Kierkegaard for Grownups

[Kire]

Kierkegaard for Grownups
Richard John Neuhaus Copyright (c) 2004 First Things 146 (October 2004): 27-33.



That extraordinary writer of stories about the "Christ-haunted" American South, Flannery O’Connor, was frequently asked why her people and plots were so often outlandish, even grotesque. She answered, "To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you have to draw large and startling figures." I expect Søren Kierkegaard, had he lived a century later, would have taken to Flannery O’Connor and would have relished her affirmation of the necessarily outlandish. But then he would immediately be on guard lest anyone think that he does not really mean what he says, that he is anything less than utterly, indeed deadly, serious. He exaggerates for effect and witheringly attacks his opponents who suggest that his exaggeration is anything less than the truth of the matter. He writes, as he repeatedly says, for that one reader—the singular individual who has the courage to understand him—while at the same time describing in detail, and often with hilarious parody, the many readers who refuse to take him at his word. Kierkegaard was keenly (some would say obsessively) attentive to the ways in which he was misunderstood, even as he persistently and defiantly courted misunderstanding. This, as readers beyond numbering have discovered, can be quite maddening. It is also at least part of the reason why Kierkegaard is so widely read.

There are circles of Kierkegaard scholarship, some of it academically solemn and much of it more in the nature of fan clubs. One can only guess what he would make of professors who lecture on his contempt for professors and lecturing, or of admirers who have made him, of all things he unremittingly despised, popular. Apart from the stolid academics and enthusiastic fans, reading Kierkegaard is for many people an "experience," preferably to be indulged early in life before moving on to the ambiguities and compromises of adulthood that we resign ourselves to believing is the real world. A well-read acquaintance of a certain age says that he remembers fondly his "Kierkegaard period." He was about nineteen at the time, and it followed closely upon his "Holden Caulfield period," referring to the young rebel of J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. In his view—shared, I have no doubt, by many others—Kierkegaard provides a spiritual and intellectual rush, a frisson of youthful rebellion, a flirtation with radical refusal of the world as it is. Kierkegaard is, in sum, a spiritually and intellectually complexified way of joining Holden Caulfield in declaring that established ways of thinking and acting are "phony" to the core, which declaration certifies, by way of dramatic contrast, one’s most singular "authenticity." Such certification does wonders for what today is called self-esteem. It is a way of thinking and acting that has the further cachet of coming with an impressive philosophical title: existentialism.

As it happened, Kierkegaard’s writings were gaining currency in the English-speaking world about the same time as the appearance of Catcher in the Rye and other "demythologizings" of all things conventional. For many readers, especially younger readers, the encounter with Kierkegaard was part of a cultural moment marked by the beginnings of disillusionment with the American Way of Life that was so triumphantly celebrated after the Second World War. Those beginnings would build into what was later dubbed the youth culture or the counterculture, which we loosely associate with "the ’60s," a curious mix of social, sexual, political, and religious liberationisms that made, as it was said, their long march through the institutions and still shape and misshape the way we think and the way we live today. Many Americans now reaching retirement age nostalgically recall, and maybe could still find somewhere around the house, the paperbacks that were the vademecums of that time: Marcuse on one-dimensional man, Charles Reich on the greening of America, C. Wright Mills on the power elite, Malcolm X on revolutionary violence, Jean-Paul Sartre on the nausea of society—and, among those and many others, Kierkegaard on authentic existence. The arguments of these books were dramatically different and often contradictory, but they had in common what was taken to be a relentless hostility to The Establishment.

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