The Original Age of AnxietyÖ Essays on Kierkegaard and His Contemporaries [370, 1 ed.] 9789004472044, 9789004472068

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The Original Age of Anxiety

Value Inquiry Book Series Founding Editor Robert Ginsberg Editor-​in-​Chief J.D. Mininger

volume 370

Studies in the History of Western Philosophy Series Editor Jon Stewart Slovak Academy of Sciences Assistant Editors Alina Feld Peter Mango

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/vibs and brill.com/shwp

The Original Age of Anxiety Essays on Kierkegaard and His Contemporaries By

Lasse Horne Kjældgaard

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Section of a painting by Wilhelm Bendz, Interior from Amaliegade with Captain Carl Ludvig Bendz, ca. 1829, 32.3 × 49 cm, oil on canvas. The Hirschsprung Collection. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kjældgaard, Lasse Horne, author. Title: The original age of anxiety : essays on Kierkegaard and his contemporaries / by Lasse Horne Kjældgaard. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2021] | Series: Value inquiry book series, 0929-8436 ; 370 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “The idea of this book is to revisit the “original” age of anxiety, the time and place, where Kierkegaard’s thoughts on the subject were formed and formulated, Copenhagen in the 1830s and ‘40s”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021038924 (print) | LCCN 2021038925 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004472044 (hardback : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9789004472068 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813-1855. Classification: LCC B4377 .K5238 2021 (print) | LCC B4377 (ebook) | DDC 198/.9–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021038924 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021038925

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill.” See and download: brill.com/​brill-​typeface. issn 0929-​8 436 isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​4 7204-​4 (hardback) isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​4 7206-​8 (e-​book) Copyright 2021 by Lasse Horne Kjældgaard. Published by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau Verlag and V&R Unipress. Koninklijke Brill nv reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-​use and/​or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill nv via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-​free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents  Acknowledgements vii  Abbreviations viii Introduction 1  The Dizziness of Freedom 1 1  There Is Nothing to Be Afraid Of 1 2  The Ascendance of Anxiety 4 3  The Golden Age 9 4  Departures 13 5  The Annihilation of Eternity 16 The Political Turn of the Public Sphere 23 2  1  Young Denmark? 26 2  The Critique of Aestheticization 29 3  The State of Art 31 4  Politics versus Aesthetics 33 5  The Politicization of the Press 35 6  The Directions and Distractions of the Age 37 7  The Resurgence of Poetry 40 8  A New Waker 42 9  An Artist among Rebels? 44 The Poetics of Paralysis 3  The Pregnant Moment of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling 46 1  The Limits of Painting and Poetry 48 2  The Pregnant Moment of Medea 49 3  Romeo and Juliet and the End of Narrative Desire 52 4  Going Further or Remaining Standing 56 5  Abraham’s Tableau and the State of Indecision 58 6  Ethics and the Question of What Could Have Happened 62 7  Fear and Pity and Trembling 64 Paratextualism in Kierkegaard’s Prefaces and Contemporary Literary 4  Culture 68 1  Hegelian Reflections 69 2  Promises and Performances 76 3  Paratextualism 78 4  Simulated Motions 84

vi Contents 5  The Immortality of the Soul and the Death (and Resurrection) of Art in Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript 88 1  The Immortality of the Soul and the Death of Art 91 2  Art as an Anticipation of the Afterlife 95 3  The Most Pathos-​Filled Issue of All 99 The Emancipation of Images 6  The Optical Unconscious of Andersen’s “The Shadow” 111 1  The Scholar and the Shadow 114 2  Perversions 116 3  The Semiotics of the Shadow 119 4  Phantasmagoria 120 5  The Emancipation of Images 123 6  The Semantics of Image and Self 126 Epilogue 7  The Modernity of the Late Golden Age 129  Bibliography 131  Index 144

Acknowledgements The group of essays brought together in this volume reflects some years of thinking and writing about the modernity of the late Golden Age of Danish literature. They revolve, in particular, around the works of Søren Kierkegaard, but with a sustained attention to the intricate intertextual labyrinth in which these works emerged, and to which they were addressed in the first place. Hans Christian Andersen, Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Poul Martin Møller and many others are important figures in this network, and certainly also in their own right. They play a key role in the tentative characterization of the age that I propose here, as the original age of anxiety. Earlier versions of the essays have appeared in Jon Stewart (ed.): The Heibergs and the Theater: Between Vaudeville, Romantic Comedy and National Drama, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2012, pp. 45–​66 (­chapter 2); Journal of the History of Ideas (vol. 63, nr. 2), Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002, pp. 303–​321 (­chapter 3); Robert L. Perkins (ed.): Prefaces and Writing Sampler and Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2006 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol 9 & 10), pp. 7–​28 (­chapter 4); Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Hermann Deuser (eds.): Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2005. Berlin/​New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2005, pp. 90–​112 (­chapter 5), and Klaus Müller-​Wille (ed.): Hans Christian Andersen und die Heterogenität der Moderne, Beiträge zur Nordischen Philologie. Tübingen: Francke Verlag, 2009, pp. 33–​51 (­chapter 6). For their numerous suggestions and valuable critical comments on the manuscript, I am deeply indebted to Mads Sohl Jessen and Jon Stewart.

Abbreviations c a

The Concept of Anxiety, trans. by Reidar Thomte in collaboration with Albert B. Anderson, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. kw, vol. 8. c up1 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vols. 1–​2, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992, vol. 1. kw, vol. 12.1. e o1 Either/​Or 1, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. kw, vol. 3. e o2 Either/​Or 2, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. kw, vol. 4. e pw Early Polemical Writings: From the Papers of One Still Living, Articles from Student Days, The Battle between the Old and the New Soap-​Cellars, trans. by Julia Watkin, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. kw, vol. 1. f t Fear and Trembling, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. kw, vol. 6. j p Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vols. 1–​6, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1967–​78. Cited by volume number and entry number. Index and Composite Collation, vol. 7, by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1978. k jn Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, vols. 1–​11, ed. by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce H. Kirmmse, George Pattison, Vanessa Rumble and K. Brian Söderquist, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007–​2020. l d Kierkegaard: Letters and Documents, trans. by Henrik Rosenmeier, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. kw, vol. 25. P Prefaces, trans. by Todd W. Nichol, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. kw, vol. 9. p f Philosophical Fragments, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. kw, vol. 7. p v The Point of View, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. kw, vol. 22. R Repetition, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. kw, vol. 6. s ks Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, vols. 1–​28, K1-​K28, ed. by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Jette Knudsen, Johnny Kondrup and Alastair McKinnon, Copenhagen: Gad Publishers, 1997–​2012. s lw Stages on Life’s Way, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. kw, vol. 11.

­c hapter 1

Introduction

The Dizziness of Freedom

1

There Is Nothing to Be Afraid Of

The concept of anxiety remains closely associated with the name of Søren Kierkegaard, due to the book he published with that title in 1844, under the pseudonym of Vigilius Haufniensis: The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin. The legacy and cultural impact of the thoughts upon the concept and the phenomenon of anxiety put forth in this work would be difficult to overstate. By interpreting anxiety as something that was at the same time individual and universal, diffuse and profound, Kierkegaard paved the way for its later ascendance in the fields of philosophy, psychology, theology, and, subsequently, in popular culture. The idea of the present book is to revisit the “original” age of anxiety, the time and place, where Kierkegaard’s thoughts on the subject were formed and formulated, Copenhagen in the 1830s and ’40s. The pseudonym used in The Concept of Anxiety, Vigilius Haufniensis, is Latin for “the watchman of Copenhagen.” A question that will constantly guide the essayistic explorations in this book is what the vigilant Haufniensis might have observed in his city—​and especially in the literature and literary culture of his time and day. Why was anxiety such a major issue and concern for Kierkegaard and his contemporaries? Anxiety was not a term Kierkegaard coined, but he added to it distinctions and a depth that cannot be found in earlier philosophical considerations.1 The word he expounded upon was the Danish—​and German—​“Angst,” derived from “angi” and related to the Latin word “angustus,” meaning “narrow” or “contracted.” Earlier, “Angst” had been used—​ for instance by Immanuel 1 A succinct and valuable introduction to Søren Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety can be found in Arne Grøn’s The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2008. See also William McDonald, “Anxiety,” in Stewart, Jon, Steven M. Emmanuel and William McDonald (eds.), Kierkegaard’s Concepts, Tome I, Absolute to Church, Aldershot: Ashgate 2013 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 15), pp. 59–​64.

© Lasse Horne Kjældgaard, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004472068_002

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Kant—​to denote a more intense sensation of fear, but Kierkegaard, famously, introduced a qualitative distinction between fear (Frygt) and anxiety (Angst), regarding them as two different phenomena.2 “I must point out that [anxiety] is altogether different from fear and similar concepts that refer to something definite, whereas anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility,” Haufniensis contended.3 Anxiety, he stipulated, was not an extreme degree of fear, but rather an overpowering experience of freedom in the second degree or in an optional or future state, offering fundamental insight into the human condition. It was important to Haufniensis, in The Concept of Anxiety, to stress the universal aspects of anxiety by going back to the biblical narrative on the Fall of Man, which he explicates with erudition. Much of the work reads like a scholarly treatise in the field of dogmatic theology. In a journal entry from 1842, Kierkegaard explains how anxiety is the component needed for understanding hereditary sin in a way that does not sacrifice the freedom of the individual: Now people have often enough treated the nature of hereditary sin, and yet they have lacked a principal category, namely anxiety; this is its essential determinant. Anxiety is in fact a desire for what one fears, a sympathetic antipathy; anxiety is an alien power that seizes the individual, and yet one cannot tear oneself free of it and one does not want to, for one fears, but what one fears is what one desires. Anxiety now renders the individual powerless, and the first sin always takes place in powerlessness; therefore it apparently lacks accountability, but this lack is the actual snare.4 This fundamental ambivalence of anxiety—​“what one fears is what one desires”—​is elaborated upon in The Concept of Anxiety. It is, furthermore, transformed into a number of hypnotizing comparisons that capture the drama between resolve and resistance played out by anxiety—​as, for instance, in the parallel Haufniensis draws between anxiety and vertigo: 2 “Anxiety, anguish, horror, and terror are degrees of fear, that is, degrees of aversion to danger,” Kant writes in § 77 of his 1798 Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, ed. by Robert Louden, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 154. However, Kant also, to some extent, anticipated a part of Kierkegaard’s conception of anxiety by observing that “Anxiety can fasten on to someone without his knowing a particular object for it: an uneasiness arising from merely subjective causes (from a diseased state)” (p. 153). The pathologizing perspective is, however, noticeably absent from Kierkegaard’s discourse on anxiety. 3 sks 4, 349 /​ca, 55-​56. 4 sks 18, 311 /​kjn 2, 286.

Introduction

3

Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself.5 By way of such a well-​known experience like vertigo, Haufniensis fights staunchly to salvage the Christian concept of man, which—​as we shall later see—​was under attack from several sides, while also cultivating his conception of anxiety into an original contribution to the theological interpretation of hereditary sin in the tradition of St. Augustine and Luther.6 Søren Kierkegaard’s discrimination between fear and anxiety has been important ever since to the understanding of the phenomenon. In particular, Kierkegaard accentuated nothingness in the understanding of anxiety. While fear is elicited by a specific object considered bad or harmful, anxiety does not have an external cause in the ordinary sense, according to Haufniensis: “If we ask more particularly what the object of anxiety is, then the answer, here as elsewhere, must be that it is nothing. Anxiety and nothing always correspond to each other.”7 Dealing with this nothingness was, moreover, an inescapable human quest, which Haufniensis makes clear by way of a zoological contrast: “anxiety is not found in the beast, precisely because by nature the beast is not qualified as spirit,” he added.8 According to Haufniensis’ religious-​ philosophical anthropology, man is a composite creature rooted both in eternity and temporality: “If a human being were a beast or an angel, he would not be in anxiety. Because he is a synthesis, he can be in anxiety; and the more profoundly he is in anxiety, the greater is the man—​yet not in the sense usually understood, in which anxiety is about something external, about something outside a person, but in the sense that he himself produces the anxiety.”9 Considered as an essential feature of being human, anxiety is presented by Haufniensis as both a privilege and a problem. 5 sks 4, 365 /​ca, 73. 6 See Niels Jørgen Cappelørn: “The Interpretation of Hereditary Sin in The Concept of Anxiety by Kierkegaard‘s Pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis,” Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie, 2010, vol. 72, no. 1, pp. 131–​146. For a study of the “ethics of dizziness” proposed by Kierkegaard, see Pia Søltoft, Svimmelhedens Etik. Om forholdet mellem den enkelte og den anden hos Buber, Lévinas og især Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: Gads Forlag 2000. 7 sks 4, 399 /​ca, 102. 8 sks 4, 348 /​ca, 39. 9 sks 4, 454 /​ca, 161.

4

Chapter 1

This is the relatively timeless dimension of Haufniensis’ appraisal of anxiety. But he also anchors his analysis in observations of a more historical nature and makes a number of pertinent comments on the increase of anxiety that he had observed among his contemporaries. Rather reluctantly, Haufniensis asserts: “It is not my desire to use big words in speaking about the age as a whole, but he who has observed the present generation can hardly deny that the discrepancy in it and the reasons for its anxiety and unrest is this, that in one direction truth increases in scope and in quantity, and partly also in abstract clarity, while in the opposite direction certainty constantly declines.”10 The verdict Haufniensis presents is based on two opposite tendencies: an increase in the quantity and precision of knowledge and a coinciding decline in certainty—​in the quality of the knowledge one possesses. “Strangely enough,” Haufniensis duly notes.11 Therefore, it was not more abstract—​philosophical, scientific or “objective”—​knowledge people were craving for, but rather knowledge one could believe in. These specifically historical dimensions of anxiety will be the prime focus of this book. My point of departure is a basic observation: that anxiety loomed large in Danish literature during these decades and that it was coupled with a series of emancipatory processes unfolding at the time. Freedom came in many forms and instilled a sizeable repertoire of strong emotions of various kinds. The mixing of fear with desire, registered in Kierkegaard’s account of anxiety, can be discovered in many corners of contemporary culture and literature. 2

The Ascendance of Anxiety

“In Western intellectual history, the concept of anxiety seems to have acquired a certain epistemological cachet, having given rise to an all-​purpose term stretching across knowledge formations and disciplinary boundaries,” Sianne Ngai has noted.12 Anxiety has developed into a much sought-​after and precious critical concept as well as a widely known psychological disorder. This ascendance of anxiety was one that began in the age of Kierkegaard, but certainly not due to his effort alone. “Anxiety only stood out and began to be widely defined and treated as a disorder during the nineteenth century, once people could expect a basic level of safety and certainty in their lives,” the sociologist

10 sks 4, 439 /​ca, 139. 11 Ibid. 12 Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005, p. 213.

Introduction

5

Allan V. Horwitz has argued.13 Anxiety was, indeed, a phenomenon on the rise in Kierkegaard’s lifetime, owing to obvious material circumstances, such as the improving living conditions, at least among the upper classes to which Kierkegaard himself belonged. It was a dialectical companion to the more and more protected and predictable lives afforded to a rising number of people. Accordingly, anxiety was gradually conceived of as a diagnostic category, a pathology, which various professionals sought to remedy with medical and therapeutic means. This medical notion of anxiety, however, differed fundamentally from Kierkegaard’s conception of anxiety. He saw it as an existential-​ religious condition rather than a medical or psychological disorder. Anxiety was a patent of nobility to Haufniensis, a symptom of spirit rather than a disease. So, while addressing a phenomenon growing fashionable—​a kind of psychological pandemic on the rise—​Kierkegaard’s thoughts on the subject were also rather untimely. “With the nineteenth century demanding a view of anxiety that was disease oriented, Kierkegaard’s thought languished for a hundred years, until it became a major influence on existential philosophers and theologians in the mid-​twentieth century,” Horwitz comments.14 Only much later did Kierkegaard’s ideas about anxiety enter mainstream culture and become an urgent concern. Research into the history of Kierkegaard’s reception confirms Howitz’s observation about the discontinuity of Kierkegaard’s writings about anxiety and its philosophical and cultural impact. There is a clear pattern in the attention generated by Kierkegaard’s philosophy, which has boomed twice in the twentieth century: right after the First and Second World War. Usually, this is explained with reference to the disillusion, lack of orientation and fear of the future in the wake of war.15 In these situations, Kierkegaard’s thoughts have been embraced for their ability to capture the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, at moments of crisis. That was, for instance, what appealed to the young Martin Heidegger, who read a partial German translation of Kierkegaard’s Two Ages in the Catholic avant-​garde literary journal Der Brenner from 1914. Subsequently, Heidegger committed himself to “the Kierkegaardian task of offering a genuine “critique

13 14 15

Allan W. Horwitz, Anxiety: A Short History, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013, p. 13. Ibid., pp. 63–​64. See, for instance, Steen Tullberg, “Denmark: The Permanent Reception—​150 Years of Reading Kierkegaard,” in: Stewart, Jon (ed.), Kierkegaard’s International Reception, Tome I, Northern and Western Europe, Aldershot: Ashgate 2009 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 8), pp. 3–​120.

6

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of the present age” which would address the prevailing crisis in German thinking,” Charles Bambach has explained.16 This is just one example of Kierkegaard’s role in the twentieth-​century as a crisis-​thinker with the conceptual power to grasp what it means to live in a time of turmoil, “between the times,” to use Heidegger’s phrase.17 For this purpose, Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety, in particular, has seemed eminently suited, catching the mood at critical moments of the twentieth century, particularly in the wake of the two World Wars. This holds true not only for the German, but also for the American reception of Søren Kierkegaard in the later 20th Century. In Existential America, George Cotkin has told the story of Søren Kierkegaard’s introduction to an American audience. Kierkegaard’s works were translated and introduced by the Episcopal clergyman Walter Lowrie, who published a two-​volume biography on Kierkegaard in 1938, and his chief collaborator, the philosopher David Swenson. Their enterprise initiated the far-​reaching popularization and influence of Kierkegaard’s thoughts in the US, with great implications for wartime and post-​war intellectual, political and cultural life. “For many thinkers in the period from the publication of Lowrie’s Kierkegaard biography in 1938 to the mid-​1950’s,” Cotkin explains, “dread and anxiety, especially as formulated by Kierkegaard, came to function as powerful metaphors for their age and for human experience … Indeed, as the poet W.H. Auden understood, these years composed an age of anxiety.”18 The Auden text alluded to by Cotkin is the long poem The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue from 1947. Auden had relocated from England to the US in 1939, and he would later, in 1952, edit an anthology of Kierkegaard’s writings, The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard.19 Kierkegaard’s presence in the long poem is already palpable. It begins by gathering four random customers at a Manhattan bar on All Souls Day, speaking in beautiful verse about bleak life during wartime “where everybody is reduced to the anxious status of a shady

16 17

18 19

Charles R. Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism, Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1995, p. 202. Later, Heidegger became, in the words of Theodore Kisiel, “wary of the modishness of “Kierkegaardianism” in the early 1920s and prone to underscore Kierkegaard’s significance to his own philosophical development” (Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, p. 275). George Cotkin, Existential America, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005, p. 53. On Auden and Kierkegaard, see Leonardo F. Lisi, “W.H. Auden: Art and Christianity in an Age of Anxiety,” in Stewart, Jon (ed.), Kierkegaard’s Influence on Literature, Criticism and Art, Tome IV, The Anglophone World, Aldershot: Ashgate 2013 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 12), pp. 1–​25.

Introduction

7

character or a displaced person,” as the prologue announces.20 The tavern becomes a site of retreat, a kind of heterotopia, where the provisional party probes the fertile ground for anxiety in the world surrounding them, confirmed by the somber radio messages that occasionally interrupt their verse. The effect was powerful: “The poem quickly captured the imagination of its cultural moment, and not just because its title provided a terse and widely applicable diagnostic phrase,” Alan Jacobs has stated.21 Around the middle of the twentieth century, anxiety had, indeed, become one of the “big words” frequently used “in speaking about the age as a whole.” In poetry, music and politics, anxiety increasingly came to be seen as an emotive sign of the times. Auden’s poem promptly inspired Leonard Bernstein to compose a symphony (no. 2), The Age of Anxiety, which was performed for the first time in 1949. In the same year, the Harvard historian and prominent Democratic activist Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., published an influential political book, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom, which opened with a chapter sizing up the situation, “Politics in an Age of Anxiety.” Some of the greatest political and cultural ailments of the twentieth century were suddenly explained with recourse to reactions sparked by anxiety. Another prime example of this is Erich Fromm’s classic work, The Escape from Freedom, published in 1941. It offers a sweeping interpretation of the psychological pitfalls of freedom to the modern individual, who becomes anxious by the multitude of choices and decisions facing her or him. One of the “visionary thinkers in the nineteenth century,” who had foreseen this state of affairs, invoked by Fromm, is Kierkegaard.22 In Fromm’s own words, “Escape from Freedom is an analysis of the phenomenon of man’s anxiety engendered by the breakdown of the Medieval World in which, in spite of many dangers, he felt himself secure and safe.” Despite the great social and political advances that had been made since the Middle Ages, “modern man still is anxious and tempted to surrender his freedom to dictators of all kinds, or to lose it by transforming himself into a small cog in the machine, well fed, and well clothed, yet not a free man but an automaton.”23 This was the ultimate—​and 20 21 22

23

W.H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue, ed. by Alan Jacobs. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011 (W.H. Auden: Critical Editions), p. 3. Ibid., p. xli. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom, New York: Henry Holt, 1994, p. 132. On Kierkegaard’s influence on Fromm, see John Lippitt, “Erich Fromm: The Integrity of the Self and the Practice of Love,” in Stewart, Jon (ed.), Kierkegaard’s Influence on the Social Sciences, Aldershot: Ashgate 2011 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 13), pp. 95–​120. Ibid., pp. xiii-​xiv.

8

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rather unpalatable—​choice people were facing in modern times. Such was the wretched state of the modern individual, who was overwhelmed by feelings of anxiety and insignificance and stuck between totalitarianism and conformism. This cultural diagnosis of Fromm’s, revolving around freedom and anxiety, enjoyed great popularity in the first decades after World War ii and affirms the diagnostic power of Kierkegaard’s analysis of anxiety in the twentieth century. So does the publication, in 1950, of the best-​selling book The Meaning of Anxiety by the existential psychologist Rollo May.24 With a rather sweeping statement May commenced the book by announcing: “The evidence is overwhelming … that men and women of today live in an “age of anxiety.” If one penetrates below the surface of political, economic, business, professional, or domestic crises to discover their psychological causes, or if one seeks to understand modern art or poetry or philosophy or religion, one runs athwart the problem of anxiety at almost every turn.”25 Suddenly, anxiety seemed to be everywhere, as a kind of catch-​all diagnosis of cold-​war culture and a key to understanding a plethora of phenomena. An overheard dialogue between two men in William March’s blockbusting novel The Bad Seed (1954) further corroborates this: “I was reading the other day … that the age we live in is an age of anxiety. You know what? I thought that was pretty good—​a pretty fair judgment,” says the one to the other. This casual use of the favored buzzword of the age prompts the answer: “Every age that people live in is an age of anxiety.”26 And perhaps it is so. It is certainly conceivable that anxiety is an incurable malady of the modern condition rather than an emotion apt for characterizing any specific age. But maybe not anymore. The case can be made that the post-​ war age of anxiety has drawn to a close. In After 1945: Latency as the Origin of the Present (2013), Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has described the chronotope in which he himself grew up as one where the future was “experienced as an open horizon of possibilities from which one can choose.” This differs fundamentally from the present climate in which the future is experienced “as a multiplicity of approaching threats. Instead of a series of choices to make, my grandchildren’s lives will be a sequence of challenges to survive,” he conjectures.27

24

25 26 27

Kierkegaard’s significance to May has been studied by Poul Houe in “Rollo May: Existential Psychology,” in Stewart, Jon (ed.), Kierkegaard’s Influence on the Social Sciences, Aldershot: Ashgate 2011 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 13), pp. 217–​38. Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety, New York: Ronald Press, 1950, p. v. William March, The Bad Seed, Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1997, p. 30. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht: After 1945: Latency as the Origin of the Present, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013, p. 199.

Introduction

9

Such an historical and existential situation is likely to evoke other moods than anxiety—​sorrow or apathy or depression, for instance.28 The viability of the term as an epochal metaphor is, though, a strong reason for going back to the sources from which Søren Kierkegaard drew the basic notions of the age he was living in—​and to the turmoil and crises of that age itself, the last two decades of the so-​called Golden Age of Danish culture and literature. 3

The Golden Age

As a concept of Danish literary history, “the golden age” was launched towards the end of the nineteenth century by the renowned professors of literature Valdemar Vedel and Vilhelm Andersen.29 They used it as a backward-​looking and rather fuzzy term designating the time between the arrival of romanticism in 1803 and the abolishment of absolute monarchy and the establishment of a representative democracy in 1849. The term itself comes from the Latin aetos aurea, derived from Greek mythology and particularly from Hesiod, who had portrayed, in Works and Days (ca. 700 bc), a golden race of humanity living in the earliest time in the history of civilization, preceding the Silver, Copper and Iron Ages. So, from the earliest beginning, there was a retrospective logic built into the metallurgic metaphor of the term, combined with the kind of feeling which, more recently, has been dubbed nostalgia, that is, idealization of, or longing for, a bygone era. “Nostalgia (from nostos—​return home, and algia—​ longing) is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed)”, Svetlana Boym writes.30 In the case of the conception of the Danish golden age, I will argue that the object of longing is by and large an illusion. It is true that the label seems justified on the basis of the excellence and intensity of the literary and intellectual life of these decades. It is indisputable that particularly the 1830s and 40s were an exceptionally dynamic and fruitful period in Danish literature and culture, booming with long canonized authors such as Thomasine Gyllembourg, Adam Oehlenschläger, N.F.S. Grundtvig, 28 29

30

In his forthcoming book, Prophetic Noir: Søren Kierkegaard and Catastrophe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, Isak Winkel Holm considers the pertinence of Kierkegaard’s thinking in the present situation. Valdemar Vedel: Studier over Guldalderen i dansk Digtning, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1890. Vilhelm Andersen: Guldhornene. Et Bidrag til den danske Romantiks Historie. Copenhagen: Nordisk Forlag, 1896. See also Johan Fjord Jensen: Efter guldalderkonstruktionens sammenbrud, vols. 1–​3, Århus: Klim, 1981s. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, New York: Basic Books, 2001, p. xiii.

10 

Chapter 1

Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Frederik Paludan-​Müller, Hans Christian Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard. They lived and wrote at the same time in Copenhagen together with a significant number of outstanding scientists and artists, such as Hans Christian Ørsted, Rasmus Rask, Bertel Thorvaldsen, August Bournonville and C.W. Eckersberg. In their own time, Andersen, Ørsted, and Thorvaldsen achieved international recognition, and several have followed suit, including Kierkegaard. From this perspective, the rationale for using the term “golden age” is easily understandable. But so is the most severe problem with the concept, namely that it is almost completely out of sync with the experience of living and writing in these decades and with the great historical events that shaped them. There is a substantial discrepancy between the retrospective characterizations of the age and the conceptions of it articulated during these years. Many Golden Age writers and intellectuals experienced their present not as a golden age, but as a time of crisis. That goes for St. St. Blicher, N.F.S. Grundtvig, Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Hans Christian Andersen, Frederik Paludan-​Müller, Hans Lassen Martensen, Poul Martin Møller and Søren Kierkegaard, and several others. The publication in 1846 of Kierkegaard’s The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, using the word in definite form, testifies to a general recognition of the expression and its delineation of the age as a critical moment. Going back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, the term “golden age” would have been a most peculiar representation. “Disastrous” would, in fact, be a better epithet, lending a more adequate description to the age—​especially, if compared to the age that preceded it. Times had been good in Denmark in the late eighteenth century. The country had prospered from a number of successful agricultural reform acts and from a large and far-​reaching merchant fleet, which made huge profits out of trade with Danish colonies in West Africa and the West Indies. On an appalling colonial background, this era was, indeed, an economical golden age, euphemistically labelled as the palmy days of Danish overseas trade. These were the years in which Søren Kierkegaard’s father, as a prosperous merchant, established the fortune, out of which his son was later to live as an author of independent means, being able to write and publish his gigantic work without any obligations or restraints. In this respect, as in almost any other, he was the complete opposite of Hans Christian Andersen. Andersen was born in 1805 as the son of a shoemaker and an illiterate washerwoman in the town of Odense. He grew up among the lowest classes of a rather rural, pre-​industrial society. As nobody was able to sponsor his education beyond elementary school, he seemed destined to a life much like his parents. Andersen arrived in Copenhagen in 1819, as a fourteen-​year-​old boy with a desperate wish to get

Introduction

11

away and, much more daringly, with an ambition for an artistic career of some kind. The fact that he achieved this goal has later assumed a symbolic national value that goes far beyond the narrative of his individual biography, which he continually rewrote in order to make sense of his unfathomable social ascent. The historical background for his rise was dismal, though. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, conjunctures had changed drastically and significantly in Denmark. The country had attempted to maintain neutrality during the Napoleonic wars, lasting from 1793 to 1815. Danes had traded happily with all parties involved. This was a thorn in England’s side, especially as Danish activities were not always as neutral as professed by the Danish Government. When Denmark joined the League of Armed Neutrality in December 1800, England responded with a declaration of war. Under the command of Lord Nelson, the British fleet came in April the year after and conquered the Danish Navy, forcing Denmark to rescind its membership of the league. Peace was consequently restored between Denmark and England, but only for a while. Fearing Danish compliance with Napoleon, Britain dispatched its fleet to Copenhagen six years later, bombarded the city for four days in September 1807 and took captive the entire Danish fleet. In modern European military history, the event stands out as the first terror bombardment targeted primarily against a civilian population. Its traumatizing effects on the inhabitants of Copenhagen are not to be underestimated. Immediately after, Denmark teamed up with Napoleon and joined the continental system. As the war fell out to the advantage of England, Denmark experienced great losses, especially due to heavily diminished trade opportunities. In 1813, the year of Kierkegaard’s birth, the Danish state was declared bankrupt. When a peace treaty was signed the year after in Kiel, Denmark had to surrender Norway to Sweden. “Denmark is a small and poor country,” that is the recurring line in Poul Martin Møller’s national hymn “Glæde over Danmark” /​“Joy over Denmark,” written in 1819, while the author was abroad.31 As seen from this perspective, the Golden Age began with devastation and despair. It began in an amputated empire, in a national state of bankruptcy, poverty, stagnation, with military powers reduced to a bare minimum. The Golden Age unfolded in a capital that was suffering heavily from the damages of the bombardment, and in which commercial life was steadily decaying. Recovering was a process lasting for decades. In fact, Golden Age Copenhagen was the most overpopulated city in Europe, leaving only two square meters of

31 Poul Martin Møller, “Glæde over Danmark,” Tilskuerne. Et Ugeskrift, no. 47, 1823, pp. 374–​376.

12 

Chapter 1

housing area to each inhabitant. Average life expectancy in the 1830s was as low as 35 years for men and 39 years for women. Out of these dire circumstances grew, rather surprisingly, a generation of such eminence that it remains unparalleled in Danish literary and intellectual history, celebrated by the concept of the “golden age.” They themselves did not, however, conceive of their times as a “golden age.” On the contrary, many of them perceived of the present as a time of chaos and decay, with things going particularly downhill for art and literature, which were dying, if not already dead. Subscribing to a romantic philosophy of history, they saw “the golden age” as an era of the past, as something lost that had to be regained: “the radiant Top, /​From where we are sunk and must rise again,” as announced by one of the characters of Adam Oehlenschläger’s closet drama “Sanct Hansaften-​ Spil,” concluding his landmark collection Poems 1803.32 Reaching this top turned out to be an arduous and sluggish process. Anxious and alarmist speculations on the state and fate of art were also circulating in the 1830s and 40s. “But the time of the Knights, alas! it was poetic; /​Our Time is in the highest aesthetic,” Frederik Paludan-​Müller wrote in the second stanza of the prologue to his highly lauded epic poem Adam Homo from 1842,33 elegantly contrasting the aesthetically (and philosophically) reflected present with an earlier poetic knightly era. Denigrating the literature of the day, as being either over-​ intellectualized or not theoretically sophisticated enough, was a ritual among both authors and critics. The prominent Hegelian theologian Hans Lassen Martensen reported, in 1838, that “it is a complaint frequently heard that today’s poetry is in a state of deep decay, that a false and pernicious direction in art has supplanted the good, and that even the better part of today’s poetic productions are only poor and insignificant in comparison with the good and magnificent works of a period not far away.”34 Such complaints and concerns have been efficiently drowned out and betrayed by the later characterization of the period as a “golden age.” Remarkably, the term “golden age” also appeared in the golden age, with low frequency and with a different content. In a review from 1843, Johan Ludvig Heiberg—​a dramatist and critic, who was Kierkegaard’s great example in his younger years and even greater adversary in the years when he undertook his astounding pseudonymous enterprise—​wrote: “We no longer live in the Golden Age, but, as is well known, in the Iron Age, and, more specifically, in 32 33 34

Adam Oehlenschläger, Digte, ed. Johan de Mylius, Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog-​og Litteraturselskab, 2019, p. 225. Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own. Frederik Paludan-​Müller, Adam Homo, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel, 1842, p. 9. Hans Lassen Martensen, “Fata Morgana, Eventyr-​Comedie af Johan Ludvig Heiberg,” review in Maanedsskrift for Litteratur, no. 19, 1838, p. 361.

Introduction

13

the Railway Age.”35 This is another epochal self-​characterization defying the retroactive branding of the age. The event Heiberg hinted at was the opening of Denmark’s first railway line the following year, the Altona-​Kiel line, and the quoted passage is from his review of the two-​volume work Either/​Or, published by the pseudonym Victor Eremita, another of Søren Kierkegaard’s literary masks. Heiberg’s ironic and rather condescending response to the work was embedded in a mocking depiction of the age highlighting its modernity in the shape of railroads and mass transportation, providing an apparently odd context for Kierkegaard’s magnum opus. In these times of change, the golden age seemed long gone, while anxiety about the future was rising. A shared feature of many writers in the period is that they perceived their age as an intermediate time, a kind of transitional phase between two epochs, nourishing hopes but mostly fears. Few Danish authors and artists joined in on the desires for political reform leading up to the June Constitution of 1849. For this reason, the “age of anxiety” may perhaps be better suited for understanding what it meant to live and write “between the times” than the dilapidated name of the “golden age.”36 4

Departures

Anxiety was a topic that had gestated for a long time in Kierkegaard’s writings before The Concept of Anxiety, and it recurred many times after, but it was 35

36

Johan Ludvig Heiberg, “Litterær Vintersæd,” Intelligensblade, no. 24, 1843, p. 289. An English translation of Heiberg’s review of Either/​Or will soon be published, see Jon Stewart, “Johan Ludvig Heiberg’s ‘Literary Winter Crops’ and Kierkegaard’s Polemic,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2020, pp. 325–337. Following a number of recent studies, particularly by Jon Stewart and Bertel Nygaard, I wish to explore the crises of the golden age, so prevalent in the texts and the epochal self-​understanding of the day, and yet conspicuously softened or subdued in the literary historiography of the period. See Nathaniel Kramer and Jon Stewart (eds.), The Crisis of the Danish Golden Age and Its Modern Resonance, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2020 (Danish Golden Age Studies, vol. 12); Jon Stewart, The Cultural Crisis of the Danish Golden Age: Heiberg, Martensen and Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2015 (Danish Golden Age Studies, vol. 9); Jon Stewart, Søren Kierkegaard: Subjectivity, Irony and the Crisis of Modernity, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015; Bertel Nygaard, Guldalderens moderne politik. Om krisediagnose, utopi og handling hos Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2011, and Lasse Horne Kjældgaard, Sjælen efter døden. Guldalderens moderne gennembrud, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 2007. See also Hans Vammen’s Den tomme stat: Angst og ansvar i dansk politik 1848–​1864, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2011, for an excellent analysis of the anxiety haunting the first Danish generation of politicians to be responsible for leading the country on democratic terms.

14 

Chapter 1

also a topic which was meditated upon in many other contemporary texts and cultural expressions than his. This book will attempt to show that although Kierkegaard’s contribution to the understanding of anxiety is unmistakably original, his strong interest in the subject was by no means idiosyncratic or inexplicable. Anxiety arises as “freedom looks down into its own possibility,” as Kierkegaard puts it in The Concept of Anxiety, thus linking anxiety to emancipation in a way that enables a better understanding of the virtual nature of many of the emancipatory processes and the acts of prospecting that numerous texts of the Danish golden age engage with.37 In many cases, it was the prospects of freedom, much more than actual freedom, which impelled their anxious responses. Conceptually, Haufniensis was far from the only one to make a connection between the possibility of freedom and the on-​going unrest of the time. Equally, one of Kierkegaard’s contemporaries, the literary critic P.L. Møller, observed in 1843 regarding the manifold manifestations of the longing for liberty: “It is a generally emerging tendency of emancipation, a desire to break loose, in many directions, from the bolt of a civilization, which in many regards is outdated, over-​refined and fallen from nature. This craving for emancipation is felt in all national, religious and social affairs, as well as in philosophy and politics.”38 Several authors reacted accordingly with anxiety, which became a vital force in a number of the most memorable literary works of the period. “Angst” is, in fact, the title of one of the most canonized Danish poems of the period, written by the medical doctor Emil Aarestrup, one of the few authors, whose company Kierkegaard enjoyed, if only briefly. It was published in Poems, Digte, from 1838, the only book Aarestrup ever issued. Both the collection and its author received little immediate attention, but gained recognition later, in the 1860s, after Aarestrup’s death. Several of his poems are today considered classics of Danish Golden Age literature, but none is as widely read and appreciated as “Angst”: Hold on to me, around me With your round arms Hold on, while your heart Yet has blood and warmth Soon, we will be parted 37 38

sks 4, 454 /​ca, 161. P.L. Møller, “Om Poesi og Drama, med Hensyn til Prof. Heiberg, Ørkenens Søn og Fr. Hebbels Tragedier,” Arena, et polemisk-​æsthetisk Blad, 1843, pp. 95–​96.

Introduction

15

Like the berries on the bush Soon, we will be gone Like the bubbles in the brook.39 Often, the erotic ardor and the attention to bodily detail of Aarestrup’s poetry have been emphasized in presentations of him and contrasted with the spiritual tenets of most Danish poetry from the same time. An air of frivolity clings to his name. The controversial nature of this poem, however, is not due to its erotic content: After all, it is merely a firm hug that the speaker of the poem is asking for. Much more scandalous is the evoked occasion of the embrace, reminding the reader not only of the brevity of life but also rebuffing the Christian conception of afterlife. To dogmatically minded readers, the materialism of the concluding simile (“like the bubbles in the brook”) would be shuddering or revolting. Still, the poem does not rejoice in the notion of life as a onetime affair but represents the condition as a source of anxiety, overwhelming the speaker, who asks the second person of the poem for refuge from fugitiveness by engaging in immediate corporeal consolation. Aarestrup presents us in the poem with a contraction, which may be seen as a physical correlate to the emotional “Angst” of the moment. Indeed, as we shall see later in this book, the decline of belief in the immortality of the soul was one of the most hotly debated topics in the intellectual life of the Golden Age, and an issue that captivated Kierkegaard throughout his entire authorship. In The Concept of Anxiety, Haufniensis makes the observation that “now more than ever the present life appears as a fleeting, transitory moment.”40 This can be read as a philosophical phrasing of the temporal condition that Aarestrup’s poem encircles: that life was no longer considered everlasting but as something occurring only once and on entirely earthly conditions. To Aarestrup as well as to Kierkegaard, this was a momentous change and one explanation for the increase in anxiety at the time. This was not, however, a kind of anxiety shared by Kierkegaard himself. Nothing suggests that he was among those who abandoned belief in the immortality of the soul. On the contrary, the stanza that Kierkegaard chose for his tombstone, by the Pietist Bishop and psalmist Hans Adolph Brorson, may be read as commenting upon the issue. It is taken from Brorson’s famous

39 40

Emil Aarestrup, Udvalgte digte, ed. by Dan Ringgaard, Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog-​og Litteraturselskab, 1998, p. 140. sks 4, 407 /​ca, 105.

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Chapter 1

hymn, “Hallelujah, I have found my Jesus,” “Halleluja! jeg har min JEsum funden,” from The Rare Treasure of Faith, Troens rare Klenodie, 1739. In a little while, I shall have won, Then the entire battle Will at once be done. Then I may rest In halls of roses And ceaselessly Speak with my Jesus.41 The contrast to Aarestrup’s “Angst” poem is striking. While both texts express the important shortness of earthly existence, in Brorson’s case life continues in Heaven, where combat and struggle yield to peace and repose—​and to incessant communication with the savior. In the original Danish version, the word “så,” meaning “then,” is repeated in the beginning of the second, third and fifth verse, insistently conjuring up the immediacy of the transformation that will take place in the transition from earthly to heavenly existence. In this way, Kierkegaard’s tombstone heralds a happy ending: death is liberation, at least for the righteous ones. A gloomier future awaits lost souls and apostates, according to later stanzas of Brorson’s hymn, condemning them to hell with much detail and no mercy. There is no question that death means divine judgment in Brorson’s poetic vision. As we shall see in a later chapter, that ought to be the real concern and cause for anxiety, according to some of Kierkegaard’s more uncompromising texts on the subject, confessing and professing a rather orthodox Christian eschatology. 5

The Annihilation of Eternity

Aarestrup’s poem clearly indicates that “angst” was around, so to speak, in Danish literature of the 1830s. For that reason, The Concept of Anxiety may also be conceived of as a reflection upon a condition that inspired a number of literary works, giving us insight into the advent of modernity in various guises and the ambivalences—​and numerous amalgamations of sympathy

41

H.A. Brorson, Udvalgte salmer og digte, ed. by Steffen Arndal, Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog-​og Litteraturselskab, 1994, p. 194.

Introduction

17

and antipathy—​that followed. As mentioned before, a favored epochal self-​ characterization found among the authors of the time was that they were living and writing “between the times,” in an interregnum, where certain (political, philosophical and religious) systems were swiftly vanishing, while others were coming into being. This notion instigated both anxiety and enormous philosophical and literary creativity. Numerous interpretations were offered of the “unrest” summed up by P.L. Møller in the quotation above, and many suggestions were made as to where true “rest”—​to use one of Haufniensis’ phrases—​could be found. That would fit in with Haufniensis’ deployment of anxiety as a cultural diagnosis. All of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings comprise diatribes against “our age” or “the most recent philosophy,” including The Concept of Anxiety, which he himself, in a discarded postscript to the book, portrayed as “a terrible verdict and a drastic epigram over their heavily made up untruths and their whole—​only by the unhealthy intoxication of promises—​vapored being.”42 The polemical mission of the work is spelled out here, and the address to contemporary philosophers in particular—​whom the possessive pronouns of the sentence refer to—​is revealed. A main point in The Concept of Anxiety is that anxiety was escalating due to a growing refusal to deal seriously with eternity: “men are not willing to think eternity earnestly but are anxious about it, and anxiety can contrive a hundred evasions.”43 Haufniensis summed up many of these “evasions” as expressions of an obsession with momentary and fragmented experience, which Kierkegaard had earlier incarnated in the Aesthete of Either/​Or (1843): In our day, men fear the eternal far too much, even when they recognize it in abstract words and in words flattering to the eternal. Nowadays, the various governments live in fear of restless disturbers; there are altogether too many individualities who live in fear of one restless disturber that nevertheless is the true rest—​eternity. So they preach the moment, and just as the road to hell is paved with good intentions, so eternity is best annihilated by mere moments.44 As Haufniensis’ apparently casual comparison with the protests against absolutism uncovers, there was also a political side to his analysis of anxiety. Kierkegaard’s vigilant pseudonym draws a parallel here between the 42 43 44

Quoted from the account of the genesis of the text in sks k 4, p. 323. sks 4, 453 /​ca, 153. sks 4, 451 /​ca, 151.

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Chapter 1

contemporary political movements disturbing “governments”—​absolute rulers that is—​and the unsettling effects of eternity. Eternity had become a negative force creating restlessness instead of the spiritual abode that it ought to be, according to his conception of Christianity—​“the true rest,” in the words of Haufniensis. From this analysis, it is evident that Kierkegaard also viewed the expansion of anxiety as a consequence of secularization and the political demands for democracy. It was an attempt to understand the unrest rising in contemporary culture and politics. With the abolition of the immortality of the individual soul, the fixed point of eternity, against which the ceaselessly vanishing present could be understood, disappeared. Left Hegelians, such as Ludwig Feuerbach, had stressed the intensification of existence following from this new and epoch-​making condition: “Only when the human once again recognizes that there exists not merely an appearance of death, but an actual and real death, a death that completely terminates the life of the individual, only when he returns to the awareness of his finitude will he gain the courage to begin a new life and to experience the pressing need for making that which is absolutely true and substantial, that which is actually infinite, into the theme and content of his entire spiritual activity,” he had proclaimed provocatively in his Thoughts on Death and Immortality: From the Papers of a Thinker, published in 1830.45 In the truth of death lies the key to a new life, according to Feuerbach. Kierkegaard, on the contrary, emphasized the compelling and deeply concerning radicality of eternity. In the words of Haufniensis: But eternity is a very radical thought. Whenever it is posited, the present becomes something entirely different from what it was apart from it. This is something that men fear. Often enough, talk is heard about particular governments in Europe that are in fear of restless elements. I prefer to say that the entire present generation is a tyrant who lives in fear of one restless element: the thought of eternity. This thought is always suppressed; nevertheless, it is still impossible not to be in contact with it: a person will think it, and he does not dare to think it.46 Haufniensis’ view of his contemporaries—​“the entire present generation”—​ as a “tyrant” is noteworthy for its reversal of their self-​conception and usual 45 46

Ludwig Feuerbach: Thoughts on Death and Immortality: From the Papers of a Thinker, along with an appendix of theological-​satirical epigrams, edited by one of his friends; trans. by James A. Massey, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980, p. 17. sks 4, 451 /​ca, 206.

Introduction

19

casting as champions of freedom, opposing despotism and absolute rulers unrestrained by law or constitution. But they were themselves, according to Haufniensis, imperiled by their ambivalent relation to eternity, encapsulating again the inexplicable combination of fear and desire applying to anxiety: They were drawn to the thought of eternity and yet horrified by it. This peculiar form of abjection, applied by Haufniensis to describe the political fervor of the age, provides further evidence of the political dimensions of Kierkegaard’s analysis in The Concept of Anxiety. Kierkegaard, to be sure, did not endorse liberal democracy, he loathed political mass movements (nationalism and liberalism were the two most urgent variants), and he despised the state as much as his Hegelian contemporaries prized it. He was a great champion of indirect communication, but when it came to the liberal pleas for democracy, his statements were rather candid. In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, from 1846, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus puts it like this: Of all forms of government the monarchical is the best, more than any other it favors and protects the private gentleman’s quiet concerns and innocent pranks. Only democracy, the most tyrannical form of government, obliges everyone to take a positive part, as the societies and general assemblies of our time often enough remind one. Is this tyranny, that one man wants to rule and so leave the rest of us free? No, but it is tyranny that all want to rule, and in addition to that would oblige everybody to take part in the government, even the man who most insistently declines to have a share in governing.47 This is yet another remarkable reversal of the concept of freedom, advocating freedom not in the sense of self-​rule, but as freedom from government. Climacus preferred the liberty of not having to form his opinion on tedious and trivial matters and from being subjected to the incompetence and vulgarity of majoritarianism, which was what liberal democracy looked like to Kierkegaard. Consistently and fiercely, Kierkegaard opposed the political reforms and changes in his lifetime. He turned Christianity into a mode of cultural critique, converting it from a hegemonic to a marginalized perspective on contemporary culture. To this project, anxiety worked as an antidote with the potential of directing the readers’ attention to the complications of existential freedom rather than the promises of political freedom. So, in addition to a diagnosis, an 47

sks 7, 563 /​cup1, 548.

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Chapter 1

etiology and a symptomology, one can also deduce a cure from The Concept of Anxiety: Whoever is educated by anxiety is educated by possibility, and only he who is educated by possibility is educated according to his infinitude … However, in order that an individual may thus be educated absolutely and infinitely by the possibility, he must be honest toward possibility and have faith. By faith I understand here what Hegel somewhere in his way correctly calls the inner certainty that anticipates infinity.48 In a rather unexpected approval of Hegel, Haufniensis presents “faith,” or “inner certainty,” as a requirement for anxiety to have an educative effect. Anticipating infinity, anxiety can be formative, and not only unsettling and destructive, if one develops the right kind of piety and conviction. Interestingly, Haufniensis recurs to a fairy tale by the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, “The Story of a Bow who Went Forth to Learn Fear,” published in 1819 in the second edition of their Kinder-​und Hausmärchen, as a parable of this process of education, which he considers a task for life for everybody: In one of Grimm's fairy tales there is a story of a young man who goes in search of adventure in order to learn what it is to be in anxiety. We will let the adventurer pursue his journey without concerning ourselves about whether he encountered the terrible on his way. However, I will say that this is an adventure that every human being must go through—​to learn to be anxious in order that he may not perish either by never having been in anxiety or by succumbing in anxiety. Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.49 The “ultimate” lesson is exhibited allegorically here by way of a fable, which attests to the role played by the literary imagination to the educative powers of anxiety. The imagination can be trained to deal with anxiety in a non-​ destructive manner on literary tours, that is by reading. In the right dosage, anxiety is, in other words, presented as an essential ingredient of a bona fide existence. This is one of the reasons why Kierkegaard’s writings attempt not only to analyze anxiety but also to create and induce it. Reading his pseudonymous

48 49

sks 4, 455-​456 /​ca, 161-​163. sks 4, 454 /​ca, 155.

Introduction

21

works is supposed to be an unsettling experience, exposing the reader to ordeals like the one boy in Grimm’s fairy tale encountered. According to another of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms, Johannes Climacus, writing in Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), “with regard to something in which the individual person has only himself to deal with, the most one person can do for another is to unsettle him.”50 In relation to existential issues, one cannot reassure others but only disturb them, for their own sake. This is, indeed, what Kierkegaard’s texts did, and so did a number of other texts from the Danish Golden Age: in non-​cathartic ways they responded swiftly to various aspects of modernity that have only become more advanced and unrelenting since. They seek to make their readers feel uneasy and evoke anxiety as a textual effect. In these essays, I will investigate their uneasiness in order to understand the “original” age of anxiety. Each chapter will focus upon one or a few literary texts and attempt to analyze the varieties of anxiety and emancipatory processes that constitute their impetus: philosophical, political, social, textual and semiotic—​to name those that I will trace. All of the texts—​canonized or not—​are coded and indirect in countless manners and will therefore be studied with an attention both to detail and to the labyrinthic literary culture they derive from. The first chapter will consider a series of political developments happening at the time and present a number of polemical contexts to understand the political anxieties haunting golden age literature. The semantic contrast between “unrest” and “rest,” shaping Kierkegaard’s thoughts upon anxiety, also pervaded the vocabulary widely used to describe the political upheavals happening at the time. It seemed to many authors that a new “political age” was dawning, much to their disquiet and dismay. With a cascade of journalistic and literary initiatives they were fighting against it and seeking to awaken and reorient their readers. Probably the most “violent” and shocking of all the publications attempting to do so is Søren Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous work Fear and Trembling (1843). The second chapter will present a reading of this text focusing upon its entanglements with the aesthetics and philosophy of history of Johan Ludvig Heiberg and its sustained attempt to expose the reader to the staggering challenges of Christianity by way of the biblical narrative of the binding of Isaac. By contracting the narrative to a single moment, Fear and Trembling challenges the boundaries between literary and visual art and seeks to recreate the agonies and anxiety of the ancient story to the modern reader. That “nothing” 50

sks 7, 352 /​cup1, 387.

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was really happening in contemporary literature is a point of departure for Kierkegaard’s subsequent pseudonymous work Prefaces, which is the subject of ­chapter 3. Prefaces was published in 1844, as a deliberately confounding complement to The Concept of Anxiety, and approaches “nothingness” from a different and much more humorous angle, while still painting a devastating picture of the corrupted literary culture of the time and day. The most significant source of anxiety, according to Kierkegaard’s diagnosis, was the reconfigurations of eternity taking place in contemporary culture, and especially the decline of belief in the immortality of the individual soul, registered and interpreted by many authors. Chapter 4 traces the repercussions of this discussion in Kierkegaard’s work and beyond, with an emphasis on the Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. For local reasons, this discussion became inextricably intertwined with the question of art’s future, and particularly with Hegel’s declaration of the death of art. This specific worry kicked off a vigorous debate, which, in turn, incubated Kierkegaard’s innovative and highly influential theory of art as existential communication. The last chapter contemplates some of the technological reasons for the increase of anxiety in the Danish Golden Age. It does so by arguing that Hans Christian Andersen’s famous short story “The Shadow” (1846) played on deep and very specific feelings of dread created by the invention and dissemination of photographic reproduction. Social mobility, fears of imitation and semiotic ruptures come together in this text, which allows us to discover the traumatic implications of a new visual economy on the rise. The notion that images can take on a life of their own is painfully familiar to many people living in today’s regime of almost unlimited access to produce and distribute images. Once again, this reveals the continuing importance of late Golden Age culture and literature, which the essays of this book will seek to demonstrate by roaming around in its terrains, following anxiety as a leitmotif.

­c hapter 2

The Political Turn of the Public Sphere “The Artist Among the Rebels” is the title of a famous poem by Poul Martin Møller, called “Kunstneren mellem Oprørerne” in the original Danish.1 It was published for the first time in the year of Møller’s death, 1838, as a poetical commentary to current political affairs. The artist referred to in the title, and the protagonist of the poem, is a sculptor, working in his studio, surrounded by sculptures and apprentices. The silent and dedicated atmosphere of the studio is contrasted with the noise and unrest on the street, where a mob is shouting and cheering. The eighth stanza of the poem vividly evokes the situation on the street: The magnificent banner of rebellion In the air proudly flies: Our tyrants are being overthrown Bond and bolt are being broken. The heroes of freedom are already approaching. With guns, clubs and spears Listen how the brave hordes Are singing songs of joy.2 Outside of the studio, revolution is in the air, and the conflict cannot be kept out. Suddenly, some of the armed “heroes of freedom” enter the studio in order to confront the master with his lack of political commitment. They scorn him for his artistic trade, which they see as a cowardly, unmanly escape from reality and mere flattering of the rich and powerful. The carving of statues is not an innocent craft, in the political terms of the day. The rebels give the artist a chance to make amends, if he commits himself to their fight for freedom. When he declines, the rebels begin to vandalize his studio, leading to fatal consequences. Anger grips the artist, who begins to froth and fight back. He seizes a club and beats the rebels in the studio. He chases those who escape and ends up driving the entire rebellious crowd out of the town, together with the King’s soldiers. 1 Poul Martin Møller, “Kunstneren mellem Oprørerne,” in Nytaarsgave fra danske Digtere, ed. by H.P. Holst and Christian Winther, vol. 4, 1838, pp. 82–​94. 2 Ibid., p. 85.

© Lasse Horne Kjældgaard, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004472068_003

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In the aftermath of the confrontation, the King greets the Samsonesque artist and offers to decorate him for his heroic deed. But the artist declines; he will have none of the royal bling-​bling and recognition offered—​and, once again, he does not allow himself to be enlisted in the King’s service: “In my studio, the silent /​I bid the world goodbye /​Play the judge I will not /​Nor people kill.”3 The artist does not wish to ally himself either with the established order or with those wishing to overthrow this order. With his double rejection, he attempts to steer round the political traps waiting for him, but without success. This is the point of Møller’s poem: it is impossible to remain uninvolved, when the agenda turns political. And, indeed, the artist gets himself involved by launching his vigilante counterattack on the rebels—​in order to save his artworks. Circumstances draw him into the battlefield in a situation where passivity would only lead to further damage, and where the autonomy of art and the artist can only be maintained at the expense of the destruction of art. Nothing in the poem suggests that it takes place in Denmark, while nothing in it suggests that it does not. However, if one only knows the standard descriptions of the age of the poem from Danish literary history, it will be difficult to grasp what the poem can be said to comment upon. Civil unrest, uproar and uprising in the street, vandalizing thugs, coercive demands for political commitment in art—​what is the poem talking about? It has often been argued that the 1830s was an unpolitical Biedermeier age where everybody was cultivating “the serene, the quiet and refined,” as Erik Lunding stated in his very influential article about “Danish Biedermeier” in 1968.4 The conventional characterization of the age, handed down in Danish literary history under this concept, emphasizes the static and politically laid-​ back condition of Danish literary and intellectual life of the time. “The political interests, which in the 1840s under the reign of Christian viii, assumed power from the aesthetic [interests], manifested themselves only weakly in the poetical literature of the 1830s, in the last decade of the paternal [landsfaderlige] rule of Frederik vi,” Vilhelm Andersen claimed.5 Andersen, endorsing the King’s own rhetoric by reiterating the regal keyword “landsfaderlige,” was adamant in his insistence that the 1830s was “the real aesthetic age of Danish literature.”6 Even the poem by Møller, “The Artist Among the Rebels,” has been interpreted as an expression of this age by Andersen’s antipode, Georg Brandes, 3 Ibid., p. 94. 4 Erik Lunding, “Biedermeier og romantismen,” in Kritik, no. 7, 1968, p. 47. 5 Vilhelm Andersen, Illustreret dansk Litteraturhistorie, vols. 1–​4, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1934, vol. 3, p. 585. 6 Ibid., vol. 3, p. 585.

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who in 1872 wrote that “by its loyalty, its aesthetic indifference to the events of the surrounding world, its unlimited scorn for all movements of society,” this poem “paints the entire epoch in this country.”7 Traditionally, (literary) historians have interpreted the high interest in art and aesthetics of the Golden Age as a confirmation that the age was introverted, reactionary and apolitical. According to established opinion, there is a deep gap separating art from politics in the period, at least until late 1830s when, upon the death of King Frederik vi in 1839, the desire for political reforms became more outspoken. But fundamentally, this conception is incorrect. Political and controversial issues were deeply embedded in contemporary art and discussions on aesthetics. Historians have tended to think of politics only in terms of party politics and have thus failed to analyze what was going on in the dynamic and highly complex literary culture of the time. This was a time of literary schemes, satires, profound allegorizing, double articulation, pseudonymous and anonymous authors and indirectness to be found almost everywhere in literary language. Every work and every word published in this time landed in a battle zone or a magnetic field in which they gained powers and meanings that only have become harder to trace through the passage of time. Kierkegaard frequently represented the literary and intellectual situation as one of usurpation and illegitimate rule: “Just as in a country where a mutinous cabinet has seized power the king is kept at a distance while the mutinous cabinet acts in the king’s name, so is speculation’s conduct in mediating Christianity”—​so was his conception of the philosophical (mis)appropriation of Christianity taking place.8 In such a situation, uses of literary cunning become not only acceptable, but absolutely imperative. The depiction of the age therefore needs to be adjusted, particularly in order to analyze the polemical context of some the literary maneuvers of Johan Ludvig Heiberg and his apprentice Søren Kierkegaard in the 1830s and ’40s. What I would like to do in this chapter is to present some historical correlates to the revolutionary atmosphere in Møller’s poem—​that is, the rapid politicization of the Danish public sphere in the 1830s—​and Johan Ludvig Heiberg’s strategic reaction to this change. In 1833, Heiberg observed, “it is the very political character of the age which constitutes its crisis.”9 Unrest was the keyword of Heiberg’s characterization of his contemporary moment, and this 7 Georg Brandes, Emigrantlitteraturen, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1872, p. 23. 8 sks 7, 343 /​cup1, 376. 9 Johan Ludvig Heiberg, On the Significance of Philosophy for the Present Age and Other Texts, ed. and trans. by Jon Stewart, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 2005 (Texts from Golden Age Denmark, vol. 1), p. 95.

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unrest chiefly manifested itself in the political commotion. The following year, Heiberg noted, “our entire European unrest is a spiritual battle between two parties: the conservative and their opposites (whom I will not label out of fear of not finding the right name), but, consequently, every government eo ipso takes part in the battle.”10 So did Heiberg, and he initiated, as we shall see, several campaigns in his poetry as well as in his journalistic enterprises in order both to defy and comply with this political turn. The situation was, on a biographical note, particularly precarious for Heiberg. He was the son of a rebel, Peter Andreas Heiberg, who had been banished from Denmark, in 1799, due to his satirical authorship attacking specific Danish authorities as well as absolutism in general.11 Johan Ludvig Heiberg’s childhood had been uprooted due to his father’s meddling in politics, and it is possible to argue that the banishment of the father—​when the son was only eight years old—​was the singularly most important event in his life. As the son of an exiled rebel, Johan Ludvig Heiberg was put in a situation comparable to that of the artist of Poul Martin Møller’s poem: he could not, by any means, escape the political. He was confronted with the forced choice of rebelling, thus imitating the father, or refusing to rebel, which can be understood as another kind of revolt, against the authority of the father. No matter what he did, Johan Ludvig Heiberg’s political behavior was prone to be analyzed in relation to his paternal origin. Also for this reason, it is interesting to see how he reacted when the dismantling of absolutism, which his father had supported in the wake of the French Revolution, gained new momentum in the 1830s in the aftermath of another French Revolution, the July Revolution of 1830. 1

Young Denmark?

Now, were there any political rebels in Danish literature and intellectual life in the late Golden Age? The standard answer to this question would be no. There is, instead, a rather obvious lack of “youth” in Danish literature in this period, comparatively speaking. It is commonplace in literary history to talk about Young Germany—​with Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne, and Ludwig 10 11

Johan Ludvig Heiberg, “Christensens Skrift om Trykkefriheden,” in Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post, Interimsblad no. 16, ed. by Uffe Andreasen, vols. 1–​4, Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog-​og Litteraturselskab/​C.A. Reitzel 1981, vol. 4 (1834), p. 72. Further biographical information about Peter Andreas Heiberg can be found in Henning Fenger, The Heibergs, New York: Twayne Publishers 1971, pp. 23–​37.

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Feuerbach—​and Young France, including Stendhal, Victor Hugo, and Alphonse de Lamartine. A somewhat similar blend of romanticism and political radicalism can be found earlier in English literature in the art of the trio: John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron. But no equivalent can be detected in Danish literature. There is no literary formation known as “young Denmark” in the history of Danish literature, not in this period, at least: no united group of hotspurs using their eminent literary powers to advocate political reform or, indeed, revolution. It was not until “the modern breakthrough” of the 1870s that the concept of the “young Denmark” became slightly fashionable, but at that time it was used to designate a movement that understood itself as a rupture with the “golden age” of the 1830s and ’40s.12 I am not going to argue here that Johan Ludvig Heiberg, who was born in 1791 and not exactly young in the 1830s and 40s, represents an unrecognized young Denmark. Although leaning toward the Hegelian Left in matters of aesthetics and religion,13 Heiberg was close to the Hegelian Right and rather conservative in political questions. He was, for instance, a staunch supporter of state absolutism and liked to compare the state to an artwork since they were both ends in themselves and not a means to something else. He even turned this principle into an aphorism: “the state does not exist for the sake of the citizens, but the citizens for the sake of the state.”14 One should certainly not ask what the state could do for you, but what you could do for the state, Heiberg contended. Subscribing to such views, Heiberg was not disposed to embrace either liberalism or natural law, invoked by many political reformists in his time. Indeed, formulations like these place him in direct opposition to such currents. Still, one should not neglect the fact that the role of the King was also subordinated

12

13 14

Some decades later, the term was picked up by Heiberg’s wife, Johanne Luise Heiberg, who used it with the same content in her memoir A Life Re-​Lived in Memory (1891–​92), see Johanne Luise Heiberg, Et liv gjenoplevet i Erindringen, vol. 1–​4, ed. by Aage Friis, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1944, vol. 1, p. 258 and vol. 2, p. 177. Earlier, it had been used as a title for the novel Det unge Danmark (Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag, 1879) by the Danish author and later Nobel Laureate Karl Gjellerup. This novel incited Sophus Claussen to write an unpublished poem with the same title. But to Gjellerup and Claussen, the term “young Denmark” would refer to the later movement in Danish literature normally labeled “the modern breakthrough.” It had nothing to do with the 1830s and ‘40s. Yet, although the term has been employed occasionally, it has never become a household word in Danish literary historiography, neither with reference to currents or movements during the Golden Age or The Modern Breakthrough. See Lasse Horne Kjældgaard, Sjælen efter døden. Guldalderens moderne gennembrud, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 2007. Johan Ludvig Heiberg, “Autoritet,” in Intelligensblade, no. 7, 1842, p. 165.

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to the superiority of the state, according to Heiberg’s political views.15 Heiberg’s Hegelian separation of the state—​as an independent concept, compared to, say, the Kingdom or the Throne—​can even be seen as a subversive act in itself, due to its immanent downgrading of the King’s role. Heiberg did, furthermore, pay heed to the growing political movement, and he did not always refrain from labelling it. He referred to the liberal political movement, at least once, with the term “young Denmark.” He did so in a remark to the journal Fædrelandet in his own journal Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post, in 1836. Heiberg’s intervention was a reply to a call that had been made by Johannes Hage for a so-​called “contra-​opposition literature,” aimed at the oppositional literature said to be flourishing at the time. The contention, to which Heiberg responded, was that the new political voices made a deafening noise, while receiving no reply from the literary establishment—​from the defenders of the old regime, the despotism of King Frederik vi. Heiberg used the term “young Denmark” ironically about these voices, pointing to a purely political movement with no evident literary allies. That does not mean, however, that the political movement was of no consequence to contemporary literature. In this chapter, I will suggest that “young Denmark” might, indeed, be a useful concept to apply in order to understand the antagonistic—​yet also, in some respects, politically converging—​literary enterprises of Johan Ludvig Heiberg and Søren Kierkegaard. What is interesting about Heiberg’s use of the phrase, and the exchange that he engaged in, back in 1836, is that it provides a rather different picture of the situation than the one that has been transmitted in Danish literary history. It suggests that there was, indeed, a Young Denmark, which was of importance to the literature of the period, although the movement did not manifest itself, at least not primarily, in imaginative literature. I will sustain this view by looking at three mutually related tendencies in the 1830s, which challenge the depiction of the age as “the real aesthetic age of Danish literature”: the critique of aestheticization, the pitting of politics 15

Studies in Heiberg’s political philosophy include Aage Kabell, “J. L. Heiberg og Hegels retsfilosofi,” in Danske Studier, 1944, pp. 110–​28, and Leonardo F. Lisi, “Heiberg and the Drama of Modernity,” in Johan Ludvig Heiberg: Philosopher, Littérateur, Dramaturge, and Political Thinker, ed. by Jon Stewart, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press 2008 (Danish Golden Age Studies, vol. 5), pp. 421–​448; Klaus Müller-​Wille, “Ghostly Monarchies: Paradoxical Constitutions of the Political in Johan Ludvig Heiberg’s Royal Dramas,” in The Heibergs and the Theater: Between Vaudeville, Romantic Comedy and National Drama, ed. by Jon Stewart, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press 2012 (Danish Golden Age Studies, vol. 7), pp. 67–​94; and Bruce H. Kirmmse, Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1990, pp. 155–​168.

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against aesthetics (and vice versa) and, finally, the rapid politicization of the press taking place during the decade. These three trends are important to bear in mind when considering Heiberg’s literary and polemical tactics in those years. 2

The Critique of Aestheticization

One of the ironical aspects of the afterlife of the 1830s in Danish literary history is that the interpretation that has made “young Denmark” invisible was, actually, introduced by the foremost representative of this movement, Orla Lehmann. As a concept, Biedermeier was first successfully introduced by Erik Lunding in 1968 (who offered a sympathetic revaluation of Georg Brandes’ negative depiction of the period), but the key elements of its epochal self-​characterization were circulating in the age itself, as a biased contribution to the political discussion.16 The young Orla Lehmann, who was leading the liberal faction, and who later became a key figure in the development of Denmark’s first parliamentary government, launched it on February 12, 1836, in the liberal journal Kjøbenhavns-​ Posten. It is striking how his narrative of Danish history in the first half of the nineteenth century, which may, in the historical context, be considered a stratagem in a political struggle, has slipped effortlessly into the historiography of the period. Commenting upon what he saw as the motionless state of the Danish general public since the Censorship Act of 1799 and since the Napoleonic Wars, which had proved disastrous to Denmark, Lehmann noted that these events had served to scare the public away from politics and left them “aestheticizing,” as he said. For too long, his countrymen had been playing with “Old Denmark and the Dannebrog” and other “jingling” while “forgetting or lacking the courage to begin briskly on what was to be done: to re-​establish, with force and prudence, what had been destroyed by all the tempests playing havoc with Denmark.”17 Lehmann here delivered the basis for that interpretation of the period, for which Georg Brandes later became (in)famous, and which lives on today in Lunding’s more positive Biedermeier characterization of the age. He

16 17

An historical account of the Biedermeier concept in Danish literary historiography can be found in Lasse Horne Kjældgaard, “Kultur i et snævert rum. Biedermeiers begrebshistorie,” Kritik, no. 167, 2004, pp. 8–​18. Orla Lehmann, “Trykkefrihedssagen,” Kjøbenhavnsposten, February 12, 1836, p. 169.

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did so with a bold gesture with obvious political motives, fashioning himself as a “man of movement” in contrast to the stagnation he ascribed to his opponents and to the preceding age.18 Lehmann considered the great interest in art and aesthetics, for which the 1830s is known, as a childish kind of escapism and compensation for historical defeat. Lehmann’s accusations echo the words of the rebels confronting the artist in Møller’s poem. Or vice versa, Lehmann’s critique of the aesthetical apathy of the nation provides a historical correlate to the accusations made by the vandalizing radicals evoked by Møller. Lehmann expounded the “aestheticizing” as a collective withdrawal from the unbearable political reality to the private sphere, where one could indulge in sentimental idylls and evade the present by escaping into glorious fictions about the past. The Danish Restaurationszeit had, indeed, manifested itself aesthetically in poetic glorifications of the past: Adam Oehlenschläger’s and N.F.S. Grundtvig’s discovery of Nordic mythology, B.S. Ingemann’s historical novels and his song “Paa Sjølunds fagre Sletter” are seen in this light—​as cultural reverberations of the nation’s traumatic defeats. It is this political attack on Romantic escapism by Orla Lehmann—​strongly influenced by Heinrich Heine—​which paved the way for the interpretation of the age now known under the rubric of Biedermeier. This characterization of the age is quite simply inadequate. It was certainly not an apolitical age but, on the contrary, a time in which a vast array of issues was becoming highly politicized. This is attested to by the word I have just used: politicize or, in Danish, “politisere.” “Politicize” was a verb frequently used by the defenders of the old order, and it has an equivalent in the conversion of the noun “aesthetics” into the verb “aestheticize,” which was employed by Young Denmark when advocating political reforms. Orla Lehmann, for instance, repeatedly used it. Both of these linguistic innovations ascribe a bad habit to the opponent of wanting to extend his or her perspective on the world—​aesthetic or political—​way beyond its limits. The words were weapons in the on-​going battle between aesthetics and politics that took place in the 1830s—​a clash that can even be traced to a philological level.

18

For an account of this antithesis in the intellectual and political life of the time, see the chapter “Stillestandsmændene i Fyrrerne” in Otto Borchsenius’ book Fra Fyrrerne. Litterære Skizzer, vols. 1–​2, (Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag and Otto B. Wroblewskys Forlag, 1878), vol. 1, pp. 246–​308.

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31

The State of Art

The great respect for, and interest in, art, literature and aesthetic reflection is one of the salient characteristics of the late Golden Age—​not only in histories of art and literature, but also in the general historiography of the period. It manifested itself in a number of ways and with considerable institutional ramifications. In spite of the economic distress in the wake of the state bankruptcy, the state stepped up its economic support to artists and scientists via the foundation ad usus publicus.19 Cultural institutions of the state apparatus—​such as the academies and the Royal Theatre—​were not only intact, but thriving. Journals with an emphasis on aesthetic issues flourished in the period. Paradoxically, the development can be expounded both as an upgrading and a decline of art, which was bestowed a vital significance but also allotted a defined and delimited space in society at large. At the same time, the concept of the aesthetic was extended from the sphere of art to manners and mores in accordance with the increasing aestheticization of everyday life. Johan Ludvig Heiberg was instrumental to both of these processes. During these decades, Heiberg was the prime mover of the advancement of aesthetic thinking in Denmark with a series of important publications and periodicals to his credit. His proclamation of the death of art—​to which I shall return in ­chapter 5—​may, indeed, be regarded as a melodramatic formulation of the ongoing changes of the literary and critical institution, which he both contributed to and framed with theoretical depth and precision. The subjugation of art to the state had been expressed pointedly by Heiberg in his 1826 manifesto On the Vaudeville as a Dramatic Form and its Importance for the Danish Stage: “Art is by no means made to be a toy for children, or a poacher in private loopholes; it has in our time become a matter of the state, and it is precisely by this that it has revealed its power, its dignity; thereby it has justified itself and its aspirations .”20 The appreciation of art had found its ultimate expression in the recognition by the state. Art was not a private matter, but a “state affair.” Artists should pay heed to this, according to Heiberg, and acknowledge their function in the totality of society: “The poet must,” he contended, “like every citizen in the state, from the statesman to the shoemaker (and in these ranks, however, the poet must also find his place), strive to give his individual subjective work general validity and objectivity, for otherwise it passes away as a plant without juice and power .”21 Poets and artists should 19

See Aage Rasch, Staten og kunstnerne. Bevillinger og meninger under enevælde og folkestyre, Aarhus: Universitetsforlaget, 1968, pp. 26–​39. 20 Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Om Vaudevillen, som dramatisk Digtart, og dens Betydning paa den danske Skuesplads: En dramaturgisk Undersøgelse, Copenhagen: Schultz, 1826, p. 4. 21 Ibid.

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accommodate themselves to this new state of affairs and provide a kind of public service, Heiberg maintained. This evolution of the literary public is negatively reflected in Kierkegaard’s overtly anti-​institutional writings, which from the first work is skeptical of all critical post-​rationalizations and validations. The demand for justification, formulated by Heiberg, gives rise to self-​trivialization and a certain rhetoric of modesty among the Kierkegaardian pseudonyms, who all pose as ingenious idlers, tirelessly stressing their independence and uselessness. It is against this background that they emphasize the private nature of their enterprises, as when Johannes de Silentio in Fear and Trembling declares that he “writes because … it is a luxury that is all the more pleasant and apparent the fewer there are who buy and read what he writes.”22 Tim Hagemann’s labeling of this practice as a kind of “anti-​persuasive rhetoric” captures its paradoxical gist very accurately.23 The comprehensive institutionalization of art and literature is one aspect of “the death of art” process. Another is the expansion of the boundaries of the aesthetic that took place in concert with the rise of urban mass culture. This was also a development, to which Heiberg paid attention in his contributions to Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post, published under the name Urbanus. The name itself provides a clue as to what it is all about, namely to get people to behave in an urban manner, that is, politely, with culture, and education. Heiberg himself called these pages a contribution to an “aesthetic morality.” One can gain insight into this aesthetic morality by reading one the most significant of these contributions, “On Our National Entertainments” from 1830, which relates precisely to the expanding mass culture: One imagines that taste should be educated especially by aesthetic reading and enjoyment of art, but there is a far simpler means to this end in the whole arrangement of domestic life, in the arrangement of residence, furnishing, the daily dining and way of life, in the arrangement of marital relations, and of children’s relations to adults, in domestic sociability and in the distractions sought outside the house. Who, in all these and similar conditions, the power of which asserts itself every hour of the day, has not yet found out what belongs to the right tact, what is delicate and tasteful, certainly does not yet have sense for art and poetry,

22 23

sks 4, 103 /​ft, 7. Tim Hagemann, Reden und Existieren: Kierkegaards antipersuasive Rhetorik, Berlin: Philo, 2001.

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where the same appears in higher forms; for it is the same beauty that goes through everything, but if one has not perceived it in daily life, then one will understand it even less in the aesthetic world of ideas.24 Here one gets a sense of the social ideality that Heiberg wanted to promote, “the right tact,” as he called it, and which, interestingly enough, is presented as a prerequisite for being able to relate properly to artistic beauty. It was not possible to read poems and go to art exhibitions and lead the way in soiree life as a cultured person, if one’s private and domestic life was not delicate and in accordance with certain ideals of taste. This is also a development, which some of Kierkegaard’s works reflect and respond to. The extension of the aesthetic perspective to the sphere of life is appropriated in the second part of Either/​Or by Kierkegaard’s Judge William, for whom it is important to show “that it is possible to preserve the esthetic even in everyday life.”25 His mission in “The Esthetic Validity of Marriage” is to expand the perception of aesthetic representation to the practice of everyday life, as he underlines that “everything I am talking about here certainly can be portrayed esthetically, but not in poetic reproduction, but only by living it, by realizing it in the life of actuality. In this way the esthetic elevates itself and reconciles itself with life.”26 In these lines, the honored Judge sounds like an avant-​garde artist seeking to create a synthesis of life and art, while dissolving the boundaries between them. By overdoing Heiberg’s imperatives, the Judge makes it even clearer that the aestheticization of everyday life suggested an explosion of the aesthetic that can also be considered a symptom of the death of art. This could be a further occasion for the special designation frequently used pejoratively in the political press of the time, aestheticization. 4

Politics versus Aesthetics

A vivid impression of the conflict between aesthetics and politics can be found in Henrik Hertz’s long forgotten roman à clef Moods and Conditions, from 1839. It provides a kind of literary report on the moods and conditions among the intellectuals in Copenhagen in the 1830s. One of the novel’s most interesting 24 25 26

Johan Ludvig Heiberg, “Om vore nationale Forlystelser I,” in Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post, no. 84, 1830, photographical reprint edition by Uffe Andreasen, Copenhagen: Det danske Sprog-​og Litteraturselskab, 1980, vol. 3, p. 343. sks 3, 19 /​eo2, 9. sks 3, 135 /​eo2, 137.

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figures is the so-​called translator, “Translatøren,” who is allegedly based upon the young Søren Kierkegaard, portrayed some years before his pseudonymous frenzy. The translator is a fiery character, who talks a lot, and his favorite topic is how political everything had recently turned: “At the time, when the King gave the decree on the establishment of the Assemblies, people here in Copenhagen gave little thought to politics. We were, so to speak, all aesthetical. Every single one of us aestheticized, at all parties people aestheticized, and all the journals aestheticized.”27 But that had come to an end. The epoch-​making event that the translator is referring to here is the establishment by law of four Advisory Provincial Assemblies. The assemblies had defined a new era—​this is what the translator says while showing his scorn by placing the concept of “era” in quotation marks. The assemblies were established in 1834, and they provided a vital step towards the constitution of 1849, replacing absolute monarchy with representative democracy. The obligation to establish the four assemblies was an old one. It was one that Frederik vi had brought upon himself during the Congress of Vienna in 1815. But he had only been compelled to comply with his promise in 1831 under German pressure. Political unrest in the wake of the July Revolution made it expedient to do so. So, the political revival in Denmark, registered in Henrik Hertz’s novel, had its impetus in the exact same event as the one that had given rise to Young Germany and Young France, namely, the July Revolution in France in 1830. This event paved the way for new demands for political reforms in Denmark, which the King sought to play down by establishing the four Advisory Provincial Assemblies. To many contemporary observers, this event marked a turning point and the beginning of a new age, a political age. The political movement began as an elite phenomenon and only slowly evolved into mass movements, but, from the beginning, it counted a high number of press entrepreneurs and gifted writers on contemporary public issues. Due to their intervention, the public sphere underwent not a structural but a thematic transformation: as questions about constitutionalism, civil rights, and freedom of the press were raised, the agenda changed from aesthetics to politics. The press turned political and introduced, again according to Hertz’s translator, a “language of opposition” [et Oppositions-​Sprog], which had hitherto been unheard of in little peaceful Denmark, where conflicts of interests, allegedly, had not emerged until then, 27

Henrik Hertz, Stemninger og Tilstande. Scener og Skildringer af et Ophold i Kjøbenhavn, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1839, p. 219. For Henrik Hertz’s role in the contemporary critique of the politicization, see Bertel Nygaard, “Fremmedgørende politik: Henrik Hertz og kritikken af 1830’ernes politisering,” Fortid og Nutid, no. 3, 2010, pp. 163–​188.

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at least according to the translator. A new factionalism had set in, due to the influx of foreign ideas, he asserts. This notion was widespread: the political enthusiasts were only imitating new fashionable trends that they had picked up in France, in particular. “If a political spirit were to rush into us Danes, then we would do well to put on the same political clothes which are worn in England and France,” Heiberg sarcastically remarked in his pseudonymous “Letters to a Village Pastor” from 1834, using indirect communication in order to chastise what he saw as political fanaticism brewing.28 The political zeal was not home-​grown, so to speak. This was, of course, a way of opposing the nationalist rhetoric often used by those advocating political reforms. 5

The Politicization of the Press

The transformation of the press was even investigated empirically at the time. The media researcher who did so was an apprentice of Heiberg, and a young student of theology, by the name of Søren Kierkegaard. He studied the change of agenda in the periodical literature towards political matters and gave a talk about his findings in the Student’s Association on November 28, 1835 with the title, “Our Periodical Literature: A Study from Nature in Noonday Light,” that is, “Vor Journalllitteratur. Studium efter Naturen i Middagsbelysning.”29 It is probably due to this very early intervention that the largely unknown Søren Kierkegaard appears in Henrik Hertz’s novel, from 1839, drawing similar conclusions about the political turn.30 The change of agenda in the newspapers and journals appeared to Kierkegaard as striking. In the introduction to the second volume of Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post in 1828, Heiberg had celebrated the great importance of art in his age, to which his new journal was meant to bear witness.31 This is 28 29 30 31

Johan Ludvig Heiberg, “Letters to a Village Pastor,” in Contingency Regarded from the Point of View of Logic and Other Texts, ed. and trans. by Jon Stewart, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press 2008 (Texts from Golden Age Denmark, vol. 4), p. 204. See Søren Kierkegaard, “Our Journalistic Literature. A Study from Nature in Noonday Light,” in epw, 35–​52. See also Teddy Petersen, Kierkegaards polemiske debut. Artikler 1834–​36 i historisk sammenhæng, Odense: Odense Universitetsforlag, 1977 (Odense Studies in Scandinavian Languages and Literatures, vol. 9). Johan Ludvig Heiberg, “Til Læserne ved den nye Aargangs Begyndelse,” in Kjøbenhavns Flyvende Post, ed. by Uffe Andreasen, vols. 1–​4, Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog-​og Litteraturselskab/​C.A. Reitzel 1981, vol. 2 (1828), p. 14.

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the great interest in art and aesthetics for which the period is reputed—​as “the real aesthetic age of Danish literature,” in Vilhelm Andersen’s words. But it did not last long; interest in art was in decline in the early 1830s, and it had almost vanished ten years later, where all the great journals concerned with aesthetics and literature—​Maanedsskrift for Litteratur, Tidsskrift for Litteratur og Kritik, and Journal for Litteratur og Kunst—​had been closed down. The times seemed to have changed. Kjøbenhavnsposten, the foremost liberal newspaper, started as an aesthetic journal, but its agenda was changed into politics in 1834. So was, although to a lesser degree, the agenda of Heiberg’s journal Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post upon its third launch, in 1834: “The new version of the Flyvende Post had a decidedly political bent, thus diverging from its original profile as a journal primarily for literature and aesthetics,” Jon Stewart has observed, thus backing up Kierkegaard’s conclusions about the political turn of the press.32 One may note that the politicization of the press to a high degree follows the historical pattern of the 1789 Revolution, upon which Jürgen Habermas based his classic study on the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. The infrastructure of the public sphere—​such as the journals and private parties referred to in Hertz’s novel—​had been aesthetically oriented, and yet full of antagonisms, but gradually, or rather quite suddenly, the conflicts became framed as political. The aesthetic debates may thus be seen as a kind of Vorschule—​or “a training ground,” with Habermas’ phrase—​to the democratic debates that followed.33 To the young Kierkegaard, this turn towards politics was a regretful change. His overwhelming literary enterprise became devoted to the task of turning the attention of his readers “back” to the things that really mattered—​and that also meant away from politics. He complained that people had lost interest in what he then called “aesthetics and in the higher purposes of life,” while immersing themselves totally in politics.34 32 33

34

Jon Stewart, A History of Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark, Tome I, The Heiberg Period: 1824–​1836, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 2007, p. 474. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. by Thomas Burger, Cambridge, Massachusetts: mit Press 1989, p. 29: “Even before the control over the public sphere by public authority was contested and finally wrested away by the critical reasoning of private persons on political issues, there evolved under its cover a public sphere in apolitical form—​the literary precursor of the public sphere operative in the public domain. It provided the training ground for critical public reflection still preoccupied with itself—​a process of self-​clarification of private people focusing on the genuine experiences of their novel privateness.” sks 14, 23 /​epw, 16.

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37

The Directions and Distractions of the Age

This was not an original insight attained by the young Kierkegaard. His mentor, Johan Ludvig Heiberg, had registered this change of interest back in 1833. Heiberg grasped, from early on, the scale of the change that was happening: that an epoch was swiftly closing, and a new one slowly dawning. That was how Heiberg characterized the age in a short prospectus that he issued in 1833, in order to advertise for a private course of lectures on modern philosophy that he offered—​On the Significance of Philosophy for the Present Age. The present age was, according to Heiberg, a time of transition and turmoil, with many forces working in many directions: Anyone who, with an attentive eye, has observed the present generation … will without doubt have found that [it] strives powerfully forward in manifold new directions. However, it does not itself know where many of these directions will lead it and thus does not know whether they all lead to a common goal or what that might be. … A condition of this kind is actually no condition; it is only a transition from a previous condition to one that is yet to come. It is not a fixed existence but only a becoming, in which what is old ends and what is new begins, an appearance of existence, destined to take the place of a real condition; in other words, it is a crisis.35 With the concept of crisis, Heiberg closed the chain of predicates that he used, periphrastically, to characterize “the present age” as a transitional period. According to him, unrest was the defining feature of the efforts of “the present generation,” seeking peace without knowing how to attain it. Restlessly, they were moving in many directions, but they did not know which way “the cunning of reason” would eventually take them. But Heiberg knew. Heiberg used the crisis of the “present age” as an occasion to retell Hegel’s grand narrative of how the history of the different symbolic forms, in which Spirit—​“humanity,” in Heiberg’s vocabulary—​has manifested itself, had culminated now with the appointment of philosophy as the purveyor of the highest truth. In the prospectus, he asserted the authority of philosophy over lower forms of knowledge such as religion and poetry and art. In the current situation, religion had a choice between either merging with philosophy or maintaining independence, which would, in either case, result 35 Heiberg, On the Significance of Philosophy for the Present Age, p. 87.

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in its inevitable downfall. Poetry, still, was able to blend with philosophy and benefit from the alliance, making it possible and theoretically justifiable for Heiberg to sustain his primary occupation as a dramatist and poet. The epochal characterization, put forth by Heiberg in the prospectus, is remarkably similar to the one Hegel had casually advanced in his famous preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit from 1807.36 And yet, the acuteness of the crisis, as Heiberg presents it, seems to have increased dramatically. Something was threatening art and poetry very imminently, according to Heiberg. What was it? What were the signs—​or rather the symptoms—​of the disorder he sought to explain? Heiberg mentions two recent developments in the prospectus. The first was the growing interest in the natural sciences, and the consequent loss of domain that arts and the humanities suffered. The second trend that Heiberg points to is the political revival taking place in Denmark at the time: “Politics is indeed in our time the present in which the cultured world lives.”37 This is the turn—​ not only towards politics, but also against art and aesthetics—​that Heiberg registered in the prospectus. It put the diagnosis in rather direct terms: “it is the very political character of the age which constitutes its crisis,” Heiberg wrote.38 Heiberg’s significant statement establishes both that there was a crisis and that this unfolding crisis manifested itself in the fact that things had turned political. Politics had superseded religion as the final vocabulary, which people used to make sense of the world and their lives. The “cultured [de Dannede] are in recent times the people engaged in politics,”39 Heiberg contended, and to this newly emerged social class, politics was even regarded as the new eschatology: “the cultured … have their heaven and hell in the ferment of politics,” Heiberg made clear.40 The very ideal of salvation had been secularized and politicized. Heiberg did not bemoan the dethronement of religion. But he objected to the idea that political aspirations could provide that “real condition,” which everybody purportedly was longing for. Only philosophy could supply such serenity, according to Heiberg, and that was a good reason for signing up for a seat in his philosophy class. Since too few did so, the course was cancelled.

36

G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by A.V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1977, p. 6: “Besides, it is not difficult to see that ours is a birth-​time and a period of transition to a new era.” 37 Heiberg, On the Significance of Philosophy for the Present Age, p. 95. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., p. 95. 40 Ibid., p. 94.

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Heiberg’s invitation to the philosophical lecture series—​and its diagnosis of the age—​exerted, however, a long and profound influence upon the entire intellectual life in Copenhagen. It is a text of modest appearance but with an enormous influence. The description of the age, offered by Heiberg in On the Significance of Philosophy for the Present Age, was of vital importance to Søren Kierkegaard as a continued source of provocation and inspiration. Kierkegaard eagerly offered alternatives to Heiberg’s description of the “present age,” while heavily depending upon it. It is evident from Kierkegaard’s first book, his critique of Hans Christian Andersen’s third novel Only a Fiddler (1837), from 1838. The review reiterates Heiberg’s definition of the age as a transitional period—​“a period of fermentation” in Kierkegaard’s words—​while also noting that the “main trend of the age” is “in the political sphere.”41 Kierkegaard’s outrageous review attacks Andersen on a number of accounts, one of them being his political inclinations. Indeed, one may see Kierkegaard’s critique as a warning to Andersen (who had avidly read Heine in the company of Orla Lehmann).42 “With his critique, Kierkegaard wants to tell Andersen that he is about to take a dangerous and damaging course,” Johan de Mylius has observed.43 Do not turn political, was the implicit admonition, and, according to the conventional wisdom of Andersen scholarship, Andersen followed it.44 Kierkegaard’s attack was of a sordid and of a highly personal kind. It was made by a brat with economic, intellectual, and educational means like no other in Copenhagen. In the year before the publication of From the Papers of One Still Living we know that Kierkegaard’s tailor expenses exceeded the annual public grant that was Andersen’s only stable and main source of income. Also for that reason, it sounds a bit odd to hear Kierkegaard lecture Andersen on the right significance of struggling. For 11 years after Kierkegaard’s attack, Andersen did not write another novel. Instead, he devoted almost all of his energy to the literary form that he had taken up in 1835, the fairy tale. The 41 42 43 44

sks 1, 27 /​epw, 63. Hans Christian Andersen, Mit Livs Eventyr, vols. 1–​ 2, ed. by Helge Topsøe-​ Jensen, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1996, vol. 1, p. 109. Johan de Mylius, “Af en endnu Levendes Papirer,” in Tonny Aagaard Olesen and Pia Søltoft (eds.), Den udødelige. Kierkegaard læst værk for værk, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel, 2005, p. 32. Again, it is tempting to quote Vilhelm Andersen, whose words have been repeated over and over again in Hans Christian Andersen scholarship: “There is not a single political motif in Andersen’s fairy tales, not a single political thought in his collected works” (Vilhelm Andersen, Illustreret dansk Litteraturhistorie, vols. 1–​4, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1934, vol. 3, p. 586).

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form of the fairy tale did not invite for the same degree of identification as the novels, thus avoiding the sympathetic fallacy for which his critics blamed him. So, in this way one can say that Kierkegaard had an effect on Andersen’s artistic career, as to his decision to turn to the literary form by which he was to achieve his greatest success. Kierkegaard’s attack repeated the established opinion about Andersen’s work in Denmark at the time. By warning—​or, perhaps, threatening—​Andersen, Kierkegaard was paying lip service not only to Heiberg in From the Papers of One Still Living but also to Poul Martin Møller, his honored teacher of philosophy at the University of Copenhagen. The year before he wrote “The Artist among the Rebels,” Møller had, in 1836, published an extensive review of Thomasine Gyllembourg’s (Johan Ludvig Heiberg’s mother) story of everyday life, The Extremes, in which he had held up Gyllembourg as a contrast to the political literature thriving on the continent—​as does Kierkegaard in From the Papers of One Still Living. Møller deplored what he called the “constantly repeated call for literature to enter more into the service of politics than so far, a thought which must be considered a big mistake.”45 His intervention here supports the ample evidence that the possible emergence of a Young literary Denmark was the specter that the literary establishment, revolving around Heiberg, was fighting against. They would not allow it to happen. 7

The Resurgence of Poetry

This was the political condition that Johan Ludvig Heiberg put into words in 1833, and through which he maneuvered with his theoretical and poetical writings of the 1830s and ’40s. Art and poetry had, under the present circumstances, been “relegated to a simple recreation amidst the seriousness of political life”46—​and were badly in need of someone who could restore them to their rightful place. This was the role Heiberg designed for himself and tried to fulfil. Already in 1833, Heiberg had prophesied a resurgence of poetry: “Let the serious, politically reasoning and politically acting citizen remain unaware that his actual life lies in what he considers mere amusement. The time will come when he will have his eyes opened.”47 What the political minds would 45

Poul Martin Møller, “Nye Fortællinger af Forfatteren til en Hverdagshistorie. Udgivne af Johan Ludvig Heiberg. Andet Bind: Extremerne,” in Maanedsskrift for Litteratur, vol. 15, 1836, p. 138. 46 Heiberg, On the Significance of Philosophy for the Present Age, p. 98. 47 Ibid.

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discover was the salving powers of poetry—​its ability to provide that tranquility they were striving for. This was the goal Heiberg subsequently worked towards, opening the eyes of the philistines to the powers of poetry. Heiberg’s venture to restore the prominence of poetry included his attempts to create a new kind of poetry after the death of art, “speculative poetry.” Regarded in the context that I have tried to establish here, speculative poetry may indeed be regarded as a kind of “contra-​opposition literature,” to recycle Heiberg’s phrase from 1836. Along similar lines, but with a very different output, Kierkegaard launched his pseudonymous enterprise in the 1840s.48 This enterprise was (also) intended as art against politics, which may serve to explain the curious dual position towards issues of art and aesthetics maintained in Kierkegaard’s authorship: on the one hand, it defends them, and, on the other, it critiques the aestheticizing tendencies of Heiberg, thus providing what we may call—​and now it is beginning to sound like something from a Monty Python movie—​an “anti-​contra-​opposition literature.”49 In terms of political aversions, Heiberg and Kierkegaard were, nevertheless, two of a kind. The most successful speculative drama Heiberg wrote might also be considered his most efficacious attack on the political tendencies of the age, that is, his 1840 closet drama, “A Soul after Death,” labelled by Heiberg as an “apocalyptic comedy.”50 The comedy contains a mild condemnation of exactly that “serious, politically reasoning and politically acting citizen,” whom he had addressed in the 1833 pamphlet. Although often wallowing himself in philosophical pathos, Heiberg repeatedly teased the political minds for their pathos and seriousness, which he perceived as a kind of fanaticism.

48 On the significance of “speculative poetry” to Kierkegaard, see also Jon Stewart, “Heiberg’s Speculative Poetry as a Model for Kierkegaard’s Concept of Controlled Irony,” in Johan Ludvig Heiberg: Philosopher, Littérateur, Dramaturge, and Political Thinker, ed. by Jon Stewart, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 2008 (Danish Golden Age Studies, vol. 5), pp. 195–​216, and Jon Stewart, “Heiberg’s Conception of Speculative Drama and the Crisis of the Age: Martensen’s Analysis of Fata Morgana” in The Heibergs and the Theater: Between Vaudeville, Romantic Comedy and National Drama, ed. by Jon Stewart, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press 2012, pp. 139–​160. 49 In Prefaces (1844), for instance, Søren Kierkegaard associates Heiberg with his political antagonist, the liberal editor of Kjøbenhavnsposten, Andreas Peter Liunge, by hinting that their literary entrepreneurships served similar objectives, to simulate movement. See ­chapter 4. 50 For a recent analysis and assessment of the drama, see Nassim Bravo, “Heiberg’s ‘A Soul after Death’: A Comedic Wake-​Up Call for the Age,” in The Crisis of the Danish Golden Age and Its Modern Resonance, ed. by Jon Stewart and Nathaniel Kramer, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum 2020 (Danish Golden Age Studies, vol. 12), pp. 27–​49.

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Indeed, one of the flaws of the protagonist-​soul of “A Soul after Death” is his lack of self-​irony and inability to look upon himself from the outside. The deceased anti-​hero of the poem is a liberally minded soul, who admires America—​“the country where one dwells upon the soil of freedom”51—​and who had avidly been reading the new political press in Denmark. The soul, finally, finds employment and a home in Hell as someone who tries in vain to fill the bottomless barrel of the Danaids, implying that his idea of progress, as a “man of movement,” amounts to nothing but endless repetition. The poem ridicules the soul for his insipidness, thus returning a verdict upon the continued political aspirations of the age. But, interestingly, the poem does so by deploying a literary mode considered political par excellence: satire. Heiberg was, in this regard, infected by that disease which he actively tried to cure also with literary means: the political mobilization of art. Like the poor artist in Møller’s poem, Heiberg had to imitate the opponents in his counterattack. In this sense, Heiberg was an artist among the rebels, but without self-​pity or scruples about playing the judge. 8

A New Waker

A similar attack on the political turn can be found in Heiberg’s new journalistic enterprise of the 1840s, the periodical Intelligensblade. Heiberg had, in his journal Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post, accommodated the emerging political debate and also taken part in it. But this appeasement was replaced with confrontation, when he, in 1842, launched the Intelligensblade. The preface, which clearly admonishes the dominance of the political in the public sphere, sets out explicitly Heiberg’s wish to lead the audience [“Publicum”] back from the political paths it had been straying upon—​“back” to literature and aesthetics: We Danes have been blamed that we, until a few years ago, have been so absorbed in literary and chiefly aesthetic interests that we had become blind to the great political endeavors of the age, and somewhat deaf to the call to orient ourselves in our own civil and constitutional conditions that are contained in these efforts. But by continually debating these issues for a long time, the press has remedied this lack, and the time has come when the opposite one-​sidedness is thriving, so that the literary

51

Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Nye digte 1841, ed. by Klaus P. Mortensen, Copenhagen: Borgen/​Det Danske Sprog-​og Litteraturselskab 1990, p. 29.

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and especially aesthetic interests could need if not a new waker (for they could not possibly slumber when once awakened)—​then rather a regulator, so that the public [“Publicum”], which has for too long been walking on its own, may be led back from the wrong ways, which it so easily treads when left to its own guidance.52 The preface reiterates the key metaphor of the 1833 prospectus On the Significance of Philosophy for the Present Age, depicting history as a journey with many distractions but with only one right direction. But it also introduced a more active role of the journal, as a kind of shepherd leading the flock back to the right path—​back to “the literary and especially aesthetic interests.” Curiously enough, Heiberg and Kierkegaard shared this desire to turn the interest of the public away from the political with the aesthete Georg Carstensen, the founder of Tivoli, who, according to an unverified anecdote, in an 1842 audience with the King, offered this explanation of his amusement park: “When the people has fun, it forgets to politicize.”53 Tivoli’s achievement in this respect was probably bigger than Heiberg’s, and, yet, neither succeeded in their attempts to change the interests of the public. The politicization continued to escalate up through the 1840s, culminating with the Constitution of 1849. We get, however, an impression of the consequences of Heiberg’s campaign from the critic P.L. Møller, who—​without naming him—​repeated, and subtly modified, Heiberg’s epochal characterization in 1843: Our age is a crisis, a transition, a period of unrest and fermentation. This must be true, at least it has been repeated until tedium. But the movement is not, as the philosophers think, a merely philosophical urge, nor, as the politicians think, a merely political one. It is a generally emerging tendency of emancipation, a desire to break loose, in many directions, from the bolt of a civilization, which in many regards is outdated, over refined and fallen from nature. This longing for emancipation is felt in all national, religious and social affairs, as well as in philosophy and politics. Philosophers and politicians only represent the extreme Right and Left of the general movement. As poetry is a popular and pleasing means of communication, all the struggling parties seek to take possession of it, and as drama is the fattest province in the kingdom of poetry, they fight 52 53

Johan Ludvig Heiberg, “Til Læserne,” in Intelligensblade, no. 1, 1842, p. 1. Alfred Jeppesen, Kjøbenhavns Sommer-​Tivoli 1843–​1968, Copenhagen: Aschehoug Dansk Forlag, 1968, p. 31.

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over it. … On the one side, it is turned into a matter of honor for poetry to personally participate in the political fights; on the other side, it is threatened with death and destruction if it does not immediately trade its earlier content with the philosophical ideas.54 It was Heiberg, who had “threatened” poetry with “death and destruction,” if it did not enter into the service of philosophy. He is, here, exposed by P.L. Møller as a participant in the on-​going fights, which poetry could hardly stay out of—​ as an artistic rebel among rebels. P.L. Møller blamed the politicians and philosophers, to whom Heiberg belonged, for both being wrong about the encompassing nature of the “generally emerging tendency of emancipation.” This expression elaborates upon Heiberg’s significant essay on “Authority” from the year before, but it also anticipates that revolt against the “authority principle,” which later became a leitmotif in the third volume of Georg Brandes’ Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature (1874). But, considered in the contemporary context, P.L. Møller’s diagnosis differs from Heiberg’s due to its orientation toward the past rather than the end toward which all historical processes are tending. On a more Rousseauian note, Møller believed that the contemporary turmoil should be considered a reaction, a move away from a corrupt civilization rather than a confused step forward, in a direction that eventually would be right. 9

An Artist among Rebels?

With critical detachment, P.L. Møller analyzed the condition of art and poetry in this era of unrest, where attempts were made to mobilize art and poetry from both political and philosophical sides. It was in many ways the same situation as that which Poul Martin Møller had staged with his poem “The Artist Among the Rebels,” about the artist going berserk. Poul Martin Møller himself fought against the political turn, while admitting, in “The Artist Among the Rebels,” the impossibility of maintaining artistic autonomy in the heat of the battle. Five years later, P.L. Møller added, with his observations, to the impression that the “aesthetic age” was long gone in the early 1840s. In 1842, Heiberg conceded that it was “impossible to separate the political trend from the literary,” as “the

54

P.L. Møller, “Om Poesi og Drama, med Hensyn til Prof. Heiberg, Ørkenens Søn og Fr. Hebbels Tragedier,” Arena, et polemisk-​æsthetisk Blad, 1843, pp. 95–​96.

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relation of poetry to politics manifests itself in something much deeper than the direct use of political matters.”55 In the wake of the July Revolution, the demands for political reform had intensified in Denmark, and an irreversible politicization of the public sphere had begun. Young Denmark existed as a political formation that called all non-​ committed aesthetic activities into question. I believe this political turn, or the actual scope of it, has been underestimated in the literary historiography of the period. Even though works of art and poetry were not intended as political messages, they were, nevertheless, easily politicized due to the trends I have outlined in this chapter. The tension between aesthetics and politics structured the thinking and writing of Heiberg, but also of Kierkegaard and other Danish intellectuals of the time. The pseudonymous missile battery, which Søren Kierkegaard launched the following year, was—​among other things—​ targeted against this political turn of the age. The next chapters will explore the tactics of this literary warfare and its recurrent concern with anxiety. 55

Johan Ludvig Heiberg, “Folk og Publicum,” in Intelligensblade, no. 6, 1842, pp. 136–​137.

­c hapter 3

The Poetics of Paralysis

The Pregnant Moment of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling

When Søren Kierkegaard in the 1840s began his one-​man crusade against the predominant philosophy of his time and place—​the Hegelianism that was en vogue among his contemporaries in Copenhagen—​he chose his weapons with great circumspection. The indirect form of communication, which he later advocated in more direct terms in his Point of View,1 was not only a maieutic means that helped the reader conceive of the latent and strictly private messages of the texts; it was also a strategy for Kierkegaard’s undercover assaults on the Hegelian turn of the Geistesleben around him in Copenhagen. By interweaving many of the Hegelian platitudes and self-​confident pronouncements that circulated in the intellectual life of the day into the pseudonymous writings, Kierkegaard contested them with parody rather than argumentation. This is the local background against which these texts are structured and to which they are addressed in multiple and very subtle ways. That also goes, I shall argue, for the pseudonymous work which has become the best known, but which may also be regarded as the most private and most secretive of them all, Fear and Trembling, published pseudonymously in 1843. Secrecy, silence and unspeakable messages are abundantly thematized in Fear and Trembling, as one could expect from the name of the narrator, Johannes de Silentio. Silentio is a prominent member of the choir of pseudonymous figures Kierkegaard invented to communicate indirectly with his audience and in the name of which he published his most celebrated works. The silence that Silentio speaks of is that of Abraham of the Old Testament, who was commanded by God to sacrifice his only son on Mount Moriah. Although Genesis 22 includes fragments of the dialogue between Abraham and Isaac on their way to the mountain, Silentio insists that Abraham remained silent on the essential issue: the command he acts upon. The unmediated message Abraham had received from God could not be conveyed, and he was therefore barred from communication and bereft of his community as he journeyed to the Mountain.

1 See Søren Kierkegaard, The Point of View on my Work as an Author (pv).

© Lasse Horne Kjældgaard, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004472068_004

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Yet Silentio’s discourse upon this silence in Fear and Trembling has given impetus to innumerable pages of commentary. The questions and answers he poses in his reflections upon Abraham’s ordeal have called for critical attention and controversy since the time of its publication. His obsession with the biblical narrative certainly seems to have been passed on to many readers of Fear and Trembling, which “continues to haunt us like no other of [Kierkegaard’s] writings,” a commentator has remarked.2 So far, it would seem, then, that Kierkegaard was right when he predicted, in an undated journal entry, that “Fear and Trembling will be enough to immortalize my name.” It has indeed been “read and translated into foreign languages,” as he foresaw it would.3 Even so, what has passed unnoticed in its long history of reception is the significance of the titles that the manuscript bore before it came to be called Fear and Trembling. On the title page the definitive appellation is placed together with two alternatives with less suggestion of pathos: “Movements and Postures” [Bevægelser og Stillinger] and “Between-​each-​other” [Mellemhverandre].4 Not much can be discerned from these phrases in isolation. However, by tracing their history and significance through Kierkegaard’s writings and beyond, we can make it become clear that Fear and Trembling was also dispatched to the narrow Hegelian community in Copenhagen for the purpose of questioning their literary and visual aesthetics and philosophy of history. Into the guerrilla warfare against them Fear and Trembling introduces a weapon of such sophistication that it has remained undetected so far: the power of the “pregnant moment.” My aim in this chapter will be to demonstrate the way in which Fear and Trembling appropriates a principle of selection intended for the visual arts by the German aesthetician Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, that of the pregnant moment, in order to call the Hegelians to account. That is the design which the discarded titles will help us disclose.

2 Ronald M. Green, “ ‘Developing’ Fear and Trembling,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. by Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 257. 3 sks 22, 235 /​kjn 6, 231. In fact, it is “the most studied of Kierkegaard’s works in the undergraduate curriculum” according to Robert Perkins’ “Introduction” to Fear and Trembling and Repetition, Macon, GA: Mercer, 1993 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 6), p. 3. 4 See the commentary to the scholarly edition of Frygt og Bæven, sks K4, 79.

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The Limits of Painting and Poetry

“Mellemhverandre,” spelled in one word, is a neologism in Danish, one that is apparently formed from the German word “Nebeneinander.”5 It seems to have come into Kierkegaard’s vocabulary via the playwright and aesthetician Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who is referred to and praised on many occasions in the pseudonymous writings.6 Lessing used the word “Nebeneinander” in his influential treatise on the limits of poetry and the visual arts, Laocoön (1766), to designate the object field best suited for painting and sculpture. As “painting uses completely different means or signs than does poetry, namely figures and colors in space rather than articulated sounds in time, and if these signs must indisputably bear a suitable relation to the thing signified, then signs existing in space can express only objects whose wholes or parts coexist, while signs that follow one another can express only objects whose wholes or parts are consecutive,” Lessing famously argued.7 The contention that this is, in fact, the theoretical import of the discarded title suggestion “Mellemhverandre” is supported by the loyal recapitulation of Lessing’s central distinctions made by the Aesthete in the first part of Either/​ Or. In “Silhouettes” he declares that since “the time when Lessing defined the boundaries between poetry and art in his celebrated treatise Laocoön, it no doubt may be regarded as a conclusion unanimously recognized by all estheticians that the distinction between them is that art is in the category of space, poetry in the category of time, that art depicts repose, poetry motion.”8 These categories of content, it may be observed, match perfectly with the first title suggestion for Fear and Trembling: “Movements and Postures.” So, the two

5 Isak Winkel Holm, Tanken i billedet. Søren Kierkegaards poetik, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1998, p. 135. 6 In a footnote in Fear and Trembling Lessing is spoken of as “one of the most comprehensive minds Germany has had.” On the same occasion Silentio declares that he is “always very happy when I can find an opportunity to include Lessing” (sks 4, 178 /​ft, 88). The most extensive consideration of Lessing’s philosophical position takes place in part two of the first volume of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (cup1, 59–​125), which includes a whole chapter devoted to Johannes Climacus’ “Expression of Gratitude to Lessing.” On Lessing’s theological significance to Kierkegaard, see Curtis L. Thompson, “Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Appropriating the Testimony of a Theological Naturalist,” in Kierkegaard and the Renaissance and Modern Traditions, Tome I, Philosophy, ed. by Jon Stewart, Aldershot: Ashgate 2009 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 5), pp. 77–​112. 7 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön. An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. by Edward Allen McCormick, Baltimore, Maryland, 1984, p. 78. 8 sks 2, 167 /​eo1, 169.

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alternative titles apparently point to the same theoretical source, to Lessing’s attempt to distinguish more clearly between the performance of art and poetry. The Aesthete’s repetition of Lessing’s limits between poetry and painting was not an isolated occurrence on the contemporary scene of aesthetic theory in Denmark. When he claims, in “Silhouettes,” that Lessing’s limits are a “result” which is “recognized by all estheticians,” this group almost certainly includes the most prominent aesthetician of the time and place, Johan Ludvig Heiberg, who had five years earlier made a similar statement.9 A devoted Hegelian and a very powerful playwright and critic, Heiberg provided the main target for Kierkegaard’s parodic assaults. In 1838 Heiberg had contributed to Perseus—​a journal for “the speculative idea,” the subtitle declared, and an influential organ for the right Hegelian circles of Copenhagen10—​with an extensive review, almost a hundred pages long, that included a reconsideration of Lessing’s Laocoön. In the review Heiberg blamed the artists and critics of his day for being ignorant about Laocoön, which could save them from many misjudgments and failed paintings. For their sake he returned to Lessing, laid out the main argument of Laocoön, while also correcting it on the question of the temporality of pictorial representation. 2

The Pregnant Moment of Medea

Heiberg’s correction concerned Lessing’s banning of “the transitory” from the object field of the visual arts. Lessing had proscribed the representation of phenomena that are “essentially sudden in their beginning and end and which can be what they are only for a brief moment.” Such events should not be represented in either painting or sculpture, as they “fill us with disgust or horror” when beheld repeatedly or at length.11 One of the reasons why the sculpture of Laocoön did not appear to scream, according to Lessing’s interpretation, was the prohibition against the transitory, which did not allow for a screaming expression that could only have lasted for a very short while. This observation formed the basis for Laocoön’s famous advocacy of the “pregnant moment.” As painting and sculpture were materially confined to the 9

For an informative account of the Heiberg family’s significance in Danish literary and intellectual history, see Henning Fenger, The Heibergs, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1971. 10 These were not large in numbers. The list of subscribers only counted 133, but among them were the most influential intellectuals of the time. The name of “S. Kierkegaard” also figures on the list (Perseus, no. 2, 1838, p. vii). 11 Lessing, Laocoön, p. 20.

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representation of bodies existing between each other in space, whereas poetry could, and should, depict actions unfolding in time, it was necessary for the visual arts to select for its object a given moment of a course of action that “gives free rein to the imagination” by suggesting both what came before and what will come after the moment.12 “From the sensuous presence of the single painted moment the imagination moves backward and forward, unfolding, as it does so, an unwritten narrative,” David Wellbery has explained.13 As it imposes too narrow limits on the imagination, the climax of a course of action, as for instance Laocoön’s scream, could not make a suitable object for artistic representation. If, however, Laocoön sighs, as he apparently does in the classical sculpture, “the imagination can hear him cry out.”14 In his 1838 review of Laocoön Heiberg found himself in agreement with the idea that too transient phenomena were not a suitable subject matter for the visual arts, but he could not fully accept Lessing’s theoretical explanation for why this should be so. Lessing’s fundamental observation that painting and sculpture could only represent one moment in time implied to Heiberg that they could represent nothing else than what is transitory. Accordingly, there is a discrepancy, Heiberg contended, between the single, essentially transitory moment of time represented in the artwork and the continuous time from which the moment is abstracted and in which the contemplation proceeds. Realizing that all artistic motives were transitory by nature, Heiberg had to change the focus of selection from the moment itself to its effect on the beholder in order to maintain Lessing’s rejection of motives considered too fleeting: “one has to say,” he writes, “that that which cannot be painted is such moments that prevent the beholder from resting in his contemplation, such moments in which the visible immutability of that which is essentially transitory becomes disagreeable [stødende] to the feeling, as this, just like in a narrative, desires to move forward and cannot but ask, when the narrative is discontinued: ‘What next?.’ ”15 Through this statement Heiberg made explicit the narrative expectations of the beholder, and he established that they could not be met by representations of transitory phenomena that were too short and too sudden to form part of a narrative scheme. As he inclined to believe that Lessing had actually shared 12 13

Ibid., p. 19. David E. Wellbery, Lessing’s Laocoon: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, p. 169. 14 Lessing, Laocoön, p. 20. 15 Johan Ludvig Heiberg, “Om Malerkunsten i dens Forhold til andre skjønne Kunster,” in Perseus, no. 2, 1838, p. 117.

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this opinion—​that the narrative desire of the beholder was the actual reason why the transitory had no place in art—​he returned to one of Lessing’s weightiest examples in the Laocoön: a painting of Medea by the Byzantine painter Timomachos, which Lessing had thoroughly praised for its strict fidelity to all the prescriptions advanced in the treatise. Lessing’s famous concept of “the pregnant moment,” metaphorically drawing upon gravidity, is linked closely, yet also discreetly, to the most legendary infanticidal mother of Western literature, Medea. The felicity of the Medea was due to the fact that Timomachos had abstained from painting the climax of Euripides’ tragedy, when the heroine sacrifices her own children to take revenge upon their father: “Timomachos did not represent Medea at the moment when she was actually murdering her children, but a few moments before, when a mother’s love was still struggling with her vengefulness,” Lessing commented.16 In the play we do not see the murder staged either; we only hear the children cry and call out for help behind the scene where the murder takes place. “Death is here!,” we hear her one son say to the other, but death is not represented on the stage.17 Horace, in The Art of Poetry, mentions Medea’s killing of her children as the kind of scene which is unfit for representation on the stage: “you will not bring upon the stage what should be performed behind the scenes, and you will keep much from our eyes, which an actor’s ready tongue will narrate anon in our presence; so that Medea is not to butcher her boys before the people.”18 Timomachos had obeyed this rule in his painting that represents a state of hesitation a few moments before—​a state that is not to be found in the play in which Medea proclaims her resolution and takes action immediately after. By inventing such a moment, it seemed to Lessing that Timomachos had combined “that point or moment which the beholder not so much sees as adds in his imagination, and that appearance which does not seem so transitory as to become displeasing through its perpetuation in art.”19 Lessing had never gazed at Timomachos’ painting, and never could he have had the chance to do so, for it has only survived in a description by Pliny the elder. Still, the absence of the visual representation was clearly not an obstacle to his empathic response to the painting:

16 Lessing, Laocoön, p. 21. 17 Euripides, Medea, trans. by Arthur S. Way, London: Heinemann, 1966, p. 383. 18 Horace, Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, trans. by H. Rushton Fairclough, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1970, pp. 465–​67. 19 Lessing, Laocoön, pp. 20–​21.

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We can foresee the outcome of this struggle; we tremble in anticipation of seeing Medea as simply cruel, and our imagination takes us far beyond what the painter could have shown us in this terrible moment. But for this very reason we are not offended at Medea’s perpetual indecision, as it is represented in art, but wish it could have remained that way in reality. We wish that the duel of passions had never been decided, or at least had continued long enough for time and reflection to overcome rage and secure the victory for maternal feelings.20 In this case, the motionlessness of the moment does not impose a blockade on the impatient beholder who wishes to move beyond the moment. This is perfectly possible but undesirable. All narrative desire is counteracted by this pre-​climactic moment, which invites us instead to take pleasure in the pictorial arrest of the catastrophic course that proceeds in Euripides’ tragedy. The desire to see or imagine “what’s next” is replaced here by a general wish, pronounced by Lessing in the first-​person plural, that the represented moment would remain unchanging, as it does indeed. For this reason, Heiberg agreed with the ideality of Timomachos’ painting on which he also based his own argument against “such moments that prevent the beholder from resting in his contemplation.” 3

Romeo and Juliet and the End of Narrative Desire

It is noticeable that only five years after Heiberg had pronounced it a “scandal” that all practitioners and theoreticians were hopelessly ignorant of Lessing’s treatise, one of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous voices proclaimed it to be “recognized by all aestheticians.” Furthermore, Heiberg’s review seems familiar to even such a non-​aesthetic character as Kierkegaard’s moraliste, the ethical Judge William, whose voice is heard all through the second part of Either/​Or: he concedes that “if I behold a work of art … it is really in me that movement takes place, not in the work of art.”21 We may recognize this notion from the subjective turn that Heiberg had proposed in his review, about which William never drops a single word, although it is unmistakably alluded to in his excursion into aesthetic theory. Nevertheless, Heiberg’s review and Lessing’s treatise are

20 21

Ibid., p. 21. sks 3, 260 /​eo2, 274.

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echoed not only in discursive statements, as indirect as they may be, but also in some of the images that are represented in the pseudonymous writings. It may be illustrated by “a picture” presented by the Married Man in the “Reflections on Marriage in Answer to Objections” in Stages on Life’s Way. It is used as an illustration of the differences between married and unmarried couples, but it may also be read as an implied and very perceptive intervention into the renewed considerations of Lessing’s aesthetics, which is, to be sure, not mentioned at all in the context: There is a picture that portrays Romeo and Juliet—​an eternal picture. Whether it is an exceptional work of art, I leave undecided, or whether the forms are beautiful, I do not judge—​I lack both the aptitude and the competence for that. The eternal element in the picture is that it portrays a pair of lovers and portrays them in an essential expression. No commentary is necessary; one understands it at once, and on the other hand no commentary provides this repose in the beautiful situation of love. Juliet has sunk in admiration at her lover’s feet, but from this adoring position her devotion raises her up in a gaze filled with heavenly bliss, but Romeo stops her look and with a kiss all the longing of erotic love is set at rest forever, for the reflection of eternity surrounds the moment with a halo, and no more than Romeo and Juliet does anyone who looks at the picture think that there will be a next moment, even if it were only to repeat the sacred seal of the kiss. Do not ask the lovers, for they do not hear your voice, but out in the world ask what century this happened, in what country, at what time of the day, at what hour it was—​no one replies, for it is an eternal picture.22 It has been suggested that the Married Man’s ekphrastic description refers to a picture by the German lithographer Ferdinand Piloty, which represents the moment before the farewell kiss in the third act of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.23 Attempts to trace this picture, made by the editors of the scholarly edition of the text, have proved futile, though, and no other visual source for

22 23

sks 6, 156 /​slw, 167–​68. This is according to Hong and Hong (slw, 703, n129), who probably have the notion from Emanuel Hirsch’ note to the passage in his German Edition of Stages in which he assumes that “Kierkegaard meint eine Zeichnung Ferdinand Pilotys (gest. 1844), welche die Sekunde vor dem Abschiedskuß (Romeo und Julia iii. Akt. 5. Szene) darstellt und als Stich illustrierten Shakespeare-​Ausgaben beigegeben ist” (Sören Kierkegaard, Stadien auf des Lebens Weg, Düsseldorf: Eugen Diderichs, 1958, p. 545, n194).

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the description has been located.24 In this respect the case seems identical to Lessing’s approval of Timomachos’ painting of Medea, which was not based on any visual impression either, inasmuch as the painting was only known to him from Pliny’s description. In fact, if placed under scrutiny, it does not seem that the description given by the Married Man adheres very strictly to any pictorial representation, for the motionless image of Romeo and Juliet actually moves in his commentary. It enumerates a series of events: first, Juliet is sunken, then devotion raises her until she is stopped by Romeo, who meets her with a kiss. What is related here surely goes beyond the moment; it takes time. What is achieved in this commentary, the transformation of a static motif into a motion picture and of a single moment into a temporal sequence, was exactly what the pregnant moment should facilitate. From the representation of the single moment the beholder should be able to imagine what went before and what came after the represented moment, culminating, of course, with a given climax. In this way the imagination may proceed from Laocoön’s sigh to his scream, and from Juliet’s devoted look at Romeo to their kiss. These situations are destined to reach a climax that is not shown but is easily imagined. If we may speak of a “represented” situation of the imaginary picture of Romeo and Juliet beheld by the Married Man, it would in fact seem identical to that of the lovers on Keats’ imaginary Grecian urn, whose movement toward each other’s lips remains permanently suspended in the realm of pictorial representation: “Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss /​Though winning near the goal.”25 The Married Man, however, is kind enough to redeem the teleological promise of the arrested situation in the picture, letting Juliet reach her goal and unite with Romeo in a kiss. Nothing proceeds after this joyous climax in the Married Man’s commentary: “all longing of erotic love” has been “set at rest forever” and “no more than Romeo and Juliet does anyone who looks at the picture think that there will be a next moment.” What Romeo and Juliet sought has been reached, their desire has been fulfilled, and so has the narrative desire of everybody who looks at, or rather imagines, the picture. As was the case when Lessing described his encounter with Timomachos’ painting, the Married Man is careful to include everybody, by way of indefinite pronouns (“one,” “anyone”), in 24

25

There is a note to the picture saying that it “has not been identified” in the commentary to Stadier paa Livets Vei, sks 6, 202. Prof. Johnny Kondrup, the editor of the text, has confirmed to me that the lithograph by Piloty has been carefully sought and that no evidence that such a picture actually exists has been found. John Keats, Complete Poems, ed. by Jack Stillinger, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1978, p. 282.

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his contemplation and pronouncement of the effect of the “picture.” The pictorial stasis is not regarded as an irritation, but as a gratification, for the climax of the imaginary continuation engenders absolutely no wish to move beyond the moment. In this respect, its achievement is similar to that of Timomachos’ portrait of Medea, which also left everybody happy with the lack of motion, at least according to Lessing’s imaginary contemplation of it. To judge by the effect that the Married Man ascribes to the “picture,” it is, then, exactly of the kind that Heiberg idealized: it does not “prevent the beholder from resting in his contemplation” because of his or her wish to know “what next.” The pregnancy of the moment is impeccable, and yet its handling of the beholder’s narrative desire is even more efficacious than the imaginary painting of Medea. Whereas Timomachos’ painting generated a wish that the Euripidean narrative had never gone any further, the beholder enthralled by the image of Romeo and Juliet has slipped into the total oblivion of the fatal events that follow. For, in spite of the Married Man’s conviction that nobody looks beyond the moment of Romeo and Juliet’s kiss, it is well known that the narrative of Shakespeare’s play does not end in such a blissful tableau. We all know that there is more to come after their kiss in the third act; that both Romeo and Juliet die in the course of the dramatic narrative after each has experienced the death of the other. But just as Timomachos’ painting of Medea had suspended the fatal course of Euripides’ tragedy, the picture deployed by the Married Man is able to arrest the progress of Shakespeare’s play, maintaining the romance at its peak before it definitively turns into tragedy. It is thus shown how the “picture of romance,” to borrow Wendy Steiner’s term,26 may erase from our minds all memory of the tragedy into which the moment is eventually subsumed. The “picture” of Romeo and Juliet can be taken as yet another indirect intervention into the discussion about the limits between poetry and painting that Heiberg had discussed in his 1838 review. The conversion of the pictorial moment into a temporal and narrative sequence confirms Lessing’s theory of the “pregnant moment,” while even refining it, as this pregnant moment, the kneeling Juliet who aspires to a kiss, actually implies two climaxes: first, their kiss, and later, their deaths. A situation is evoked in which the beholder is gratified by the pictorial repose and released from all narrative desire to go any further. In this way Kierkegaard drew from Lessing’s Laocoön, which contains the

26

See Wendy Steiner, Pictures of Romance: Form Against Context in Painting and Literature, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

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most influential argument for separating poetry and painting, the principle of selection known as the pregnant moment and appropriated it in his writings. The “picture” presented in Stages on Life’s Way was not the first occasion, though. As Silentio had faced the same problem in Fear and Trembling, the desire to go further, he had also seized upon a similar solution. As we shall now see, the “misappropriation” of Lessing’s theory is also a key to the text which has come to be known as Fear and Trembling. 4

Going Further or Remaining Standing

Now, almost nothing could seem as remote from Silentio’s painstaking panegyrics on the sublimity of Abraham in Fear and Trembling as the pleasurable picture of Romeo and Juliet that the Married Man presents us with in Stages on Life’s Way. Nor would the aesthetic considerations of the distinctions between the arts seem to have anything to do with Silentio’s ponderings on the intricate relations between ethics and religion. Even so, we have already seen how these distinctions are actually inscribed on the title page of the manuscript of Fear and Trembling. Both “Movements and Postures” [Bevægelser og Stillinger] and “Between-​each-​other” [Mellemhverandre], the two suggestions, allude to Lessing’s distinction between the appropriate object fields for poetry and the visual arts. If we look for the distinction between “Movements and Postures” in the published text of Fear and Trembling, we can find it in the recurrent idiomatic contrast between “remaining standing” and “going further,” which is employed by Silentio, both in the preface and in the epilogue, when he laments the tendency among his contemporaries towards transcending faith: “In our age, everyone is unwilling to stop with faith but goes further.”27 As is often the case in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings, which are indirect in so many ways, there is a specific address implied in this remark. Although Silentio does not mention his contemporaries by name, they can be identified as the Danish group of Hegelians that was led by Johan Ludvig Heiberg. Elsewhere, in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, these are referred to as “a whole generation” who “although in various ways, seems to want to unite in going further en masse.”28 Already in 1833 Heiberg had declared in a rather daring phrase “that religion in our age is for the most part a matter for the uncultured, while for the cultured it belongs to the past, to the road already

27 28

sks 4, 102 /​ft, 7. sks 7, 533-​534 /​cup1, 587.

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traveled.”29 Views like this were advertised on several occasions: “the standstill is impossible,” Heiberg had proclaimed in the 1837 issue of Perseus: “whoever does not go forward, goes backward.”30 If Silentio’s utterances are seen in this context, their implied address stands out; apparently they allude to this campaign of Heiberg. He could even be inserted as the source of the anonymous quotation that Silentio cites in the epilogue: “One must go further, one must go further.”31 Appropriately, the semantic emptiness of this demand to “go further” is satirized by Silentio when he deems it “rash to ask where they are going.”32 The progressive fervor of contemporary thought is, then, both the point of departure and the point of arrival for Fear and Trembling, which begins and ends with Silentio’s complaints about all the effort his generation makes to “move on.” His indirect address to the Hegelian audience constitutes a frame around his sustained praise of Abraham. The main motivation for the praise is that Abraham never gave up, or went beyond, his faith. He preserved it during the trial that God made him go through when he was asked to sacrifice his son. The faithful attitude of Abraham is thus the opposite of that shown by the Danish Hegelians who, in the opinion of several of the Kierkegaardian pseudonyms, were all too eager to leave faith behind. Seen in the context of the abandoned title suggestions, these opposing attitudes are analogous to the contrast between “movements and postures.” Abraham remained standing all alone, utterly isolated as he was, whereas Silentio’s contemporaries (Heiberg and his fellow Hegelians) are only impatient to move on en masse. But Abraham’s immovability could, however, also be taken in another sense: that he remained standing on Mount Moriah, where the sacrifice was supposed to take place, without going any further. Needless to say, that he did not do so in the Old Testament, according to which he came down from the mountain and travelled back to Beersheba to become the father of Israel. That the outcome of the story is well known is a fact of which Silentio is painfully aware: “We know it all—​it was only an ordeal [Prøvelse],” he laments.33 It is not the familiarity of the story that bothers Silentio as much as the fact that people read it from the vantage point of 29 30 31 32 33

Johan Ludvig Heiberg, On the Significance of Philosophy for the Present Age and Other Texts, ed. and trans. by Jon Stewart, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 2005 (Texts from Golden Age Denmark, vol. 1), p. 95. Johan Ludvig Heiberg, “Review of Dr. Rothe’s Doctrine of the Trinity and Reconciliation,” Heiberg’s Perseus and Other Texts, ed. and trans. by Jon Stewart, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press 2010 (Texts from Golden Age Denmark, vol. 6), pp. 94–​95. sks 4, 210 /​ft, 122. sks 4, 102 /​ft, 7. sks 4, 118 /​ft 22.

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the end—​that they only focus upon the outcome, the moral: the fact that it was only an ordeal. By doing so, they make everything banal that precedes the edifying end: “We do not want to know anything about the anxiety, the distress, the paradox,” but “when we have heard the result, we have built ourselves up,” Silentio observes.34 His observation is comparable to the one Constantin Constantius makes in Repetition when he notices the immense difference between progressive and retrospective readings of the biblical story of Job. From the vantage point of the end, things seem simple: “The explanation is this: the whole thing is an ordeal [Prøvelse].”35 Still, this explanation is only available at the end of the story, whereas “Any explanation is possible” when Job’s sufferings take place, and therefore “the maelstrom of passion begins to spin.”36 But the maelstrom of passion is efficiently brought to a halt, and the element of trial is surely eliminated when the outcome is taken to be the essence of the story. Reading the story from the vantage point of the end means giving up upon the dreadful experience of Abraham when he was torn between his love for his son and his duty toward God. Similarly, reading the story for the sake of the end will only divert our attention from the middle of the narrative, the crisis that precedes the sense-​making ending. As “we are curious about the result, just as we are curious about the way a book turns out,” the crisis seems completely swallowed up by narrative desire.37 An equivalent to these reading practices—​reading the story from the point of view of, or for the sake of, the end—​may be found in the Hegelian philosophy of history that was ardently championed by Heiberg. According to this, the meaning of events is determined by their finality, and if such a view is applied to the story of Abraham, all fear and trembling will disappear, obliterated by an absolute Besserwissen: “We know it all—​it was only an ordeal.” 5

Abraham’s Tableau and the State of Indecision

Still, in spite of Silentio’s campaigns to discredit all end-​focused readings of the Abraham story, he cannot escape the fact that there is an end to it. If reading the story like “a book” is considered illegitimate, as Silentio’s analogy would seem to imply, it would only be fair to ask what else there is to do, for, obviously, 34 35 36 37

sks 4, 156 /​ft 63. sks 4, 76-​77 /​R 209. sks 4, 76-​77 /​R 209. sks 4, 156 /​ft 63.

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the story of Abraham is included in a book, in Genesis, which is included in the Bible. One would expect there to be an alternative in the first place. In fact, this is exactly what Silentio’s discourse upon Abraham undertakes to produce by repeatedly presenting the story as a Mellemhverandre, as a group of bodies standing between each other instead of as a series of actions following upon each other. It does so by continually returning to, and interrupting the story at, the pre-​climactic moment at Mount Moriah where Abraham is about to sacrifice Isaac: “He split the firewood, he bound Isaac, he lit the fire, he drew the knife,”38 and “even in the moment when the knife gleamed he had faith.”39 “This is the peak on which Abraham stands.”40 In these passages of Silentio’s discourse the narrative contracts to a single moment. The evocations seem to suspend the narrative in a mute tableau that carries a deeply unsettling, and indeed damaging, effect upon any beholder: Who strengthened Abraham’s arm, who braced up his right arm so that it did not sink down powerless! Anyone who looks upon this scene is paralyzed. Who strengthened Abraham’s soul lest everything go black for him and he see neither Isaac nor the ram! Anyone who looks upon this scene is blinded.41 The mute and motionless situation that Silentio evokes here, and which he keeps referring to throughout, is very aptly intimated by Lessing’s inscription on the title page of Fear and Trembling’s manuscript: it is indeed a Mellemhverandre like the Laocoön group. Abraham and Isaac are placed between each other [Mellemhverandre] in a static composition, like statues or figures on a painting that can neither move nor speak.42 All movement seems suspended at this critical moment on the mountain where Isaac is bound, Abraham stands transfixed, and the beholder is paralyzed. In Silentio’s discourse the unconsummated sacrifice of Isaac is rendered in a tableau, in a manner that may be regarded as antithetical to the story. The 38 39 40 41 42

sks 4, 117 /​ft 21. sks 4, 131 /​ft 36. sks 4, 132 /​ft 37. sks 4, 118 /​ft 22. The general appeal of the story to the painterly and sculptural imagination is attested to by the significant number of masterpieces that represent this composition: the bronze reliefs of Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi, both entitled The Sacrifice of Abraham and made for the competition for the new door of the Baptistery in Florence in 1401, The Sacrifice of Isaac by Donatello from 1418, The Sacrifice of Isaac by Caravaggio from 1601–​02, and Rembrandt’s The Sacrifice of Abraham from 1635.

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frozen moment of this tableau seems carefully chosen from Lessing’s prescriptions. “What art historians call ‘the pregnant moment’ is the pictorial equivalent of a crisis. Such paintings represent a single moment but one which can only be understood as following the past and announcing the future,” Mieke Bal has explained.43 Her conceptual comparison may be confirmed by Silentio’s translation of the pregnant moment from a pictorial to a linguistic register, for “the peak on which Abraham stands” is exactly such a moment of decision, a crisis. In fact, his and Isaac’s ascent of the mountain may be read as a figuration of the etymology of climax, which is derived from the Greek word for “ladder.” There are several reasons why Lessing’s concept matches with the stopped-​ action scene evoked by Silentio. If we see it in the context of Laocoön’s reflections upon the limits of poetry and painting, it becomes clear that this is yet another intervention into the contemporary discussion of these issues, as was the picture of Romeo and Juliet. For the technique employed here seems conspicuously similar to the one prescribed by Lessing when he recommended to visual artists that they select the moment before the climax, as Timomachos had done when he portrayed Medea some moments before the infanticide. If considered in juxtaposition, Timomachos’ representation of Medea and Silentio’s representation of Abraham and Isaac show great resemblances, technically speaking, as they are both based on the principle of selection that Lessing recommended, the arrest of the narrative at the pre-​climactic stage. Earlier, we have seen how the Married Man in Stages on Life’s Way made use of this technique when he presented us with an image of Romeo and Juliet in a position before their kiss. The initial motif of Romeo and Juliet craving a kiss can be said to be structurally similar to the motifs of Medea and Abraham: they are all pre-​climactic “pregnant moments” in Lessing’s sense of the term. Still, the motifs are markedly different as concerns the kinds of climax they are heading towards. Whereas Romeo and Juliet are destined to kiss, Medea and Abraham are both depicted just as they are about to murder their children. This is their shared intent in the two moments. While an angel saves Abraham, Medea goes through with her murderous project. Kierkegaard has replaced the infanticidal mother with the near-​infanticidal father whose storyline leads to an anti-​climax far removed from the painting of Medea and the picture of Romeo and Juliet, which actually implied two climaxes, as we have seen. It has been remarked by Erich Auerbach, in his famous reading of Genesis 22 43

Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 2nd ed., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997, p. 211. It should be noted that this is a narrower definition of the pregnant moment than Lessing’s, which demands that the selected moment is pre-​ climactic but not necessarily critical.

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in Mimesis, that the “whole” of the story “is permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal,” the sacrifice of Isaac.44 This massive suspense is relieved when God cancels his command. But by suspending the narrative in the moment before the anti-​climax Silentio’s discourse reproduces “the anxiety, the distress”—​and the fear and trembling—​which belonged to the undecided moment. The indecision is yet another reminiscence of Timomachos’ portrait. As we recall, the brilliance of Timomachos’ portrait, according to Lessing’s imaginary beholding, was that it put a “duel of passions” on display, catching Medea in a moment where her rage of jealousy and her maternal feelings are still struggling against each other. This was what made the beholder desire that the narrative had either changed its course or not gone any further; that “the duel of passions [der Streit des Leidenschaften] had never been decided, or at least had continued long enough for time and reflection to overcome rage and secure the victory for maternal feelings,” as Lessing declared. It is striking that the same vocabulary is taken up by Silentio when he describes the “Collision” in Abraham’s situation between his paternal feelings, his love for his only son, and his faith that bids him to suspend the “ethical” in order to fulfill the wish of God. Although Silentio employs a Hegelian concept, “collision,” used in the Lectures on Aesthetics to designate the conflict in tragedies between different “ethical interests,”45 he is keen to emphasize that the story of Abraham is not a tragedy and that its “collision” is not between ethical interests, as Hegel would have it. Instead, passion is pitted against passion. According to Silentio’s rather unorthodox view, not only is Abraham’s love of his son a passion, but so is his faith. In a programmatic statement, the first half of which is borrowed from Lessing, Silentio defines “that which unites all human life” as “passion” and adds that “faith is a passion.”46 Arresting the narrative of Abraham at a pre-​climactic moment allows Silentio to maintain these mutually exclusive passions in a stage of collision, around which his reflections in the three “Problemata” 44 45 46

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. by Willard R. Trask, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1953, pp. 11–​12. See, for an example, the chapter on “The Principle of Tragedy, Comedy and Drama” in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics, vols. 1–​2, trans. by T. M. Knox, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975, vol. 2, pp. 1193–​1205. sks 4, 159 /​ft 67. As Silentio reveals in a footnote, his statement is taken from Lessing’s comments upon Diderot’s Entretiens sur le Fils Naturel (1757). Diderot’s dramaturgy of feelings confirmed Lessing’s notion that “die Leidenschaften machen alle Menschen wieder gleich” (69n). To which Silentio, then, adds his remarkable notion that “faith is a passion.”

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revolve. As long as the narrative does not develop any further, this collision is neither solved nor dissolved, just as the “duel of passions” between a mother’s love and her rage was left undecided in Timomachos’ painting. The way in which Silentio stages the collision of Abraham’s ordeal as yet another duel of passions may add to our notion that Timomachos’ portrait has served as an example to Silentio. He even makes the principle explicit, as he addresses all mediocre poets of his day, in a footnote, to let them know that only “passion against passion provides a poetic collision, not this hurly-​burly of minutiae within the same passion.”47 Apparently, this is the recipe for the “collision” of the Abraham story, and it may thus serve as further evidence that Silentio’s evocation of Abraham and Isaac on Mount Moriah is, in fact, both a structural and thematic replica of Timomachos’ lost painting of Medea. 6

Ethics and the Question of What Could Have Happened

The replication of Medea—​its theme, composition and enargeia—​can be showed to be a reply. There is an intricate relation between Silentio’s manipulation of the Abraham story and that which we have earlier called the “frame” around this discourse, his lamentations, put forth in the preface and epilogue of Fear and Trembling, about the progressive fervor of his generation, the desire “to go further” which impelled the campaigns of Heiberg and his fellow travelers along the way to absolute knowledge. The desire to go further was exactly what Lessing had been released from, as he saw Medea’s duel of passions before his mind’s eye. Instead he obtained great satisfaction from the status quo of the arrested situation before the murderous climax. 70 years later, in his review of Laocoön, Heiberg agreed to the pleasure it gave: “far from offending us [støde os], the prolongation which art here renders [the state of the moment] makes us wish, on the contrary, that the real Medea had remained standing at the same point instead of proceeding.”48 Heiberg’s repetition of Lessing’s reaction, then, turns on the same contrast that formed the basis of his pronouncements on the place of religion in the philosophy of history, published in the preceding issue of Perseus and elsewhere. In both cases, the matter is a question of remaining standing or going further. In history, one had to go further, also beyond religious faith, for “whoever does

47 48

sks 4, 159 /​ft, 92n. Johan Ludvig Heiberg, “Om Malerkunsten i dens Forhold til andre skjønne Kunster,” in Perseus, no. 2, 1838, p. 117.

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not go forward, goes backward.”49 But as an art critic, Heiberg was nevertheless very pleased that the narrative of Medea had been suspended in Timomachos’ painting. In this situation, stasis was a source of pleasure rather than impatience. The verdicts pronounced by Heiberg in both matters are then governed by the same contrast between “movements and postures,” as we may label it. This is what Silentio takes advantage of by discretely establishing an ironical interplay between Heiberg’s attitudes, and between his philosophical phraseology and aesthetic idiom. He turns Heiberg’s critical claims against his philosophical program by repeating his Hegelian slogans (“One must go further, one must go further”) while also presenting Abraham as a counter-​example to this restlessness. What is unforgettable about the example of Abraham is that he “got no further than faith.”50 He remained standing, so to speak, not only with his faith, but also, according to Silentio’s evocation, at Mount Moriah in the crisis that Fear and Trembling is centered upon. Silentio’s evocation is obviously a manipulation, and as such it serves a certain purpose. His suspension of the biblical narrative at the pre-​climactic stage may be read as a response to Heiberg’s wish “to go further,” confronting him with an arrested moment that is identical, in several respects, to the Medea motif that made him rest in his contemplation without giving any thought to “what’s next.” Silentio assigns the same immobilizing effect to the Abraham tableau, although it certainly has taken on a more violent meaning: “Anyone who looks upon this scene is paralyzed.”51 It definitely sounds like a far less pleasing experience than the contemplative repose Heiberg requested from the visual arts. Maintaining the moment where Abraham stands with the knife raised thus invalidates the argument of the supercilious readers that only read the story as an ordeal. Silentio’s presentation of the standstill tableau on Mount Moriah may be regarded as an attempt to undo the plot, “reopen” the end, hence reconstructing the situation when things were as yet undecided—​when the ordeal was yet to be established. Yet, this suspension of narrative in Fear and Trembling reads as more than a sustained opposition to Heiberg’s aesthetics and philosophy of history. There is more to it. It is not only an efficient way of forestalling the retrospective interpretation that left out all the horror of the

49 50 51

Heiberg, Johan Ludvig, “Review of Dr. Rothe’s Doctrine of the Trinity and Reconciliation,” Heiberg’s Perseus and Other Texts, ed. and trans. by Jon Stewart, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press 2010 (Texts from Golden Age Denmark, vol. 6), p 95. sks 4, 119 /​ft 23. sks 4, 118 /​ft 22.

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story; it is also a condition for Silentio’s reappraisal of the ethical implications of the ordeal. What permits an unreserved engagement with the ethical questions is actually this state of indecision; giving free rein to the imagination, as a well-​chosen pregnant moment should, it confronts us with the choice left to Abraham when events might still have taken a different course. The reader, then, is not allowed to cling onto any sense of only one ending, but must face up to all the alternatives with which the moment was also pregnant. This awareness of what could have happened is also inherent in Lessing’s wish that the state of Medea’s indecision “could have remained that way in reality.”52 His empathic response attests to an absorption in the “reality” of the narrative that is so strong that it engenders alternative endings—​and non-​endings—​to the tragic drama of Euripides. Likewise, Silentio is so obsessed with the incomprehensible story of Abraham that he continues to make up alternatives to it in Fear and Trembling. In this respect, Silentio’s response is similar to the reaction of the “man” he presents in the short preliminary, and very enigmatic, chapter “Exordium.” This man was possessed by Genesis 22, “so much that he forgot everything else because of it” and was compelled to make an infinite series of variations over it.53 Silentio quotes four of these variations and adds: “in many similar ways did the man of whom we speak ponder this event.”54 The production of unwritten narratives in which the man has engaged may be recognized as the response that the pregnant moment is supposed to stimulate. The pregnant moment may be seen as a technique for producing such alternatives that create an open-​endedness, which attracts a much more engaged response to the severe ethical question raised by the ordeal. By a suspension of the narrative Fear and Trembling reconstructs the crisis of Abraham to which he allegedly replied with a suspension of the ethical. 7

Fear and Pity and Trembling

The approach to Fear and Trembling taken here has relied on two titles that did not make it to the title page of the published text: “Movements and Postures” [Bevægelser og Stillinger] and “Between-​each-​other” [Mellemhverandre]. Both attest to the implied dialogue in which the text is engaged: with Lessing’s aesthetics and Hegel’s philosophy of history, or, we should rather say, with 52 Lessing, Laocoön, p. 21. 53 sks 4, 105 /​ft 9. 54 sks 4, 111 /​ft 14.

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the mediator of both in contemporary Copenhagen, Johan Ludvig Heiberg. Silentio’s contraction of Genesis 22 to the one critical moment is an intervention into this debate; it is crucial to the creation of doubt, which is one of the most important effects of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings. In conclusion, I will connect the two suggestions with the phrase that came to serve as the appellation of the book. In order to do so, we need to inspect more closely the way in which Fear and Trembling also contests Aristotelian poetics. Traditionally, the phrase “fear and trembling,” which is never commented upon in the text, has been regarded as an allusion to Paul’s letter to the Philippians in which he asks them to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.”55 Certainly, this allusion is undeniable and confirmed by the fact that the passage is frequently alluded to in Kierkegaard’s writings. All the same, it is arguable that the title has a double reference; that it also alludes to the two categories of catharsis in Aristotle’s Poetics.56 Tragedy is a major theme in Fear and Trembling, especially as regards the status and properties of the tragic hero in comparison with Abraham. Recurrently the tragic hero is invoked as a contrast to Abraham, who “is at no time a tragic hero but something entirely different.”57 Consequently, Fear and Trembling goes through several notions of the tragic against which the biblical narrative and its hero are defined negatively. Already we have seen how this procedure is at work in Silentio’s appropriation of Hegel’s notion of the “tragic collision,” which he restaged as a collision between passions instead of ethical interests. In a similar vein, the definitive title may also be read as an alternative to Aristotle’s famous categories of catharsis, fear and pity. Or at least to one of them, pity, which is scorned by Silentio for introducing a “curious dialectic” between victimization and hero-​worship that may ultimately reduce Abraham’s heroic status.58 Confronted with the ultimate hero, the knight of faith, pity is an unbecoming response. Thus, pity has been substituted by “trembling” in the definitive title. It is worth noting that, both as a muscular and as a paralinguistic phenomenon, trembling is an anticipatory response, something that is provoked by fear of

55 56

57 58

Quoted from https://​www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/​Philippians-​2-​12/​. For Kierkegaard’s use of Aristotle’s theory of tragedy, see also Daniel Greenspan, “ ‘Poetics’: The Rebirth of Tragedy and the End of Modernity,” in Kierkegaard and the Greek World, Tome II, Aristotle and Other Greek Authors, ed. by Jon Stewart and Katalin Nun, Aldershot: Ashgate 2010 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 2), pp. 59–​79. sks 4, 150 /​ft 57. sks 4, 193 /​ft 104.

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an event to come. Lessing perfectly demonstrated this when he imagined what everybody would do at the (imaginary) sight of Timomachos’ Medea: “we tremble in anticipation of seeing Medea as simply cruel, and our imagination takes us far beyond what the painter could have shown us in this terrible moment” (italics added).59 Similarly, the pregnancy of Abraham’s moment may indeed take us far beyond what is related in the compact prose of Genesis, forcing us to envision all the alternative endings that could have come out of the critical moment. The fear and trembling are sustained by the tableau that encapsulates the unmasterable moment of Abraham’s life, preventing any resolution into narrative closure. This is a more formal reason why Abraham is not a tragic hero at any stage. The “tragic hero, however, comes to the end of the story,” Silentio says near the end of Fear and Trembling.60 The adverbial phrase “however” determines the proposition as a counter-​argument, implying that Abraham, in contrast, does not get to the end of the story: that there is no ending to it as to a tragedy. If this is so, the ordeal constitutes a severe violation of Aristotle’s definition of tragedy in the Poetics as “the imitation of an action that is serious and … complete in itself.”61 As the ordeal is represented in the shape of a Mellemhverandre, no action is imitated and no state of completeness is reached. Hence it falls outside the standard definition of tragedy. As Abraham remains captured in the critical moment on the mountain, there is neither closure to the story nor any cathartic relief to be gained from it. From the defiance of Aristotle’s poetics we may now forge a link between all the titles that are placed on the title page of Kierkegaard’s manuscript of Fear and Trembling. We may conclude that the alternative Between-​each-​ other describes the static configuration that is a condition for stimulating and maintaining the response described in the definitive title: fear and trembling. Anxiety is aroused and prolonged by Silentio’s transformation of the “Nacheinander” of the biblical narrative into a “Nebeneinander” that deprives us of the sense and security of an ending. It creates a literary vortex resembling the abyss of freedom that The Concept of Anxiety would later revolve around. Fear and Trembling is, then, a bold attempt to block the narrative road to cathartic relief, to absolute knowledge and certainty, by way of one single pregnant moment that keeps us forever in the middle of the narrative, under 59

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön. An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. by Edward Allen McCormick, Baltimore, Maryland, p. 21. 60 sks 4, 203 /​ft 115. 61 Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. by Jonathan Barns, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984, p. 2320 [1449b].

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the spell of indecision, at the point where “the maelstrom of passion begins to spin,” to quote from Constantius.62 The promise of immortality that Fear and Trembling represented to Kierkegaard has indeed been kept so far. 62

sks 4, 76-​77 /​R 209.

­c hapter 4

Paratextualism in Kierkegaard’s Prefaces and Contemporary Literary Culture Prefaces is both the shortest text and the one least attended to in the reception of the pseudonymous works of Søren Kierkegaard. It came out as a complement to The Concept of Anxiety, which is a stern and scholarly work, in June 1844 and appeared under the full title of Prefaces: Light Reading for People in Various Estates According to Time and Opportunity (Forord: Morskabslæsning for enkelte Stænder efter Tid og Leilighed). The subtitle specifies the generic format of the text: “Morskabslæsning,” literally amusement reading or reading for amusement, was a kind of popular literature that thrived in the literary market place of the day, consisting of literary divertissements that required little effort to read and served to make time pass agreeably. Already the title, then, takes us many miles away from that Scandinavian bleakness and “real adolescent, fashionable pessimism,” which Diane Keaton’s character attributes to Kierkegaard (and Ingmar Bergman) in Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979), and which remains to this day the popular reputation of his works in some circles. After having been largely neglected in Kierkegaard scholarship for more than a century, Prefaces began to attract attention from readers trained in deconstruction from the 1970s and on. Sylviane Agacinski’s reading of Prefaces in her study Aparté: Conceptions and Deaths of Søren Kierkegaard (1977, English translation 1988) may in this respect be said to be pioneering. The path to Prefaces has for these readers been established by Jacques Derrida’s essay “Outwork, prefacing” from Dissemination (1972, English translation 1981), which to a large extent reiterates the performance of Prefaces. Curiously enough, Derrida does not mention his precursor in the art of deconstructing the philosophical preface.1 By appropriating the label of “Morskabslæsning,” Nicolaus Notabene, the pseudonymous author of Prefaces, clearly transgresses the boundaries between high and low literature, academic affairs and popular culture, which applied in his time and place. The contemporary use of the category may be exemplified by the Repertorium for Morskabslæsning (1843), a “repertory of amusement

1 Jacques Derrida: “Outwork, prefacing,” in: Dissemination, trans. by Barbara Johnson, London: Athlone Press, 1981, pp. 1–​60.

© Lasse Horne Kjældgaard, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004472068_005

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reading,” which had been issued the year preceding the publication of Prefaces by one of Kierkegaard’s strongest anathemas in the world of Danish politics and publishing, the notorious editor of the liberal newspaper The Copenhagen Post (Kjøbenhavnsposten) A. P. Liunge.2 It was a volume of short stories and so-​ called “daguerreotypes,” vivid verbal snapshots of great historical events and anecdotes of everyday life in exotic places, providing popular pastime reading. As an object of academic study, the genre of Morskabslæsning had earlier been firmly established by the literary historian Rasmus Nyerup’s pathbreaking historical study Common Amusement Reading in Denmark and Norway through Centuries from 1816.3 By using this well-​known generic category in the subtitle Kierkegaard established a tie between the text and the sphere of light literature, presenting Prefaces as an easy piece. In this chapter I wish to take up this connection as a point of departure for a consideration of the relations between the work and the local conditions of the literary world in contemporary Copenhagen to which the title alludes. I will focus, in particular, on the imitative qualities of the text, which become recognizable when it is regarded in the context of contemporary literary culture. I will consider, in other words, the content of the form, which will, I hope, provide further evidence that the main preoccupation of Prefaces is with Johan Ludvig Heiberg and the tendencies that he represented to Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous observers of the age rather than with G. W. F. Hegel and his systematic philosophy, as the standard interpretation of the work has it. 1

Hegelian Reflections

Prefaces may be said to fit into the genre of Morskabslæsning in more than one respect. First, the generic label allowed for a great degree of heterogeneity among the individual pieces that were selected to serve a single pragmatic purpose: to provide amusement. In a similar manner, Prefaces is compiled from scraps left over from Kierkegaard’s earlier literary projects and held together by a farcical frame narrative about Nicolaus Notabene, who is prevented by his wife

2 A. P. Liunge, Repertorium for Morskabslæsning (Copenhagen, 1843). Previously, Liunge had also published a weekly magazine of amusement reading: Nyeste Repertorium for Moerskabslæsning (Copenhagen, 1832–​34). 3 Rasmus Nyerup, Almindelig Morskabslæsning i Danmark og Norge igjennem Aarhundreder, Copenhagen: Andreas Seidelins Forlag, 1816.

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from realizing his wish to become an author.4 Prefaces is presented as the result of a compromise between them that allows him to write prefaces and prefaces only. Also, as a rule, the miscellaneous pieces of Morskabslæsning addressed themselves to a particular class, namely common readers. Correspondingly, Prefaces complies with this rule by narrowing the intended scope of readers to “People in Various Estates,” who are not to feel obliged but instructed instead to read the text only if they feel like it—​“According to Time and Opportunity.” Such insistent efforts not to insist are included in Kierkegaard’s writings right from the earliest book, From the Papers of One Still Living (1838), which encourages the reader to skip not only the preface but also the entire text, if convenient. One should feel free to read these texts but also to ignore them, if that seems more suitable. The prevailing notion of the subtitle is that the pursuit of the text should be both pleasant and unpretentious, even as it pokes fun at a dilemma, which had had the most severe and painful consequences in Kierkegaard’s own private life: the necessity of choosing between marriage and writing. Prefaces can be said to go even further than any earlier pseudonymous writing in emphasizing the non-​mandatory and unserious nature of its enterprise, while also capturing the paradox of this approach in the contradiction between the pseudonym (“nota bene” meaning mark well) and the subtitle that presents the text as merely a trifle. Now, professional readers, like Kierkegaard scholars, do not read for fun, and are thus destined to look for a deeper meaning in Prefaces than what its subtitle suggests. The significance usually attributed to the text is that it is a humorous ridicule of Hegel’s notorious difficulties with the preface as a genre, which he disavowed but was not able to dispose of. In the famous “Vorrede” of The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel provides a number of reasons why it is “inappropriate and misleading” to begin a philosophical work with a preface, the most important being that “since philosophy moves essentially in the element of universality, which includes within itself the particular, it might seem that here more than in any other sciences, the subject-​matter itself, and even in its complete nature, were expressed in the aim and final results, the execution being by contrast really the unessential factor.”5 The whole is the true and truly what counts, and yet this totality can only be presented successively. If the philosophical preface is the site where the individual voice of the author changes into the universal voice of philosophy, as the French critic Jean-​Marie 4 The genesis of the text is thoroughly elucidated in the account of the critical edition (sks k4, 531–​563). 5 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by Arnold V. Miller, Oxford/​ New York: Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 1.

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Schaeffer has observed,6 the desire of Hegel and thinkers of a similar disposition was to eliminate this embarrassing change of dressing. This aspiration had received relatively great attention among Hegel’s audience in Copenhagen. The discrepancy between his ambitions of eradicating all traces of subjectivity from philosophical discourse and his own idiosyncratic and rather emotional style was duly noted by Poul Martin Møller, Kierkegaard’s honored teacher of philosophy at the University of Copenhagen. In an 1835 review Møller remarked upon Hegel’s reputation as “the angry Agamemnon in the legion of philosophers”; he further writes that there “is no doubt that the frank [djærve], sarcastic preface that introduces Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit has contributed to make our age aware of his extraordinary intellectual capacity [Aandskraft].”7 Although Hegel wished to serve as a kind of medium through which absolute spirit was speaking, writing in an age where “the share in the total work of Spirit which falls to the individual can only be very small,”8 it seemed to Møller that Hegel’s impact was largely due to his stylistic signature rather than the objective philosophy professed by him. Almost a decade before Kierkegaard began his battle against Danish Hegelianism, Møller had thus sown doubt about the true attractions of Hegelian philosophy, while paying special attention to the effect of the “Vorrede” in the reception of his works.9 Apparently, Hegel’s denial of the preface seems to be the point of departure for Notabene, who alludes to the philosophical denigration of the preface in passing: “The preface has received its deathblow in recent scholarship … because when one begins the book with the subject and the system with nothing, there apparently is nothing left over to say in a prologue.”10 The preface had become superfluous, thus creating the condition of which he is willing to take the consequences:

6 7

Jean-​Marie Schaeffer, “Note sur la préface philosophique,” Poétique, no. 69, Paris, 1987, p. 37. Poul Martin Møller, “Om Poesie og Konst i Almindelighed, med Hensyn til alle Arter deraf, dog især Digte-​, Maler-​, Billedhugger-​, og Skuespilkonst. Foredrag over almindelig Æsthetik og Poetik. Af Dr. Frederik Christian Sibbem, Professor i Philosophien. Første Deel. Kiøbenhavn. Paa Forfatterens Forlag, trykt hos Fabritius de Tengnagel. 1834,” review in Dansk Litteratur-​Tidende, issue 12 (Copenhagen, 1835), p. 206. 8 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 45. 9 In this regard, it is interesting to note that the “Vorrede” to The Phenomenology of Spirit was actually an addition to the work after the first edition had been published. See the account of the genesis and reception of the text in Hans Friedrich Fulda and Dieter Henrich’s “Vorwort” to Materialien zu Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. by H. F. Fulda and D. Henrich, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973, pp. 7–​42. 10 sks 4, 468 /​P, 4.

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This state of affairs has given me occasion to become aware that the preface is an altogether unique kind of literary production, and since it is elbowed aside it is high time for it to liberate itself like everything else. In this way it can still come to be something good. The incommensurable, which in an earlier period was placed in the preface to a book, can now find its place in a preface that is not the preface to any book. I believe that in this way the conflict will be settled to mutual satisfaction and benefit; if the preface and the book cannot be hitched up together, then let the one give the other a decree of divorce.11 One of the main achievements of Prefaces is that it makes visible a literary genre so familiar—​and so “subjective”—​that it is almost imperceptible as a kind of literature: the preface. Ironically, contemporary philosophy had made the preface discernible in its attempts to purify philosophical discourse from subjectivity. By sustaining the marital metaphor, Notabene trivializes this pretension as a matter of domestic trouble. In order to avoid divorce in his private life, Notabene processes it on a textual level as a separation of the book and the preface. In this way he punctures the pomposity of Hegel’s philosophical prose, while also resurrecting the preface as a reservoir for the incommensurable and an exile for textual pleasure. “Notabene does not attack Hegelianism head-​on; he ironizes,” the French philosopher Sylviane Agacinski has rightly remarked.12 Kierkegaard, like Derrida, makes the reader aware of the textual but also sociological circumstances surrounding the philosophical discourse that is supposed to be untainted by such earthly matters. Seemingly, Kierkegaard’s jesting may be interpreted as a stylistic means of opposing the rhetoric of earnestness to be found in both the political and philosophical discourse of the time and particularly among the right Hegelians, whom he combated. The German critic Karl Heinz Bohrer has described the linguistic situation of the age in terms of an oscillation between a pathetic-​ emphatic and a relative-​ironic style that may be observed in European literature from the end of the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth. From this point of view, the triumph of German idealism marked the advent of an idiom that was downright hostile to the playful and ironic literary modes flourishing in the last decades of the eighteenth century in the writings of Johann Georg Hamann, Jean Paul and Friedrich Schlegel: “With the texts of 11 12

sks 4, 468 /​P, 4. Sylviane Agacinski, Aparté: Conceptions and Deaths of Søren Kierkegaard, trans. by Kevin Newmark, Gainesville, Tallahassee, FL: University Presses of Florida: Florida State University Press, 1988, p. 220.

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Hegel, Fichte and Schelling,” Bohrer explains, “a new style was put into place, so to speak, that was persuasive to a broad academic and educated middle class audience with its earnestness, its religiousness, and rhetoric of spiritual erotic” [geisteserotischen Rhetorik].13 Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship may be regarded as a scene where these two stylistic currents, the pathetic-​emphatic and relative-​ironic, meet. It is a place where they are both theorized and juxtaposed with great deliberation. This goes for Prefaces in a special sense. When Johannes Climacus in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) reviews the preceding pseudonymous writings, Prefaces is mentioned as a strategic intervention into the architectonics of the oeuvre. Since the form of The Concept of Anxiety was “direct and even somewhat didactic [docerende],” Climacus feared it would invite a favorable response from philosophically minded readers.14 The expectations that this form might raise were, however, to be defied immediately by “a merry little book” that was published by Nicolaus Notabene: “The pseudonymous books are generally ascribed to one writer, and now everyone who had hoped for a didactic author suddenly gave up hope upon seeing light literature from the same hand.”15 According to this statement, Prefaces was designed to disappoint those readers that expected the authorship to turn in a speculative and more conventional philosophical direction. They were to be diverted by what is presented in the subtitle as nothing but a divertissement, as a bit of Morskabslæsning. If Prefaces is indeed nothing but light literature, it would seem, then, that Jon Stewart is more truthful to it when he devalues the philosophical content of the text and reads it primarily as a humorous feature with a certain polemical import.16 Stewart, whose aim is to correct the standard interpretation of Kierkegaard’s relationship to Hegel as one of plain hostility, calls attention to the strong polemical thrust of Prefaces, but shows the degree to which it is directed not against Hegel but against his local representative, Johan Ludvig Heiberg. Stewart makes use of philological findings in order to situate Prefaces in the context of the local literary scene of Copenhagen. Investigations into

13 14 15 16

Karl Heinz Bohrer, “Sprachen der Ironie, Sprachen des Ernstes. Das Problem,” Sprachen der Ironie, Sprachen des Ernstes, ed. by Karl Heinz Bohrer, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000, p. 34. sks 7, 245 /​cup1, 269–​270. sks 7, 245 /​cup1, 270. See Jon Stewart’s chapter on “The Polemic with Heiberg in Prefaces” in his Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 419–​447.

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Kierkegaard’s sources and targets accomplished by the commentators of the new Danish critical edition of the text have recovered a wealth of satirical references to Heiberg and other Danish Hegelians, who have scarcely been translated into other languages, and who have long passed into oblivion in Danish intellectual history.17 Heiberg is explicitly singled out for derision in the published text. Besides, genetic studies of the manuscripts have also revealed that the names of Bishop J. P. Mynster and Heiberg’s fellow Hegelian within Danish theology, Professor H. L. Martensen, were included in the first draft but omitted later.18 Prefaces is considered by Stewart to be Kierkegaard’s first “overt and direct attack on Heiberg.”19 He sees it as “the high point of Kierkegaard’s polemic with Heiberg,” but also, reciprocally, as a sort of nadir in Kierkegaard’s philosophical enterprise, while the rather provincial focus of the polemic reduces the philosophical scope and significance of the text: “This polemic can be witty, amusing—​indeed, it is—​and even true, but for whatever it is, it cannot be regarded as a substantive philosophical statement or criticism. What is being attacked in the work is the person and character of Heiberg, which in the context of journalistic polemics in nineteenth century Copenhagen makes perfect sense.”20 Basically, the ad hominem polemical strategies deployed against Heiberg are devoid of any philosophical substance. What we are witnessing, as readers of Prefaces, is, in other words, primarily a clash of personalities. Stewart’s ultimate purpose is to reappraise the historical relations between Kierkegaard and Hegel, not those between Kierkegaard and Heiberg. It is in order to elucidate the former topic that he goes around the latter. He argues that “the question of Hegel’s own philosophy is ultimately a secondary issue since the primary goal, at least of Prefaces, is clearly to satirize Heiberg and not to criticize any specific aspect of Hegel’s thought.”21 There is though, to be sure, a great methodological difficulty involved in determining the priority of personal and principal matters in intellectual polemics, where things often tend to get mixed up. This is further complicated by the fact that “the person and character of Heiberg,” whom Stewart sees as the true target, appeared not only as a prominent but also very complex, and indeed multifaceted, figure in Danish 17 18 19 20 21

A number of these have been published by Museum Tusculanum Press in its Danish Golden Age Studies series. See the commentary to the scholarly edition of Forord, sks K4, 531-​563. Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, p. 420. Ibid., p. 446. Ibid., p. 446.

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intellectual life of the time. By 1844, Heiberg had been a celebrated and widely acclaimed dramatist and the leading authority in matters of aesthetics for almost two decades. He was the one who in 1824 had introduced Hegel’s philosophy into Denmark, and he remained loyal to this system for the rest of his life. In his capacity as the Danish head of Hegelianism, for which he continued to campaign vigorously up through the 1830s, Heiberg complicated the stylistic situation in the Danish-​speaking area—​compared to the general European situation, which Bohrer laid out for us above—​by his excellent skills in blending philosophical pathos with playful polemics. In this respect, he served as a mentor and a model to Kierkegaard, who would turn against him with many of Heiberg’s own weapons. In the words of Henning Fenger, “Heiberg is indeed served in his own spiced sauce after having carefully taught Kierkegaard the recipe for polemical tactics.“22 In the pseudonymous authorship Kierkegaard engaged in a battle with Heiberg that was to become more and more open, reaching a satirical climax in Prefaces. Yet, Kierkegaard was only one of Heiberg’s many assailants. The scope of Heiberg’s activities is attested to by the number and dissimilarity of his inveterate enemies, ranging from Kierkegaard, Grundtvig, the liberals, Oehlenschläger’s supporters, particularly the Professors at Sorø Academy, to Sibbern and his students, almost all of whom were also at odds with each other. Heiberg was at the center of the Danish intellectual scene in the remarkable sense that almost everyone had something on him and could easily join in on a feeling of aversion or disapproval of his work or certain aspects of it. Many issues—​literary, philosophical, religious, and political—​were at stake in the widespread resistance to Heiberg, which cannot be reduced to a personal grudge against him. This also goes for Kierkegaard’s opposition, which cannot be exhaustively explained in terms of his disapproval of “the person and character of Heiberg,” as Stewart suggests.23 To be sure, Kierkegaard’s unpublished journals and papers provide ample evidence of his antagonistic—​ yet always ambivalent—​ attitudes towards Heiberg’s character. Nonetheless, both his overt and covert attacks on Heiberg in the published texts mainly tend to refuse to deal with his individual follies per se; rather, these, as well as the general phenomenon of Hegelianism, are subsumed under a more general cultural critique of the age, thus leaving an impression that Kierkegaard is not concerned so much with Heiberg in himself, 22 Henning Fenger, “Kierkegaard: A Literary Approach,” in Kierkegaard and His Contemporaries: The Culture of Golden Age Denmark, ed. by Jon Stewart, Berlin/​ New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2003 (Kierkegaard Studies, Monograph Series, vol. 10), p. 310. 23 Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, p. 446.

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as much as what he stands for and reveals about the conditions of contemporary intellectual and spiritual life in Denmark. Taking Stewart’s conclusion—​ that Kierkegaard in Prefaces is out to get Heiberg rather than Hegel—​as a point of departure, I would therefore like to proceed a bit further in the investigation of the main issues between them in the text. 2

Promises and Performances

Kierkegaard made his debut in Heiberg’s journal Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post in 1834 with two polemical pieces and aspired for the rest of the decade to become a critic of the Heiberg School. This is particularly evident in From the Papers of One Still Living (1838). It was intended for publication in Heiberg’s journal of speculative philosophy Perseus (1837–​38) and assesses, as we have already seen, Hans Christian Andersen’s novels in theoretical terms mainly provided by Heiberg. To his friend Hans Brøchner Kierkegaard revealed in 1842 that he saw Heiberg as “the aesthetic educator of his generation in our country” and that he ranked him “over all the contemporary aestheticians in Germany.“24 Even when the attacks on Heiberg were both fierce and overt, Kierkegaard maintained a genuine respect for Heiberg’s status as “the legitimate ruler of Danish literature,” comparable to his support for absolute monarchy and defiance of democracy. Things started to go seriously wrong, between Kierkegaard and Heiberg when the latter, in a review of Either/​Or in his journal Intelligensblade in March 1843, showed greater preoccupation with the monstrosity of the physical dimensions of the book than with its actual content, displacing the reception of the text into the realm of literary journalism or even book history. The piece was a studied insult that presented Either/​Or as a curiosity and measured it solely in terms of the annual cycles of the literary market place, classifying it as a kind of “literary winter crops” (probably inspired by the piece on crop rotation in the first part of Either/​Or), whose significance was still undecided; it was first to be harvested later, so to speak.25

24 25

Hans Brøchner, “Hans Brøchner on Kierkegaard,” in Encounters with Kierkegaard: A Life as Seen by His Contemporaries, ed. by Bruce H. Kirmmse, trans. by Bruce H. Kirmmse and Virginia R. Laursen, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996, p. 231. For an English translation of Heiberg’s review of Either/​Or see Jon Stewart, “Johan Ludvig Heiberg’s “Literary Winter Crops” and Kierkegaard’s Polemic,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2020, pp. 325–​337.

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The whole review is directed toward the tastes and interests of the so-​called “Læseverdenen,” which Kierkegaard subsequently appropriated as a scornful label for the reading public of the day that revolved around Heiberg’s authoritative judgments. The term translates into English as “the reading world” and conveys a sense of autonomy and, indeed, insularity in relation to society at large. The fact that this “reading world” is at the center of attention in Prefaces, is a strong indication of the retaliatory nature of the text. In the fifth preface the literary public sphere is portrayed as a place where the circulation of gossip is of greater significance than the production and actual reception of literary works. Under these circumstances the work itself had even become superfluous, as Either/​Or could be said to be in the case of Heiberg’s review. The more specific design of Prefaces is likely to have been triggered by a remark made by Heiberg in his literary and astronomical almanac Urania, which came out towards the end of 1843, and which contained a derogatory review by Heiberg of Kierkegaard’s Repetition, embedded in a causerie on the topic of the astronomical year. Heiberg had intended to accompany the almanac with a preface stating “the real purpose with this project” but had refrained from doing so. Upon publication the purport of the book was misconstrued, and Heiberg therefore decided “to resolve” this misunderstanding by communicating “in a postscript what I did not tell in a preface.”26 Significantly, Heiberg blamed the communicative fiasco on his own failure to express his motive in advance of the text instead of realizing this intention in the text itself. This measure is sarcastically commented upon in the Postscript, when Johannes Climacus denies that “it could help a reader that an author ‘intended this and that’ when it was not carried out; or as if it were certain that it had been carried out, since the author himself says so in the preface.”27 Heiberg obviously believed it would be helpful to issue such a statement of his ambition, as he deemed it necessary to do so after the fact. Heiberg’s writings abound with similar declarations of intent and statements of purpose. Although basically a popularizer of Hegel, Heiberg conceived of his literary efforts as contributions to a philosophical system in the manner of Hegel and was therefore committed to locate each publication in the system as a whole, requiring each time retrospective adjustments to earlier 26 27

Johan Ludvig Heiberg, “Eftertale til Urania,” Intelligensblade, no. 44, February 1, 1844, Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1844, p. 227. sks 7, 229 /​cup1, 252. This protest against intentional fallacies—​to use the new critical term of William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley—​backfired on Kierkegaard a few years later, as he hesitated and eventually resisted to publish his own retrospective Point of View on my Work as an Author.

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projections of the architectonics of the entire edifice. By disclosing his plans before realizing them, Heiberg made himself an easy target for Notabene’s ridicule. In the preface to Prefaces Notabene observes that promises are the chief concern in contemporary literature and therefore vows … as soon as possible to realize a plan envisaged for thirty years, to publish a logical system, as soon as possible to fulfill my promise, made ten years ago, of an aesthetic system; furthermore, I promise an ethical and dogmatic system, and finally the system. As soon as this has appeared, generations to come will not even need to learn to write, because there will be nothing more to write, but only to read—​the system.28 This is an obvious parody of the vows that Heiberg had made in the preceding decades. In his announcement to the readers in the first issue of the second volume of Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post, published in 1828, Heiberg had declared his intention of establishing a true science of aesthetics, founded upon logic and capable of eliminating all arbitrariness in aesthetic judgments.29 When he finally got around to publishing his “System of Logic” ten years later, he announced in the preface that its purpose was “to pave the way for that aesthetics which I have wished to deliver for a long time, but have been unable to put forth without giving it a logical point of support in advance.”30 By 1844, Heiberg’s promise of a complete and systematic treatise of aesthetics had still not materialized. The vows were not exactly broken, but they were as yet unfulfilled. These gaps between promises and performances and deliveries receive great attention in Prefaces, but they are not ascribed to Heiberg’s personal shortcomings. Rather they are, as we shall see, regarded as a mark of the epoch. 3

Paratextualism

One way to humiliate an opponent is to view him or her as a symptom of the age, which is exactly what Kierkegaard is doing to Heiberg and Danish 28 29 30

sks 4, 478 /​P, 14. Johan Ludvig Heiberg, “Til Læserne ved den nye Aargangs Begyndelse,” Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post, no. 1, January 4, 1828, photographical reprint edition, ed. by Uffe Andreasen, (Copenhagen: Det danske Sprog-​og Litteraturselskab, 1980), vol. 2, p. 14. Johan Ludvig Heiberg, “Det Logiske System. Første Afhandling, Indeholdende: Paragrapherne 1–​23,” in Perseus, no. 2, 1838, p. 3.

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Hegelianism in this phase of the combat, to which Prefaces belongs. This strategy involves a particular kind of insult against Heiberg that has to do with their shared point of departure. In spite of their great differences, the literary ventures of Heiberg and Kierkegaard share a discursive basis in the tradition known in both German and Danish as Kulturkritik, cultural critique or cultural criticism. They both subscribed to a pathogenetic conception of contemporary culture, agreeing that it was, in fact, in a state of crisis.31 As to the diagnosis and treatment, they did, however, disagree. Heiberg had used the concept of crisis to introduce Hegel’s philosophy as a therapeutic measure.32 Kierkegaard instead redefined the efforts of Heiberg and the phenomenon of Hegelianism as part of the problem instead of the solution. This is made explicit in the Postscript, when Johannes Climacus comments that if “it were not reserved for our age totally to ignore existing, it would be unthinkable that wisdom such as the Hegelian could be considered the highest.”33 The triumph of speculative philosophy was, in other words, dependent upon a more far-​reaching abnormality of the age. Climacus discovered that “the deviation of speculative thought” was “located far deeper in the orientation of the whole age—​most likely in this, that because of much knowledge people have entirely forgotten what it means to exist and what inwardness is.”34 What Heiberg took to be the cure, objective knowledge, was represented by Climacus instead as the cause of contemporary disorder and confusion; forgetfulness of being was at the heart of the matter rather than ignorance of the goal, toward which all efforts were directed, as Heiberg asserted. Heiberg and Hegelianism were only regarded as symptoms of a general malaise, but not as the radix malorum. A typical move for Kierkegaard is to appropriate and reinterpret Heiberg’s critical observations while making the inventor into an object of them. A case in point would be Kierkegaard’s renowned analysis of the Nivellement of the age, the leveling, which he laid out in his Literary Review of Thomasine Gyllembourg’s short story Two Ages. It is a concept and a Zeitkritik that Kierkegaard had adopted from Heiberg, who introduced it in his pseudonymous “Letters to a Parson,” published in 1834, as a description of the 31

For a historical account of this line of thought, see Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society, trans. anonymously, Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 1988. 32 Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Om Philosophiens Betydning for Den Nuværende Tid, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel, 1833, p. 4; Johan Ludvig Heiberg, On the Significance of Philosophy for the Present Age and Other Texts, ed. and trans. by Jon Stewart, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 2005 (Texts from Golden Age Denmark, vol. 1), p. 87. 33 sks 7, 270 /​cup1, 297n. 34 sks 7, 220 /​cup1, 242.

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wish for political reforms.35 The occasion for this little epistolary fiction was the King’s establishment by law of four Advisory Provincial Assemblies, which was a momentous step towards the constitution of 1849 that replaced absolute monarchy with representative democracy. “Equality of circumstances is what popular politics aspires to,” Heiberg ventriloquized through the parson,36 who, while repeating Hegel’s theory of the state, viewed this tendency as a matter of intellectual levelling. Democracy to Heiberg equaled a multiplication of ignorant opinions. Furthermore, Heiberg’s essays on the distinction between “The People and Public” and “Authority” in the early issues of Intelligensblade from 1843 inspired Kierkegaard’s critique; in “these articles Heiberg was to provide virtually all of the conceptual armoury with which Kierkegaard was to analyze Two Ages and the ‘present age’ represented in it,” George Pattison has remarked.37 From the perspective of Kierkegaard, however, the phenomenon of Nivellement also comprised the homogenizing tendencies of speculative logic that would eventually resolve all apparent contradictions. As this was the logic promoted by Heiberg, he is thus associated with a phenomenon that he himself absolutely abhorred.

35

36 37

Johan Ludvig Heiberg, “Breve til en Landsbypræst,” Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post, issue 22–​24, 1834, photographical reprint edition by Uffe Andreasen, (Copenhagen: Det danske Sprog-​ og Litteraturselskab, 1980), vol. 4, p. 93. For an English translation of the letters, see Johan Ludvig Heiberg, “Letters to a Village Pastor,” in Heiberg’s Contingency Regarded from the Point of View of Logic and Other Texts, ed. and trans. by Jon Stewart, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press 2008 (Texts from Golden Age Denmark, vol. 4), pp. 199–​222. The provincial clerical epistolary, which Heiberg uses, is a topos in Danish literature. Going back to Steen Steensen Blicher’s canonical 1824 novella “Fragments from the Diary of a Parish Clerk,” this literary device can be traced through Heiberg’s “Letters to a Parson” to the concluding sermon of the second part of Kierkegaard’s Either/​Or (commended to B by the judge, who had received it in a letter from a priest in Jutland), up to Martin A. Hansen’s The Liar (1950) and Ole Wivel’s The Hidden God: Letters to a Priest (1952) and indeed, with certain modifications, to Thorkild Grosbøll’s non-​fictional A Stone in the Shoe from 2003, in which a priest in The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Denmark confessed that he did not believe in an interventionist God, thus provoking great scandal. The first-​person testimony of these texts is usually employed to stage encounters between official doctrine and personal (loss of) faith, and between the capital (where the parson has been trained) and the provincial horizon of the parishioners. For a perceptive evaluation of the sermon’s significance to the project of Either/​Or, see Robert L. Perkins: “Either/​Or/​Or: Giving the Parson His Due,” Either/​Or Part II, ed. by Robert Perkins, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1995 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 6), pp. 207–​231. Johan Ludvig Heiberg, “Breve Til En Landsbypræst,” p. 99. George Pattison, Kierkegaard, Religion, and the Nineteenth-​Century Crisis of Culture, Cambridge/​New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 65.

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The “whole direction” of the age was an issue upon which Heiberg felt very competent and often made authoritative and rather sweeping statements. He was considered to be the leading Danish authority on the “Spirit of the Times,” as Hegel called it,38 capable of tracing all phenomenal developments back to their common spiritual source and always able to tell the demands of the time.39 Heiberg was convinced of his ability to regard contemporary culture sub specie aeternitatis, which amounted to his rather Platonic conception of what speculation was about: “Only through a leap out of time, into the realm of ideas, may we arrive [at the bottom of things], and this is what all speculation consists of.”40 From this vantage point, which was characterized as either timeless or as located further down the road of the historical trajectory toward absolute knowledge, Heiberg believed that he could survey the total situation and tell the outcome of all current conflicts. But while Heiberg was certain that he was ahead of his time and the majority of his educated contemporaries, Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms revealed him to be instead a man of his time, in the pejorative sense of the phrase. Exposing him as unconsciously subjected to the Zeitgeist, which he believed himself to be raised above, was a way of debunking his claims. The way in which Prefaces does so is by aligning Heiberg’s writings with a certain generic configuration, pointing to a characteristic that these shared with many other publications of the age. This generic configuration, which Kierkegaard came to see as the salient feature of his literary epoch, was a certain condition that may be labelled “paratextualism.” The concept is derived from the word “paratext,” which has been introduced by the French narratologist Gerard Genette as a heuristic category for a whole range of textual practices—​such as titles, authorial appellations, notes, intertitles, mottos, dedications, interviews, epigraphs etc.—​that borders on the text and frames it in decisive ways.41 The paratext “in all its forms,” Genette says, is “a discourse that is fundamentally heteronomous, auxiliary, and dedicated to the service of 38

See, for instance, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “Philosophy as the thought of its time,” in Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. by E.S. Haldane, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955 pp. 53–​56. 39 See Heiberg, Om Philosophiens Betydning for Den Nuværende Tid. 40 Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Om Den Menneskelige Frihed. I Anledning om de nyeste Stridigheder over denne Gjenstand, Kiel: Universitets-​Boghandlingen, 1824, p. 91. 41 The concept has been applied exclusively to Prefaces before by Finn Frandsen (“Forord: Kierkegaards paratekst,” in Denne slyngelagtige eftertid. Tekster om Søren Kierkegaard, vols. 1–​2, ed. by Finn Frandsen and Ole Morsing (Aarhus: Modtryk, 1995), vol. 2, pp. 367–​385) and Mads Fedder Henriksen (“A Preface to the ‘Preface’ of Prefaces,” Kierkegaardiana, vol. 20, 1999, pp. 7–​29).

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something other than itself that constitutes its raison d’être. This something is the text.”42 This heteronomy had, however, been transformed into a curious kind of autonomy in the Danish literary culture that Kierkegaard inherited as a writer, creating the condition of paratextualism. This condition is characterized by the fact that the paratext had “emancipated” itself due to the excessive publicity and ensuing commotion surrounding the philosophical fervor of the age. Many paratexts no longer stood in service of any text but had taken on a life of their own. Heiberg was the main representative of the paratextualism that thrived in what Kierkegaard took to be a corrupted literary culture, manifesting itself in a number of textual forms. Paratexts were proliferating in the shape of prospectuses, introductions, invitations, feuilletons, programs, advertisements, preliminary investigations, Grundrisse and subscription plans for journals and books. These forms shared a certain temporality, as they were all presented as being prior to some greater text or event, which they anticipated or celebrated. Different pragmatic reasons explained their paratextual status. Frequently, first editions of scientific or scholarly works were only meant to be provisional for later, revised editions. Prepublication advertisements and prospectuses, in which the writer disposed of the work, as if it already existed, were, on the other hand, in many cases necessary to establish the financial foundation for publication—​something that Kierkegaard did not have to bother about because of his paternal inheritance. Paratexts were, however, also a class of textual practices on which Kierkegaard often focused his critique of the age.43 A case in point could be Climacus’ comparison, in Philosophical Fragments, of “the most recent philosophy” and “the most recent period,” both of which seem “to suffer from a strange inattention [Distraktion], confusing the performance with the caption, for who was ever so marvelous or so marvelously great as are the most recent philosophy and the most recent period—​in captions [Overskrifter].”44 Sensationalist captions were the place where the magnitude and marvel unfolded—​not inside or outside of the text, but in the strange zone between

42 43

44

Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, Cambridge/​New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 12. Paratexts were, furthermore, a textual domain in which Kierkegaard excelled—​deploying titles, mottos, pseudonymity, prefaces, and auto-​exegetic comments with much ingenuity. The title alone of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript illustrates his skillfulness, for where exactly does this predominantly formal title leave the publication—​as a conclusion and thus as a part of, or as an appendix to, the authorship? Is it a text or a paratext? sks 4, 273 /​pf, 73.

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them. A similar discrepancy is addressed by Vigilius Haufniensis, who, in The Concept of Anxiety, is more specific about the confusion of text and paratext so prevalent in his time: “Thus when an author entitles the last section of the Logic ‘Actuality,’ he thereby gains the advantage of making it appear that in logic the highest has already been achieved, or if one prefers, the lowest.”45 The achievement is, however, merely an appearance, a trick pulled by the logician, who is believed by an audience apparently unable to distinguish titles and texts, promises and performances. On a more abstract level this inability is addressed by Climacus in the Postscript when he notes that “the actuality of action is so often confused with all sorts of ideas, intentions, preliminaries to resolutions, preludes of mood, etc. that there is very seldom any action at all.”46 These preparatory measures were matched by the anticipatory current of Heiberg’s Hegelianism: “the purpose of the introduction to philosophy,” Heiberg wrote in his Guide to the Lectures on the Philosophy of Philosophy or the Speculative Logic (1831–​32), “is to lead into philosophy, that is, lead thinking from the region of representation, in which everyday reason moves, to the point where the concept, and with that, philosophy, begins.”47 These initial steps, by which the basic principles of philosophical thinking were laid out, did not count as philosophy, though. Such principles could not be deduced and proven at the same time, and for that reason “the introduction to philosophy falls outside philosophy,” Heiberg stressed.48 Philosophy had not begun yet, for the introduction was merely a preface—​a paratext—​to real philosophy. When F. C. Sibbern, Kierkegaard’s philosophy professor at the University of Copenhagen, in 1838 delivered an extensive critique of Heiberg’s Hegelianism, he turned this assumption on its head, remarking that “the introduction to philosophy actually then becomes the whole of philosophy itself.”49 The paratext, the introduction, would eventually become the whole text. Climacus was aware of the potential confusion of these systematic ambitions with commercial considerations. It might be, he suggests, that the systematic 45 46 47

sks 4, 317-​318 /​ca, 9, italics added. sks 7, 311 /​cup1, 340. Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Outline of the Philosophy of Philosophy or Speculative Logic in Heiberg’s Speculative Logic and Other Texts, ed. and trans. by Jon Stewart, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 2006 (Texts from Golden Age Denmark, vol. 2), p. 46. 48 Ibid. 49 F. C. Sibbern, “Perseus, Joumal for den speculative Idee. Udgiven af Johan Ludvig Heiberg. Nr. 1, Juni 1837. Kjøbenhavn. Reitzels Forlag. xiv og 264 S. 8. Priis 1 Rbd. 84 Skill.—​(Med stadigt Hensyn til Dr. Rothes: Læren om Treenighed og Forsoning. Et speculativt Forsøg i Anledning af Reformationsfesten.),” review in Maanedsskrift for Litteratur, issue 19, (Copenhagen, 1838), p. 327.

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label favored by Heiberg and his fellow Hegelians was nothing but a matter of marketing, designed to meet the expectations of a reading public accustomed to large claims and marvelous captions. “Perhaps the systematician thinks this way: If on the title page or in the newspaper I call my production a continued striving for the truth, alas, who will buy it or admire me; but if I call it the system, the absolute system, everyone will buy the system—​if only the difficulty did not remain that what the systematician is selling is not the system.”50 The title page was, in other words, a misleading trade description. To the degree that the greater texts or events that these paratexts anticipated, did not materialize—​as was the case with Heiberg’s promises and preparations for an aesthetic system—​they had indeed become autonomous. From a generic point of view, one could claim that the paratext had divorced from the text and embarked upon its own adventures. It seemed to have been released from its obligations to the text. 4

Simulated Motions

What the concept of the paratext makes apparent is that certain correlates exist between Prefaces and a series of predominantly scientific genres in contemporary literary culture. The separation of text and paratext, which has now been located in the rather local domain of Danish literature, is indeed the exact point of departure for Nicolaus Notabene, who, in Prefaces, adopts it as a conscious strategy in his program for the emancipated preface. It is defined by him both in terms of its content and its effect: “The preface as such, the liberated preface, must … have no subject to treat but must deal with nothing, and insofar as it seems to discuss something and deal with something, this must nevertheless be an illusion and a fictitious motion.”51 The poetics of the liberated preface would have to be a conjuring trick, like the one the logician pulls by his use of titles. The preface was a kind of literary correlate to the epochal self-​consciousness of Kierkegaard’s contemporaries. The phrase that Notabene uses to describe the performance, “fingeret Bevægelse” in Danish, has been translated by Todd W. Nichol into “fictitious motion.” It had been used earlier by Kierkegaard in another text, a draft for a direct response to Heiberg’s review of Repetition entitled “A Little Contribution By Constantin Constantius Author of Repetition.” In the translation of this

50 51

sks 7, 105 /​cup1, 108. sks 4, 468 /​P, 5.

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text by Howard Hong, the phrase has been rendered as “simulated motion.” Etymologically speaking, the Danish adjective “fingeret” in the phrase can be traced back to the Latin word fingo, meaning “to create forms,” “to invent” or “to pretend,” which is also the source for the well-​known word fiction, but its broader connotations are more adequately expressed with the word “simulated.” The two places where the phrase occurs are significant to the project of Prefaces. In the draft for the response to the review of Repetition (which is likely to have been the decisive impetus to Prefaces), the phrase is used in a generalizing statement on the current condition of Danish literature, reporting that although “literature today demonstrates that practically nothing is being done one can scarcely hear a word because of the promises, trumpet blasts, subscription hawking, toasts, announcements, assurances, compliments, etc. In this simulated motion, the year marches on.”52 What was going on in the realm of Danish literature and intellectual life was a kind of pseudo-​movement, creating a hubbub concealing the fact that nothing was actually accomplished. The annual rhythms of Danish literature served only to make time pass more or less agreeably, which was the exact same purpose as that which the genre of Morskabslæsning catered for. By appropriating the label of Morskabslæsning, affiliated with the name of A. P. Liunge, Prefaces associates the distinguished, conservative Heiberg with his complete contrast and political arch-​enemy, Liunge, by suggesting that their literary entrepreneurships served similar objectives. Prefaces is a reply from the sociological field of light literature that Kierkegaard’s first pseudonymous and immensely ambitious work had been deported to by Heiberg in his review that treated Either/​Or as merely an event in terms of literary journalism, refusing to take it seriously. Prefaces, by contrast, begs not to be taken seriously, thus immunizing itself against such denigrating treatment. The appearance of the phrase “simulated motion” in both Prefaces and Kierkegaard’s review of Danish literature confirms the mimical nature of Notabene’s text and verifies that it does indeed serve to simulate the simulated motions that were taking place around him. Deliberately, Prefaces copies and extravagates this mode of functioning in order to be amusing. In doing so, Prefaces does, nevertheless, also resume a theme that is recurrent in Kierkegaard’s authorship: the problem of motion. The constant concern with motion, which is considered by him in the entire semantic range of the word, has been captured well by John D. Caputo, who highlights how 52

sks 15, 66 /​R, 301n.

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Kierkegaard “wants to put real movement, genuine kinesis” against the tradition of “immanence” and “speculation” and its “theory of pseudomovement, meant to take the sting out of the flux.”53 This is a classical philosophical problem, and one to which Kierkegaard sought to make a substantive contribution, especially in Repetition. In this work he had levelled the same charge against modern philosophy as the one he makes against Danish literature in general: “Modern Philosophy makes no movement; as a rule it makes only a commotion, and if it makes any movement at all, it is always within immanence, whereas repetition is and remains a transcendence.”54 Real movement was to be found neither in philosophical nor in general literature at the time; the motions on display were rather made, simulated. This is a fundamental critique of a philosophical movement that derived motion from the immanent, universal development of logic, and it is, again, an attempt to deprive Hegelian philosophy of its exceptional position above contemporary culture, ascribing it instead to a more comprehensive cultural and textual condition of the age. Later, Kierkegaard developed these observations on the lack of real action into a full-​fledged critique of the age in the Literary Review (1846). In it he contrasts his own age with the age of revolution in the late eighteenth century. Despite its recklessness, the age of revolution had passion and thus a certain power to act, which the present age lacks completely: “In contrast to the age of revolution, which took action, the present age is an age of publicity, the age of miscellaneous announcements: nothing happens but still there is instant publicity.“55 Kierkegaard asserts in the Review that a real performance would be unthinkable in both contemporary politics and science. In the age of enlightenment, scholarly achievements on the scale of the 32-​volume French Encyclopedia, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, could come into being. In Kierkegaard’s own age of reflection, such a tour de force was simply inconceivable. A contemporary “scientific virtuoso” would, instead, perform a different “feat” [Kunststykke]: “He would casually outline a few features of a comprehensive system and do it in such a way that the reader (of the prospectus) would get the impression that he had already read the system.”56

53

John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987, pp. 13–​14. See also his “Heidegger, Kierkegaard and the Foundering of Metaphysics,” in Fear and Trembling and Repetition, ed. by Robert Perkins, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1993 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 6) pp. 201–​224. 54 sks 4, 56–​57 /​R, 186. 55 sks 8, 68 /​lr, 70. 56 Ibid.

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“Kunststykke” appears here in the meaning of trick, and the (Hegelian) scientist, once again, as an illusionist, a conjurer, who is able to make the reader believe that he or she has actually read the phantomlike system. A common feature of these diatribes against contemporary philosophy is that they depict it as a kind of make-​believe, performed by magicians and believed by an audience desiring to be duped. This is, of course, not particularly flattering to a philosophical enterprise, Hegelianism, which conceived of itself as the continuation of rationalism. But, more specifically, the accusation of illusionism is also a clue to the more local address of the text. The domain in which Heiberg had won his claim to fame, the theatre, is the space usually reserved for the production of simulated movements for the sake of commercial entertainment.57 The recurrent analogies between Hegelian philosophy and the art of make-​believe and magic insinuate an underlying affinity between Heiberg’s dramatic, literary and philosophical activities—​that he was indeed a juggler in all areas. It confirms once again that the primary target of the satire in Prefaces was the celebrated vaudevillist of contemporary Copenhagen. Considered from this perspective, Prefaces is, of course, neither a sophisticated critique of an opponent nor a “substantive philosophical statement,” as Stewart rightly suggests; but it is an insult that is wrapped in much obliqueness and ingenuity.58 Furthermore, it is enclosed in a text that provides a picture of the corrupted and distracted literary culture, now referred to as the Golden Age of Danish literature, against which Kierkegaard took action. Prefaces’ concern with issues of diversion, distraction, divertissement, and divorce implies that the “direction of the age” appeared to be wrong, and the book points to a number of phenomena that contributed to its malaise. Leaving aside the question of the fairness—​or indeed the truth-​value—​of Notabene’s judgments, his light reading deserves attention for its excellent testimony to Kierkegaard’s conception of the conditions of that literary public sphere to which his pseudonymous writings were addressed. Prefaces echoes, one could say, the pandemonium of miscellaneous announcements against which Kierkegaard’s polyphonic choir of pseudonymous voices was directed. 57 58

For an inquiry into the significance of Heiberg’s theater criticism to Kierkegaard’s aesthetics, see George Pattison, “Søren Kierkegaard: A Theatre Critic of the Heiberg School,” British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 23, no. 1, 1983, pp. 25–​34. Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, p. 446.

­c hapter 5

The Immortality of the Soul and the Death (and Resurrection) of Art in Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript The Concluding Unscientific Postscript was released in late February 1846 as the eighth volume of pseudonymous writings to appear from Søren Kierkegaard’s hand. It is written by a 32-​year-​old man who was preparing himself for death. Because of the curse that was believed to hang over his family, Kierkegaard was convinced—​not least from the strong precedent of his five deceased siblings—​ that he probably would not make it past his 34th year. The strong epitomizing tendencies of the Postscript can be understood in terms of this predicament; it reads, at times, as an adieu and an epilogue to the preceding pseudonymous writings. It, however, also forms a sequel to one of these publications in particular, Philosophical Fragments, which had come out two years earlier in the name of the same pseudonymous author: Johannes Climacus. The longer title of the text, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, testifies to this connection. And actually, the point of departure for the Postscript is a question that had already been addressed, and which has, in fact, been lifted directly from the title page of Philosophical Fragments. The question at the center of the Postscript is a profound one: “How can something historical be decisive for an eternal happiness?”1 The historical something alluded to is the event of the incarnation, the appearance of the eternal one in historical space and time, which would remain eternally inaccessible to human understanding according to Climacus’ scrutiny. Theologically speaking, one could say that Climacus rephrases the communicatio idiomatum, the coexistence of mutually contradictory attributes in Christ, as a temporal paradox, emphasizing the contradiction between his temporal and eternal natures. This intersection of time and eternity constitutes a focal point for Climacus’ considerations both in Philosophical Fragments and in the Postscript. In musical terms, the latter may thus be considered a variation of a theme that had been treated before. Featured as the absolute paradox, the incarnation holds a special prominence in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript as well as in the history of reception 1 sks 7, 92 /​cup1, 94.

© Lasse Horne Kjældgaard, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004472068_006

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of this work, from which it has entered nineteenth-​century Protestant theology as one of Kierkegaard’s controversial contributions.2 There is, however, an aspect of this question carried over from the Philosophical Fragments, which has almost escaped attention in Kierkegaard scholarship: that is, the question of the immortality of the soul, which is actually what is at stake for any individual who wants to commit himself to Christianity, according to Climacus. “How can Christianity, based upon the historical event of the incarnation, be the foundation of any expectations of a future life, of a hereafter, of eternal salvation?,” would be another way of stating the question that Climacus pursues in the Postscript after having posed it already in Philosophical Fragments. This issue of the immortality of the soul is, as we shall see, inextricably intertwined with the question of the incarnation returned to by Climacus. That it is a matter of vital concern for him is obvious from his preliminary self-​presentation: I, Johannes Climacus, born and bred in this city and now thirty years old, an ordinary human being like most folk, assume that a highest good, called an eternal happiness, awaits me just as it awaits a housemaid and a professor. I have heard that Christianity is one’s prerequisite for this good. I now ask how I may enter into relation to this doctrine.3 As is apparent from this opening statement, the immortality of the soul, or the attainment of an eternal happiness, is put front and center of Climacus’ personal agenda. The priority of this issue is confirmed by similar statements of purpose, imitating juridical-​contractual discourse with the fairly pedantic specification of the antecedent of the personal pronoun (“I, Johannes Climacus”), which are repeated throughout the Postscript as reminders that it is a purely personal matter that motivates the publication, namely, the question of how Climacus “may enter into relation” [“hvorledes kommer jeg i Forhold til denne Lære”] to Christianity and its promise of a future life as the summum bonum. The quotation marks around the statement is cautiously placed there by Climacus himself in order to stress that he is not posing the question for real but only citing a hypothetical example of how the question could be posed—​ “using myself in an imaginatively constructing way [experimenterende],” as he says.4 This is in keeping with the general shift of emphasis in the Postscript 2 See Louis Dupré, Kierkegaard as Theologian: The Dialectic of Christian Existence, New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963. 3 sks 7, 560 /​cup1, 617. 4 sks 7, 26 /​cup1, 15.

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that boldly attempts to turn the focus away from “the truth of Christianity” to the “individual’s relation to Christianity.”5 In his efforts to give practical effect to this change in course, the question of the immortality of the soul plays an important role, which I will consider in this chapter. Bringing up the issue of the immortality of the soul was, in the context where the Postscript was published, a gesture of a certain polemical import. In the preceding decade, the Christian dogma of the immortality of the soul had in Germany become one of the most hotly contested topics in intellectual life. In the wake of the death of G. W. F. Hegel in 1831, the question whether the individual soul was immortal or not, had moved to the center of both public and philosophical debate. Hegelians had divided into two branches according to what stand they took on the issue: Left Hegelians denied the immortality of the individual soul but maintained a belief in the immortality of the collective spirit, whereas the Right Hegelians endorsed Christian orthodoxy on this and several other issues. The Left emphasized the incompatibility of Hegelian philosophy and Christian theology, whereas the Right held onto a conception of Christianity as the source and foundation of Hegelian philosophy as well as culture in general.6 The German intellectual historian Karl Löwith once noted that it “is difficult today to conceive of the vividness of the controversies over the questions of the God-​man, the personal God and the immortality of the soul, so obvious to us is already the destructive event of the critique of religion levelled by Hegel’s pupils.”7 Imagining this intensity has not become easier for us in the meantime. Nonetheless, this issue was an inescapable element of the intellectual horizon in Kierkegaard’s formative years, while the eschatological controversies spread to Denmark during the 1830’s.

5 Ibid. 6 For an account of these divisions of Hegel’s followers, see William J. Brazill, The Young Hegelians, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970, and, for detailed studies of the significance of the controversies over the immortality of the soul, Wilhelm Stähler, Zur Unsterblichkeitsproblematik in Hegels Nachfolge, Münster: Universitas-​Verlag, 1928, Walter Jaeschke, Die Vernunft in der Religion. Studien zur Grundlegung der Religionsphilosophie Hegels, Stuttgart-​Bad Cannstatt 1986, pp. 361–​436; Olaf Briese, Der Anspruch des Subjekts. Zum Unsterblichkeitsdenken im Jungen Deutschland. Stuttgart: M & P, 1995; and Jon Stewart, “Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion and the Question of ’Right’ and ’Left’ Hegelianism,” in Douglas Moggach (ed.), Politics, Religion, and Art: Hegelian Debates, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2011, pp. 66–​95 (especially pp. 66–​75). 7 Karl Löwith, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche. Der revolutionäre Bruch im Denken des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, Stuttgart: Metzler, 1988, p. 65.

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What I want to do here is to survey this historical horizon and look at the role played by the question of the immortality of the soul in the mind and imagination of two of the Danish intellectuals that had the most profound influence on the formation of Kierkegaard in the 1830’s: Poul Martin Møller and Johan Ludvig Heiberg. Especially, I want to focus on how the question pertained to issues of art and communication in their statements on the subject. These issues are closely interrelated in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, where they are important to Climacus’ development of the concept of existence-​ communication. The nexus between these issues, art and the immortality of the soul, assumed by Climacus in the Postscript, is one with a previous history in the local context. The question of the immortality of the soul was indeed of great significance to aesthetic theory, as the key conception of art in Denmark at the time turned around it. It was a time, one could say, of epistemological turbulence in which the boundaries between the different social systems—​art, philosophy and religion—​were renegotiated, and in these negotiations I will argue that the question of the immortality of the soul held a supremely important position.8 What I will attempt to do is therefore to look at the Concluding Unscientific Postscript as an intervention into the on-​going dialogue about this question in Danish intellectual life at the time. 1

The Immortality of the Soul and the Death of Art

Although the commotion caused by the left Hegelian movement in Germany was transmitted to Denmark, it would be unwarranted to assert that it gained any strong footing in Copenhagen intellectual circles. It did not happen, broadly speaking, until the literary critic Georg Brandes, Kierkegaard’s first biographer, pushed his agenda forward with much persuasiveness in the early 1870s. Even so, left Hegelian views on the immortality of the soul were expressed in the public debate of the 1830s, and the most prominent and articulate voice that advocated these views was Johan Ludvig Heiberg. One of the possible explanations why denial of the immortality of the soul was not particularly outspoken in Denmark in the 1830s was the legal restraint imposed on the press. According to section five of the existing press law, 8 This way of stating the issue is informed by Niklas Luhmann’s description of the differentiation of art from other social systems in Art as a Social System, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. The use of the term “aesthetic communication” is derived from Gerhard Plumpe’s Ästhetische Kommunikation der Moderne, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1993.

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introduced in 1799, it was prohibited to distribute writings that sought to undermine the belief in the immortality of the soul.9 The penalty for the offence was banishment for a period from three to ten years, which may be taken as a clear indication of the powerful institutional interests invested in maintaining the doctrine, and, of course, in upholding the adherent belief in the wages of sin and virtue, which, undoubtedly, served as a disciplinary measure. It did not, however, hold Heiberg back from speaking out rather directly on the issue, even in spite of the fact that the press law had been specifically designed to enforce exile upon his father back in 1799.10 He disclaimed on several occasions the Christian doctrine of the immortality of the soul and its inherent notion of an individual post-​mortal judgment.11 Nevertheless, Heiberg’s most seditious statements on the subject were not downright disavowals of the immortality of the soul but rather matter-​of-​fact observations of the overall loss of faith in this doctrine and of the undeniable decline of art and religion. These statements were published in his 1833 pamphlet On the Significance of Philosophy for the Present Age, in which Heiberg made a strong claim for the supremacy of philosophy over lower forms of knowledge such as religion and poetry and art, importing to Denmark Hegel’s rumor of the death of art,12 known to him from Kollegieheften collected in Berlin.13 In this account the 9 10 11

12

13

See Harald Jørgensen, Trykkefrihedsspørgsmaalet i Danmark 1799–​ 1848. Et bidrag til en karakteristik af den danske enevælde i Frederik VI’s og Christian VIII’s tid, Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1944, pp. 32ff. For a succinct account of the life of Heiberg’s father, P.A. Heiberg, and his role in Danish history, see Henning Fenger, The Heibergs, trans. by Frederick Marker, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1971. As, for instance, in Johan Ludvig Heiberg, “Et Par Ord om det Uendelige,” Kjøbenhavns Flyvende Post, ed. by Uffe Andreasen, vol. 2, no. 100, Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog-​og Litteraturselskab/​C.A. Reitzel, 1981, translated as Johan Ludvig Heiberg, “A Few Words about the Infinite,” in Heiberg’s Contingency Regarded from the Point of View of Logic and Other Texts, ed. and trans. by Jon Stewart, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press 2008 (Texts from Golden Age Denmark, vol. 4), pp. 161–​166; Johan Ludvig Heiberg “Bretschneiders Forsvar for Rationalismen,” Kjøbenhavns Flyvende Post, ed. by Uffe Andreasen, vol. 3, issues nos. 101–​105 and 107–​110, Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog-​og Litteraturselskab/​C.A. Reitzel, 1981. Addressing Hegel’s influential thesis of the death of art as a “rumor,” which also owes to the fact that it was not, at the time, recorded in any authorized publication (Hegel’s Aesthetics was posthumously published by his student H.G. Hotho, and the first volume did not appear before 1835), is derived from Eva Geulen, Das Ende der Kunst: Lesarten eines Gerüchts nach Hegel, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002. As documented by Heiberg’s letter to Hegel in February 1825: Johan Ludvig Heiberg Breve og aktstykker vedrørende Johan Ludvig Heiberg, ed. by Morten Borup, Copenhagen: Gyldendal/​ Det Danske Sprog-​og Litteraturselskab, 1946, vol. 1, p. 162, translated as Johan Ludvig

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question of the immortality of the soul played a discrete but very substantial part in Heiberg’s claim, and he substantiated it by reference to the supposed inability of art and religion to provide certainty in this issue. If one goes through Heiberg’s text in search of a straight argument or any evidence in favor of the development that he charts, only one reason can be found, which takes the shape of a rhetorical question: Is there, Heiberg asks, anyone “among the honest believers of our age—​that is, those who lie only to themselves but not to others—​[…] who, if God’s existence and the immortality of the soul could be proved to him as clearly as a mathematical proposition, would not with eagerness, indeed thankfulness, seize the proof and feel infinitely happier than theretofore?”14 The alleged absence of such a person, who would not give away his intimations and emotions for real, robust knowledge—​patterned after the standards of mathematical proof—​was, in the eyes of Heiberg, a clear indication that the stocks of poetry and religion had gone down drastically, and that these forms of knowledge were now a lot less authoritative than the proclamations of philosophy. The adaptation of faith to mathematical truth was the common desire that Heiberg served as a self-​appointed spokesman for. Richard Rorty has remarked upon the ancient inclination of philosophy “to be impressed with the special character of mathematical truth” that “such paradigmatically necessary truths as the axioms of geometry are supposed to have no need of justification, of argument, of discussion.”15 Of such a nature was indeed the kind of assurance, eliminating all doubt and religious scruples that had to be subjectively solved, which Heiberg believed contemporary true believers were craving for. From Heiberg’s perspective, the religious turmoil of the time was nothing less than the dawn of a new epoch in the history of humanity, in which the most convincing and commanding statements were scientific and based on logic—​Hegelian logic that is. Logical proofs were in demand; religious conjectures and poetic fancies were not. Religious creeds as well as poetic representations had to pass the test of philosophy in order to make any claim for validity. In a similar vein, he had, the year before, interpreted the resurgence of interest

14 15

Heiberg, “A Letter to Hegel,” in Heiberg’s On the Significance of Philosophy for the Present Age and Other Texts, ed. and trans. by Jon Stewart, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 2005 (Texts from Golden Age Denmark, vol. 1), pp. 69–​72. Johan Ludvig Heiberg, On the Significance of Philosophy for the Present Age and Other Texts, ed. and trans. by Jon Stewart, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 2005 (Texts from Golden Age Denmark, vol. 1, p. 96. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979, p. 158.

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in the question of the immortality of the soul, and the accompanying desires for philosophy to deliver a rigorous proof, as a sign “that art and especially religion—​which are supposed to provide immediate certainty [Vished], needing no proof, both of this and of the existence of God—​have lost their greatest and most important influence on people.”16 Luckily, though, philosophical discourse was both willing and able to step in and cater to this need, which religion, art and poetry could no longer satisfy. In the pamphlet On the Significance of Philosophy for the Present Age, Heiberg retold Hegel’s grand narrative of how the history of the different symbolic forms, in which Spirit has manifested itself historically, had culminated now with the appointment of philosophy as the purveyor of the highest truth. In the current situation, religion had a choice between either merging with philosophy or maintaining independence, which would, in either case, result in its inevitable downfall. Poetry, still, was able to blend with philosophy and benefit from the alliance, making it possible and theoretically justifiable for Heiberg to sustain his primary occupation as a dramatist and poet. So, even though Heiberg was a conservative and an ardent Right Hegelian in political matters, being a staunch supporter of state absolutism, he was, nevertheless, rather left-​leaning in his takes on theology and aesthetics. It is true that he never embraced the antagonism that Hegelians of the Left generally wanted to establish between philosophy and theology, and that he never participated in any direct or substantial critique of religion. A plausible explanation for this avoidance of confrontation is, however, his conviction that the decline of religion would follow by design: that religion would be abolished, no matter what, or swallowed, quite simply, by philosophy due to the necessities of the development of spirit.17 16

17

Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Ledetraad ved Forelæsningerne over Philosophiens Philosophie eller den speculative Logik ved den kongelige militaire Højskole 1831–​1832 (1832), p. 114, Outline of the Philosophy of Philosophy or Speculative Logic in Heiberg’s Speculative Logic and Other Texts, ed. and trans. by Jon Stewart, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 2006 (Texts from Golden Age Denmark, vol. 2), p. 96. As is apparent from these quotations, Heiberg’s statements on the mutually related crises of art and religion are even more direct than Hegel’s declaration of the death of art (which may be taken as a euphemism for the death of religion). For this reason, I do not share George Pattison’s perception that this “limitation of art in relation to philosophy—​and, indeed, within the larger compass of Hegel’s system in relation also to religion—​does not register to anything like the same degree in Heiberg’s writings. As a man of the theatre, Heiberg was not about subordinating art to philosophy, but subordinating a less adequate form and understanding of art—​that of Romanticism—​to his own more intellectualistic practice” (George Pattison, Kierkegaard, Religion and the Nineteenth-​Century Crisis of Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 101). Heiberg, who was a

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Art as an Anticipation of the Afterlife

As one could predict, Heiberg’s statements offended the religious sensibilities of his contemporaries, causing controversies in the years to follow. One of those who protested was Poul Martin Møller, Heiberg’s old friend and Kierkegaard’s revered teacher of philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, who engaged in a sustained but covert dialogue with Heiberg. The year before he died, in early 1837, Møller reacted against the denial of immortality by publishing an article in Maanedskrift for Litteratur entitled “Thoughts on the Possibility of Proving the Immortality of Man.” The article, almost a hundred pages long, considers a number of possible logical demonstrations of the immortality of the soul, but it does so only in order to conclude that the task is impossible. Prior to the publication of the article, Møller had outlined the thrust of his argument in an aphorism, stating that “he who champions the immortality of the soul is now unable to make a claim to universal validity.”18 The immortality of the soul was an article of faith that could no longer be conveyed through the medium of everyday language, Møller believed. Of course, it was possible for any person to declare that “I believe in the immortality of the soul,” but such a confession would be sure to misfire in the linguistic environment of the age, as the expression itself had become a cliché that could almost only be used in a figurative sense. It had become stale or overburdened and lost its efficacy, Møller contended. He held that this was not only a matter of routine and ordinary linguistic change. The semantic evolution was, in fact, the linguistic surface of a large-​scale secularization in progress. One religious belief system that had secured the dogma of the immortality of the soul was being phased out, and a new one that could revitalize it, had not yet come into being. The linguistic manifestation of this was the fact that the immortality of the soul had become a hackneyed metaphor, which many hesitated to use and tried to substitute with other expressions. But, Møller said, “despite of their numerous attempts to bring new expressions into currency, such as the idea of personality, the individual perduring, and so forth, no expression has hitherto been able to achieve the general validity of the old expression, and some have therefore returned to the old

populariser of Hegel’s philosophy, can, on the contrary, be regarded as more candid about the death of art and religion than Hegel. 18 Poul Martin Møller, Skrifter i Udvalg, ed. by Vilhelm Andersen, Copenhagen: Holbergselskabet af 23. September/​G.E.C. Gads Forlag, 1930, vol. 2, pp. 351f.

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manner of speaking, but by doing so, they have only added to the confusion.”19 This was the peculiar linguistic and legal situation that Møller found himself in: The proponents of the immortality of the soul were unable to profess their creed, while the opponents were, at least in Denmark, restrained by the penal code from saying what they really believed and disbelieved, thus preventing any dispute from actually taking place. Møller found this state of affairs regrettable, as he believed a free discussion would reveal the ultimate absurdity of the denial and promote a renewed faith in a future life. He therefore spoke in favor of easing the restrictions that precluded the opponents from speaking out. The contention that the decline of belief in the immortality of the soul had ramifications for art—​that it was, actually, connected to the crisis and eventual death of art—​was one which Møller shared with Heiberg. According to Møller, this connection was of a causal kind. He held that the abandonment of the belief in the immortality of the soul was the cause of the death of art. This was due to his core definition of the experience of art as an anticipation of post mortal salvation—​that is, of the bliss that would surely follow in afterlife. If no such afterlife was believed to exist, art would simply become an empty gesture, anticipating nothing. He therefore concluded: With dogmatic negation of immortality no art can exist. In order that man can retain his force to rise to the regions of the higher imagination, he must either with a kind of unreflected immortality use life as an eternity without any clear notion of its brevity, or he must hold a conviction of the reality of the concept of immortality. … Yes, many have perhaps themselves used the same tirade, and yet only considered it as a quick rhetorical figure, but what is said here is meant literally: True art is an anticipation of life in a state of bliss.20 This definition of art, to which we shall return later, is indeed the key formula on the nature of art and aesthetic experience among the most prominent Danish poets and aestheticians of the 1830s, at the time when Kierkegaard took up aesthetic theory. Møller’s highlighting of his literal use of the expression alludes to Heiberg; several had perhaps used it as a “quick rhetorical figure,” but Heiberg, in particular, had advocated this view on art in a metaphorical sense. Viewed 19 20

Poul Martin Møller, “Tanker over Muligheden af Beviser for Menneskets Udødelighed, med Hensyn til den nyeste derhen hørende Literatur,” Maanedsskrift for Litteratur, no. 17, 1837, p. 14. Ibid., p. 53.

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in context, the phrase owed its currency to Heiberg’s deployment of it in On the Significance of Philosophy for the Present Age, in which he declared that in art and poetry one ought “to enjoy in the present what one otherwise, under the name of another life, expects in the future.”21 Heiberg’s wording here, dissociating his discourse from the conventional meaning of a “another life,” reveals the deep dogmatic discrepancy between him and Møller. Møller held onto a traditional Christian eschatology in his conception of art’s anticipation of the immortality of the soul, which Heiberg abandoned for an immanent and non-​theological understanding of it. Whereas Møller believed that aesthetic experience—​described by him within a Kantian framework as a harmonious, free interaction between imagination and understanding—​was a temporary foretaste of the perpetual blessedness that was to follow ever after, Heiberg rather conceived of it as a moment of great intensity, a certain elation following from the fact that one was in touch with the collective, immortal spirit. To both of them aesthetic gratification had, yet, a deeply edifying aspect, inasmuch as it either gave assurance of the bliss one could expect in an afterlife where all conflicts and contradictions that martyred human existence had been resolved, or it made you feel in sync with the immortal spirit, thus overcoming death before dying, as Heiberg believed you actually could.22 Heiberg confirms, then, the point advanced by Møller that the immortality of the soul had become a more or less free-​floating signifier that could be used to refer to a great many things except for the Christian orthodoxy that Møller believed in. A semantic evolution had taken place that made the relations between denotation and connotation in this phrase highly unstable: Did “immortality of the soul” signify a continued existence for the individual after death, or did it refer to an intensified experience in life, when one surrendered to the immanent spirit? Consequently, the expression, the “immortality of the soul,” had become a kind of permanent catachresis, which was continually used in contexts that differed from its proper but somehow lost application. Kierkegaard joined in on this contention in the second of his Three Upbuilding Discourses from 1844, stating that “eternal salvation seems to have

21 Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Om Philosophiens Betydning for den nuværende Tid, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel, 1833, p. 20; Heiberg, On the Significance of Philosophy for the Present Age, p. 97. 22 See Heiberg, Ledetraad ved Forelæsningerne over Philosophiens Philosophie eller den speculative Logik ved den kongelige militaire Højskole 1831–​1832, Copenhagen, 1832, pp. 114f.; Outline of the Philosophy of Philosophy or Speculative Logic in Heiberg’s Speculative Logic and Other Texts, ed. and trans. by Jon Stewart, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 2006 (Texts from Golden Age Denmark, vol. 2), p. 198.

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become what the thought of it has become, a loose and idle phrase, at times virtually forgotten, or arbitrarily left out of the language, or indifferently set aside as an old-​fashioned turn of speech no longer used but retained only because it is so quaint.”23 What concerned both Kierkegaard and Møller in these linguistic observations was not the question whether the immortality of the soul was only imaginary or obsolete but rather, to borrow Northrop Frye’s pertinent phrase, “the question of what resources of language may be dead or obsolete.”24 Møller and Kierkegaard—​and later, as we have seen, Karl Löwith—​depicted the demise of the belief in immortality as a destructive event. But there was, however, also a strong creative side to this semantic instability: It turned the immortality of the soul into a highly productive metaphor in Danish art and literature and aesthetic theory, a kind of master-​trope of the time, one could say. The most obvious case in point is Heiberg’s so-​called “apocalyptic comedy,” the closet drama A Soul after Death that was published in late 1840 and hailed in its time as a Christian didactic poem, although it can, in fact, be perceived as a poetic proclamation of the immanent, left Hegelian views on art and immortality that Heiberg had disseminated up through the 1830s. But also Møller’s “Thoughts on the Possibility of Proving the Immortality of the Soul” illustrates the point and confirms the literary productivity sparked by the immortality issue, for, stylistically speaking, the treatise is not a run-​of-​the-​mill philosophical intervention. The ways in which it confronts Heiberg’s views of the death of art and the decline of belief in the immortality of the soul are extraordinary from a literary perspective. For, suddenly, in the middle of his philosophical exposition of the intricacies of proving the immortality of the soul, Møller changes the text from a discursive to a narrative mode of presentation, unfolding a little fictitious anecdote intended to visualize the mood of which he is speaking. This narrative excursus can be regarded as a practical defense of the necessity of art as a complementary mode to philosophical discourse. The anecdote coheres with the epistemology Møller wants to defend, which was diametrically opposed to Heiberg’s theory of the nature and the grounds of knowledge that idealized mathematical truth needing no further explanation or deliberation on behalf of the recipient. Against Heiberg’s aggrandizement of conceptual understanding, Møller endeavored to restore dignity to emotions, which he proclaimed to be the primary faculty of cognition and the true motivating force in the history of philosophy. An idea could not be compelling, 23 24

sks 5, 251 /​eud, 254. Northrop Frye, The Great Code. The Bible and Literature, New York & London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982, p. 17.

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he argued, if it did not correspond with the emotional conviction of those to be persuaded. Emotional conviction was, in other words, more deep-​rooted than intellectual opinion. In the present transitional period, where one belief system was superseding another, there was an increased risk that these two psychological levels would be out of joint. This potential discrepancy between private convictions or insecurities and public declarations was a topic of concern for Møller in the last years of his life, where he worked on a separate treatise on certain forms of self-​deception labelled by him “Affectation.” In “Thoughts on the Possibility of Proving the Immortality of Man” he applied the term specifically to deniers of the immortality of the soul, who were prone to deceive themselves in their apparently self-​assured refutation of a future life that might cover deeper-​lying fears or hopes or insecurities in relation to the issue. This remark was also a way to retaliate against Heiberg, who, as we may recall, had defined true believers as those who only lie to themselves, not to others. Møller, instead, believed the opponents of immortality to be the true victims of self-​deception. When left Hegelians asserted the absolute termination of individual existence in death, it was very likely to be a kind of intellectual display that was out of touch with their emotional convictions, eschatological expectations, hopes and fears. Møller’s observation is comparable to what Schopenhauer had pointed out, namely that “deep down,” no one “really” believes in his own death.25 So, the question of the immortality of the soul did not only divide intellectuals into different tribes; it also divided the single individual, who was tempted to deny immortality on an intellectual level while still remaining doubtful—​or even hopeful—​on a more emotional level. Insincerity was thriving, Møller believed, on both sides of the chasm that the question had created. 3

The Most Pathos-​Filled Issue of All

Søren Kierkegaard immediately applauded Poul Martin Møller’s discourse on the immortality of man upon its publication, singling out, in particular, the narrative excursus in a journal entry, stating that “it is pretty interesting with the episode Poul Møller has inserted into his treatise on the immortality of the soul … perhaps such a relieving of the more strictly scientific tone with lighter

25

Quoted from the entry on “Death and Immortality” in Philip P. Wiener, Dictionary of the History of Ideas, vols. 1–​6, New York: Scribner, 1973, vol. 1, p. 634.

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parts, in which life appears with more abundance, will become more common in science and be something similar to the chorus, to the comic acts of romantic dramas.”26 Some have speculated that this item of Møller’s text provided an important impulse for Kierkegaard’s mixing of modes,27 but it may not only have been the literary qualities of the text that encouraged Kierkegaard; also the subject matter attracted attention and later turned into a leitmotif in his pseudonymous work. Even though one will find no single text devoted to the topic in his oeuvre, the immortality of the soul is a recurrent theme in Kierkegaard’s writings as well as the lives of the fictitious characters that inhabit these: “The idea of immortality, constantly assumed, is never adequately treated in his work,” the Belgian-​American theologian Louis Dupré has claimed.28 As clear evidence of this interest, though, one may evoke A from the first part of Either/​Or, who provides a testimony of the haunting character of the question, remarking in a diapsalm that: Strangely enough, it is always the same thing that preoccupies a person throughout all the ages of life, and one always goes just so far, or, rather, one goes backwards. In grammar school, when I was fifteen years old, I wrote very suavely on demonstrations for the existence of God and the 26 27 28

Søren Kierkegaard, Dagbøger i udvalg 1834–​1846, ed. by Jørgen Dehs and Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Copenhagen: Det danske Sprog-​og Litteraturselskab, 1992, p. 254. Cf. F. J. Billeskov Jansen, Studier i Søren Kierkegaards litterære Kunst, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel, 1987 [1951], p. 45; Isak Winkel Holm Tanken i billedet. Søren Kierkegaards poetik, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1998, pp. 13–​18. Louis Dupré, “Of Time and Eternity,” in The Concept of Anxiety, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1985 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 8), p. 129. An exception, however, is a fire-​and-​brimstone Christian discourse on immortality published in Tanker som saare bagfra—​til Opbyggelse. Christelige Foredrag, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel, 1848. István Czakó has published a number of studies of Kierkegaard’s conceptions of immortality: “Becoming Immortal: The Historical Context of Kierkegaard’s Concept of Immortality,” in Králik, Roman, Abrahim H. Khan, Peter Šajda, Jamie Turnbull and Andrew J. Burgess (eds.), Kierkegaard and Christianity, Toronto and Šal’a: Kierkegaard Society of Slovakia and Kierkegaard Circle, University of Toronto 2008 (Acta Kierkegaardiana, vol. 3), pp. 59–​71; “Unsterblichkeitsfurcht. Ein christlicher Beitrag zu einer zeitgenössischen Debatte in Søren Kierkegaards ‘Gedanken, die hinterrücks verwunden—​zur Erbauung,’ ” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2007, pp. 227–​ 54; “Die kritische Rezeption der Philosophie Hegels in der dänischen Debatte über die Unsterblichkeit,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2012, pp. 235–​266; “Heiberg and the Immortality Debate: A Historical Overview,” in Johan Ludvig Heiberg: Philosopher, Littérateur, Dramaturge, and Political Thinker, ed. by Jon Stewart, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 2008 (Danish Golden Age Studies, vol. 5), pp. 95–​138.

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immortality of the soul, on the concept of faith, and on the meaning of miracles. For my examen artium, I wrote a composition on the immortality of the soul, for which I was awarded præ ceteris; later I won the prize for a composition on this subject. Who would believe that in my twenty-​ fifth year, after such a solid and very promising beginning, I would have come to the point of not being able to present a single demonstration for the immortality of the soul. … So this is my advice to parents, superiors, and teachers that they urge the children in their charge to keep the Danish compositions written in the fifteenth year. To give this advice is the only thing I can do for the benefit of the human race.29 Contrary to conventional expectations, that both knowledge and know-​how expand with age, A had experienced the opposite: A sort of epistemological setback had dispossessed him of his skills, of the prize-​winning demonstrations of the immortality of the soul that he had learned and artfully reproduced in his glorious school days. In this respect, his life story had gone in the exact opposite direction than the progress of humanity toward further knowledge, indeed absolute knowledge, which Heiberg had charted. While A’s interest in the issue had remained, his knowledge of it had been reduced or “gone backwards,” as he says. His mastery had been replaced with modesty, as attested to by the humble contribution he is able to offer mankind. Within the boundaries of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous texts, A is far from the only one to embark on speculations over the intricate implications of the question of the immortality of the soul and its importance to contemporary intellectual life. So do several of the pseudonymous characters, including Johannes Climacus who takes up the problem in both Philosophical Fragments and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. From the above it follows that the immense enquiry undertaken by him in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript—​the question of how he might “enter into relation” with Christianity and its highest good in the shape of an eternal happiness—​was not only a strictly personal matter within the fictional frame of the text but also a growing concern outside of it, that is within the parameters of contemporary intellectual and religious life. Climacus himself was indeed attentive to the fact that the doctrine of future life was in danger of extinction in this environment: that “an eternal happiness is a security whose market price is no longer quoted in the speculative nineteenth century; at best the reverend clerics can use a cancelled bond of that sort to trick the peasants,” as he poignantly observes.30 In the nineteenth 29 30

sks 2, 43 /​eo1, 34-​35. sks 7, 352 /​cup1, 386.

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century, the doctrine could serve as nothing but a confidence trick, a cheap scam, effective only on uneducated people, whereas the cultured classes—​“de Dannede” in the jargon of Heiberg and his fellow Hegelians—​were much too advanced to indulge in such phantasms. Both in the original and the critical edition of the Postscript, this claim is encircled with inverted commas,31 so as to emphasize its currency in everyday discourse, emphasizing once again that the obliteration of the doctrine of the immortality of the soul was not confined to academic circles but an event taking place within society at large. Considering the great deal of attention paid to the question of the immortality of the soul in the surroundings in which Kierkegaard’s intellectual formation took place, the omnipresence of the theme in his works is not strange, after all. Neither does it astonish that the issue should remerge in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript in relation to the themes of art and communication. Considered in the context of contemporary culture, the Postscript is another example of the enormous weight carried by the question of the immortality of the soul. With respect to this issue, Climacus’ discourse seems to have a more local scope than what has usually acknowledged among its commentators. Jon Stewart has argued compellingly against the “long-​standing perception that the Postscript is Kierkegaard’s great polemic with Hegel,” which is rejected by him as “nothing more than a myth based on an ahistorical understanding of the text.”32 Drawing upon insights from the large philological labor behind the new Danish critical edition of the text, Stewart substitutes this understanding with a more context-​sensitive interpretation of the Postscript that takes into account the “fact” that Kierkegaard’s “polemic was actually with Martensen, Heiberg, Grundtvig, and Nielsen” rather than Hegel.33 All of these were major figures in Danish intellectual life of the time, but their viewpoints have since been virtually forgotten in Denmark and remained largely unknown to international scholars. Agreeing with Stewart upon the embeddedness of the Postscript in the highly polemical circumstances of contemporary intellectual life in Copenhagen, I shall return now to the text and pay attention to the way it continues the negotiations concerning the immortality of the soul that had taken place between Heiberg and Møller in the preceding decade, while it also reinterprets some of the key concepts involved in the dispute.

31

sks 7, 352. Cf. Johannes Climacus, Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift, ed. by S. Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel, 1846, p. 295. 32 Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 522. 33 Ibid.

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The issue of the immortality of the soul becomes in the hands of Climacus a paradigmatic case for separating subjective and objective thought. While Climacus grants that Heiberg’s and Møller’s observations of the decline were according to the truth, or at least to received opinion, he nevertheless ventures in the Postscript to cross the threshold of common knowledge and contemporary wisdom in order to enter “into relation to” Christianity. Becoming a Christian means dealing with the two cornerstones of Christianity: the incarnation and the immortality of the soul. The correlation between these issues is apparent from the fact that Climacus’ notions of incarnation and anthropology mirror each other: the immortality of the mortal being is the flip side of the mortality of the immortal, which is the paradox of the death of Christ. Correspondingly, the immortality of the soul is held out by him to be just as impenetrable to attempts of understanding as the incarnation: “What is inaccessible to all thinking is: that one can become eternal although one was not eternal.”34 The essentially individual nature of these two questions is emphasized all the way through the Postscript, and they are of vital importance to the redirection of interest in the text from “the truth of Christianity” to the “individual’s relation to Christianity.”35 That the question of the immortality of the soul is not up for collective negotiation but only answerable through a strictly private resolution, is an important point not to be missed from Climacus’ careful endeavor to retrace the contours of Christianity; as the religion derived from Jesus Christ, it “wants to give the single individual an eternal happiness, a good that is not distributed in bulk but only to one, and to one at a time,” Climacus points out.36 A search for the expression “the immortality of the soul” [Sjælens Udødelighed] in the text of the Postscript will, however, yield few results. The issue is persistently spoken of in the Postscript as an “eternal happiness” [evig Salighed], which is, furthermore, referred to in a heading as the “Issue in Fragments.” We have seen, earlier, the extent to which the question of the immortality of the soul is built into the personal matter that the Postscript revolves around. It is also a constitutive component of the minimal consensus about the essence of Christianity—​to draw in the title of Feuerbach’s notorious 1841 work—​that is the point of departure for Climacus’ attempt at a demarcation: That an eternal happiness is decided in time by the relation to something historical was the substance of what was imaginatively constructed 34 35 36

sks 7, 521 /​cup1, 573. sks 7, 26 /​cup1, 15. sks 7, 122 /​cup1, 130.

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and what I now call the essentially Christian. Surely no one will deny that the teaching of Christianity in the New Testament is that the question of the individual’s eternal happiness is decided in time and is decided by the relation to Christianity as something historical. In order not to cause unrest by prompting any thought about an eternal unhappiness, I want to point out that I am speaking only of the positive, that the believer becomes sure of his eternal happiness in time by his relation to something historical. In order not to cause confusion, I do not wish to call attention to other Christian qualifications; they all inhere in this one qualification and can be consistently derived from it, just as this qualification forms the sharpest contrast to paganism. I only repeat once again: whether Christianity is in the right, I do not decide. In that pamphlet, I have already said what I continually confess, that the merit of my fragment, if there is to be any mention of that, is to state the issue.37 These repeated notices about the desired effect of the publications—​stating the issue instead of solving or explaining it—​are a manner of underscoring the analytic, non-​apologetic nature of the enterprise of the Postscript, which is, at least according to Climacus, more about drawing boundaries than testing or defending any truth claims on behalf of the belief systems, Christianity and paganism (synonymous with modern speculation, i.e., Hegelianism), that he contrasts. That should be left up to the reader to decide. Accordingly, historical time is accentuated as a decisive while for the individual Christian believer, who has to work out his or her own salvation with fear and trembling. Salvation is not secured in Climacus’ characterization of Christianity; taking his consistent application of the term “eternal happiness”—​rather than the “immortality of the soul”—​as a guarantee that afterlife will be a pleasurable affair, would be unjustified. His wording is, in fact, motivated by the presupposition of an alternative, an eternal punishment, in the expression: “When “decisive” is predicated, it is eo ipso said that when eternal happiness is decided, eternal unhappiness is also decided, whether as posited or excluded,”38 he maintains. Applying here the Aristotelian principle of the excluded middle, principium exclusi medii inter duo contradictoria, to the question of post-​mortal judgment, Climacus employs one of Kierkegaard’s standard responses to the Hegelians’ striving for dialectical synthesis.39 Between the 37 sks 7, 336 /​cup1, 369. Translation emended. 38 sks 7, 93 /​cup1, 94. 39 See Victor Kuhr, Modsigelsens grundsætning, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1915. Anton Hügli, “The Principle of Contradiction” in Concepts and Alternatives in Kierkegaard, ed.

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ultimately final destinations of human life, heaven or hell, no middle could be found. A very traditional Christian eschatological thinking, relying on the four last things—​death, judgment, heaven or hell—​lurks, in other words, behind Climacus’ apparently forthcoming discourse of an eternal happiness. The non-​apologetic purpose of the Postscript comprises also the controversial key question whether the individual soul is immortal, which Climacus explicitly refuses to demonstrate: “I have in no way involved myself in demonstrating that there is an eternal happiness (partly because it is not my business, but höchstens that of Christianity, which proclaims it, partly because it would not exist at all if it could be demonstrated, since the existence of the absolute ethical good can be demonstrated only by the individual who, himself existing [existerende], expresses that it exists [er til]).”40 Reversing the argument of Heiberg, turning the absence of any positive demonstration into a condition for the existence of the immortality of the soul, Climacus once again accentuates the privacy of the issue, which would only be hindered by inference from external authorities or necessarily non-​individual arguments. Correspondingly, Climacus counsels his reader not to seek instruction or expect any erudition from him on the topic of the immortality of the soul, upon which he possesses only common knowledge: For example, what it means to be immortal. On that topic, I know what people ordinarily know. I know that some accept immortality, that others say they do not. Whether they actually accept it, I do not know. That is why it does not occur to me to contend with them, for such a procedure is so dialectically difficult that it would take ages for me to become dialectically clear about whether such contention has any reality; whether the

40

by Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Boghandel 1980 (Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 3), pp. 272–​280. Skat Arildsen, “Striden om de logiske Principer og om Rationalismens og Supranaturalismens Begreb,” Chapter 8 in his Biskop Hans Lassen Martensen. Hans Liv, Udvikling og Arbejde, Copenhagen: Gads Forlag 1932, pp. 142–​150. O. Waage, “Strid om de logiske Principer og om Rationalismens og Supranaturalismens Begreb” in his J.P. Mynster og de philosophiske Bevægelser paa hans Tid i Danmark, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1867, pp. 123–​152. Jon Stewart, A History of Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark, Tome II, The Martensen Period: 1837–​1842, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 2007 (Danish Golden Age Studies, vol. 3), pp. 289–​342. Jon Stewart, “Introduction: The Debate Surrounding Hegel’s Criticism of the Laws of Logic in Golden Age Denmark,” in Mynster’s “Rationalism, Supernaturalism” and the Debate about Mediation, ed. and trans. by Jon Stewart, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press 2009 (Texts from Golden Age Denmark, vol. 5), pp. 1–​45; and Jon Stewart, “Hegel, Kierkegaard and the Danish Debate about Mediation,” Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, no. 61, 2010, pp. 61–​86. sks 7, 384 /​cup1, 424.

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dialectic of communication, if understood, would sanction such conduct or transform it into shadowboxing; whether the consciousness of immortality is an instructional topic that can be taught and how the instruction must be dialectically qualified in relation to the learner’s qualifications; whether these are not so essential that the instruction becomes an illusion if one is not promptly aware of this and in that case changes the instruction into non-​instruction. Furthermore, I know that some have found immortality in Hegel; others have not. I know that I have not found it in the system, since it is unreasonable to look for it there anyway, because in a fantastical sense all systematic thinking is sub specie aeterni [under the aspect of eternity] and to that extent immortality is there as eternity. But this immortality is not at all the one inquired about, since the question is about the immortality of a mortal, and that question is not answered by showing that the eternal is immortal, because the eternal is, after all, not the mortal, and the immortality of the eternal is a tautology and a misuse of words.41 By way of these few lines Climacus recapitulates the controversy over the immortality of the soul dividing left and right Hegelians. Concerning the crux of the problem between left and right Hegelians, whether Hegel’s writings sanctioned the immortality of the soul or not, Climacus remains reticent. He only summarizes the two main interpretations and adds his own reading, but does not convey any suggestion about what could possibly be read out of Hegel’s text in relation to this issue. What is of more concern to him is securing that the issue is stated correctly; that the involved parties stick to the point without misusing words or confusing ideas. This permissibility relates to the most audacious feat accomplished by Climacus in this unpretentious summary: its sabotage of the fundamental premise for the heated philosophical discussion of the topic among left and right Hegelians—​that the question of the immortality of the soul is “an instructional topic” comparable to and manageable like other academic questions. This premise is called into question by Climacus, who in this regard reveals his affinity to Poul Martin Møller, who had made people aware of the great risk of affectation involved in any discourse on death and immortality. The Concluding Unscientific Postscript has the same deictic quality as Møller’s article: it points you to a problem, it presents it with painstaking accuracy, but it does not resolve it. Climacus’ simple but absolutely devastating objection is 41

sks 7, 158-​159 /​cup1, 171.

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that “essentially the question of immortality is not a learned question.” It is not the sort question on which one can give talks and organize scholarly colloquia and write dissertations. It is, Climacus emphasizes: … a question belonging to inwardness, which the subject by becoming subjective must ask himself. Objectively the question cannot be answered at all, because objectively the question of immortality cannot be asked, since immortality is precisely the intensification and highest development of the developed subjectivity. … Socially the question cannot be answered at all, because socially it cannot be enunciated, since only the subject who wills to become subjective can grasp the question and rightly ask: Do I become immortal or am I immortal? The very moment I am conscious of my immortality, I am completely subjective.42 What becomes evident from these comments is that, in the eyes of Climacus, the question of the immortality of the soul was not a dividing line between left and right Hegelianism, but more essentially between subjective and objective thinking. Radicalizing Møller’s notion that actual belief in the immortality of the soul could no longer be conveyed in standard language because of the triteness of the phrase, Climacus assigns the question to the secret recesses of one’s soul. Whereas Møller believed that this was due to a temporary religious crisis that would eventually pass and give way to a revitalized belief system, the condition that Climacus alludes to, seems to be of a more permanent nature. The question of the immortality of the soul was a question of such precariousness that it could not even be articulated through language, for, when spoken of, the question of the immortality of the soul becomes a question of “immortality in general,” which is a mere “phantom,” according to Climacus.43 These observations on the nature of the whole question are the basis for Climacus’ rejection of the way speculative thought treats the issue, as if it was a topic to be scrutinized in logical terms. Speculative thought, which has completely understood Christianity and declares itself to be the highest development within Christianity, has remarkably enough made the discovery that there is no “beyond,” that “hereafter” and “beyond” and the like are the dialectical narrow-​ mindedness of a finite understanding. The beyond has become a

42 43

sks 7, 160 /​cup1, 173. sks 7, 161 /​cup1, 174.

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pleasantry, a claim so problematical that not only does no one honor it, but no one makes it, so that one is merely amused to remember that there was a time when this idea transformed all existence. … But note, the issue is not, after all, a logical issue indeed, what does logical thinking have in common with the most pathos-​filled issue of all (the question of an eternal happiness)?44 In the text Climacus puts “hereafter” and “beyond” in quotation marks to emphasize the abstract and non-​literal use that speculative thought makes of the terms. The dichotomy between here and hereafter was not some apparent contradiction to be aufgehoben, nor was the question of the immortality of the soul “a logical issue.” The distinction between time and eternity was, on the contrary, to be maintained, and the question of immortality was to be considered as an “existence-​issue,” as Climacus called it.45 In order to deal with such issues one should proceed with great precaution. If one wanted to expound them, one should do so only by way of what he labels as existence-​communication. This is where the issue of aesthetic communication comes in again. Now, as we have seen, the future of art depended, in the Danish aesthetics of the 1830s, upon the question of the immortality of the soul, whether one saw the decline of dogma as a symptom of the death of art, as Heiberg did, or granted that it was the actual cause of the death of art, as did Møller. The key formula that they subscribed to, while differing on its basic meaning, recurs in the Postscript, where it is used by Climacus as an occasion for a number of dismissive comments upon art. “Poetry and art,” Climacus summarizes: “have been called an anticipation of the eternal. If one wants to call them that, one must nevertheless be aware that poetry and art are not essentially related to an existing person, since the contemplation of poetry and art, ‘joy over the beautiful,’ is disinterested, and the observer contemplatively outside himself qua existing person.”46 While repeating the basic formula that Møller and Heiberg fought over, Climacus adds a further condition, which neither of the two takes into account, at least not explicitly: the first of Kant’s four moments of the judgment of taste, specifying the experience of the beautiful to be that which is felt with disinterested pleasure.47 This freedom from 44 45 46 47

sks 7, 329 /​cup1, 361-​361. sks 7, 330 /​cup1, 362. sks 7, 285 /​cup1, 313n. Kant contended that when it comes to experience of the beautiful, all “one wants to know is whether the mere representation of the object is to my liking, no matter how indifferent I may be to the real object of this representation” (Immanuel Kant The Critique of Judgement, trans. by J.C. Meredith, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 43). For that

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mundane matters and prosaic desires evoked by Kant was the property of aesthetic experience that called for comparisons with heavenly bliss in Møller’s aesthetic theory, whereas Climacus saw this pleasure of the beautiful as the sign of the detachment of aesthetic experience from existential issues. His rejection of this conception of art was thus not caused by a repudiation of the immortality of the soul but rather by a wish for a more comprehensive understanding of the consequences of this doctrine according to Christian anthropology: “Since a human being is a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal, the speculative happiness that a speculator can enjoy will be an illusion, because he wants to be exclusively eternal within time.”48 The “blessed gods,” which are seen by Climacus as the “grand prototypes for the speculative thinker,” were “not in the least concerned about their eternal happiness. Therefore, the issue never arose in paganism.”49 For the strictly immortal being, the issue of immortality could, of course, be of no concern. Kant’s business in emphasizing the disinterestedness of art was, famously, to differentiate art as a social system, to claim the autonomy of art as well as the distinctness of aesthetic experience as a modality of perception. Climacus does not repudiate this central notion of Kant, but wants instead to make room for an alternative concept of art, for an art form that was “essentially related” to the existing person. Alternatively, his conception of art takes into account that the “existing subject is eternal, but as existing he is temporal,” and that in order for the “existing subject” to render such “negative thoughts … an illusive form is the only adequate one, because direct communication implies the dependability of continuity, whereas the illusiveness of existence, when I grasp it, isolates me.”50

48 49

50

reason, poetry and art cannot have any proper relation to the immortality of the soul, because it is an issue, which we cannot contemplate disinterestedly, that is without any interest in the real existence of afterlife. Aesthetic pleasure is more of an ecstatic affair, in which the spectator is lifted out of existence and placed in a kind of speculative realm beyond space and time and worldly constraints. In this respect, art and poetry appear as an “eternity of abstraction” that “is gained by disregarding existence” (sks 7, 285 /​cup1, 312–​313). For a discussion of the history of disinterestedness, see Jerome Stolnitz, “On the Origins of ‘Aesthetic Disinterestedness,’ ” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 20, no. 2, 1961, pp. 131–​143. sks 7, 60 /​cup1, 56. Climacus is here repeating one of Hegel’s points in his comparison of Classical and (Post-​) Christian art in the Aesthetics, namely that the “Greeks did not take seriously what we call immortality. Only for the later reflection of subjective consciousness on itself, in the case of Socrates, has immortality had a deeper sense and satisfied a more far-​reaching need” (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art, vols. 1–​2, trans. by T.M. Knox, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, vol. 1, p. 523). sks 7, 82 /​cup1, 82–​83.

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This “illusive form” should be furnished for addressing the individual in existence instead of making pretense of contemplating existence sub specie aeternitatis: “Wherever the subjective is of importance in knowledge and appropriation [Tilegnelse] is therefore the main point, communication is a work of art.”51 Aesthetic communication of this kind—​or existence-​communication—​was needed in any case where the single individual could no longer rely on external authorities but had to do his or her labor of cognition herself. Climacus considered it “foolish … to want to reassure people about their eternal happiness, because, with regard to something in which the individual person has only himself to deal with, the most one person can do for another is to unsettle him.”52 Interestingly, the question of the immortality of the soul appears here as the paradigmatic case of an existential issue, defined by the essential solitude that any individual would feel in relation to it, being “something in which the individual person has only himself to deal with.” Art was necessary to state existential issues, as for instance the immortality of the soul, about which everybody had to draw his or her own conclusions. What is interesting about this argument, from the perspective that I have tried to establish here, is that the same properties of art that Heiberg saw as incapacities—​its inability to provide intersubjective knowledge or certainty (of the immortality of the soul)—​are recycled in the Postscript as reasons for the exigency of aesthetic communication. Aesthetic communication was capable of exposing the recipient to the complexity and “humane solitude” of existence, imitating the uncertainty and negativity that distinguished the here from the hereafter. Being based on the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, the aesthetics of indirect communication advanced by Climacus thus continues the discourse on art and immortality from the preceding decade. His justification of aesthetic experience avails itself of the same issue that had discredited art altogether thirteen years earlier, and it testifies, once again, to the local scope of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript that has survived most of the contemporary voices and controversies with which it was concerned. 51 52

sks 7,79 /​cup1, 79. sks 7, 352 /​cup1, 387.

­c hapter 6

The Emancipation of Images

The Optical Unconscious of Andersen’s “The Shadow”

One of the hallmarks of modernity is the invention of a wide range of new techniques for recording, reproducing and distributing sound and images and the subsequent introduction and expansion of many new media, notably photography, phonography, and telephony. The famous label for the epoch introduced by Walter Benjamin, the “age of mechanical reproduction,” refers to this process, which irreversibly altered the conditions for the production and reception of artworks.1 Following this hypothesis, great attention has been paid to the influence of technology, and media technology in particular, on the development of the aesthetics and language of literature.2 In this chapter I wish to test this approach on Hans Christian Andersen’s classic doppelgänger story “The Shadow,” about a scholar, who loses his shadow and becomes haunted and eventually killed by it. I will read it with a special emphasis on its relations to nineteenth-​century visual mass culture, and, in particular, I want to explore the relations between “The Shadow” and two media technologies: first, the so-​called Schattenspiel an der Wand—​literally, shadow pictures upon the wall—​which was a pre-​cinematic aesthetic technology for the creation of moving images that grew immensely popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries both as a public and private entertainment; and, second, daguerreotype, one of the earliest techniques for photographic reproduction. “The Shadow” was written in 1846 and published a year later—​that is, in the first decade after the invention of photographic reproduction, at a time when the daguerreotype was being popularized and made available to a rapidly expanding audience. Hans Christian Andersen had become fascinated with this emerging medium from an early stage; he conveys in a letter from 1839 how “delighted” he is with Daguerre’s invention, which “occupies [him] a lot.”3 1 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1968, pp. 217–​252. 2 See, for instance, Sara Danius, The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002; Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998; and Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. 3 Hans Christian Andersen in a letter to Chr. Høegh-​Guldberg, dated February 2, 1839; quoted from Gerhart Schwarzenberger, “Den ældre H. C. Andersen og »det nye«,” Danske Studier,

© Lasse Horne Kjældgaard, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004472068_007

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In this respect, Andersen differed from many cultural pessimists of the day, as, for instance, Kierkegaard, who found that mass culture, mass media, mass transportation were despicable. “You have been accused for a lack of education,” Hans Christian Ørsted once said to Andersen, and added: “but perhaps you will be the poet who accomplishes most for science.”4 Behind the friendly compliment lies a fact that is a bit overlooked in the reception of Andersen, the deep fascination with science and technology one can find in his writings: electromagnetism, electricity, railways, prophecies of mass air travel—​ these are some of the phenomena that appear in his texts, revealing an interest in the technological process of modernity that unfolded during his lifetime. And like Ørsted, Andersen was an optimistic modernist, believing that science and technology were largely benefits to mankind. But Andersen was also, as we shall see, very quick to observe some of the gloomier aspects of photography. To be sure, no reference is made to either of these techniques in “The Shadow” itself. Even so, I will argue that they provide a context in which to approach the text and understand its special appeal to the contemporary imagination and its pertinence to the understanding of the traumatic implications of the new visual economy founded upon photography. This historical understanding of Andersen’s “The Shadow” differs from the standard interpretation of it, which conceives of it in psychological terms and emphasizes its universal implications.5 There is a long tradition for regarding the detachment of the shadow as a psychological cleavage, a split personality to be diagnosed according to various psychoanalytical theories.6 Otto Rank’s seminal study on Der Dobbeltgänger, originally published in 1914 in Imago: Zeitschrift für Anwendung der Psychoanalyse auf die Geisteswissenschaften, edited by Sigmund Freud, has been of tremendous importance to this line of reception of the text. “The Shadow” is briefly analyzed by Rank and included among the “literary representations of the double-​motif which describe the persecution 1962, pp. 33–​34. This article offers a valuable introduction to Hans Christian Andersen’s reception of the technological inventions of his time. 4 Hans Christian Andersen, Mit Livs Eventyr, 2 vols., Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel, 1855, vol. 2, p. 67. 5 One exception, though, is Uffe Hansen, who has pointed to a historically specific context for the split personality of “The Shadow,” namely the phenomenon of Mesmerism, a hypnotic induction held to involve animal magnetism that was en vogue in certain of the circles in which Andersen was moving at the time (“H.C. Andersens Skyggen i en overset idehistorisk sammenhæng,” in Kritik, no. 165, 2003, pp. 63–​70). 6 Villy Sørensen’s interpretation was first published as a feature article in the Danish newspaper Berlingske Tidende, August 12, 1954, and has recently been reprinted in Villy Sørensen, Sørensen om Andersen, ed. by Torben Brostrøm, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2004, from which I quote, p. 54.

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complex” and “confirm not only Freud’s concept of the narcissistic disposition toward paranoia, but also … reduce the chief pursuer to the ego itself, the person formerly loved most of all.”7 The duplication of the self that takes place in “The Shadow” has, accordingly, been considered as a psychodrama between a man and his demonic double, the shadow, which is perceived as an externalization of his inner self. This interpretation of the text has been further developed and sustained in Denmark by the modernist author Villy Sørensen, who held, in 1954, that the tale “is not about two persons but about two sides of the same person … and about the cleavage in this human being, as soon as the shadow emancipates itself and leads an independent life.”8 This psychopathological understanding of the “The Shadow” as a story about split personality has been predominant in the Danish reception of the text.9 Within this conceptual framework “The Shadow” has traditionally been understood as an exploration of a universal and timeless theme, the relation of the self to the self. What I want to do instead is to contemplate some historical correlates to the tale, and I will do so by considering the more superficial issue of the semiotic connection that the story is centered upon, between a man and his shadow. The split that I will be concerned with is semiotic more than psychological. The alternative I propose is to approach the “optical unconscious” of the story rather than the unconscious in the usual psychoanalytic sense. This expression, “the optical unconscious,” was one that Walter Benjamin introduced in an article from 1931 on the history of photography and especially about the revelatory effects of early photography. The term refers to those aspects of visual reality which remain unregistered by ordinary perception, as for instance the infinitesimal steps of human locomotion, which chronometric photography was suddenly able to record and expose to the human eye. The camera was, in other words, able to see more than meets the naked eye, and Benjamin concludes that it “is through photography that we first discover 7 Otto Rank, The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, trans. by Harry Tucker, Jr., Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971, p. 75. 8 Villy Sørensen, Sørensen om Andersen, ed. by Torben Brostrøm, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2004, p. 54. 9 According to Inger Lise Jensen, Villy Sørensen “offered a new conceptual framework for understanding the fairy tale” (“Why Are There So Many Interpretations of H.C. Andersen’s ‘the Shadow’?” in H.C. Andersen: Old Problems and New Readings, ed. by Steven P. Sondrup, Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University, 2004, p. 292), but, as we have seen, Sørensen’s reading was in line with Otto Rank’s psychopathological understanding. A good collection of readings of “The Shadow” has been published by Finn Barlby in Det Dæmoniske Spejl. Analyser Af H.C. Andersens “Skyggen” (Copenhagen: Dråben, 1998).

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the existence of this optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.”10 In a comparable manner, “The Shadow” lets us discover some of the collective fears and fantasies that were stimulated by the emergent media. “The Shadow” can be read as a very early response to this new technology that registers very precisely some of its traumatic implications. The emancipation of the shadow is an experience, I want to argue, which, albeit improbable, had a shape which would have seemed recognizable to a contemporary audience. 1

The Scholar and the Shadow

Let me begin by providing an outline of the plot. A young scholar from the north sojourns in the south, where the sun beats down, and the heat is unbearable. All day he is forced to stay in his room with the shutters drawn and doors closed. Only after sunset is it possible for him to go outside. He spends his evenings on the balcony where candlelight from the room behind him projects his shadow on the balcony of the house in front of him. The man contemplates the flickering image of his shadow on the wall and one night encourages it, jokingly, to step inside the house, as if he was addressing a dog or a child—​ “Well go along then, but don’t stay too long.”11 Only the narrator notices that the shadow actually does so and that it does not return. The scholar does not discover his loss until the next day. When he finds out about his departed shadow, his reaction is not wonder but embarrassment. It causes him great frustration to know that the incredible event that has occurred to him is prefigured in a story that everybody knew in his home country. With this hint Andersen pays homage to his own very obvious precursor, Adalbert de Chamisso’s classic novella Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte, or The Man Who Sold his Shadow, as an American translation renders the title. It had been published in German in 1814 and translated into Danish in 1841, six years in advance of Andersen’s “The Shadow.” The fame of Chamisso’s story is only a source of embarrassment for the poor protagonist of Andersen’s tale: not only is he bereft of his shadow but also in peril of facing 10 11

Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Selected Writings, vols. 1–​4, ed. by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1999, vol. 2, part 2, pp. 510–​512. I quote from Faith Ingwersen’s translation, which appeared in H. C. Andersen, The Shadow and Other Tales, Madison, Wisc.: Dept. of Scandinavian Studies, University of Wisconsin, 1982, p. 23.

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charges back home for imitating Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte. And he would be ashamed to imitate others, which is, we may note, exactly what a shadow is normally supposed to do. It is a reaction that exposes his vanity. He—​but not Andersen—​is engulfed by anxiety of influence12 in a situation where curiosity or horror would have been more easily understandable reactions. For the time being, the awkward state of affairs is solved, for after a few weeks in the sun the scholar grows a new shadow and is able to return without further ado. The transformation that is later to befall him is, however, anticipated by this anxiety. Many years lapse before the incident has further consequences. One evening back home the learned man receives a visit from a thin man, impeccably dressed and with an unmistakable air of distinction. The visitor turns out to be his former shadow, all dressed up and able to walk and talk and behave like a human being, in fact like a well-​to-​do person, flashing many tokens of prosperity. “To be sure, the shadow was extremely well dressed, and that was exactly what made it so very human,” the narrator comments.13 Naturally, the scholar is curious to know what had happened—​how the shadow had been transformed. It had all happened in the warm countries, the shadow relates, in the strange house across the street, which the shadow had entered. For weeks the shadow had stayed in the anteroom and also managed to peek into the innermost room in the house where Poetry lived. This had been his key to absolute knowledge, which extends by far that of the learned man, whose erudition does not go beyond the theoretical spheres of the good, the true and the beautiful. He is obliged by the streetwise shadow to make a vow not to tell anybody about its past as a subordinate, which is to be kept secret for the sake of the shadow’s present high standing. Like his former master, the shadow is aware of what other people might think of him and keen on keeping up appearances at any cost. The story of how he scales the social ladder is to remain a secret. An interval of several years passes once again after this encounter before the shadow resurfaces in the scholar’s life, asking him with great familiarity how he is doing. Not well, is the answer—​for his treatises about the good, the true and the beautiful attract no audience or public attention. His efforts seem superfluous, his life seems pointless. As a measure against this feeling of despondency the shadow counsels him to take a journey and proposes that he should travel with him as a companion: “Will you come along as my shadow?” he asks, thus suggesting that they turn around the original relation between them. Even 12

Cf. Harold Bloom: The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. 13 Andersen, The Shadow and Other Tales, p. 26.

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though the scholar finds this suggestion rather offensive, he complies and goes along to a sanatorium with his former shadow to which he now serves as a surrogate shadow. There they meet a princess, who fancies the shadow for his luxurious habits. Especially, she is impressed by the splendor of having a shadow of such wisdom, which is permitted to roam freely. She decides to marry him. Now, as the absolute top of society is within sight of the striving shadow, it becomes even more imperative that the learned man remains reticent on the real nature of their relationship. The shadow therefore attempts to strike an agreement with the learned man, asking him to keep pretending to be his shadow in exchange of a privileged position at the court. The learned man declines the offer and threatens to disclose the secret in accordance with a moral argument against the role playing that the shadow wants him to perform: “To do so would be to deceive the whole country and the king’s daughter as well! I’ll tell them everything; that I am a human being and that you are a shadow, that you are merely dressed up!”14 The shadow’s response to the threat is to have his former owner arrested and beheaded before the night of the wedding. When the shadow tells the princess about the peculiar idea that his crazy shadow had fostered, and how he had decided to take its life, she commends him for his humanity in dealing with the servant’s insanity, regarding it as a charitable act to kill him. 2

Perversions

The princess’s praise of the execution as an act of mercy is only the last perversion out of a whole series of perversions. Almost everything in the story goes wrong and off course. This pattern is repeated on every level in this nightmarish vision of a world where social relationships and hierarchies are upended, and where the copy succeeds in masquerading as the original. It is like watching a horror movie where a creepy character gets away with killing the good guy and is indeed celebrated for his misdeed. Things go wrong from the very beginning where the learned man discovers that his expectations of being able to stay outside in the south were a “mistake.” Due to the southern climate, the circadian rhythm is reversed, so that one stays in at daytime and goes out at night-​time. Another perversion is the good-​humored jest that inspires the shadow’s separation, and yet another is the princess’s malady, which is that she sees too well, as if that could be 14

Ibid., p. 33.

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a problem—​or even a reliable diagnosis, given her blatant inability to see that her fiancé is a shadow. In every way, the events of the story defy conventional expectations and seem distorted, which is, of course, a reflection of the core scandal of the story: that a shadow breaks away from its parent subject, dresses up as a human being, and eventually destroys its original referent. Now, it is, of course, careless of me to talk about perversions here without making explicit what established norms the story can be said to stray from. The degree to which the whole plot of “The Shadow” deviates from certain norms can be calculated more precisely by comparing it with the literary tradition from which the story originates. In his remarkable work A Short History of the Shadow, the art historian Victor Stoichita has described a certain topos in European literature—​established by medieval emblems and narratives—​that depicts a guilt-​ridden psycho-​drama between a man and his shadow that has witnessed some misdeed committed by the man. The man therefore fights his shadow, which has come to embody an externalization of his bad conscience, causing him ultimately to commit suicide. Upon this conflict Stoichita remarks that it is “a blueprint that will thrive as part of our European culture. It was predominantly a favourite theme of romantic fiction, which has endured until now.”15 This, exactly, was also the theme that Andersen was working on by delicately turning the shadow into the destroyer of the scholar, who had not incurred blame for anything. The “crime,” for which the scholar must pay with his life, is his knowledge of the shadow’s embarrassing past as a subordinate to him. It is truthfulness and not deviousness that becomes the end of him. The scholar “was very kindhearted and most mild and amiable,” the narrator assures us, and although vanity is a trait he shares with the emancipated shadow, his actions in the tale give us no reason to doubt this.16 The cruelty of “The Shadow” will, in fact, become even more perceptible if the question of guilt is considered in comparison with Chamisso’s story that belongs to the same literary tradition. The scholar’s blamelessness for the misfortune that befalls him is also a departure from Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte. Chamisso’s novella is about the poor Schlemihl, who is tempted at a garden party to trade his handsome shadow to a man in grey, the devil himself, for a magic purse containing inexhaustible amounts of gold. The devil deftly detaches Schlemihl’s shadow, folds it neatly together,

15 Victor Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, London: Reaktion Books, 1997, p. 140. 16 Andersen, The Shadow and Other Tales, p. 29.

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puts it in his pocket and takes it with him. The profit that Schlemihl gains from the sale is limitless, and yet it cannot compensate for the stigmatization that his shadowlessness entails. It becomes a real curse when he falls in love with a girl, Mina, to whom he cannot hide nor confide his secret. This causes a lot of trouble, and yet there is a happy ending to it, as he is saved in the end by Mina and a devoted servant. Furthermore, there is a moral frame around the whole Faustian story in the shape of a preface admonishing against selling one’s shadow to strangers at garden parties. Schlemihl is, pronouncedly, a moral tale, whereas Andersen’s “The Shadow” is undeniably an immoral one. Insight into the singular attainment of Andersen’s tale can be gained by comparing it with Schlemihl. The strangest thing of all in Andersen’s “The Shadow,” the separation of man and shadow, is evidently transmitted from Chamisso. In Schemihl’s case, the shadow gets turned into a commoditized and portable sign. Victor Stoichita remarks upon this transaction that the “shadow is the very prototype of the immovable sign. It is undetachable from, coexistent and simultaneous with the object it duplicates. To suggest (and to perform) such an exchange, we must accept that it is ‘exchangeable’ and that it has an exchange value. We must therefore accept its reification.”17 In Andersen’s case, it works differently: It is not the reification of the shadow that we are asked to accept but the fact that it has taken on a life of its own. The agency that Andersen assigns to the shadow allows for the essential metamorphosis that takes place in the story, as a purely physical phenomenon is recast as a social one—​as a power structure that gets turned around. The physical relationship between man and shadow is turned into a commercial relationship by Chamisso and further transformed into a social—​and indeed reciprocal—​relationship by Andersen. In Andersen’s story, the demon is the shadow, a fiend in human shape. This is indeed the most fascinating aspect of the transformation of Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte into “The Shadow”: the way that Andersen’s tale combines Schlemihl and the devil in the shadow character, which is, accordingly, both craving for acknowledgement and unscrupulous in its pursuit of it. Conversely, the scholar is both less guilty and punished harder than Schlemihl: The occasion for his separation from his shadow is not that he sells it for profit but that he addresses—​and indeed apostrophizes—​ it amusingly.

17 Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, p. 170.

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The Semiotics of the Shadow

Stoichita’s observations on the semiotic nature of the shadow calls attention to the basic question of what a shadow is, in the first place. The simplest answer to this fundamental question that I have been able to find has been formulated by the art historian Michael Baxandall: a shadow, he writes, “is in the first instance a local, relative deficiency in the quantity of light meeting a surface.”18 This relative deficiency in the quantity of light arises because a solid object of some kind gets in the way between the light source and the surface. The relationship between the object and the sign may thus be used to define what a shadow is, semiotically speaking. If the shadow-​casting object is a human being, then the shadow both resembles the person and necessarily stands in physical relation to him or her.19 In terms borrowed from Charles Sanders Peirce, this relationship may be described as being both iconic and indexical. It is an icon because it resembles the person, and it is an index because there needs to be a physical connection between the person and the shadow. The index “refers back to its object not so much because it is similar or analogous to it nor because it is associated with the general characteristics that this object happens to possess, but because it is dynamically (and spatially) connected with both the individual object on the one hand and on the other with the sense or memory of the person to which it serves as a sign of the other,” Peirce writes.20 I single out the indexical relation here because it is this dynamic and spatial connection that is broken in Andersen’s story of the shadow. The scandal of the story is the fact that the indexical sign emancipates itself from its parent subject. This is not to say that the iconical aspect is unimportant, for if the shadow had only been transformed into a fluffy, amorphous spectral being, bearing no resemblance to a human creature, it would have been ridiculous rather than spooky. But it is rather uncanny. And it is the uncanniness of the way in which this double is separated, the tearing apart of the indexical relation, that I want to take a closer look at. This separation of the shadow from the scholar is, to be sure, a special effect that goes beyond belief and belongs to the domain of the imaginary: “I would never have believed that one’s old shadow could come back as a human being,” the scholar says upon the return of the shadow, and we can easily indulge in 18

Michael Baxandall, Shadows and Enlightenment, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995, p. 2. 19 Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, p. 15. 20 Quoted from Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, p. 113.

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his astonishment.21 Yet there is, I suppose, something about this transformation that would have seemed uncannily familiar to a contemporary audience. I would therefore like to dwell upon this transformation for a moment. 4

Phantasmagoria

It takes place on the balcony in the south where the scholar contemplates his shadow moving upon the opposite wall: “One evening the stranger was sitting on his balcony while the candle burned in the room behind him, and so it was quite natural, of course, that his shadow should make its way to the neighbor’s wall,” says the narrator at this stage where the relationship between scholar and shadow is still intact.22 As Jørgen Bonde Jensen has suggested, this whole projection scene on the balcony bears a strong resemblance to a particular form of popular entertainment known under the name of Schattenspiel an der Wand—​shadow pictures upon the wall.23 Anticipating slide shows, these spectacles were performed by traveling showmen, who projected transparent, painted slides upon the wall or upon a canvas mounted on the wall, while manipulating the slides so that the figures on the wall moved. In 1736 motion was introduced “on the screen by using a stationary slide as background and a moving one as a foreground.”24 The projection of the shadow upon the opposite wall in Andersen’s tale is parallel to these popular spectacles that had been fashionable since the late eighteenth century. It is evident that Andersen had an interest in this kind of entertainment. Earlier, he had made extensive use of it as a metaphor for his mimetic aspirations in the travelogue Shadow Pictures of a Journey to the Harz Mountains, etc., in the Summer of 1831 (1831), where he modestly explains in the prologue that “we do not mount any sheet on the wall, that would be too much trouble, we have the white sheets in the book where the pictures stand, only with loose strokes, to be sure, but one has to remember that these are only shadow

21 Andersen, The Shadow and Other Tales, p. 25. 22 Ibid., 23. 23 Jørgen Bonde Jensen, “Reisekammeraten Versus Skyggen,” in his Forgyldning forgår. Guldalderlæsninger, Copenhagen: Babette, 1998, p. 135. 24 Charles Joseph Singer and Trevor Illtyd Williams: A History of Technology, vols. 1–​7, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954, vol. 5, p. 736.

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pictures of reality.”25 Hence, the pieces of paper in the book substitute for the canvas on the wall but should still be regarded as a surface upon which images appear—​with loose strokes that the reader has to complete with the aid of his or her own imagination. Similarly, Søren Kierkegaard had one of his pseudonyms make use of Schattenspiel an der Wand as a metaphor for his literary endeavor in a section of the first part of Either/​Or (1843) entitled “Silhouettes.” The pseudonymous character writing in the first part of Either/​Or, the Aesthete, presents a kind of literary slide show on the topic of reflective sorrow, which he evokes “in a few pictures” of some literary characters whose hearts are broken and minds are troubled, while he simultaneously expounds their misery. “I call them silhouettes,” the Aesthete explains, “partly to suggest at once by the name that draw them from the dark side of life and partly because, like silhouettes, they are not immediately visible. If I pick up a silhouette, I have no impression of it, cannot arrive at an actual conception of it; only when I hold it up toward the wall and do not look at it directly but at what appears on the wall, only then do I see it.”26 By way of this rather elaborate instruction in the technology of the Schattenspiel the Aesthete describes the imaginative process involved in his psychological investigation. The reason that Kierkegaard’s Aesthete gives for choosing the label Skyggerids for his psychological profiles is that they come from the “dark side of life.” This comment alludes not only to the technical negativity of the transparent slides—​the reversal of light and shade on the slide—​but also to the predominantly gothic content of these shadow picture shows, which often delved into the dark side of life and indeed probed the borders between life and death. This was especially the case with the so-​called phantasmagoria shows—​that is, public showings of supernatural apparitions. The defining feature of these shows was that the projector was concealed to the audience, or, as Jonathan Crary explains: “Phantasmagoria was a name for a specific type of magic-​lantern performance in the 1790s and early 1800s, one that used back projection to keep an audience unaware of the lanterns.”27 This was, of course, to heighten the illusion, as the showman called forth ghostly apparitions or

25 26 27

H.C. Andersen, Skyggebilleder af en Reise til Harzen, det sachsiske Schweitz etc. etc., i Sommeren 1831, Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog-​og Litteraturselskab/​ Borgen, 1986 (1831), p. 10. sks 2, 170 /​eo1, 172–​173. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 1992, p. 132.

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dead people and imitated their voices and addressed them verbally. By hiding the magic lantern, these apparitions appeared to come out of nowhere. The phantasmagoria shows were often referred to as a kind of Schwartzkunst, black magic, and the name of the apparatus itself—​laterna magica or magic lantern—​hints at the connection in the popular imagination between these shows and traditional sorcery.28 The special appeal of the magic-​lantern spectacles was, in fact, triggered by the sustained fluctuation between rational and irrational imperatives, between the evocations of ghostly presences and the denials that such beings existed. In her analysis of the phenomenon in the book The Female Thermometer, Terry Castle comments: Producers of phantasmagoria often claimed, somewhat disingenuously, that the new entertainment would serve the cause of public enlightenment by exposing the frauds of charlatans and supposed ghost-​seers. Ancient superstition would be eradicated when everyone realized that so-​called apparitions were in fact only optical illusions. The early magic-​lantern shows developed as mock exercises in scientific demystification complete with preliminary lectures on the fallacy of ghost-​belief and the various cheats perpetrated by conjurers and necromancers over the centuries. But the pretense of pedagogy quickly gave way when the phantasmagoria itself began, for clever illusionists were careful never to reveal exactly how their own bizarre, sometimes frightening apparitions were produced. Everything was done, quite shamelessly, to intensify the supernatural effect. Plunged in darkness and assailed by unearthly sounds, spectators were subjected to an eerie, estranging, and ultimately baffling spectral parade. The illusion was apparently so convincing that surprised audience members sometimes tried to fend off the moving “phantoms” with their hands or fled the room in terror. Thus even as it supposedly explained apparitions away, the spectral technology of the phantasmagoria mysteriously recreated the emotional aura of the supernatural.29 Such moving phantasms had only been available to the imagination before, but now they could be observed with a thrill, as disbelief was momentarily suspended by the vividness of the moving shadows: “One knew ghosts did not

28 29

See David Robinson, The Lantern Image: Iconography of the Magic Lantern, 1420–​1880, Nutley, East Sussex, England: Magic Lantern Society, 1993. Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-​Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny, Ideologies of Desire, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 143–​144.

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exist, yet one saw them anyway, without knowing precisely how.”30 The shows were thus performed for amusement’s sake, but their effect was dependent upon the “what if” that accompanied the shows and added the necessary element of horror to the entertainment. I believe that the pivotal point of the plot in Andersen’s “The Shadow”—​ the separation of the shadow from the scholar—​alludes to the ultimate horror that the magic-​lantern shows were hinting at: that the shadows upon the wall actually might come alive and detach themselves from the representational frame of the projection. The scene on the balcony in the south is indeed a sort of Schattenspiel where the artificial light, the candle in the room, comes from behind the scholar and therefore is hidden from him. It is, in this respect, a phantasmagoria that he contemplates on the opposite wall where the diaphanous body of his shadow is moving, and, suddenly, upon his encouragement, is moving autonomously. The circumstances around the separation seem to support this link, for the phantasmagoria shows were only gambling with the devil, as the scholar is when he addresses the shadow and tells it to run off.31 I suppose, in other words, that the shadow picture shows might have stimulated the animistic and gothic semiotic fantasy of Andersen’s “The Shadow,” while simultaneously providing some of the imaginative resources that the story was drawing upon among the audience: that is, the excitement and anxiety about the moving image that might eventually take on a life of its own and turn into an autonomous force, as the shadow does. 5

The Emancipation of Images

That Andersen’s “Shadow” drew upon forces of a collective and historical nature can be inferred from the variations of the theme that can be found in Danish literature from the period. I will try to sustain my analysis by juxtaposing “The Shadow” with a few other texts—​by Heiberg and Kierkegaard—​from about the same time that share Andersen’s vision of the emancipated image. A similar flight of the imagination can be found in a very influential piece on aesthetic theory from 1838 with the title “Painting in Relation to the Other Beautiful Arts” by Johan Ludvig Heiberg from which I want to quote an excerpt that describes a semiotic emancipation that is strikingly similar to the one that takes place in “The Shadow.” The passage appears among Heiberg’s considerations of portrait 30 31

Ibid., p. 144. See Jørgen Bonde Jensen’s acute remarks on the scholar’s shadow play as a distracted play with fire (“Reisekammeraten Versus Skyggen,” in his Forgyldning forgår, p. 135).

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painting and the problem of how to extract an ideal image of the phenomenal human being who is being portrayed. Heiberg describes the process in terms of Christian eschatology applied in a merely figurative sense, and he believes the artist is meant to perform a kind of aesthetic resurrection that will give the object a new transfigured body that will then replace the phenomenal one.32 The procedure inspired Heiberg to imagine how transfigured images could be released from their objects and float around freely: For, if beauty in general is the image of reality, which as an outer surface is attached to it, then let us imagine for a moment that all such images detached themselves from the reality [Virkelighed] upon which they rest, as tones do from the strings, and fluttered around freely but without vanishing as tones do: then beauty would be liberated from its phenomenal condition on earth and find itself situated among the blessed spirits. To human beings the resurrection of the body would thus consist in the emancipation of the image from its material substratum.33 The strong idealism of Heiberg’s aesthetic vision is identifiable by its fundamental gesture toward the materiality of the signifier. The scandal of art was its embeddedness in empirical matter, which is, of course, all the more conspicuous in the case of the visual arts. Heiberg dreamed of emancipating images from their materiality, but, ironically, his vision of immaterial images that would flutter around like butterflies seems heavily inspired by the aesthetic hardware available to his age: that is, the magic-​lantern shows, which were, in reality, able to produce immaterial images of the kind that Heiberg imagines. Heiberg’s theoretical vision is remarkably related to the semiotic nightmare that occurs in Andersen’s “The Shadow,” which is precisely about the emancipation of the image “from its material substratum,” as Heiberg writes in his more affirmative account of what would happen if images became autonomous forces. Again, I am not arguing that Heiberg’s article on aesthetic theory served as a direct source of inspiration to Andersen, although it is indisputable that he was familiar with it. I am quoting it in order to demonstrate that the

32

33

Heiberg’s intervention is intertwined with the contemporary controversy over the immortality of the soul in Danish intellectual life. In Sjælen efter døden: Guldalderens moderne gennembrud (Copenhagen, Gyldendal, 2007,) I have analyzed the ways in which Danish aesthetic thinking and literary practices were reformed and divided during these years by this controversy. Johan Ludvig Heiberg, “Om Malerkunsten i dens Forhold til andre skjønne Kunster” in Perseus. Journal for den speculative Idee, no. 2, 1838, p. 172.

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flight of the imagination that takes place in “The Shadow” was not an idea that was unique to Andersen but one that had currency in both contemporary Danish literature and popular imagination. That this was the case is further demonstrated in Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/​ Or from 1843. The second part of this famous work contains a lengthy argument in favor of “The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage,” where the ethical judge William blames his friend, the Aesthete from the first part of Either/​Or, for his aesthetic vision of human existence. My concern here is not with the clash between the two outlooks on life that Kierkegaard is staging in Either/​Or. I am merely interested in the analogies that the judge uses to condemn his lost friend. In particular, the judge blames the Aesthete for his obsession with the moment, especially the magic moment of romantic love, at the expense of those virtues and delights that are not temporally designed to culminate in a moment, but that last, grow, and mature over the course of a whole life, such as marriage is supposed to do. The Aesthete’s sense of totality has disintegrated into a wealth of interesting details—​as for instance an erotically charged Blickwechseln with a young girl in a mirror—​which he registers and saves for later enjoyment. His outlook is described and condemned by the judge by way of two interesting metaphors that connect Schattenspiel and Chamisso’s story about Peter Schlemihl with each other as well as both of them with the new photographic technique known as daguerreotype: “You preserve such things as accurately and as swiftly as a daguerreotype, which, as is generally known, takes only a half-​minute even in the poorest weather,” the judge writes to the Aesthete, while showing that he is updated on the latest developments of this technology that had recently reduced the exposure time drastically.34 We should note that the little insert “as is generally known” testifies to the common knowledge of this fact. The pleasure that the Aesthete takes from observing and memorizing such moments is described by the judge as a kind of theft: “You … actually live by plundering; unnoticed, you creep up on people, steal from them their happy moment, their most beautiful moment, stick this shadow picture in your pocket as the tall man did in Schlemihl and take it out whenever you wish.”35 That is how the judge states the case against his friend, as he unexpectedly changes the metaphor from the daguerreotype to the shadow picture slide. The analogy that the judge makes between the Aesthete’s way of life and the story of Peter Schlemihl entails an important change in relation to the source.

34 35

sks 3, 17 /​eo2, 7. sks 3, 20 /​eo2, 10.

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As mentioned earlier, it is not a shadow picture slide that the devil of Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte obtains and folds together and carries in his pocket—​it is Schlemihl’s shadow. The shadow has been substituted for such a slide in this excerpt from Either/​Or, which shows how Chamisso’s story provided a narrative model for grasping and fantasizing about these visual technologies that are evidently regarded as parts of a continuum in the judge’s discourse. In only a few pages the daguerreotype has changed into a Schattenbild in the judge’s metaphorical description of the Aesthete’s social behavior. What the two technologies—​Schattenspiel and daguerreotype—​have in common is, obviously, that they allude to the permanence and the portability of the Aesthete’s memory images, but the reproachful attitude with which the judge regards the Aesthete’s interaction with other people also associates these technologies with a certain extent of thievishness. This is attested to by the word “plunder” [stjæler], which suggests that the Aesthete robs people by forcible means. There seems to be something unethical—​or even criminal—​not only about the Aesthete’s activities, but also about the technologies that his activities are compared to. The shift between them in the second part of Either/​Or provides us with a hin at what is going on in Andersen’s story about the scholar and his emancipated shadow. 6

The Semantics of Image and Self

The way that the daguerreotype is compared to Schlemihl’s shadow and later, imperceptibly, transformed into a Schattenbild in Kierkegaard’s discourse suggests why the idea of the emancipated image recurred so frequently at the time. The Danish Golden Age texts included here were all written in the early days of photography, at a time when knowledge of the daguerreotype was gaining ground. It was this technology that made it relevant to talk about the image as something that may “stick” to a person and become “detached” or even “stolen” from him or her. It introduced a new language for talking about the relation between self and image. The point of photographic pictures is that this physical connection can be broken, and the indexical sign be released from its referent and circulate and proliferate freely. The semiotic rupture envisioned by Heiberg and Kierkegaard, and turned into a nightmare in Andersen’s “The Shadow,” is, in fact, the standard procedure of photography, which emancipates the image from its indexical obligations. A shadow is, as we know, a combination of an icon and an index, and so were the photographic pictures invented by Louis Daguerre. Every photograph is, in the words of Rosalind Krauss, “the result of a physical imprint transferred

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by light reflections onto a sensitive surface. The photograph is thus a type of icon, or visual likeness, which bears an indexical relationship to its object.”36 “The Shadow” can thus be regarded as a disturbing dramatization of the new semantics surrounding the relationship between image and self.37 The invention of photography enabled indexicals to take on a life of their own and survive the referent, like the shadow does in Andersen’s story. The “fear of the image, the anxiety that the “power of images” may finally destroy even their creators and manipulators, is as old as image-​making itself,” W.J.T. Mitchell writes.38 As “The Shadow” shows us, this anxiety was amplified drastically with the invention of photography. A photograph captures us in a moment and thus also reminds us of our timely existence, which will surely come to an end one day, whereas the picture is able to live on. This spectral quality has later become a key issue in the theory of photography, as for instance in Roland Barthes’ memorable phrase of the “micro-​version of death” one experiences by being photographed: “I am truly becoming a spectre.”39 This is the reminder that the scholar receives from the shadow, which upon its first return explains him that it felt “a sort of longing … to see you once more before you die; after all, you will die, sir!,” presupposing, conversely, that the shadow itself is immortal.40 Viewed in this context, “The Shadow” lets us discover some of the unconscious fears and anxieties that came along with the new technology. It stages 36

37

38 39 40

Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-​Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 1985, p. 203. Peirce, who lived in the age of photography, was able to categorize this new representational practice: “Photographs … are very instructive, because we know that they are in certain respects exactly like the objects they represent. But this resemblance is due to the photographs having been produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature. In that aspect, then, they belong to the second class of signs, those by physical connection” (quoted from W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology. Image, Text, Ideology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986, p. 60). This connection has also been noted by Thomas Fechner-​Smarsly, who has suggested that one can read “Andersen’s Märchen durchaus als Allegorie auf das Verhältnis—​oder auch Mißverhältnis—​von Individuum und dessen (öffentlichem) Bild” (“Der Spiegel und seine Schatten. Abdrücke der frühen Photographie in Texten von Aa. O. Vinje, Henrik Ibsen und H. C. Andersen,” in Zwischen Text und Bild. Zur Funktionalisierung von Bildern in Texten und Kontexten, ed. by Annegret Heitmann and Joachim Schiedermair, Freiburg: Rombach, 2000, p. 36). W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Visual and Verbal Representation, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994, p. 15. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang, 1981, pp. 13–​14. Ibid., p. 38.

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the emancipation of images taking place in contemporary visual culture, as a new economy of signs was being established, and it gives us a glimpse of the traumatic implications of this modern condition.

­c hapter 7

Epilogue

The Modernity of the Late Golden Age

Anxiety came in many shapes in the late Golden Age of Danish literature, and so did the conditions and tendencies that triggered it. As I hope to have shown in the preceding chapters, Søren Kierkegaard and his contemporaries explored an array of issues of modernity that fused anxiety with scenarios of emancipation: The democratization of society, the rise of liberalism, the tangled processes of secularization, the invention of (urban) popular culture, the increase of objective knowledge, the emergence of photographic reproduction, the finitude of human existence and the death (and rethinking) of art. What makes their texts intriguing and highly relevant reading is that many of these issues are closely interwoven and condensed into insightful cultural critique. It is a body of work that addresses developments and questions that have neither been resolved nor rendered obsolete but continues, to this day, to generate concern. Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety was only one among several literary attempts to capture and comprehend the complex sentiments arising from this interregnum, where many things were obviously undecided and cryptically connected. The redefinition of death, for instance, called for a radical rethinking of life, but it also induced vivid phantasies of inanimate objects taking on a life of their own. The death of art prompted an acute rethinking of aesthetic communication and its indispensability to human existence. The theoretical debate about aesthetics became an arena for a battle over secularization. Attempts to transfix the boundaries between the arts encouraged intrepid experiments in transcending them. The limits of language were tested and theorized in this literary and intellectual environment, which became the seedbed for existentialism. Common to all the authors that I have focused upon is this book is that they experienced their time as a transition period, a crisis. Some of the most significant texts of the late Golden Age deal with crises and unrest rather than with the harmony and repose that literary historiography has frequently attributed to the period. Disruptions marked the literary responses to the feeling of living between the times, where “the old is dying and the new cannot be born,” to use Antonio Gramsci’s famous phrase—​revolving around ambivalences and instabilities that the “golden age” and “Biedermeier” labels have been allowed

© Lasse Horne Kjældgaard, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004472068_008

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to eclipse for far too long.1 The dizzying and frightening experience of freedom, or the prospects of freedom, has been muted by these tags. In order to understand the complexity of this literary and intellectual environment, one must take into account the conflicting visions of the time, be they poetic, religious, or political; they were certainly not in agreement with each other. Considerable satirical and polemical energies were unleashed in the literature of these decades, and by no means exclusively by Kierkegaard. Numerous issues were addressed and debated by him and his contemporaries. Deep conflicts unfolded, and Kierkegaard gladly took part in them. It is especially rewarding to be aware of the common crisis in which art and religion found themselves and to contemplate Kierkegaard‘s changing and ambiguous attitudes to it. The preceding chapters have adverted to three debates in particular—​about the Advisory Provincial Assemblies, about the immortality of the soul and about the death of art. All three discussions originated elsewhere, in France and Germany, and were altered significantly in transit. They were intertwined in writings that construed them as harbingers of change. Political, religious, and literary voices were deeply opposed in these debates concerning the fate of society, art and human existence. These dissonances are an important, but largely overlooked, explanation for the great literary dynamic of the late Golden Age. Anxiety was a formidable dynamo in the literary life of these transitional times. For us today, it can open new gateways of understanding the cultural dynamic and lasting urgency of this epoch, of which we may get a better and fuller grasp, I believe, by regarding it as “the original age of anxiety.” 1 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. and ed. by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, New York: International Publishers, 1971, pp. 275–​276.

Bibliography

Primary Literature

Andersen, H.C., Skyggebilleder af en Reise til Harzen, det sachsiske Schweitz etc. etc., i Sommeren 1831, Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog-​og Litteraturselskab/​Borgen, 1986. Andersen, H.C., The Shadow and Other Tales, trans. by Faith Ingwersen, Madison, WI: Dept. of Scandinavian Studies, University of Wisconsin, 1982. Andersen, Hans Christian, Mit Livs Eventyr, vols. 1–​2, ed. by Helge Topsøe-​Jensen, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1996. Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. by Jonathan Barns, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984. Auden, W.H., The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue, ed. by Alan Jacobs. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011 (W.H. Auden: Critical Editions). Blicher, Steen Steensen, “Fragments from the Diary of a Parish Clerk,” in Twelve Stories by Steen Steensen Blicher, trans. by Hanna Astrup Larsen, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945, pp. 49–​78. Brandes, Georg, Emigrantlitteraturen, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1872. Brorson, H.A., Udvalgte salmer og digte, ed. by Steffen Arndal, Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog-​og Litteraturselskab, 1994. Brøchner, Hans, “Hans Brøchner on Kierkegaard,” in Encounters with Kierkegaard: A Life as Seen by His Contemporaries, ed. by Bruce H. Kirmmse, trans. by Bruce H. Kirmmse and Virginia R. Laursen, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996, pp. 225–​252. Euripides, Medea, trans. by Arthur S. Way, London: Heinemann, 1966. Feuerbach, Ludwig: Thoughts on Death and Immortality: From the Papers of a Thinker, along with an Appendix of Theological-​Satirical Epigrams, edited by one of his friends; trans. by James A. Massey, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Gjellerup, Karl, Det unge Danmark, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag, 1879. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vols. 1–​2, trans by T.M. Knox, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. by E.S. Haldane, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by A.V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1977. Heiberg, Johan Ludvig, Om den Menneskelige Frihed. I Anledning om de nyeste Stridigheder over denne Gjenstand, Kiel: Universitets-​Boghandlingen, 1824. Heiberg, Johan Ludvig, Om Vaudevillen, som dramatisk Digtart, og dens Betydning paa den danske Skuesplads: En dramaturgisk Undersøgelse, Copenhagen: Schultz, 1826.

132 Bibliography Heiberg, Johan Ludvig, “Til Læserne ved den nye Aargangs Begyndelse,” Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post, no. 1, January 4, 1828, photographical reprint edition, ed. Uffe Andreasen, (Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog-​og Litteraturselskab, 1980), vol. 2, pp. 13–​14. Heiberg, Johan Ludvig, “Et Par Ord om det Uendelige,” Kjøbenhavns Flyvende Post, no. 100, December 15, 1828, ed. by Uffe Andreasen, Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog-​ og Litteraturselskab/​C.A. Reitzel, 1981, vol. 2, pp. 413–​414. (English translation: “A Few Words about the Infinite,” in Heiberg’s Contingency Regarded from the Point of View of Logic and Other Texts, ed. and trans. by Jon Stewart, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press 2008 (Texts from Golden Age Denmark, vol. 4), pp. 161–​166.). Heiberg, Johan Ludvig: “Om vore nationale Forlystelser I,” in Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post, no. 84, 1830, photographical reprint edition by Uffe Andreasen, Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog-​og Litteraturselskab, 1980, vol. 3. Heiberg, Johan Ludvig, “Bretschneiders Forsvar for Rationalismen,” Kjøbenhavns Flyvende Post, ed. by Uffe Andreasen, vol. 3, nos. 101–​105 and 107–​110, 1830, Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog-​og Litteraturselskab/​C.A. Reitzel, 1981. Heiberg, Johan Ludvig, Ledetraad ved Forelæsningerne over Philosophiens Philosophie eller den speculative Logik ved den kongelige militaire Højskole 1831–​1832, Copenhagen, 1832. (English translation: Outline of the Philosophy of Philosophy or Speculative Logic in Heiberg’s Speculative Logic and Other Texts, ed. and trans. by Jon Stewart, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 2006 (Texts from Golden Age Denmark, vol. 2).). Heiberg, Johan Ludvig, Om Philosophiens Betydning for den nuværende Tid, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel, 1833. (English translation: On the Significance of Philosophy for the Present Age and Other Texts, ed. and trans. by Jon Stewart, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 2005 (Texts from Golden Age Denmark, vol. 1).). Heiberg, Johan Ludvig, “Breve til en Landsbypræst,” Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post, nos. 22–​24, 1834, ed. by Uffe Andreasen, vol. 4, pp. 93–​95, pp. 98–​100, pp. 101–​104, Copenhagen: Det danske Sprog-​og Litteraturselskab/​C.A. Reitzel, 1981 (English translation: “Letters to a Village Pastor,” in Heiberg’s Contingency Regarded from the Point of View of Logic and Other Texts, ed. and trans. by Jon Stewart, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press 2008 (Texts from Golden Age Denmark, vol. 4), pp. 199–​222.). Heiberg, Johan Ludvig, “Christensens Skrift om Trykkefriheden,” in Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post, Interimsblad, nos. 14–​16, ed. by Uffe Andreasen, vols. 1–​4, Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog-​og Litteraturselskab/​C.A. Reitzel 1981, vol. 4 (1834), pp. 61–​64, pp. 65–​ 68, pp. 69–​72. Heiberg, Johan Ludvig, “Review of Dr. Rothe’s Doctrine of the Trinity and Reconciliation,” Heiberg’s Perseus and Other Texts, ed. and trans. by Jon Stewart, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press 2010 (Texts from Golden Age Denmark, vol. 6), pp. 83–​149.

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142 Bibliography Singer, Charles Joseph and Trevor Illtyd Williams, A History of Technology, vols. 1–​5, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954. Steiner, Wendy, Pictures of Romance: Form Against Context in Painting and Literature, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Stewart, Jon, Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Stewart, Jon, A History of Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark, Tome I, The Heiberg Period: 1824–​1836, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel, 2007 (Danish Golden Age Studies, vol. 3). Stewart, Jon, A History of Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark, Tome II, The Martensen Period: 1837–​1842, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel, 2007 (Danish Golden Age Studies, vol. 3). Stewart, Jon, “Heiberg’s Speculative Poetry as a Model for Kierkegaard’s Concept of Controlled Irony,” in Johan Ludvig Heiberg: Philosopher, Littérateur, Dramaturge, and Political Thinker, ed. by Jon Stewart, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel, 2008 (Danish Golden Age Studies, vol. 5), pp. 195–​216. Stewart, Jon, “Introduction: The Debate Surrounding Hegel’s Criticism of the Laws of Logic in Golden Age Denmark,” in Mynster’s “Rationalism, Supernaturalism” and the Debate about Mediation, ed. and trans. by Jon Stewart, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2009 (Texts from Golden Age Denmark, vol. 5), pp. 1–​45. Stewart, Jon, “Hegel, Kierkegaard and the Danish Debate about Mediation,” Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, no. 61, 2010, pp. 61–​86. Stewart, Jon, “Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion and the Question of ’Right’ and ’Left’ Hegelianism,” in Politics, Religion, and Art: Hegelian Debates, ed. by Douglas Moggach, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011, pp. 66–​95. Stewart, Jon, “Heiberg’s Conception of Speculative Drama and the Crisis of the Age: Martensen’s Analysis of Fata Morgana” in The Heibergs and the Theater: Between Vaudeville, Romantic Comedy and National Drama, ed. by Jon Stewart, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2012 (Danish Golden Age Studies, vol. 7), pp. 139–​160. Stewart, Jon, Søren Kierkegaard: Subjectivity, Irony and the Crisis of Modernity, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015. Stewart, Jon, The Cultural Crisis of the Danish Golden Age: Heiberg, Martensen and Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2015 (Danish Golden Age Studies, vol. 9). Stewart, Jon, “Johan Ludvig Heiberg’s ‘Literary Winter Crops’ and Kierkegaard’s Polemic,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2020, pp. 325–​337. Stoichita, Victor, A Short History of the Shadow, London: Reaktion Books, 1997. Stolnitz, Jerome, “On the Origins of ‘Aesthetic Disinterestedness,’ ” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 20, no. 2, 1961, pp. 131–​143. Stähler, Wilhelm, Zur Unsterblichkeitsproblematik in Hegels Nachfolge, Münster: Universitas-​Verlag, 1928.

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Index Agacinski, Sylviane 68, 72, 72n12 d’Alembert, Jean le Rond 86 Allen, Woody 68 Andersen, Hans Christian vii, 10, 22, 39, 39n42, 39n44, 76, 111, 111n3, 112n3 Andersen, Vilhelm 9, 9n29, 24, 24n5, 36, 39n44, 95n18, 135 Arildsen, Skat 105n39 Aristotle 65, 65n56, 66, 66n61, 104, 131, 138 Armstrong, Tim 111n2 Auden, W.H. 6, 6n19, 7, 7n20, 136, 140 Auerbach, Erich 60, 61n44 Bal, Mieke 60, 60n43 Bambach, Charles 6, 6n16, 136 Barthes, Roland 127, 127n39 Baxandall, Michael 119, 119n18, 136 Benjamin, Walter 111, 111n1, 113, 114n10 Bergman, Ingmar 68 Bernstein, Leonard 7 Billeskov Jansen, F. J. 100n27 Blicher, St. St. 10, 80n35 Bloom, Harold 115n12 Bohrer, Karl Heinz 72, 73, 73n13, 75, 136 Bonde Jensen, Jørgen 120, 120n23, 123n31 Borchsenius, Otto 30n18 Börne, Ludwig 26 Boym, Svetlana 9n30, 136 Brandes, Georg 24, 25n7, 29, 44, 91, 136 Brazill, William J. 90n6 Briese, Olaf 90n6 Brøchner, Hans 76, 76n24, 137 Brorson, Hans Adolph 15, 16, 16n41, 137 Brunelleschi, Filippo 59n42 Byron, Lord (George Gordon) 27 Cappelørn, Niels Jørgen vii, viii, 3n6, 100n26, 133, 134 Caputo, John D. 85, 86n53, 137 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da 59n42 Carstensen, Georg 43 Castle, Terry 122, 122n29 Chamisso, Adalbert de 114, 117, 118, 125, 126 Claussen, Sophus 27n12

Cotkin, George 6, 6n18, 137 Crary, Jonathan 121, 121n27, 137 Czakó, István 100n28 Daguerre, Louis 111, 126 Danius, Sara 111n2 Derrida, Jacques 68, 68n1, 72, 137 Diderot, Denis 61n46, 86 Dupré, Louis 89n2, 100, 100n28, 138 Euripides 51 Fechner-​Smarsly, Thomas 127n37 Fenger, Henning 26n11, 49n9, 75, 75n22, 92n10 Feuerbach, Ludwig 18, 18n45, 27, 103, 131 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 73 Frandsen, Finn 81n41 Frederik vi, King 24, 25, 28, 34, 92n9, 139 Freud, Sigmund 112 Fromm, Erich 7, 7n22, 8, 138, 140 Frye, Northrop 98, 98n24, 138 Fulda, Hans Friedrich 71n9 Genette, Gérard 82n42 Geulen, Eva 92n12 Ghiberti, Lorenzo 59n42 Gjellerup, Karl 27n12 Gramsci, Antonio 129, 130n1 Green, Ronald M. 47n2 Greenspan, Daniel 65n56 Grimm, Jacob & Wilhelm 20, 21 Grundtvig, NF.S. 9, 10, 30, 75, 102 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich 8, 8n27, 139 Gyllembourg, Thomasine 9, 40, 79 Habermas, Jürgen 36, 36n33, 131 Hagemann, Tim 32, 32n23 Hamann, Johann Georg 72 Hansen, Martin A. 80n35 Hansen, Uffe 112n5 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 20, 22, 37, 38, 38n36, 61, 61n45, 64, 65, 69, 70, 70n5, 71, 71n8, 72, 73, 73n16, 74, 74n19, 75, 75n23, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 81n38, 87n58,

Index 90, 90n6, 90n7, 92, 92n12, 92n13, 94, 94n17, 95n17, 102, 102n32, 105n39, 106, 109n49, 131, 138, 140, 141, 142 Heiberg, Johan Ludvig vii, 10, 12, 12n34, 13, 13n35, 13n36, 14n38, 21, 25, 25n9, 26, 26n10, 26n11, 27, 27n12, 27n14, 28, 28n15, 29, 31, 31n20, 32, 33, 33n24, 35, 35n28, 35n31, 36, 36n32, 37, 37n35, 38, 38n37, 39, 40, 40n45, 40n46, 41, 41n48, 41n49, 41n50, 42, 42n51, 43, 43n52, 44, 44n54, 45, 45n55, 49, 49n9, 50, 50n15, 52, 55, 56, 57, 57n29, 57n30, 58, 62, 62n48, 63, 63n49, 65, 69, 73, 73n16, 74, 75, 76, 76n25, 77, 77n26, 78, 78n29, 78n30, 79, 79n32, 80, 80n35, 80n36, 81, 81n39, 81n40, 82, 83, 83n47, 83n49, 84, 85, 87, 87n57, 91, 92, 92n10, 92n11, 92n13, 93, 94, 94n16, 94n17, 95, 96, 97, 97n21, 97n22, 98, 99, 100n28, 101, 102, 103, 105, 108, 110, 123, 124, 124n32, 126, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 139, 140, 141, 142 Heiberg, Peter Andreas 26 Heidegger, Martin 5, 6, 6n16, 6n17, 86n53, 136, 137, 139 Heine, Heinrich 26, 30 Henrich, Dieter 71n9, 138 Henriksen, Mads Fedder 81n41 Hertz, Henrik 33, 34, 34n27, 35, 36, 133, 141 Hesiod 9 Hirsch, Emanuel 53n23, 134 Holm, Isak Winkel 9n28, 48n5, 100n27 Horace 51 Horwitz, Allan W. 5, 5n13, 139 Houe, Poul 8n24 Hügli, Anton 104n39 Hugo, Victor 27

145 Keats, John 27, 54, 54n25, 133 Kierkegaard, Søren v, vii, viii, 1, 1n1, 2, 2n2, 3, 3n6, 4, 5, 5n15, 6, 6n17, 6n19, 7, 7n22, 8, 8n24, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 13n35, 13n36, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 28, 28n15, 32, 33, 34, 35, 35n29, 36, 37, 39, 39n43, 40, 41, 41n48, 41n49, 43, 45, 46, 46n1, 47, 47n2, 47n3, 48, 48n6, 49, 49n10, 52, 53n23, 55, 56, 60, 65, 65n56, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 72n12, 73, 73n16, 74, 74n19, 75, 75n22, 75n23, 76, 76n24, 76n25, 77, 77n27, 78, 79, 80, 80n35, 80n37, 81, 81n41, 82, 82n43, 83, 84, 85, 86, 86n53, 87, 87n57, 87n58, 88, 89, 89n2, 90, 91, 94n17, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 100n26, 100n28, 101, 102, 102n31, 102n32, 104, 104n39, 105n39, 112, 121, 123, 125, 126, 129, 130, 133, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143 Kirmmse, Bruce H. viii, 28n15, 134, 137 Kisiel, Theodore 6n17 Kittler, Friedrich A. 111n2 Kjældgaard, Lasse Horne 13n36, 27n13, 29n16 Kondrup, Johnny viii, 54n24, 134 Koselleck, Reinhart 79n31 Kramer, Nathaniel 13n36, 41n50, 136 Krauss, Rosalind 126 Kuhr, Victor 104n39

Jacobs, Alan 7 Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter) 72 Jensen, Inger Lise 113n9 Jensen, Johan Fjord 9n29 Jeppesen, Alfred 43n53 Jørgensen, Harald 92n9

Lamartine, Alphonse de 27 Lehmann, Orla 29, 29n17, 30, 39, 134 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 47, 48, 48n6, 48n6, 48n7, 49, 49n11, 50, 50n13, 50n14, 51, 51n16, 51n19, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 59, 60, 60n43, 61, 61n46, 62, 64, 64n52, 66, 66n59, 134, 142, 143 Lippitt, John 7n22 Lisi, Leonardo F. 6n19, 28n15 Liunge, A. P. 41n49, 69, 69n2, 85 Löwith, Karl 90, 90n7, 98, 140 Lowrie, Walter 6 Luhmann, Niklas 91n8 Lunding, Erik 24, 24n4, 29, 140

Kabell, Aage 28n15 Kant, Immanuel 2, 108, 108n47, 109 Keaton, Diane 68

March, William 8, 8n26 Martensen, Hans Lassen 10, 12, 12n34, 13n36, 41n48, 74, 102, 105n39, 134, 135, 142

146 May, Rollo 8, 8n24, 8n25, 139 McDonald, William 1n1, 140 Mitchell, W.J.T. 127, 127n36, 127n38 Møller, P.L. 14, 14n38, 17, 43, 44, 44n54 Møller, Poul Martin vii, 10, 11, 11n31, 23, 23n1, 24, 25, 26, 40, 40n45, 44, 71, 71n7, 91, 95, 95n18, 96n19, 97, 98, 99, 102, 103, 106, 107, 108 Müller-​Wille, Klaus vii, 28n15 Mylius, Johan de 12n32, 39, 39n43, 135 Mynster, Jacob Peter 74, 105n39, 142, 143 Ngai, Sianne 4, 4n12, 141 Nichol, Todd W. viii, 84, 134 Nyerup, Rasmus 69, 69n3 Nygaard, Bertel 13n36, 34n27 Paludan-​Müller, Frederik 10, 12 Pattison, George viii, 80, 80n37, 87n57, 94n17, 134 Paul, Saint 65 Peirce, Charles Sanders 119, 127n36 Perkins, Robert 47n3 Petersen, Teddy 35n30 Piloty, Ferdinand 53, 54n24 Pliny (the Younger) 51, 54 Plumpe, Gerhard 91n8 Rank, Otto 112, 113n7, 113n9 Rasch, Aage 31n19 Rask, Rasmus 10 Rembrandt, Harmenszoon van Rijn 59n42 Robinson, David 122n28 Rorty, Richard 93, 93n15, 135 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques 44 Schaeffer, Jean-​Marie 71, 71n6, 141 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 73 Schlegel, Friedrich 72 Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur M. 7 Schwarzenberger, Gerhart 111n3

Index Shakespeare, William 53, 53n23, 55 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 27 Sibbern, Frederik Christian 75, 83, 83n49, 135 Singer, Charles Joseph 120n24 Søltoft, Pia 3n6, 39n43, 140 Sørensen, Villy 112n6, 113, 113n8, 113n9 Stähler, Wilhelm 90n6 Steiner, Wendy 55, 55n26, 141 Stendhal (Marie-​Henri Beyle) 27 Stewart, Jon vii, 1n1, 5n15, 6n19, 7n22, 8n24, 13n35, 13n36, 25n9, 28n15, 35n28, 36, 36n32, 41n48, 41n50, 48n6, 57n29, 57n30, 63n49, 65n56, 73, 73n16, 74, 74n19, 75, 75n22, 75n23, 76, 76n25, 79n32, 80n35, 83n47, 87, 87n58, 90n6, 93n14, 94n16, 97n22, 100n28, 102, 102n32, 105n39, 132, 133, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143 Stoichita, Adalbert Victor 117, 117n15, 118, 118n17, 119, 119n19, 119n20, 142 Stolnitz, Jerome 109n47 Swenson, David 6 Thompson, Curtis L. 48n6 Thorvaldsen, Bertel 10 Timomachos 51, 52, 54, 55, 60, 61, 62, 63, 66 Tullberg, Steen 5n15 Vammen, Hans 13n36 Vedel, Valdemar 9, 9n29, 143 Waage, O. 105n39 Wellbery, David E. 50, 50n13, 143 Williams, Trevor Illtyd 120n24, 141 Wivel, Ole 80n35 Oehlenschläger, Adam 9, 12, 12n32, 30, 75, 135 Ørsted, Hans Christian 10, 112 Aarestrup, Emil 14, 15, 15n39, 16, 131