Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments

Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments 43 Philosophical Fragments The most radically dissenting philosopher of the nineteenth century, that age of ideology constituted by the range of reactions to the French Revolution, Søren Kierkegaard would not gain an international audience until the 1930s and 40s, when he found recognition as the first existentialist philosopher. In an age of seismic secularization, with Christianity tamed by bourgeois rationalism, Kierkegaard sought to vindicate a supernaturalist Christianity. When most thinkers were focused intensely on social and political matters, Kierkegaard insisted on addressing that single individual: you and me, in our existential relation to God and to the course of our own lives. Born in Copenhagen in 1813 (he would die there in 1855), Kierkegaard was the seventh child of a brooding and devout Lutheran father, who imparted to his son a sense of religious dread. He floated through his university days, outwardly a socializing and spendthrift dandy but inwardly unhappy about the vanity of his life. His father’s death concentrated his spirit—five of his six siblings and his mother had already died. He finally completed a dissertation in philosophy and became engaged to Regine Olsen in 1840. Kierkegaard broke off the engagement after a year, the most decisive event of his life: he couldn’t see himself making her happy and couldn’t see harmonizing his vocation as a writer with a settled family life. But giving up Regine caused him bitter suffering, leaving a wound that never healed. He turned away from an ecclesiastical career, instead living off his inheritance in a life of singleness. Later in 1841, he attended lectures in Berlin (also attended by Bakunin, Humboldt, Engels, Ranke, Burckhardt) delivered by Schelling, whom King Friedrich Wilhelm IV had summoned to extinguish “the dragon-seed of Hegelian pantheism.” 45 Søren Kierkegaard Kierkegaard’s point of contact with contemporary concerns was Hegel (at least Schelling’s version of him), whose abstract system was his great enemy. Like Marx, Kierkegaard refused the Hegelian identification of the real with the rational, writing, “The deification of the established order is the secularization of everything.” Unlike Marx, he did not wish to empower dialectics by giving it economic substance. Kierkegaard saw the mass conformism of ideology and global capital’s industrial-commercial society hollowing out our inwardness; he wanted to maintain the Kantian reserve vis-à-vis the power of thought. The most stylistically literary philosopher since Plato, Kierkegaard was not a system builder. He used many pseudonyms; holding vital truth to be subjective/existential rather than propositional, he thought indirect communication the only way to be a true teacher. His vocation as a thinker and writer was to Socratically foster self-knowledge and progress in the strenuous process of becoming a Christian—which even entailed assailing the established Lutheran Church of Denmark in his “attack on Christendom.” 46 Philosophical Fragments Can a historical point of departure be given for an eternal consciousness; how can such a point of departure be of more than historical interest; can an eternal happiness be built on historical knowledge? Better well hanged than ill wed. SHAKESPEARE Preface What is offered here is only a pamphlet, proprio Marte, propriis aus- piciis, proprio stipendio [by one’s own hand, on one’s own behalf, at one’s own expense], without any claim to being a part of the scientific- scholarly endeavor in which one acquires legitimacy as a thoroughfare or transition, as concluding, introducing, or participating, as a co- worker or as a volunteer attendant, as a hero or at any rate as a relative hero, or at least as an absolute trumpeter. It is merely a pamphlet and will not become anything more even if I, like Holberg’s magister, were, volente Deo [God willing], to continue it with seven- teen others. It has as little chance of becoming something more as a writer of half-hour pieces has of writing something else even if he writes folios. The accomplishment is, however, in proportion to my talents, for I do not, like that noble Roman, refrain from serving the system merito magis quam ignavia [from justifiable motives rather than from indolence], but I am a loafer out of indolence ex animi sententia [by inclination] and for good reasons. Yet I do not want to be guilty of απραγμoσυνη [abstention from public activity], which is a political offense in any age, but especially in a time of ferment, during which, in ancient times, it was punishable even by death. But suppose someone’s intervention made him guilty of a greater crime simply by giving rise to confusion—would it not be better for him to mind his own business? It is not given to everyone to have his intellectual pursuits coincide happily with the interests of the public, so happily that it almost becomes difficult to decide to what extent he is concerned for his own good or for that of the public. Did not Archimedes sit undis- turbed, contemplating his circles while Syracuse was being occupied, and was it not to the Roman soldier who murdered him that he said 47 Søren Kierkegaard those beautiful words: Nolite perturbare circulos meos [Do not disturb my circles]? But one who is not that fortunate should look for another prototype. When Corinth was threatened with a siege by Philip and all the inhabitants were busily active—one polishing his weapons, another collecting stones, a third repairing the wall—and Diogenes saw all this, he hurriedly belted up his cloak and eagerly trundled his tub up and down the streets. When asked why he was doing that, he an- swered: I, too, am at work and roll my tub so that I will not be the one and only loafer among so many busy people. Such conduct is at least not sophistical, if Aristotle’s definition of sophistry as the art of making money is generally correct. Such conduct at least cannot occasion any misunderstanding, for it surely would be inconceivable for anyone to dream of regarding Diogenes as the savior and benefactor of the city. And of course it is impossible for anyone to dream of attributing world-historical importance to a pamphlet (something that I, at least, regard as the greatest danger that could threaten my undertaking) or to assume that its author is the systematic Salomon Goldkalb so long awaited in our dear capital city, Copenhagen. For this to happen, the guilty person would have to be singularly stupid by nature, and, most likely, by yelling day in and day out in antistrophic antiphonies every time someone deluded him into thinking that now a new era, a new epoch, etc. was beginning, he would have so completely bel- lowed the sparsely IV 177] bestowed quantum satis [sufficient amount] of common sense out of his head that he would have been transported into a state of bliss, into what could be called the howling madness of the higher lunacy, symptomatized by yelling, convulsive yelling, while the sum and substance of the yelling are these words: era, epoch, era and epoch, epoch and era, the system. The state of one thus bliss- fully transported is irrational exaltation, since he lives not as if every day were just one of the intercalary days that occur only every four years but as if it were one of those that occur only once in a thousand years, while the concept, like a juggler in this carnival time, has to keep doing those continual flip-flopping tricks—until the man himself flips over. Heaven preserve me and my pamphlet from the meddling of such an uproarious, bustling oaf, lest he tear me out of my care- free contentedness as the author of a pamphlet, prevent a kind and well-disposed reader from unabashedly looking to see if there is anything in the pamphlet he can use, and place me in the tragic-comic predicament of having to laugh at my own ill fortune, just as the fine city of Fredericia must have laughed amid all its ill fortune when it read in the newspaper the news of a local fire: “The alarm drums sounded; the fire engines raced through the streets”—although there is but one fire engine in Fredericia and probably not much more than 48 Philosophical Fragments one street. The newspaper thus compelled one to conclude that the one fire engine, instead of driving straight to the scene of the fire, did considerable side-maneuvering on the street. But, of course, my pamphlet seems to be least reminiscent of the beating of an alarm drum, and its author is least of all inclined to sound an alarm. But what is my opinion?. “Do not ask me about that. Next to the question of whether or not I have an opinion, nothing can be of less interest to someone else than what my opinion is”. To have an opinion is to me both too much and too little; it presupposes a security and well-being in existence akin to having a wife and children in this mortal life, something not granted to a person who has to be up and about night and day and yet has no fixed income. In the world of spirit, this is my case, for I have trained myself and am training myself always to be able to dance lightly in the service of thought, as far as possible to the honor of the god and for my own enjoyment, renouncing domestic bliss and civic esteem, the communio bonorum [community of goods] and the concordance of joys that go with having an opinion.

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