A LITERARY REVIEW

SøREN AABYE KIERKEGAARD was born in Copenhagen in 1813, the youngest of seven children. His mother, his sisters and two of his brothers all died before he reached his twenty-first birthday. Kierkegaard’s childhood was an isolated and unhappy one, clouded by the religious fervour of his father. He was educated at the School of Civic Virtue and went on to enter the university, where he read theology but also studied the liberal arts and science. In all, he spent seven years as a student, gaining a reputation both for his academic brilliance and for his extravagant social life. Towards the end of his university career he started to criticize the Christianity upheld by his father and to look for a new set of values. In 1841 he broke off his engagement to Regine Olsen and devoted himself to his writing. During the next ten years he produced a flood of discourses and no fewer than twelve major philosophical essays, many of them written under noms de plume. Notable are Either/Or (1843), Repetition (1843), Fear and Trembling (1843), Philosophical Fragments (1844), The Concept of Anxiety (1844), Stages on Life’s Way (1845), Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) and The Sickness unto Death (1849). By the end of his life Kierkegaard had become an object of public ridicule and scorn, partly because of a feud that he had provoked in 1846 with the satirical Danish weekly The Corsair, partly because of his attacks on the Danish State Church. Few mourned his death in November 1855, but during the early twentieth century his work enjoyed increasing acclaim and he has done much to inspire both modern Protestant theology and existentialism. Today Kierkegaard is attracting increasing attention from philosophers and writers ‘inside’ and outside the postmodern tradition.

ALASTAIR HANNAY was born to Scottish parents in Plymouth, Devon, in 1932 and educated at the Edinburgh Academy, the University of Edinburgh and University College London. In 1961 he became a resident of Norway, where he is now Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oslo. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, he has been a frequent visiting professor at the University of California, at San Diego and at Berkeley. Alastair Hannay has also translated Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, The Sickness unto Death, Either/Or and Papers and Journals for Penguin Classics. His other publications include Mental Images – A Defence, Kierkegaard (Arguments of the Philosophers), Human Consciousness and Kierkegaard: A Biography, as well as articles on diverse themes in philosophical collections and journals. He is the editor of Inquiry.

SØREN KIERKEGAARD

A Literary Review

Two Ages, a novel by the author of A Story of Everyday Life, published by J. L. Heiberg, Copenhagen, Reitzel, 1845

Translated with an Introduction and Notes by

ALASTAIR HANNAY

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First published 1846

This translation first published 2001

Published in Penguin Classics 2006

Copyright © Alastair Hannay, 2001

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-195865-1

CONTENTS

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

FURTHER READING

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

A Literary Review

Preface

Introduction

I Prospectus of the Contents of Both Parts

Part One: The Age of Revolution

Part Two: The Present Age

II An Aesthetic Reading of the Novel and Its Details

III The Results of Observing the Two Ages

The Age of Revolution

The Present Age

NOTES

I would like to dedicate my translation to

HUBERT L. DREYFUS

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

The name Kierkegaard is mostly associated with works by which the Danish author was best known in his lifetime, first and foremost Either/ Or but also other such oddly memorable titles as Fear and Trembling, The Concept of Dread, Philosophical Fragments, Concluding Unscientific Postscript and The Sickness unto Death. What we easily forget is that these and other works appeared under pseudonyms. Why Kierkegaard resorted to pseudonymity is the subject of much speculation, but he himself provided one quite plausible explanation. In a short work, The Point of View for My Activity as an Author, published after his death, he says in effect that the pseudonymity was designed to let the works express views of life without the reader being led to think they might be the actual views of the author. His own task as a writer Kierkegaard took to be that of promoting in individual readers a sense, first, of a need for such life-views and, second, of the ways in which certain prevalent life-views, the kind he called ‘aesthetic’, were inadequate to the individual’s true needs. The task, as he saw it, was to begin with the inadequate views and convey somehow the ways in which they were deficient. More generally, his project was aimed at the cultivation in the reader of what one pseudonymous author in particular, Johannes Climacus, calls ‘inwardness’ (Inderlighed). This is not, as the English word suggests, a self-centred absorption in the states of one’s own mind or soul, but an engagement by the whole person in life’s tasks.

It need come as no surprise, then, to those who know Kierkegaard only through his pseudonyms, to find how sharp an eye the poet-philosopher of inwardness has for the ways in which people fail to engage themselves in this way. More surprising, perhaps, is the skill with which, in A Literary Review, he relates such failure on the part of the individual to features of society and cultural life at large. The work includes one of the most startling pieces of cultural analysis to be found anywhere.

A Literary Review was published in Copenhagen on 30 March 1846. Kierkegaard had begun writing it while waiting for proofs of the work with which he intended to mark the end of his pseudonymous authorship, the aptly named Concluding Unscientific Postscript. That authorship, of a series of works starting with Either/Or, had occupied him for four intensive years during which he also wrote a series of signed works described as ‘edifying’ and ‘Christian’ discourses. The sequence of events which turned Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (the surname an earlier spelling of the Danish for ‘graveyard’, Kirkegård) to full-time authorship began in 1837 when he met Regine Olsen, daughter of a Copenhagen dignitary. Regine was then fourteen years old. Their later engagement and his breaking it off were to provide the focus of much of his writing. The following year Kierkegaard’s father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, died, aged eighty-one (Søren was then twenty-five). The death led Kierkegaard, after ten years as a student, finally to complete his university exams and face the future.

Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen on 5 May 1813. His father’s family had worked the land of their local pastor in East Jutland, in a feudal arrangement that gave the family its name. Kierkegaard’s father himself had been released from formal vassalage at the age of twenty-one, at a time when he had already moved to Copenhagen to work in an uncle’s hosiery business. He later became a wealthy wholesaler of imported goods, and Søren inherited a fair fortune when his father died. Søren was the youngest of seven children whose mother was their father’s second wife, and who had formerly been maid to the first. A brother and a sister died before he was nine. His two surviving sisters, a brother and his mother were all dead by the time he was twenty-one, and Søren, now alone with his father and his eldest brother, himself became convinced he would not live to be more than thirty-three. He was educated at the prestigious Borgerdydskole (School of Civic Virtue), where he gained a reputation for a quick tongue and a sharp wit, and then at the University of Copenhagen, where he enrolled in 1830. His chosen subject was theology, but he also studied liberal arts and science, excelling in the latter, and spent in all ten years as a student, his father, until his death, footing the not inconsiderable bills.

Just one month after Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard died, Kierkegaard published his first book, From the Papers of One Still Living, though the title derives not from his father’s death but from that of his teacher and mentor, Paul Martin Møller (1794–1838). A little over two years later, on 10 September 1840, he became engaged to Regine and began work on his doctoral dissertation. He also underwent the necessary practical training for a career in the State Church and gave his first sermon. However, almost immediately after his successful defence of his dissertation (‘On the Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates’) on 29 September 1841, Kierkegaard broke off his engagement to Regine, and by November the break was final and he was on his way to Berlin on the first of four visits he would make to that city. These, apart from a day trip to Sweden, were the only journeys he made outside Denmark. Ostensibly for the purpose of attending Friedrich Schelling’s widely advertised lectures Kierkegaard also devoted much of his time on this first Berlin visit to writing a large part of what was to become Either/Or.

The reasons for his break with Regine are much disputed. The crux, however, seems to have been Kierkegaard’s sense of his inability to express or – to use a term from Either/Or – ‘reveal’ himself in terms of civic virtue, or ‘ethics’, in a sense that gives a central place to civic responsibility and the maintenance of traditional institutions such as marriage. Although the parts of Either/Or that he was writing in Berlin were a defence of marriage (‘Or’), the case for it was posed in opposition to a diversely represented ‘aesthetic’ view of life (‘Either’). The reader is thereby faced with a choice in which the real author’s preference, if any, can play no part, concealed as the author’s true identity is under a barrage of pseudonyms.

The two-volume Either/Or, also edited by a pseudonym, ‘Victor Eremita’, was published in February 1843, to be followed in October by two slimmer volumes, Repetition by ‘Constantin Constantius’ and Fear and Trembling by ‘Johannes de silentio’. The first of these hints at a religious view of life, which the latter then illustrates in a rather startling way with the story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac, his son, indicating that faith has nothing to do either with reason or with ‘ethics’ in the sense just mentioned. All three works deal with the problem of entering society in the way such an ethics prescribes, what the pseudonymous authors call ‘realizing the universal [or general]’. This same theme was to be pursued in the substantial Stages on Life’s Way edited by Hilarius Bogbinder, published in April 1845. But already in June 1844 there had appeared two pseudonymous books introducing new topics, Philosophical Fragments by Johannes Climacus and The Concept of Dread (or Anxiety) by Vigilius Haufniensis. The former sought, in subtle and spare language, to suggest an alternative way of grasping essential truth to that proposed by philosophy, a theme to be resumed and reworked in the much larger Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments, and published under the same pseudonym early in 1846. The Concept of Dread examined the psychological background to the experience of sin, at the same time implying a radical critique of contemporary theology.

The manuscript of Concluding Unscientific Postscript was delivered to the printer at the end of December 1845 and published on 27 February 1846. Ten days later, on 9 March, Kierkegaard wrote a lengthy ‘Report’. It includes the following remark:

We shall return to The Corsair, a radical and somewhat scurrilous weekly, in a moment. Kierkegaard adds:

The not so little review translated here, a signed work published three weeks later, seems to have been intended as the first of a revived genre in Kierkegaard’s authorship. Though in fact no further examples appeared (the only previous one was his first publication, From the Papers of One Still Living, ostensibly a review of Hans Christian Andersen’s Only a Fiddler (Kun en Spillemand)), the review format now appealed to him for a special reason not unconnected with his thoughts about abandoning a writer’s career:

Having his own thoughts look as though they emerged from the work of another author would relieve him of the inconvenience of inventing new pseudonyms for them. As the opening quotation above mentions, Kierkegaard had already declared (in an unpaginated final section of Postscript) that his was the pen behind the pseudonyms. Of course everyone in the closely knit world of Copenhagen letters knew this, but according to the manners of the time they would not say so publicly until the real author owned up.

The declaration added to Postscript was partly forced upon Kierkegaard by certain events involving The Corsair, events which caused him to delay delivering its final text until the very last moment.

Although the Corsair affair began under cover of pseudonymity, it quickly became personal. Under the pseudonym Frater Taciturnus (from Stages on Life’s Way), Kierkegaard had provoked the periodical to attack him (under that pseudonym) by disclosing the identity of one of its anonymous authors. The author in question, Peder Ludvig Møller (1814–65), a writer, poet and literary critic with academic ambitions, wished his connection with The Corsair to remain a secret for fear of spoiling his prospects for a professorship in aesthetics at the University. Earlier Møller had criticized the work of Frater Taciturnus. Knowing of the connection, Kierkegaard made it public in a newspaper article published on 27 December (‘An Itinerant Aesthetician’s Activity and How He Nevertheless Came to Pay for the Banquet’), in a breach of etiquette that was also a morally mischievous act.

In its 2 January issue The Corsair responded in kind. It attacked Kierkegaard, not as Frater Taciturnus but in person, with accompanying caricatures of his crabwise gait, stoop, thin legs and apparently uneven trouser legs, and cane or umbrella in hand. The Corsair’s coverage in the months that followed made Kierkegaard a household name and fair game for the mockery of the town’s youth. The streets in which he was already a well known figure became places of constant harassment.

Yet, as both the first and the last passages quoted above indicate, this is something Kierkegaard seemed actually to want, and after all it was he who provoked the response. Although he may not have expected such a direct reaction, it seems clear that it was in this way that he thought his enterprise could be ‘supported negatively’, as the first quotation has it. Some explanation of this strange idea will be found in the later pages of this translation with their talk of the ‘unrecognizables’ and of ‘suffering action’, pages which he was very likely penning while the Corsair affair was upon him.

Drafts for the Review had already been written shortly after the novel reviewed first appeared. The novel itself, Two Ages (To Tidsaldre), had been published in October 1845 and was the latest from the hand of Thomasine Gyllembourg, an energetic and talented writer who made her literary debut at the exceptionally late age of fifty-three.

Before the turn of the century Thomasine Christine Buntzen, daughter of a bourgeois Copenhagen family, had married the radical poet P. A. Heiberg, twenty years her senior. He was exiled in 1799 for political activities, and on forming her attachment to the man who became her second husband, Carl Frederick Ehrensvärd, Count Gyllembourg, a wealthy Swede who was also a political exile, Thomasine divorced Heiberg. Out of resentment Heiberg made his nine-year-old son, Johan Ludvig, a ward of court, though later relented. After her second husband died in 1815, Thomasine moved in with her son who was already establishing a name for himself as a writer. These two, later joined by the leading lady of the Danish stage, the half-German actress Johanne Luise Pätges, whom Johan Ludvig Heiberg married in 1831 when he was approaching forty, enriched Danish cultural life with a much sought-after salon whose welcome the young Søren at one time eagerly solicited. Madame Gyllembourg herself was able, with her own talent and the help of her entrepreneurially as well as artistically gifted son, to establish a reputation as both a significant writer and a pioneer of modern Danish prose fiction, writing under the signature ‘The author of A Story of Everyday Life’ (in exactly the same way that her contemporary, Walter Scott, signed his works, the so-called Waverley Novels, ‘The author of Waverley’).

Originally, A Story of Everyday Life was a feuilleton in the manner of Balzac, published serially in Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post (Copenhagen’s Flying Post, referred to usually just as Flyveposten), her son’s literary journal. At one time badly needing to fill space in that paper, Heiberg had asked his mother for help. She provided it, on 12 January 1827, in the form of a fictitious letter to the editor which caused a considerable stir not least among those curious to know who the writer was. She wrote more, the letters then taking on the form of instalments in a developing story later published, in 1834, in collection, as The Family Polonius.

Two Ages, which was to be Madame Gyllembourg’s last work, tells the story of a family whose fortunes span the immediate post-revolutionary age, the age of honour, loyalty and passion, and the advent of a rational and reflective modernity, the present age, an age of calculation and prudent choices. Given her own connections and Denmark’s place in Napoleonic politics – when her serviceable merchant fleet came under the eyes of both Britain and France, Denmark had sided with the latter – the author’s familiarity with both ages enabled her to portray them in miniature in the local setting of Copenhagen. The age of revolution is reflected in the youth and love story of Claudine, who falls for a young Frenchman, Charles Lusard, a member of the French legation newly installed in Copenhagen. Claudine’s loyalty to the memory of Lusard, who has left to join the army, is rewarded after many vicissitudes by a reunion when she discovers that he has been living in an inherited estate in Jutland in the firm belief that she, Claudine, was married and living in Germany. The focus of the story reflecting the later age, ‘the present age’, is the return to Copenhagen in 1844, after a long period abroad in both Europe and America, of their now fifty-year-old son, also called Charles. What he finds, as Kierkegaard puts it in his résumé in the Review, is a Copenhagen without legations or any other intimations of ‘world-historical denouments’ in the offing, but a life

This Lusard, living alone with his recollections, seeks a worthy heir, someone close whom he can make happy, and the story ends in a form of ‘repetition’ in which another faithful woman is eventually reunited with her lover.

Repetition, as his introduction shows, is a leitmotif for Kierkegaard’s own interest in the work. Preceded, typically, by a preface saying that his review is written only for those with the time and patience to read a little book – though even they needn’t bother, and those ‘whose critical and aesthetic education comes from reading newspapers’ are excused altogether – Kierkegaard’s Introduction reminds ‘the author of A Story of Everyday Life’ of an earlier reference to ‘his’ work (‘his’ in order to respect the formality and ignorance as to the author’s identity) in his own first publication, From the Papers of One Still Living. The Review is thus given the appearance of being the fulfilment of a promise Kierkegaard had earlier made to himself to return to this author at a later date. At the end of a lengthy appreciation, he hopes the author will find him

Incidentally, the anonymous author’s son, Johan Ludvig Heiberg, had found Kierkegaard’s manuscript of the earlier treatment of his mother’s work stylistically deficient and, whether for that reason or not, had not given it room in his journal. Moreover, Heiberg had made uncomprehending remarks about one of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous publications, precisely Repetition, not grasping that ‘repetition’ meant a kind of inner revision of the motivation with which one approaches the same life-situations. Not one quick to forget a personal injury, Kierkegaard was without doubt addressing Heiberg here as much as the latter’s mother, and putting him straight on the subject of repetition. Also, in praising Madame Gyllembourg (though never by name) for even-handedness in her treatment of the two ages, and allowing his résumé to conclude with Lusard’s ‘Amen’ to a declaration of faith in human progress, Kierkegaard is preparing the way for a far more pessimistic account of the present age, a view more in keeping with the gist of his pseudonymous works to which his own Postscript, the work he was still completing when Madame Gyllembourg’s book appeared, had just been added.

For reasons explained in the Review, neither of the reunions that end each part of the novel (or each age) is a ‘repetition’ in the proper sense introduced in his pseudonymous book of that name. Nor is the reunion that ends the second part properly a repetition of the one that ends the first. Instead of being the product of a resolute will to risk everything, it is formed in the light merely of recollection. The second Lusard, after his long travels now no longer young, having ‘let the time of love pass by, having turned off at the point where a person’s future really begins, has beautifully installed himself in remembrance and chosen the past, wanting only to secure a memory for himself in making one member of his family happy’ (p. 24).

What Kierkegaard especially prizes in the novel is the author’s ability to portray the ties of family life as a medium in which the larger currents of the life of the times are reflected. The author herself puts it very neatly in her Preface:

In the last recognizably reviewing part of A Literary Review, the section called ‘An Aesthetic Reading of the Novel and its Details’ giving portraits of the leading figures from each age, Kierkegaard points out that the author does not intend these to be mere personifications of the age. Rather they are persons whose fates bear the character of the age, and are largely determined by the broad outlooks distinguishing the two ages. Rather than in the psychology of the parties involved, these outlooks are reflected in the stories themselves, their settings and outcomes.

In the long final section entitled ‘The Results of Observing the Two Ages’, Kierkegaard offers an extended analysis of the present age, preceded by a much shorter account of the age of revolution. Towards the end there is an apocalyptic crescendo in which the reader is told that a movement is afoot, called ‘levelling’, which, driven by the abstract notion of ‘the public’, in turn the creation of the press, will end inexorably in a state of culture where individuals lose their identities and will, for the first time as single selves, confront the choice between nothing and God.

For the author of Postscript, a work commonly regarded as devastatingly critical of Hegel, the language of this final section may sound surprisingly Hegelian. There is talk of an Idea. For Hegel, the Speculative Idea was an ideal of unified understanding which can be seen to be working itself out in history. But this way of talking was prevalent at the time even among those who rejected Hegel and his ‘speculative’ idealism. As many did in his time, Kierkegaard uses ‘Idea’ to refer to the sort of goals that motivated the revolutionary age. Chief among these are freedom and equality. The reader of the Review will find in what Kierkegaard has to say about ‘levelling’ a radical revision of the ways in which equality was generally understood, namely in terms of what, for Kierkegaard, are merely external factors. Typically, Kierkegaard believes that ideals of any kind are centred in the individual and not in a developing cultural environment. Any Idea, then (but let us just say ‘idea’), should have the form of an ‘inner drive’ that ‘propels the individual on’. These expressions come towards the end of a passage concerning what it really means to act from principle. As usually understood, to act from principle means to apply some rule that one has inherited, learned, internalized or in some way subscribes to. But in what Kierkegaard takes to be its proper sense, a ‘principle’ is what ‘comes first’, and that for him is ‘the substantial, the idea in the unopened form of feeling and enthusiasm’ (p. 90).

A formless society, such as the one Kierkegaard in his résumé of Two Ages describes the later Lusard as finding on his return from his travels, is one in which the ‘passionate’ distinction between form and content has been ‘annulled’. Loss of form does not mean shapelessness or chaos or madness; it means loss of enthusiasm. For Kierkegaard form is a visible feature of the individual’s life due to the sincerity and focus that belong to enthusiastic activity on behalf of an ideal. The less the pursuit of ideals originates in individual enthusiasm, the less essential becomes the truth of the ideal thus fulfilled. In a common manner of speaking, we might say that acting ‘ideally’ in that way would be ‘merely’ a matter of form, a formalism, while in its proper sense form, for Kierkegaard, is a matter of the individual’s wholehearted engagements. Essential meaning and content, whatever might seem their ‘inadequate limitation’, must be due to a ‘self-deepening’ (p. 90).

There can be sheer enthusiasm; it is the idea in its substantial but, as Kierkegaard says here, unopened form. In the age of revolution the idea unfolded, but it did not open fully. It was only a kind of opening, a partial revelation as well as a revolution, but still only half-way – indeed, an expression of human immaturity. Kierkegaard refers here to the ‘reactionary immediacy’ (p. 57) reflected in the domestic life portrayed in Part One of Two AgesRaahedp. 55