend was talking about, for he has often listened as Kierkegaard poured his inimitable scorn on Hans Lassen Martensen – and, more recently, on Heiberg. Though not quite five years older than Kierkegaard, Martensen is already Professor of Theology at the University of Copenhagen. He is from Slesvig, on the border between Denmark and Germany; in the early 1830s, after studying theology in Copenhagen and being ordained in the Danish Church, he spent time in Berlin and Munich, befriended every important intellectual he could contrive to meet, and returned to Denmark an expert on the new philosophies of Schleiermacher, Schelling and Hegel.

These German thinkers were already fashionable in Copenhagen thanks to Heiberg, who went to Berlin in the 1820s, met Hegel, and actually conversed with the great man. Stopping in Hamburg on his way home, Heiberg had the deepest spiritual insight of his life, suddenly grasping Hegel’s entire philosophical system: ‘With Hegel on my table and in my thoughts, I was gripped by a momentary inner vision, as if a flash of lightning had illuminated the whole region for me and awakened in me the hitherto hidden central thought. From this moment the system in its broad outline was clear to me, and I was convinced that I had grasped it in its innermost core … I can say, in truth, that this strange moment was just about the most important juncture in my life, for it gave me a peace, a security, a self-confidence which I had never known before.’ In the years following this philosophical conversion, Heiberg gave lectures on Hegel’s philosophy at the University of Copenhagen. While Martensen was on his European study tour in the mid-1830s, his own star rising, he met Heiberg in Paris and cultivated a friendship with the eminent writer and his glamorous young wife Johanne Luise, Denmark’s best-known actress.

Kierkegaard engaged Martensen as a private tutor in 1834, four years into his theology degree, and they read Schleiermacher together. Three years after that, still a student, he followed Martensen’s influential courses on theology and the history of philosophy. The brilliant young lecturer urged his audience to look to the modern German philosophers – Kant, Fichte and Jacobi, but most of all Hegel – to guide their understanding of Christianity.

For years now Kierkegaard has disliked Martensen, disparaged his philosophical ambitions, and resented his success. And since that patronizing review of Either/Or in Intelligensblade, Heiberg has also become an enemy. Both men gained prestige by importing German idealism into Denmark: they bask in the reflected glory of Hegel’s immense accomplishments. But Kierkegaard’s new books will ridicule their efforts to combat the spiritual decline of the present age with second-hand Hegelian philosophy. His own ambitions as a writer have taken shape in opposition to Martensen, and to the academic and ecclesial establishment that favours him. For Kierkegaard, this well-connected professional theologian represents not just an intellectual position but an existential posture: Martensen is an influential example of what it means to be a cultured, reflective Christian in nineteenth-century Christendom.

His vow to defy ‘non-human pseudo-philosophers’ with his passionate irony echoes Socrates’s subversive opposition to the Sophists. Plato portrayed those paid teachers of philosophy as peddlers of clever but shallow arguments, letting them be the foil for the genius of Socrates’s existential irony. For Socrates, teaching philosophy meant teaching people how to be human – and he began by calling into question what a human being is. Likewise, Kierkegaard has sought to expose Martensen as a false teacher: he wants to uncover the hollowness of his work, to eclipse his philosophical facility with his own genius, to undermine the whole institution of theology in which his rival has ascended so quickly. Yet at the same time he wants to beat Martensen at his own game.

If this second trip to Berlin has repeated Kierkegaard’s first, begun days after the final break-up with Regine, that first journey repeated Martensen’s philosophical reconnaissance in the 1830s – which in turn followed the trail of Heiberg, who traced the footsteps of the intrepid Danish importers of Romanticism early in the century. By the time Kierkegaard made it to Berlin in 1841, Hegel had died, but he attended Schelling’s lectures. While both Heiberg and Martensen returned to Copenhagen with career-advancing knowledge of German idealism, Kierkegaard brought home from that first visit a sharpened disillusionment with academic philosophy. ‘Dear Peter, Schelling talks the most insufferable nonsense,’ he wrote to his brother from Berlin in February 1842. ‘I am too old to attend lectures, just as Schelling is too old to give them. His whole doctrine of potencies displays the highest degree of impotence.’

Although Schelling spoke tantalizingly of ‘actuality’, Kierkegaard saw the entire academic enterprise as an evasive flight from actual existence. He connected this intellectual detachment with a cynical commercialization of knowledge: professors in the modern universities traded ideas as merchants traded commodities – but more duplicitously, for their smartly packaged abstractions contained no genuine wisdom. ‘What philosophers say about actuality,’ he wrote in Either/Or, ‘is often just as disappointing as it is when one reads on a sign in a second-hand shop: Pressing Done Here. If a person were to bring his clothes to be pressed, he would be duped, for the sign is merely for sale.’

With Repetition and Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard is not just staging a new version of his engagement drama alongside a modern adaptation of the biblical story of Abraham. He is re-staging his own authorship, setting himself – or rather his pseudonyms – opposite Heiberg and Martensen on Copenhagen’s literary scene. He is showing that he is a better dramatist than Heiberg, a better theologian and preacher than Martensen, a thinker of greater philosophical originality and more profound spiritual insight than either of them. Unlike his rivals, Kierkegaard has no pulpit or congregation, no lectern or students, no theatre or audience. He writes, he likes to say, ‘without authority’: simply as a human being, half-anonymous, with no costume of official position or institutional status. His writing will have to generate its own authority, to stake a claim through the sheer force of its argument and style. He is taking a stand as emphatically as Martin Luther when, legend has it, the polemical monk nailed his Christian manifesto to the church door at Wittenberg – though Kierkegaard is doing it indirectly, and under cover.

Without naming Martensen, Fear and Trembling will cast the Hegelian theologian as a nineteenth-century Sophist profiteering from dubious pedagogical enterprises. Plying the reader with a series of commercial metaphors, this new work will begin by declaring that ‘in the world of ideas, as in the world of business, our age is staging a veritable clearance sale’. This is the crisis of spiritual value that Heiberg, Martensen and their followers are already talking about – but Kierkegaard sees his rivals as symptoms, not saviours, of the crisis. He compares their philosophical vehicle to Copenhagen’s new omnibuses, which offer a cheap alternative to carriage travel: in 1841 the first horse-drawn buses (hesteomnibusser) clattered through the city’s streets, operated by a local entrepreneur inspired by similar ventures in Berlin, Manchester and Paris. In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard will liken the students who jump aboard the bandwagon of Hegelianism to the rabble on these public carriages; he will sarcastically bestow ‘every blessing upon the System, and upon the Danish shareholders in this omnibus’. The ‘System’ in question is Hegel’s philosophical system, and ‘omnibus’ invokes metaphysics as well as transportation, for in his lectures on the history of philosophy Martensen had often repeated Descartes’s maxim that everything should be doubted: De omnibus dubitandum est.

Østergade, Copenhagen, 1860: the omnibus to Frederiksberg

These sneers at Martensen and Heiberg will prepare a serious intellectual assault. Kierkegaard’s years of study have taught him how traditional philosophical method proceeds by making distinctions between concepts – appearance and reality, faith and knowledge, necessity and freedom – and now he has begun to twist this method, applying it to life itself. He is developing a new kind of thinking to uncover the question which usually lies concealed, unasked, within every pursuit of knowledge: how to be a human being? His method draws distinctions not between concepts, but between ‘spheres of existence’: different ways of being human in the world. Highest is the religious sphere, revolving eternally on the axis of the God-relationship, infinite in its horizons and its depth. Other spheres of existence are smaller, more limited: their boundaries constrain the spiritual possibilities of those who live within them.

This new way of carving up the philosophical terrain has a sharp critical edge. It allows him to show how people, institutions, even entire cultures, fall short of the values they claim to embody. He assigns modern philosophy in general – and Heiberg and Martensen in particular – to the lowest, most constricted sphere of existence, which he calls disparagingly the ‘aesthetic’ sphere. This term invokes surfaces, dissemblance, detachment. In Either/Or he portrayed the aesthetic sphere, personified by the clever, dissolute young author of the ‘Seducer’s Diary’, as existentially immature: the Seducer is not yet capable of the consistency and responsibility demanded by the ethical sphere, let alone the spiritual profundity of a truly religious life. This ill-formed character resembles Martensen, as Kierkegaard sees him – he flaunts his intellectual expertise, but when it comes to being human he is scarcely a beginner.

Although Fear and Trembling will not refer to Martensen by name, this book will expose his philosophical enterprise as both hubris and folly – and cheap, like the public buses. Martensen claims that Hegel’s philosophy elucidates the truth of Christian teachings, and embraces Hegel’s ambition to show how this truth unfolded over centuries, through the progress of history. But Kierkegaard will argue that this devalues faith, and that the most essential truth unfolds within each human heart over the course of a lifetime – for love, the essence of God and the longing of every soul, is the deepest truth of Christianity. Learning to love is a new task for each individual: ‘Whatever one generation learns from another, no generation learns the genuinely human from a previous one. No generation has learned to love from another; no generation can begin at any other point than at the beginning, no later generation has a shorter task than the previous one, and if someone here is unwilling to abide with love like those previous generations but wants to go further, then that is only foolish and idle talk.’

Kierkegaard knows that his educated readers will see in this argument an attack on Martensen. Yet while Kierkegaard mocks his rival’s grandiose aspiration to ‘go further’ than Hegel in his philosophical enquiries, he is making his own grand appeal over the heads of this generation, beyond the intellectual fashions of this provincial scene. In daring to write about Abraham, he is claiming a place in the theological tradition: his new interpretation of Genesis 22 follows a history of polemical readings of biblical texts. This history has already proved the revolutionary power of scriptural exegesis, and Kierkegaard wants to change the game again.

The title of his book on Abraham comes from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, who were led astray by the ‘human wisdom’ of philosophers. ‘When I came to you,’ Paul wrote to the unruly Christians of Corinth, ‘I did not come with lofty words or human wisdom (sophia) as I proclaimed to you the mystery of God. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I came to you in weakness and much fear and trembling.’ Paul offered his own faith, empowered by ‘the spirit which is from God’, as a radical alternative to the diverse philosophies followed in Corinth, and he urged the Christian community there to rest their faith ‘not on human wisdom but on the power of God’.

Like Luther, who gave lectures on the Book of Genesis three centuries ago, Kierkegaard will use the story of Abraham to expose the limitations of human reason and criticize the hubris of contemporary philosophy. As Paul attacked the Greek philosophers, so Luther rejected the scholastic methods that had shaped his own intellectual development: he argued that sixteenth-century theologians relied too much on Aristotle’s pagan philosophy, and that only the Word of God revealed in the scriptures was an infallible source of truth. Kierkegaard does not share Luther’s biblical fundamentalism, and draws liberally on ancient Greek thought: in Fear and Trembling he will present himself as a lyrical writer, a philosophical poet, who re-imagines Abraham for new generations of readers – just as Plato creatively transmitted the teachings of Socrates. Yet he will echo Luther’s interpretation of Abraham in arguing that Martensen, like Hegel, overestimates the power of rational thinking to comprehend the truth of Christianity.

In his lecture on Genesis 22 Luther insisted that the contradiction between God’s promise to make Abraham the father of a nation and his command to kill Isaac could not be resolved intellectually. It was impossible to understand Abraham’s faith, he argued – and this showed that reason should surrender before faith, recognizing its higher authority and its deeper claim on the human heart. Fear and Trembling will make a similar argument. But whereas Luther praised Abraham’s unquestioning faith in a contradictory God, Kierkegaard’s interpretation of the biblical text is much more ambivalent: ‘While Abraham arouses my admiration, he appals me as well.’

Abraham was willing to murder his own son, and Kierkegaard believes that this moral scandal cannot be taken lightly or explained away. By interrogating the ethics of the biblical story, Fear and Trembling will respond to Immanuel Kant’s reading of Genesis 22 late in the last century. Kant insisted that we fulfil our duty to God simply by fulfilling our ethical duty to respect one another: in The Conflict of the Faculties, published in 1797 shortly after he was released from a ban on writing about religion, he wrote that ‘apart from good life-conduct, anything that a human being supposes he can do to become well-pleasing to God is mere religious delusion or counterfeit service of God.’ Here Kant argued that Abraham was wrong to obey the command to kill Isaac: instead, he should have reasoned that the command was contrary to the moral law, and therefore could not really be from God, but must be either a trick of the devil or a delusion.

While Luther drew from the story of Abraham a challenge to the rationalizing tendencies of his time, Kant – writing at the end of two long centuries of religious persecution throughout post-Reformation Christendom – invoked the same story to denounce blind adherence to so-called revealed truths. Though a Lutheran, Kant believed that human dignity lay in autonomous, rational moral judgements. Like other Enlightenment thinkers, he sought to bring order and peace to an unsettled society. Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist leaders had all invoked the will of God – interpreted according to their own theologies – to sanction violence against dissenters; Kant’s meticulous arguments advanced the ethical critique of religious dogmatism that had already been launched against the churches by radical thinkers like Spinoza and Voltaire.

Half a century later, Kierkegaard is addressing a different problem: he thinks Christian society has become too settled, too complacent. Confining religion to ethical life brings new dangers, for the individual’s relationship to God – the heart of Lutheran spirituality – may be reduced to something all too human, all too worldly. Against Kant, Hegel has argued that rationality is not ahistorical and unchanging, but embedded within a specific culture; the moral law is not a transcendent truth, but a civic institution. This new interpretation of ethical life, when fused with Kant’s insistence that religion be confined to the sphere of rational moral conduct, suggests that Christians fulfil their task of faith by conscientiously carrying out their professional, social and familial duties. But Kierkegaard believes that modern Christendom has corrupted the radical, scandalous teachings of the New Testament by merging the God-relationship with bourgeois values.

Fear and Trembling will warn that once God is absorbed into the ethical sphere he will become dispensable, and eventually disappear altogether. Although the ethical theories of Kant and Hegel have sincerely accorded to God the highest place, they are implicitly secular: reducing God to moral life makes human conventions, laws and judgements supreme – and then, Kierkegaard will argue, ‘the whole existence of the human race is rounded off in itself, in a perfect sphere, and the ethical is at once its limit and its completion. God becomes an invisible vanishing point, an impotent thought, his power being only in the ethical.’

Without God, human beings will be left alone in a world with no divine order, no cosmic justice. And then morality itself will collapse, and life will lose its meaning: ‘If there were no eternal consciousness in a human being, if underlying everything there were only a wild, fermenting force writhing in dark passions that produced everything great and insignificant, if a bottomless, insatiable emptiness lurked beneath everything, what would life be then but despair? If there were no sacred bond that tied humankind together, if one generation after another rose like leaves in the forest, if one generation succeeded another like the singing of birds in the forest, if the human race passed through the world as a ship through the sea, as the wind through the desert, a thoughtless and futile activity, if an eternal oblivion always hungrily lay in wait for its prey and there were no power strong enough to snatch it away – then how empty and hopeless life would be!’

By accentuating the horror of Abraham’s story, Kierkegaard wants to shake his readers awake, to say Look, listen, this is what the God-relationship involves, this is what faith requires – it might disrupt your whole existence, overturn your sense of right and wrong, make you a criminal in the eyes of the world – and now do you claim to have faith? Jesus’s disciples broke with the laws of their community, brought shame upon their families, with no guarantee that following their subversive, troublemaking teacher would bring the spiritual rewards they hoped for. If, eighteen centuries later, faith now means living an upright life, doing what everyone agrees is the right thing, then ethics and religion must be prised apart again to show that there might be a breach between them – and then it once again becomes possible to ask whether anyone is prepared to cross it.

Fear and Trembling will put this question to its readers, addressing each one as a ‘single individual’. Kierkegaard is using the story of Abraham to sum up the spiritual crisis of his century, to mark a crossroads in the history of faith and show what philosophy has accomplished thus far. Christendom is coming to an end. There are two clear paths ahead: either let faith dissolve into rational, ethical humanism, or begin the task of faith anew. Neither path can be known in advance; both require those who call themselves Christians to learn how to live in their new world. And this task calls for a new teacher, a new philosopher, a new Socrates. One way or another the world is always there, making its claims and offering its temptations, but right now it is palpably changing – and philosophy has to change too.

He is impatient to get home to his library so that he can finish Fear and Trembling. He must get these two new books out – then he will show Martensen and Heiberg and the rest how far he has come, and how far he can surpass them all …

The miles seem interminable in this godforsaken stagecoach – only an Abraham could believe it otherwise! – and Kierkegaard’s fellow passengers look as wretched as he feels. But who knows, perhaps each one of them is, this very moment, giving thanks to God in silent prayer – for we can never see another person’s inward labour, nor know all the joys and sorrows stirring in another soul. Kierkegaard, for his part, is stiff, sore and shattered, and prays only that the coach will soon reach Stralsund.