KIERKEGAARD WAS AN EARNEST, brilliant, difficult, vituperative, sensitive, sickly emo brat whose statue in the Valhalla of Sad Young Literary Men is surely the size of a Bamiyan Buddha. He was a Christian whose devoutness was so idiosyncratic as to be functionally indistinct from heresy; who lived large on family money until the money ran out and then died so promptly that you’d almost think he planned the photo finish; who tried and failed to save Christianity from itself, but succeeded (without really trying) in founding “a new philosophical style, rooted in the inward drama of being human.” That quote is Clare Carlisle’s, from her biography Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard; the “new philosophical style” was existentialism.
Kierkegaard wrote often of love, even as his work had its origins in grief. By 1834, when he turned twenty-one, he had lost his mother and five of his six siblings. He was struggling with the question of how to reconcile his interest in Romantic literature (and concomitant rejection of Hegel and Descartes) with his attraction to Christian faith. Shortly thereafter, he began to keep a journal: “As I stood there alone and forsaken and the brute force of the sea and the battle of the elements reminded me of my nothingness, and on the other hand the sure flight of the birds reminded me of Christ’s words: ‘Not a sparrow will fall to the earth without your heavenly Father’s will,’ I felt at one and the same time how great and insignificant I am.”
In an 1835 entry that Carlisle describes as “not just a personal aspiration, but a philosophical manifesto,” he wrote, “The crucial thing is to find a truth that is true for me.” One can understand—even applaud—Kierkegaard’s resistance to the totalizing tendencies of rationalism and dialectics while also acknowledging how narcissistic and naive he sounds. But let’s give credit where it’s due. It wasn’t that Kierkegaard believed Hegel and Descartes were entirely wrongheaded; he simply saw that there was always a remainder or excess for which their systems could not account. For Kierkegaard, this excess was subjectivity itself. He believed that each of us has—each of us is—a unique perceptive consciousness, charged with observing the world, interpreting what it sees, and ultimately acting on what it believes.
Here’s Carlisle again: “His sense that divine governance directed his authorship was difficult to distinguish from his need to write to assuage his deep anxiety.”
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