My Encounter with the “Danish Doctor of Dread”
Hunched over his tall writing desk next to a tall rosewood cabinet in the soft glow of candlelight, the “Danish doctor of dread” scribbles furiously with his silver quill as dusk sheds its last feathers of light. Publishing some thirty-eight books over the span of a mere ten years, few would ever have a more prolific literary output. At a mere twenty-five years of age, five of his six siblings were dead along with his mother and father, so he writes with the urgency of one not expecting to live much longer. His family’s curse cannot overtake him before every last drop of ink has been squeezed from his veins.
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) does not know it now, but his writings -- the product of the introspective oil press he mercilessly submitted himself to every night -- will be immortalized the world over. Though childless in life, he will become the father of existentialism1; the father of thinking twice about what it means to be human.
“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all,” he writes. Like Socrates of old, he refuses to take for granted the starting point that we are human beings by default. To be a human being in the world is not so simple a feat as merely respirating; it calls for an assiduous proprioception of the soul that notices every fallen sparrow within. As with Socrates, Kierkegaard’s high-minded contemporaries in Copenhagen saw him as a menace to society and likely wished he would drink hemlock of his own accord and relieve them of his pestiferous presence.
His antics were no mere accident of personality, though. Looking around, Kierkegaard perceived that Christianity in Denmark had become too easy. Bourgeois values of social respectability had successfully infiltrated the religion and duly relieved everyone of the burden of true, daunting, Christian discipleship. His task, then, was “to make difficulties everywhere” by “introducing Christianity to Christendom.” His merciless indictments have not lost their potency with time:
The matter is quite simple. The bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.
The example that immediately surfaces is the young man who approaches Jesus inquiring after salvation and is told to sell everything he has and follow him. The meaning and implication here is as obvious as the sun at noonday but we conniving Christians “pretend to be unable to understand it.”
Not only did he make things difficult for complacent laymen and clergy alike, but he also made things unrelentingly difficult for himself.
Once upon a time he was smitten by the beautiful Regine Olsen and, like any respectable and upstanding man in Copenhagen, he was engaged to marry.
After a year of engagement, from September 1840 to October 1841, Kierkegaard’s importunate daimon did not permit him to go through with it. “My love cannot find expression in marriage,” he later confessed, and in the shadow of a trembling Abraham on Mount Moriah, “if I had had faith I would have stayed with Regine.” He could not marry, for the magma chamber of his chthonic soul rumbled with unwritten words and anyone too close would inevitably end up a casualty, so he thought. Yet those very words only found their form when tasked with assembling the wreckage of the broken engagement. Thus, in a sense, he traded a wife for a muse and domestic bliss for the fecund paroxysms of a broken heart—a Faustian bargain of great literary consequence.
His whole oeuvre after 1841 can be viewed as one long melancholy sigh, punctuated by a furious scrabbling for a foothold on the rock wall of his own psyche, futilely attempting to purge his heart from the regret of breaking off the engagement with Regine. The novelist Cormac McCarthy once wrote of regret: “...regret is a prison. Some part of you which you deeply value lies forever impaled at a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget.” Stretched just so on the crucifix so that his arms remained open to her but nailed in place, Kierkegaard wept tears of ink -- “despair is veritably a self-consuming, but an impotent self-consuming that cannot do what it wants to do.”
Clare Carlisle, in her beautiful biography Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard paints the poignant and perpetual scene:
During their breakup, she said 'in her agony' that she would thank him her whole life if she could stay with him and live in a little cupboard in his house. In memory of those words, he has had a tall cabinet made from Rosewood to his own design, with no shelves, like an upright coffin. This cupboard does not, thankfully contain Regine -- but it contains her absence. In it he carefully keeps 'everything reminiscent of her,' including two copies of Either/Or, specially printed on vellum -- 'one for her, and one for me.'
When he died he left everything in his will to her, though she was by then married to another man.
Kierkegaard did not write dry philosophy, for the ultimate summons a volcanic passion from the writer or nothing at all. His writing often took the form of a “lyrical dialectic” carried out by a horde of shifty pseudonyms discoursing at such great lengths that it bordered on descanting. As Carlisle put it, “he gathered a little troop of imagined selves and sent them off in different directions through the world.” The effect he evinces is unmistakable.
He is the philosophical Ahab aboard the Pequod pursuing the white whale -- who at any given moment is either Regine, his father, Christ, the Danish Church, or Hegel -- and the reader rides in his foaming wake. He is also Hamlet, in whom we witness a vast proliferation of consciousness that consummates in apotheosis.
“Kierkegaard’s many readers are fascinated, perhaps even spiritually titillated, by his pressing every question to the limits, and then beyond the limits” Richard Neuhaus observes, he
provides a spiritual and intellectual rush, a frisson of youthful rebellion, a flirtation with radical refusal of the world as it is. Kierkegaard is, in sum, a spiritually and intellectually complexified way of …declaring that established ways of thinking and acting are “phony” to the core, which declaration certifies, by way of dramatic contrast, one’s most singular “authenticity.”2
Modern authenticity owes more to Freud than Kierkegaard, however, for Kierkegaard would have us be obedient to God to be our authentic selves -- a proposal that would surely cause anaphylactic shock in today’s Instagram-bio certified “free spirits” and “free thinkers” (he would surely remind them that “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom”).
Despite his unsuccessful romantic life, he had no shortage of things to say about love, culminating in his rhetorically florid Works of Love. On his reading, the New Testament’s command to “love your neighbor” is tyrannically oppressive (in the best possible sense) because everywhere you turn, lo and behold, there is your neighbor. The neighbor, and therefore the command to love, cannot be escaped unless we seal our eyes and ears shut and dissolve into the dank darkness of the ‘skin-encapsulated ego.’
I first encountered Kierkegaard as a young missionary in the Philippines. Fear and Trembling, his meditations on the sacrifice of Isaac, and an excerpt from Works of Love were my introductory texts. I walked home with the printouts (yes, I had a somewhat illicit reading habit) just as a torrential typhoon was landing in our area. The streets outside my apartment were submerged in water sometimes reaching the torso.
Confined for a time in our dingy dwelling as the worst of it passed, I read Fear and Trembling, wide-eyed and disoriented, as the membrane between me and my youthful assumptions about faith was parted and I thought for the first time by God if this is faith then I have not a particle of it.
Like some loping beast struck by lightning on a featureless plain I lay on my back dazed and staring up at the whitewashed carapace of heaven. Just as Kierkegaard’s Abraham levitated out of the universal sphere of the ethical, I too levitated out, finally and irrevocably, from my first naïveté.
The typhoon eventually came to an end, and as I stepped outside again Kierkegaard’s apodictic pronouncements on love chittered about inside my skull like some captive horde of marmosets. Moreover, inscribed inside the steel ring on my left hand was the third line from an Elizabeth Barrett Browning stanza that I’d previously sworn to live by:
Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.
Thus, in a stroke of tremendous misfortune, the option to merely shut my eyes was already foreclosed; I’d already pledged to ever look for the holy fire. And so I was compelled to labor inwardly; to summon from my depths a genuine love for every last being who crossed my path (no easy task if one has ever tried). But can real love even be summoned? Kierkegaard had sprung a trap and I was caught fast.
I cannot say that reading Kierkegaard is ‘nourishing,’ when I often feel as though the store of vitamins and minerals in my bones are being leached with each line, the marrow sucked out by the minute. But, like the Shaqq al-Ṣadr story from the traditional biography of Muhammad, my internal organs are removed only to be purified and put back in place better than before. It is also relieving to find out that someone is capable of out-neuroticizing even me, that I can have a sensei of overthinking the infinite.
Speaking of the psychiatrist R.D. Laing’s youthful, enrapturing encounter with Kierkegaard’s writing in the library, depth psychologist James Hillman describes the profundity of intellectual discovery in familial terms: “you expect less from your natural parents, and they become easier to bear once you have discovered the other family tree on which your soul depends.” (165)
For me, I felt instantly grafted onto the Kierkegaardian tree. Though now, some six years later as I reread Fear and Trembling, I mournfully recognize that I am now a withered branch on that tree. He does not speak to me in the same way, though I recognize that his intervention was an indispensable adaptation for me at the time. The haunting question, however, lingers on: Have I ‘outgrown’ Kierkegaard? or have I merely resigned from the ultimate quest that he speaks to? Have I matured into a more stable socialized adult, or have I simply become hard of heart? (and is there any real difference?)
Some fourteen years after breaking off the engagement with Regine and before her departure to the Danish West Indies, she appeared before him in the streets of Copenhagen, apparition-like in her immortal beauty, to bid him one final farewell: “God bless you — may good things come your way!”
With that longed-for epiphanic token of goodwill the incessant gravity of his ‘inwardness’ at last pulled him over the event horizon within. Eight months later, after one last literary eruption, he departed this world. The doctor charged with his care during his final hospitalization was struck by the circumstances of it all, recording in his notes:
His death is necessary for the cause which he has devoted all his intellectual strength to resolving, for which he has worked alone, and for which alone he believes that he has been intended; hence the penetrating thought in conjunction with so frail a physique. If he goes on living, he must continue his religious battle; but in that case it will peter out, while, on the contrary, by his death it will maintain its strength and, he believes, its victory (Carlisle, 245).
Like Hamlet dead on stage, we puzzle over his death and what to make of it. Did he take arms against his sea of troubles and end them? Did he fall on a poisoned sword of his own making? Did Regine hold the sword?
In the end, there are two diametrically opposed ways of viewing Kierkegaard. On the one hand, he could be read as a melancholic and teemingly neurotic trust-fund kid who, in attempt to cope with his fissiparous and loveless life, wrote like a madman and just so happened to be extraordinarily good at it, accidentally striking upon an existentialist chord lying dormant in the human heart for so long.
The other way of seeing him is as one continually in the throes of a greater spirit, a daimon who, like the angel Jibrīl in the cave of Ḥirāʾ outside of Mecca, seized upon a spokesperson and compelled them to speak, even at great cost to the vessel. As Carlisle writes:
… he long[ed] for rest. The gentleness that would release his spirit, calm his body, has never come easily to him —and there is no one else to call him softly from his thoughts, to tell him he has done enough for the day and, like Judge Williams' patient wife, beckon him gently into bed. He still strains at the leash of self assertion: it will not loosen, but twist into self-sacrifice.
I opt for Plato's myth of Er over Freud's myth of compensation. He seems to have literally written himself to death, and for that strange self-sacrifice we ought to be grateful.
The best brief definition, professional philosophical dictionaries aside, comes from an anonymous Reddit user: “Existentialism is philosophical and literary tendency that typically displays a dismissal of abstract theories that seek to disguise the untidiness of actual human lives and emphasizes the subjective realities of individual existence, individual freedom, and individual choice.”