Celebrating Søren Kierkegaard’s birthday – 5th of May, 1813
For a change I’m simply going to shoot from the hip, as that wonderful North American saying has it, and tell you some things about Denmark’s only world renowned thinker without any detailed referencing. Søren Kierkegaard preferred to be called a thinker, rather than a philosopher. One reason for that is that he described the philosophers of his age as having accomplished the perverse miracle of turning wine into water. He also suggested that when a city was getting ready for a hostile invasion, philosophers should rush up and down the street, just like Diogenes did when the ancient Greek city of Corinth prepared for siege. When Corinthians – yes they were and are a thing – asked Diogenes why he was rolling his tub up and down the street, he replied that he wanted to look busy like everybody else. With these quotes alone, we can see that Kierkegaard’s thinking and writing was not only incredibly perceptive but also very funny. Where did Kierkegaard get this rep that he was exclusively doom and gloom? He drank wine to beat the bands and was often the life and soul of the Danish coffee and pastry shop – the Konditorier – and high society soirees to boot.
Of course Kierkegaard wrote about depression, and he was by his own nature depressive, but that was not his view of human nature as a whole and he described depression as a shout for freedom. And do you see this question of sin? According to some, Kierkegaard was no fun at all and ruled out all sorts of sexual fleshliness as being sinful. Quite the reverse is the case. Kierkegaard actually said that sensuality in love was vital for its full expression. The sin came in selfishness. That is, that you fell in love with someone else but failed to then embrace the world because of the joys of that love. Kierkegaard’s other main description of sin – called a category – was untruth. That is, that you were living a lie by not being your true self. You were split. We all know this to be true and we all know that it is our conscience that tells us this.
Below, I publish a poem I wrote about Kierkegaard in response to one of Ireland’s best living poets, Harry Clifton, who asks – in his train journey poem Søren Kierkegaard – what Kierkegaard would know of joy. (Night Train through the Brenner collection).
South With Kierkegaard
(For Harry Clifton)
I took you south with me Søren Kierkegaard
a two day train ride to Florence from Copenhagen
your pulp fiction parables impelling wheels, turning pages
Diary of a Seducer Don Juan – the Either/Or twin track dialectic
hurtling through the Nordic psyche to the core of existence
Where did this myth arise that you are just a cold fish
Doctor Dread wallowing eternally in fear and trembling?
The Dane opposite me professes never to have read you
but describes your Diogenes rolling his tub up and down the street
in frantic efforts to look busy as Corinth prepared for war
We left on a day of cormorant mist, quiet ice and steaming coffee
no cardboard Danish for you – a connoisseur of Konditorier
the Fred Astaire of coffee shops, an intellectual athlete of gustation
Pukkelrygget – hunchback , trousers too short for your palate and genius,
gifts from the gods to counterweight the callipers of your father’s curse
Blond men in rough clogs, red doors in village hamlets
a heron on the wing
Scandinavia slipping intelligently by
a cornucopia of original erudition
your passionate intuition through windows looking outwards looking in
I see that Kierkegaard must not be read but embraced
like the blue tint of low fjords emerging to frame the wanderlust sky
the Continental drift in your style
In the depths of Germany a flayed, ravished woman flashes by,
a nun, ghastly white and roused by loving hatred
Donna Elvira in pursuit of Don Juan
then your stoic Antigone who rejoices in being called to bear witness
your dramatis personae – stations of the cross flashing up
in a torrent of words, the train swaying again, again, again, again
So much of what you say has come true, Kierkegaard
the collapse of the church under the scandal of its own hubris
pre-disproving Freud by showing that spiritual angst not sex
is our zeitgeist – the desperate search for the self in a world
where nothingness is a fine art
When the German stations stopped I hopped off
to hear your beloved Mozart
Finally in the soft heat and flowers of Florence
I recalled Regine Olsen
your whole life’s work a eulogy to a woman and the ideal of love
Not a philosopher but a Digter – Poet, Author and Thinker.
For you the mystery of the divine was either absurd or a leap of faith
refusing the host and platitudes from a starched priest’s breath
you died well and honourably
joyously writing for eternity
Paul Larkin