Category: 01 – early polemical writings

Kierkegaard’s Early Polemical Writings

Well I have started out with a pretty healthy pace on the Kierkegaard reading finishing the first volume last night.  The volume is of course relatively short and much less demanding than what I will be tackling.  The volume is primarily a composition journalistic debate, an extended review of his school mate Hans Christian Andersen and then a fragmented play exploring various philosophical modes.

Most of the content was not particularly engaging, though the critical review of Andersen definitely had its moments.  Kierkegaard basically charges Andersen of an inability to allow his life to be invested in the process of writing but rather “he has utilized [writing] in a purely external manner.  If we now add to this the temptation to produce instead of developing himself, to hide an inner emptiness under motley pictures, to let himself be absorbed in generation without any reproduction . . . then it will certainly not surprise us that, instead of carrying through his reflection, he on the contrary encloses himself in a very small space of it” (74).

Kierkegaard goes on charge Andersen of lacking a ‘life-view’ which he defines as follows,

A life-view is more than a quintessence or a sum of propositions maintained in its abstract neutrality; it is more than experience, which as such is always fragmentary.  It is, namely, the transubstantiation of experience; it is an unshakable certainty in oneself won from all experience, whether this has oriented itself only in all worldly relationships (a purely human standpoint, Stoicism, for example), by which means it keeps itself from contact with a deeper experience – or whether in its heavenward direction (the religious) it has found therein the center as much for its heavenly as its earthly existence, has won the true Christian conviction “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, no principalities, nor powers, nor the present, nor the future, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creation will be able separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” . . . A life-view if really providence in the novel; it is its deeper unity, which make the novel have the center of gravity in itself.  A life-view frees it from being arbitrary or purposeless, since the purpose if immanently present everywhere in the work of art. (76, 81)

I just finished SK’s introduction to The Concept of Irony it looks to be both educational philosophically and engaging in terms of SK’s intellectual development.

Early Polemical Writings – The Opponent

The Kierkegaard Project has started off slow.  I feel like I am an amateur marathon runner tempted to sprint ahead but forcing myself to find a manageable pace.  I am reading the writings of a young Kierkegaard engaged in local journalistic debates that I do not have the inclination to learn more about at the moment.  One quote, however, seemed appropriate to throw up into the blogosphere.  The context could be characterized as a pre-blog comment thread;

When in a dispute the point is reached where the opponent says: I cannot understand you, although I have the best intentions – then that ends the dispute.  And although we shall willingly leave outside the whole dispute the question of whether or not his intentions are the best, because until the opposite can be proved we remain ever convinced of this, one must always respect such a move by the opponent.  But when instead he starts to attack the character of the person he is speaking to, accuses him of being a willful sophist etc., then it can at the most provoke a smile on the lips of the opponent, because the whole thing is nothing other than comic despair.

– Early Polemical Writings, 22.