Kierkegaard is
sometimes regarded as an apolitical thinker, but in fact he intervened stridently
in church politics, cultural politics, and in the turbulent social changes of his time. His earliest
published essay, for example, was a polemic against women's liberation. It is a reactionary
apologetic for the prevailing patriarchal values, and was motivated largely by Kierkegaard's
desire to ingratiate himself with factions within Copenhagen's intellectual circles. This latter
desire gradually left him, but his relation to women remained highly questionable.
One of Kierkegaard's
main interventions in cultural politics was his sustained attack on
Hegelianism. Hegel's philosophy had been introduced into Denmark with religious zeal by J.L.
Heiberg, and was taken up enthusiastically within the theology faculty of Copenhagen
University and by Copenhagen's literati. Kierkegaard, too, was induced to make a serious
study of Hegel's work. While Kierkegaard greatly admired Hegel, he had grave reservations
about Hegelianism and its bombastic promises. Hegel would have been the greatest thinker
who ever lived, said Kierkegaard, if only he had regarded his system as a thought-experiment.
Instead he took himself seriously to have reached the truth, and so rendered himself comical.
Kierkegaard's tactic
in undermining Hegelianism was to produce an elaborate parody of
Hegel's entire system. The pseudonymous authorship, from Either-Or to Concluding
Unscientific Postscript, presents an inverted Hegelian dialectic which is designed to lead
readers away from knowledge rather than towards it. This authorship simultaneously snipes at
German romanticism and contemporary Danish literati (with J.L. Heiberg receiving much
acerbic comment).
This intriguing
pseudonymous authorship received little popular attention, aimed as it was at the
literary elite. So it had little immediate effect as discursive action. Kierkegaard sought to
remedy this by provoking an attack on himself in the popular satirical review The Corsair.
Kierkegaard succeeded in having himself mercilessly lampooned in this publication, largely on
personal grounds rather than in terms of the substance of his writings. The suffering incurred by
these attacks sparked Kierkegaard into another highly productive phase of authorship, but this
time his focus was the creation of positive Christian discourses rather than satire or parody.
Eventually Kierkegaard
became more and more worried about the direction taken by the
Danish People's Church, especially after the death of the Bishop Primate J.P. Mynster. He
realized he could no longer indulge himself in the painstakingly erudite and poetically meticulous
writing he had practised hitherto. He had to intervene decisively in a popular medium, so he
published his own pamphlet under the title The Instant. This addressed church politics directly
and increasingly shrilly.
There were two
main foci of Kierkegaard's concern in church politics. One was the influence of
Hegel, largely through the teachings of H.L. Martensen; the other was the popularity of N.F.S.
Grundtvig, a theologian, educator and poet who composed most of the pieces in the Danish
hymn book. Grundtvig's theology was diametrically opposed to Kierkegaard's in tone.
Grundtvig emphasized the light, joyous, celebratory and communal aspects of Christianity,
whereas Kierkegaard emphasized seriousness, suffering, sin, guilt, and individual isolation.
Kierkegaard's intervention failed miserably with respect to the Danish People's Church, which
became predominantly Grundtvigian. His intervention with respect to Hegelianism also failed,
with Martensen succeeding Mynster as Bishop Primate. Hegelianism in the church went on to
die of natural causes.
Kierkegaard also
provided critical commentary on social change. He was an untiring champion
of "the single individual" as opposed to "the crowd". He feared that the opportunity
of achieving
geniune selfhood was diminished by the social production of stereotypes. He lived in an age
when mass society was emerging from a highly stratified feudal order and was contemptuous of
the mediocrity the new social order generated. One symptom of the change was that mass
society substitutes detached reflection for engaged passionate commitment. Yet the latter is
crucial for Christian faith and for authentic selfhood according to Kierkegaard.
Kierkegaard's real
value as a social and political thinker was not realized until after his death.
His pamphleteering achieved little immediate impact, but his substantial philosophical, literary,
psychological and theological writings have had a lasting effect. Much of Heidegger's very
influential work, Being And Time, is indebted to Kierkegaard's writings (though this goes
unacknowledged by Heidegger). Kierkegaard's social realism, his deep psychological and
philosophical analyses of contemporary problems, and his concern to address "the present age"
were taken up by fellow Scandinavians Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg. Ibsen and
Strindberg, together with Friedrich Nietzsche, became central icons of the modernism
movement in Berlin in the 1890s. The Danish literary critic Georg Brandes was instrumental in
conjoining these intellectual figures: he had given the first university lectures on Kierkegaard and
on Nietzsche; he had promoted Kierkegaard's work to Nietzsche and to Strindberg; and he
had put Strindberg in correspondence with Nietzsche. Taking his cue from Brandes, the
Swedish literary critic Ola Hansson subsequently promoted this conjunction of writers in Berlin
itself. Berlin modernism self- consciously sought to use art as a means of political and social
change. It continued Kierkegaard's concern to use discursive action for social transformation.
1. Background
