Encounters with Kierkegaard by Søren Kierkegaard

Author:Søren Kierkegaard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Nørreport with the ramparts. Watercolor by C. W. Eckersberg, 1804. From a photograph owned by the Copenhagen City Museum. Reproduced by permission of the Copenhagen City Museum.

It may be that his enmity could have been softened if I had conferred greater recognition on him. He once came to me in my home and wished to read me part of his treatise on the concept of irony—as far as I remember, a polemic against Friedrich Schlegel's one-sided aestheticism. I let him read, but expressed appreciation only rather coolly. A contributing factor was his language and style, with its intolerable discursiveness. The many tiring repetitions, the unendingly long sentences, and the affected and mannered expressions were unpleasant to me, just as they have always disturbed me when I read his works. But he appears not to have forgotten that I failed to display a greater enthusiasm for his opus. And yet it is very possible that I am wrong when I assume that a greater appreciation on my part could have diminished his enmity. Because his pretensions were unbounded and his demands were extremely difficult to satisfy if one refused to make oneself into a blind admirer and a parrot of his views, which some of our literati have undeniably done. Because he had pretensions not only to the unbelievable claim of being one of the world's greatest thinkers (and perhaps the greatest of them) but also to being one of the greatest of poets—this despite the fact that he lacked immediacy and consisted wholly and solely of reflection. As far as I was concerned, he was neither the one nor the other; from my point of view he was only a humorist, who possessed elements both of the poet and of the thinker, by means of which he developed his humor—which in Kierkegaard took on a pessimistic character, the complete opposite of Jean Paul, for whom everything is optimism and love. But even a humorist may certainly have his sort of greatness, and far be it from me to deny the sublime, the many profound and acute insights, which can be found in his writings. Nor should one overlook that there is in him a religiosity which underlies everything, and that his most profound significance is that of a religious author, to which his edifying discourses testify. As is well known, the fundamental idea for which he does battle is individualism, or the individual and the individual's relationship to God. His efforts in the field of religion are entirely deserving of attention, but unfortunately these attempts have gone astray in one-sidedness and morbidity, in half-truths and false paradoxes. It soon became clear that the individual had been entirely torn loose from society, and that the Christian requirement of self-denial and dying away from the world had been presented in such a way that the religious ideal pointed out to us was only a caricature of holiness. It would take us too far afield to delve into this in detail at this point, and I must refer to the detailed presentations I put forth about his views in my Ethics.

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