A man who thinks deeply and daringly in a small country becomes, of necessity, a martyr. It is only the conformist who is tolerated; the non-conformist is ridiculed or persecuted. Therefore the one philosopher whom Denmark has produced, Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), suffered the penalty of his greatness. He called himself “the martyr of laughter”; because the comic paper, The Corsair, made a butt of him, heaping upon him malicious ridicule. And, as everyone knows, against a witticism there is no defense possible. An epigram may kill a whole philosophy in a dozen volumes. The purpose of Soren Kierkegaard was to gain a new and more rational basis for Christianity, whereby it might re-conquer the heartfelt allegiance of the educated classes. He wars, in a long series of brilliant books against the official orthodoxy as represented by the state church and its clergy. His contemporary, Bishop Martensen (1808-1884), the well-known author of “Christian Ethics” and “Church Dogmatics,” upon whom the duty of their defense rested, held aloof from the controversy, possibly because he felt that he was, neither in profundity of thought nor brilliancy of dialectics, a match for Kierkegaard. Nor was the quondam disciple and adherent of Kierkegaard, Professor Rasmus Nielsen, who after a fashion continued his work, in any way compared with him. His attempts to reconcile religion and science reminds one of a tight-rope performance,- a tour de force in ingenious reasoning-a clever balancing in perilous altitudes with imminent danger of a somersault into space. The utter untenability of his position has been demonstrated with great logical cogency by Dr. Brandes. Among the most remarkable books of Kierkegaard (which, as far as I know, have been translated into German) are “Either-Or,” and “Stages on the Path of Life”.
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The Chautauquan, Volume 8 By Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, M. Bailey, Publisher, 1888, Scandinavian Literature p. 335-336Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
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Kierkegaard, Soren Aaby (1813-1855) Danish philosopher, the seventh child of a Jutland hosier, was born in Copenhagen on the 5th of May 1813. As a boy he was delicate precocious and morbid in temperament. He studies theology at the university of Copenhagen, where he graduated in 1840 with a treatise On Irony. For two years he travelled in Germany, and in 1842 settled finally in Copenhagen, where he died on the 11th of November 1855. He had lived in studious retirement, subject to physical suffering and depression. His first volume, Papers of a Still Living Man (1838), a characterization of Hans Andersen, was a failure, and he was for some time unnoticed. In 1843 he published Euten-Eller (Either-or) (4th edition 1878), a work on which his reputation mainly rests; it is a discussion of the ethical and aesthetic ideas of life. In his last years he carried on a feverish agitation against the theology and practice of the state church, on the ground that religion is for the individual soul, and is to be separated absolutely from the state and the world. In general his philosophy was a reaction against the speculative thinkers-Steffens (q.v.), Niels Treschow (1751-1833) and Frederik Christian Sibbern (1785-1872); it was based on the absolute dualism of Faith and Knowledge. His chief follower was Rasmus Neilsen (1809-1884) and he was opposed by Georg Brandes, who wrote a brilliant account of his life and works. As a dialectician he has been described as little inferior to Plato, and his influence on the literature of Denmark is considerable both in style and in matter. To him Ibsen owed his character Brand in the drama of that name. See his posthumous autobiographical sketch, Syns punktetfor min Forfattevirksomhed (“Standpoint of my Literary Work”); Georg Brandes, Soren Kierkegaard (Copenhagen, 1877; A. Barthold, Noten zu K.’s Lebensgeschichte (Halle, 1879) and S. K.'s Personlichkeit in ihrer Verwirklichung der Ideale (Gutersloh, 1886); F. Petersen, S. K.’s Christendomsforkyndelae (Christiania, 1877). For Kierkegaard’s relation to recent Danish thought see Hoffding’s Archiv fur Geschichte der Philosophie (1888), vol ii
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
Kierkegaard expressed himself without reserve on the significance his writings may have had for certain persons. His old uncle, M. Kierkegaard the merchant, had a son a few years younger than Soren Kierkegaard. This son was a cripple, paralyzed all down one side, and completely deformed in body, but intellectually very talented. He read his cousin’s Soren Kierkegaard’s writings with great interest, visited Kierkegaard from time to time in his home, and received much spiritual uplift from these visits. I [Hans Brochner] once spoke to Kierkegaard about him, and told him how greatly the lad had been impressed by one of Kierkegaard’s works, namely the discourse for a Confession-Service in Edifying Discourses in Different Vein. (In it Kierkegaard speaks of a man who, through bodily infirmity, is prevented from fulfilling an outward task. Beautifully and uplifting it is said how such a man still retains his ordinary ethical task unimpaired, and that his life’s work merely takes on a special form-see Purity of Heart p. 133) Kierkegaard said, ‘Yes, for him the passage is a blessing’; and that was indeed true. It had the power to give this sorely tried man strength to overcome the thought that his life was useless and wasted, and to make him feel that he really was the equal of those more fortunately endowed by Nature. It was precisely Kierkegaard’s lively ability to make him feel like this that made him go away from the above-mentioned conversations with Kierkegaard with renewed strength.
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
Kierkegaard, Soren (1813-1855), the greatest philosophical writer that Scandinavia has produced was born at Copenhagen, May 5, 1813, and was the seventh child of a respectable Jutland hosier. He was a very serious and precocious boy, weak in health, morbid in character. Of his mother, singularly enough, he has said no word in his copious autobiographical remains, although he was in his twenty-second year when she died; she had been his father’s servant. Kierkegaard became a student at the university of Copenhagen, and took up theology as a profession, but never became a priest. He lived in great retirement, deeply oppressed with melancholy and physical suffering, and was at first very little known to his contemporaries. In 1838 he published his first volume, Papers of a Still Living Man, a very poor attempt to characterize Hans Andersen. Two years later he took his degree, with a treatise On Irony, which contains the germs of his later speculations. In 1840 he engaged himself to a young lady, and shortly after broke off the engagement, an extraordinary step for which he has given many extraordinary reasons. It was not until 1842 that he began the composition of his greatest work, Enten-Eller (“Either-Or”), on which his reputation mainly rests; this appeared in 1843, and was immediately followed by a rapid succession of philosophical works, which formed at once an epoch in the history of Danish literature. From 1849 to 1854, however, he was silent as an author. In the last-mentioned year he published a polemical tract against Bishop Martensen, and the short remainder of his life was spent in a feverish agitation against the theology and practice of the state church. But his health, which had always been miserable, was growing worse and worse. In October 1855 he took up his abode in one of the chief hospitals of Copenhagen where he died, on the 11th of November, at the age of forty-two. His life has been written with great skill and brilliance by Dr Georg Brandes (1877). Kierkegaard published about thirty distinct books during his life-time, and left at his death about an equal amount of MS.; a competent analysis of these multifarious labours is given in Brande’s admirable biography.
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
We shall consider Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) only as a philosopher, leaving out of account his esthetic and religious activities, which have taken such deep hold on the life of the North.
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
As a thinker, Soren Kierkegaard was concerned with humanity’s most central existential problems. Therefore, he also sought answers to such important questions as a person’s relation to society and politics and the relation between the sexes. Kierkegaard’s honest and original treatment of these subjects is based on a penetrating knowledge of the presuppositions of the human mind and spirit. Consequently it is of value to become acquainted with what Kierkegaard has to say on these questions, and it is especially pertinent in an age when everything is opened to debate and confusion seems to prevail. Since Kierkegaard in his view of mankind places the main emphasis on the spiritual, his thoughts invariably arouse conflict, insofar as it is material and earthly happiness that people are primarily seeking. But this very controversial aspect of Kierkegaard can be the occasion for a testing and investigating of one’s own philosophy of life. As far as I can make out, it will be Kierkegaard’s wide-ranging, down-to-earth, and consistent thinking to which men must turn in the future in order to cure the rootlessness of the age and in order to find a new point of departure for their own life and for their relation to their fellow human beings.
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
Kierkegaard, Soren Aabye
Kiernan, Caitlin R.
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