“Young Girl Reading”
Seymour Joseph Guy, 1877

Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Soren Kierkegaard

by

Clare Carlisle

This is a biography of Kierkegaard, written by a woman philosopher. It tells the well-known story of his jilted fiancée, and just about everything else you might want to know about Kierkegaard.

For myself, there isn’t much else that I wanted to know, because I never much liked Kierkegaard. He’s generally counted the first existentialist, and the father of that development in philosophy. Okay, what is existentialism?

So glad you asked. It’s that orientation in philosophy that foregrounds how it is – subjectively and experientially – to be human, as opposed to what being human involves conceptually. If it’s possible conceptually to give a complete account (a logos) of human reality (as say Aristotle does) – for existentialism that would be neither possible nor desirable.

Although existentialists like Sartre and Camus were atheists, and Heidegger’s thought includes some kind of mysticism not presupposing a deity, some existentialists have been theists. And Kierkegaard is certainly a leading example of an existentialist for whom God was of overriding importance

So why don’t I care for him? After all, in recent years I too have come to reserve a key role for God in the human story. Aren’t we alike in that?

Well, no. I also give a prime place to women in virtually any human story – whether important by their presence or by their absence – and here’s where my dislike for Kierkegaard comes in.

As a young Danish seminarian, he was engaged to a charming young woman named Regina Olsen. From her portrait, we see that there is something endearing about her. After about a year of courtship, during which Kierkegaard professed the most unqualified devotion and commitment to her, he broke off their engagement.

My recoil from Kierkegaard begins with this incident. But not because of his cold feet, based perhaps on a sense (recorded in his journals) that he couldn’t make her happy and might even make her miserable. Nor because he perhaps honestly felt that his talent would flourish only in solitude. Second thoughts of that ilk might even merit a modest measure of sympathy.

What I can’t pardon is his insistence on jilting Regina in such a way as to tie her to himself endlessly afterward . “I will take her with me into history,” he wrote grandly. Because hey, I’m Kierkegaard! To me that looks like a hyper-seduction, which she would not have had the personal force to escape. And indeed, she never did, even though eventually she married another.

Beyond the psychical possessiveness that he insisted on exerting as long as he lived and beyond, I have a qualm about the lessons, purportedly spiritual, that he drew from his broken engagement.

Apparently he drew an analogy between the breaking of his engagement to Regina (unethical but required of him by a higher calling) and Abraham’s submission to God’s command (rescinded at the last minute) to sacrifice his son. Kierkegaard’s name for what occurred on Mount Moriah is “the teleological suspension of the ethical.” Which is to say, the transcendence of ethical constraints for a higher – a divinely commanded – purpose. 

Here’s the analogy: Just as it was unethical for Kierkegaard to break his engagement with Regina, so also it was unethical for a father to kill his son. But in both cases, Kierkegaard appears to have inferred, the spiritual obligation overrode the ethical.

I take what is called in Jewish memory the akedah, the binding of Isaac, to illustrate, by means of a particularly vivid metaphor, the overriding – the unqualified absoluteness – of the God/human relationship. What that means for each of us in practical terms seems to me a rather open, delicate and subtle question, not easily condensed into a formula where one-size-fits-all.

By contrast, I take Kierkegaard’s abandonment-with-spiritual-seduction of Regina to illustrate his unresolved call to be both (1) a man whose devotion to the woman he loved would be sincere and (2) a seeker whose search for God would also be sincere.

Trying to do both

he failed to do either.