Selections from the Writings of Kierkegaard
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UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS BULLETIN
NO. 2326: JULY 8, 1923
SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS OF KIERKEGAARD
TRANSLATED BY L. M. HOLLANDER
ADJUNCT PROFESSOR OF GERMANIC LANGUAGES
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE SERIES NO. 3
PUBLISHED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS, AUSTIN
The benefits of education and of
useful knowledge, generally diffused
through a community, are essential
to the preservation of a free government.
Sam Houston
Cultivated mind is the guardian
genius of democracy.... It is the
only dictator that freemen acknowledge
and the only security that free-men
desire.
Mirabeau B. Lamar
_To my Father-in-Law
The Reverend George Fisher,
A Christian._
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION.
DIAPSALMATA.
IN VINO VERITAS (THE BANQUET).
FEAR AND TREMBLING.
PREPARATION FOR A CHRISTIAN LIFE.
THE PRESENT MOMENT.
INTRODUCTION I
Creditable as have been the contributions of Scandinavia to
the cultural life of the race in well-nigh all fields of human
endeavor, it has produced but one thinker of the first magnitude,
the Dane, Sören Å. Kierkegaard[1]. The fact that he is virtually
unknown to us is ascribable, on the one hand to the inaccessibility
of his works, both as to language and form; on the other, to the
regrettable insularity of English thought.
It is the purpose of this book to remedy the defect in a measure,
and by a selection from his most representative works to provide a
stimulus for a more detailed study of his writings; for the present
times, ruled by material considerations, wholly led by socializing,
and misled by national, ideals are precisely the most opportune to
introduce the bitter but wholesome antidote of individual responsibility,
which is his message. In particular, students of Northern literature
cannot afford to know no more than the name of one who exerted a
potent and energizing influence on an important epoch of Scandinavian
thought. To mention only one instance, the greatest ethical poem of our
age, "Brand"--notwithstanding Ibsen's curt statement that he
"had read little of Kierkegaard and understood less"--undeniably
owes its fundamental thought to him, whether directly or indirectly.
Of very few authors can it be said with the same literalness
as, of Kierkegaard that their life is their works: as if to furnish
living proof of his untiring insistance on inwardness, his life, like
that of so many other spiritual educators of the race, is notably poor
in incidents; but his life of inward experiences is all the
richer--witness the "literature within a literature" that came to
be within a few years and that gave to Danish letters a score of
immortal works.
Kierkegaard's physical heredity must be pronounced unfortunate.
Being the child of old parents--his father was fifty-seven,
his mother forty-five years at his birth (May 5, 1813), he had a weak
physique and a feeble constitution. Still worse, he inherited from his
father a burden of melancholy which he took a sad pride in masking
under a show of sprightliness. His father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard,
had begun life as a poor cotter's boy in West Jutland, where he was
set to tend the sheep on the wild moorlands. One day, we are told,
oppressed by loneliness and cold, he ascended a hill and in a passionate
rage cursed God who had given him this miserable existence--the
memory of which "sin against the Holy Ghost" he was not able to
shake off to the end of his long life[2]. When seventeen years
old, the gifted lad was sent to his uncle in Copenhagen, who
was a well-to-do dealer in woolens and groceries. Kierkegaard
quickly established himself in the trade and amassed a considerable
fortune. This enabled him to withdraw from active life when only
forty, and to devote himself to philosophic studies, the leisure
for which life had till then denied him. More especially he seems
to have studied the works of the rationalistic philosopher Wolff.
After the early death of his first wife who left him no issue, he
married a former servant in his household, also of Jutish stock,
who bore him seven children. Of these only two survived him, the
oldest son--later bishop--Peder Christian, and the youngest son,
Sören Åbye.
Nowhere does Kierkegaard speak of his mother, a woman of simple
mind and cheerful disposition; but he speaks all the more often of his
father, for whom he ever expressed the greatest love and admiration and
who, no doubt, devoted himself largely to the education of his sons,
particularly to that of his latest born. Him he was to mould in his own
image. A pietistic, gloomy spirit of religiosity pervaded the household
in which the severe father was undisputed master, and absolute obedience
the watchword. Little Sören, as he himself tells us, heard more of the
Crucified and the martyrs than of the Christ-child and good angels. Like
John Stuart Mill, whose early education bears a remarkable resemblance
to his, he "never had the joy to be a child." Although less
systematically held down to his studies, in which religion was the
be-all and end-all (instead of being banished, as was the case with
Mill), he was granted but a minimum of out-door play and exercise. And,
instead of strengthening the feeble body, his father threw the whole
weight of his melancholy on the boy.
Nor was his home training, formidably abstract, counterbalanced
by a normal, healthy school-life. Naturally introspective and shy, both
on account of a slight deformity of his body and on account of the
old-fashioned clothes his father made him wear, he had no boy friends;
and when cuffed by his more robust contemporaries, he could defend
himself only with his biting sarcasm. Notwithstanding his early maturity
he does not seem to have impressed either his schoolmates or his
teachers by any gifts much above the ordinary. The school he attended
was one of those semi-public schools which by strict discipline and
consistent methods laid a solid foundation of humanities and mathematics
for those who were to enter upon a professional career. The natural
sciences played noddle whatever.
Obedient to the wishes of his father, Sören chose the study of
theology, as had his eldest brother; but, once relieved from the grind
of school at the age of seventeen, he rejoiced in the full liberty of
university life, indulging himself to his heart's content in all the
refined intellectual and æsthetic enjoyments the gay capital of
Copenhagen offered. He declares himself in later years to be "one who
is penitent" for having in his youth plunged into all kinds of excesses;
but we feel reasonably sure that he committed no excesses worse than
"high living." He was frequently seen at the opera and the theatre,
spent money freely in restaurants and confectionary shops, bought
many and expensive books, dressed well, and indulged in such
extravagances as driving in a carriage and pair, alone, for days
through the fields and forests of the lovely island of Zealand. In
fact, he contracted considerable debts, so that his disappointed
father decided to put him on an allowance of 500 rixdollars
yearly--rather a handsome sum, a hundred years ago.
Naturally, little direct progress was made in his studies. But
while to all appearances aimlessly dissipating his energies, he showed
a pronounced love for philosophy and kindred disciplines. He lost no
opportunity then offered at the University of Copenhagen to train his
mind along these lines. He heard the sturdily independent Sibbern's
lectures on æsthetics and enjoyed a "privatissimum" on the main issues
of Schleiermacher's Dogmatics with his later enemy, the theologian
Martensen, author of the celebrated "Christian Dogmatics."
But there was no steadiness in him. Periods of indifference to these
studies alternated with feverish activity, and doubts of the truth of
Christianity, with bursts of devotion. However, the Hebraically stern
cast of mind of the externally gay student soon wearied of this
rudderless existence. He sighs for an "Archimedean" point of support for
his conduct of life. We find the following entry in his diary, which
prophetically foreshadows some of the fundamental ideas of his later
career: "...what I really need is to arrive at a clear comprehension of
what I am to do, not of what I am to grasp with my understanding,
except insofar as this understanding is necessary for every action. The
point is, to comprehend what I am called to do, to see what the Godhead
really means that I shall do, to find a truth which is truth for me, to
find the idea for which I am willing to live and to die..."
This Archimedean point was soon to be furnished him. There came a
succession of blows, culminating in the death of his father, whose
silent disapprobation had long been weighing heavily on the conscience
of the wayward son. Even more awful, perhaps, was a revelation made by
the dying father to his sons, very likely touching that very "sin
against the Holy Ghost" which he had committed in his boyhood and the
consequence of which he now was to lay on them as a curse, instead of
his blessing. Kierkegaard calls it "the great earthquake, the terrible
upheaval, which suddenly forced on me a new and infallible interpretation
of all phenomena." He began to suspect that he had been chosen by
Providence for an extraordinary purpose; and with his abiding filial
piety he interprets his father's death; as the last of many sacrifices
he made for him; "for he died, not away from me, but for me, so that
there might yet, perchance, become something of me." Crushed by this
thought, and through the "new interpretation" despairing of happiness
in this life, he clings to the thought of his unusual intellectual
powers as his only consolation and a means by which his salvation
might be accomplished. He quickly absolved his examination for
ordination (ten years after matriculation) and determined on his
magisterial dissertation[3].
Already some years before he had made a not very successful debut
in the world of letters with a pamphlet whose queer title "From the
MSS. of One Still Living" reveals Kierkegaard's inborn love of
mystification and innuendo. Like a Puck of philosophy, with somewhat
awkward bounds and a callow manner, he had there teased the worthies of
his times; and, in particular, taken a good fall out of Hans Christian
Andersen, the poet of the Fairy Tales, who had aroused his indignation
by describing in somewhat lachrymose fashion the struggles of genius to
come into its own. Kierkegaard himself was soon to show the truth of
his own dictum that "genius does not whine but like a thunderstorm goes
straight counter to the wind."
While casting about for a subject worthy of a more sustained
effort--he marks out for study the legends of Faust, of the
Wandering Jew, of Don Juan, as representatives of certain basic views
of life; the Conception of Satire among the Ancients, etc.,
etc.,--he at last becomes aware of his affinity with Socrates,
in whom he found that rare harmony between theory and the conduct of
life which he hoped to attain himself.
Though not by Kierkegaard himself counted among the works bearing on
the "Indirect Communication"--presently to be explained--his
magisterial dissertation, entitled "The Conception of Irony, with
Constant Reference to Socrates," a book of 300 pages, is of crucial
importance. It shows that, helped by the sage who would not directly
help any one, he had found the master key: his own interpretation of
life. Indeed, all the following literary output may be regarded as the
consistent development of the simple directing thoughts of his firstling
work. And we must devote what may seem a disproportionate amount of
space to the explanation of these thoughts if we would enter into
the world of his mind.