Kierkegaard Against the Crowd. The Man Who Saw Mass Society Being Born and Refused It in Advance

Copenhagen, winter 1846. A man walks the streets in a worn frock coat, with trouser legs of uneven length and an umbrella under his arm, and nearly every passer-by knows his face. This is Søren Kierkegaard, the sharpest mind in Denmark, and he has just become the town joke. A newspaper made him one.

The paper was The Corsair (Corsaren), a witty, cruel satirical sheet that feared almost no one – even the king came in for its mockery. Three thousand copies went out every Friday across Denmark, Sweden and Norway, read from housemaid to grandee. It was edited in secret by the twenty-year-old Meïr Aron Goldschmidt, who had already served time and paid fines for lampooning the powerful. The spark was a private quarrel: the critic P. L. Møller, in his yearbook Gæa, mocked Kierkegaard's fertility as a sickly compulsion and portrayed Regine as a live victim on an experimenter's dissecting table. Kierkegaard answered under the name Frater Taciturnus, exposed Møller's secret tie to The Corsair, and publicly asked the paper to turn on him as well. It galled him to be quietly praised by such a sheet, to stand in the ranks of those it chose to spare. So he called the fire down on himself.

The Corsair took him up on it. The cartoonist was Peter Klæstrup, and week after week the caricatures ran: Kierkegaard on horseback in a top hat, Kierkegaard fighting a duel, Kierkegaard riding on a lady's shoulders, Kierkegaard waiting outside the office to be let in; a crooked spine and trouser legs of unequal length – one leg supposedly a little longer than the other. The drawings went around the city, and soon boys in the street were dogging his heels, shouting his name and eyeing the hems of his trousers. He gave up the long walks he loved above everything.

Hold this scene, because something new is being born in it. Kierkegaard is the first man to pick a fight with the mass press on purpose, to learn in his own skin what "the public" is. He got his answer. The public is a thousand faces laughing at you together, not one of which would have laughed alone.

Five years before The Corsair there was Regine Olsen. Kierkegaard fell in love with her when she was fourteen, courted her for three years, and in September 1840 asked her to marry him. She said yes. And the very next day a dread took hold of him that he never fully explained to anyone.

He broke the engagement. First he tried to send back her ring by letter; then, when she would not let go, he played the scoundrel to her face – cold and careless – so that the break would look like her release. He wanted the city to blame him and not her. Regine pleaded, came to him, wept; her father begged him. Kierkegaard held firm and left for Berlin.

Why? There is no clean answer here, and he had none himself. He felt in himself a melancholy too deep to share with a wife; he felt a calling that a marriage would have betrayed. He took from himself the one earthly happiness he had, and never stopped writing about her.

Out of that wound grew his strangest book – he was finishing it in the spring of 1843, on the train back from Berlin, sitting with his back to the direction of travel and watching the miles already crossed run backwards away from him, the very image behind his famous line that life is understood backwards. If love asks you to give up the thing you love most – can you go on loving it? What did Abraham do, when God told him to raise the knife over Isaac? He had a tall cabinet made of rosewood, without shelves, like an upright coffin, and hid in it everything that reminded him of Regine, along with two copies of Either/Or – "one for her, and one for me." Regine never left his life: he watched her from a distance for years and left her everything he owned in his will. The wound cut one way, and a whole book came out the other.

In 1843 an enormous book appears in Copenhagen under the title Either/Or, and the name on the title page is not Kierkegaard but one Victor Eremita, who claims to have found another man's papers in a writing desk. This is his method. He publishes his major books under invented names – Johannes de Silentio, Johannes Climacus, Anti-Climacus – and each name lives its own life and defends its own position. He does not want to persuade you from above, the way a lecturer does. He wants to set several ways of living in front of you and make you choose for yourself.

There are three of these ways, three stages of existence. The lowest is the aesthetic. The aesthete lives for the moment and its flavour. He is a connoisseur of moods and a collector of impressions, a man who has arranged his life as a run of pleasures and flees everything that spoils a pleasure, above all boredom.

And here Kierkegaard describes you more exactly than you would like. The aesthete knows one enemy – boredom – and spends all his ingenuity avoiding it. He recommends "crop rotation": as a farmer changes what he plants so the soil will not wear out, the aesthete changes his pleasures, his lovers, his cities, his enthusiasms, so that none has time to go stale. But the rotation cures nothing. Under it opens the thing the aesthete fears most – despair. A man who has lived his life as a selection of experiences notices one day that he has lived none of them through. He has become nothing, because he has never finally chosen anything. The aesthete dies of boredom before he has even died.

The second half of Either/Or is written by another hand – Judge Wilhelm, a settled married man who answers the aesthete in letters. His stage is the ethical. Here a person chooses himself: he takes on duty, marriage, work, continuity through time. The aesthete collects moments; the ethical man builds a life he is answerable for. That is already an incomparably greater thing. But Kierkegaard presses on, because even honest duty has not yet touched the one thing for which this whole library of pseudonyms was written. Above the ethical stands the religious, and only a leap gets you there.

Fear and Trembling comes out in that same year, 1843, under the name Johannes de Silentio – John the Silent – because before the thing he describes he can only fall silent. The whole book stares at one scene from Genesis. God tells Abraham to take Isaac, his only son, the long-awaited one, to climb Mount Moriah and offer him up as a sacrifice. And Abraham rises early in the morning, saddles his ass, and goes.

The Church retells this story so smoothly that we have stopped hearing its horror. Kierkegaard forces you to hear it. Judged by ethics, Abraham is a murderer raising a knife over his own child. No general rule justifies it; every morality on earth condemns him. And yet faith says Abraham is righteous. What can that mean?

The book itself opens with a man who cannot understand the story retelling it four times – and each time a different, wrong Abraham comes out. In one, so that his son will not lose faith in God, Abraham takes the guilt on himself and pretends to be an idolater: better that Isaac think his father a monster than lose God. In another he obeys, sees the ram, goes home – but "from that day on Abraham was old, his eyes were darkened, and he saw joy no more." In a third he rides back to Moriah again and again to beg forgiveness for ever having been willing to raise the knife, and finds no peace. In the fourth, Isaac glimpses his father's hand shudder – and it is Isaac who loses his faith. None of these Abrahams has faith; each shows what faith is not.

Kierkegaard gives it a name – the teleological suspension of the ethical. There is a moment when the believer hears a call higher than any general rule and must go alone, with no support from the ethics that understands and approves everything. Abraham can explain himself to no one – not to Sarah, not to Isaac. He is utterly alone before the absolute.

And here comes the book's finest image. There is the knight of infinite resignation: he gives up what he loves and lives bravely without it, like a stoic who has buried his own happiness. And there is the knight of faith, who makes a double movement. He too gives up everything, and then believes he will get it back, "by virtue of the absurd," in this life. Abraham raises the knife and at the same instant believes Isaac will live. How would you recognise such a knight? You would not. He looks like a tax collector. "Good Lord, is this the man, is this really the one – he looks just like a tax collector!" But this is indeed the one. He walks home down the street, certain that his wife has a roast lamb's head waiting for him, though he does not have four shillings to his name – and you would never guess that this man makes, every minute, a movement that would leave you dizzy.

Kierkegaard's sharpest and most misread claim runs like this: "subjectivity is truth." It is almost always read as a slogan of relativism – to each his own truth, and there is none. He meant the opposite, and his thought is precise.

There are truths you can hold objectively, from the side. That water boils at a hundred degrees you know just the same whether you are a saint or a scoundrel; your life has no stake in the fact. But there are questions of another kind – how I should live, and whether there is a God – and these, Kierkegaard says, cannot be held objectively at all. Here it matters not only what you assert but also how you hold it: with your whole life, or only in words.

His chief opponent here is Hegel. Hegel's System explained everything under the sun, unfolded history as the self-knowledge of Spirit, and gave the single person the place of a small cog in the vast machinery of world-reason. Kierkegaard answered with a jab: a man can build the most magnificent palace of thought and go on living beside it, in a shed. The system-builder has explained the whole of things and forgotten the one thing that cannot be explained and cannot be escaped: that he himself exists, here, finite, and has to die.

From this comes his startling conclusion. Two people enter a church. One recites the correct doctrines with indifferent lips, out of habit, because it is done. The other prays to an idol, but prays with all the passion of the infinite. Which of them is nearer the truth? For Kierkegaard, the second, because he has the "how" without which the "what" is dead. This is why "an objective Christian" is, for him, a contradiction in terms. You cannot be a Christian from the side, as you cannot love someone from the side. Climacus, in whose name the Concluding Unscientific Postscript is written, mocks those who want calmly to prove Christianity before living it. It cannot be proved. You can only leap into it – with your whole self, at your own risk, without a railing.

In 1846, the same year The Corsair hounded him through the streets, Kierkegaard published a review of a novel called Two Ages – and hid inside it the most prophetic pages of the nineteenth century. He compares an age of passion with an age of reflection. An age of passion can act and can risk; a person in it stands for something and pays for it with himself. An age of reflection – his own, and ours – discusses everything and does nothing, talking itself out of the strain of choice by weighing forever.

The chief invention of this age he calls "the public." The public is a phantom. It is nowhere: you cannot shake its hand or look it in the eye, no one in particular is it. And yet everyone glances at it, everyone fears its verdict, everyone repeats its opinion. The machine that manufactures this phantom is the newspaper. Day after day the paper announces what "everyone thinks," and millions take up the opinion as their own, though not one of them arrived at it himself or paid anything for it.

Here Kierkegaard drives clean through the next two centuries. "The crowd is untruth," he writes. And the point is not that people in a crowd are stupid. The crowd lets each man hide: in a mob no one has to answer, responsibility dissolves until it is nowhere. A crowd will do what not one of the men composing it would have dared alone.

Take his newspaper and multiply it by the screen in every pocket, and you recognise your own time. Then look across the nearest border. The neighbouring state manufactures its "public" daily – an official "everyone thinks so" that cheers on a war not one of these people, standing alone before God, would ever have started. The crowd is where responsibility goes to die. Kierkegaard saw the machine when it was only being born, and called it by its name.

Kierkegaard spent the last two years of his life on a single war. In Denmark everyone was a Christian – by law and by birth. A child was baptised, entered in the register, and became a member of the state church automatically, the way it became a subject of the crown. The pastor was a salaried official, the Sunday sermon a part of the machinery of state. And Kierkegaard saw in this the worst of all possible lies: when everyone is a Christian, no one is.

One phrase lit the fuse. When Bishop Mynster died in 1854, his would-be successor Martensen praised the dead man from the pulpit as a "witness to the truth" – a link in the holy chain of martyrs. Kierkegaard could not stomach that word over a bishop who had died rich and honoured. A witness to the truth, he answered in Fædrelandet, is a man who is flogged, mistreated, dragged from one prison to another, and at last crucified or burned, his body flung down by the roadside. To call Mynster such a witness was as ludicrous as to speak of a virgin with a large flock of children.

He struck first through Fædrelandet, then founded his own sheet – The Moment (Øjeblikket) – and wrote almost all of it himself, issue after issue, for as long as his strength held. The first number appeared on 24 May 1855 in a run of a thousand copies; a further five hundred had to be printed of the second. He argued that comfortable state Christianity was the very thing Christ had stood against: a way of making faith inoffensive, cost-free, respectable, useful to a pastor's career. The New Testament asked for a whole life. Copenhagen asked for a baptism and good behaviour.

He carried it to the end in his own body. At Frederik's Hospital his friend from youth, the pastor Emil Boesen, asked whether he would take communion. "Yes, but not from a pastor – from a layman." "That would be difficult to arrange." "Then I will die without it. The pastors are civil servants of the Crown, and civil servants of the Crown have nothing to do with Christianity." He would not set his dying seal on the very thing he had risen against.

He died on 11 November 1855, at forty-two. He had been born a rich man – his father left him a whole fortune – and at his death almost nothing of it remained but his library and thirty bottles of wine in the cellar: the last of the money had gone into The Moment. Even the funeral became a scandal. The Church buried him as one of its own, in a packed Church of Our Lady on a Sunday; at the graveside his nephew, the physician Henrik Lund, stood up and protested aloud – this man was being buried by the very institution he had fought all his life. The dead Kierkegaard was made a member of the crowd the moment he could no longer resist.

Half a century would pass, and out of Kierkegaard would grow a whole philosophy that forgot to say where it came from. His concepts crossed into the twentieth century, and God was taken out of each one along the way.

Heidegger would take his anxiety (Angst) – the state in which a person meets not some particular fear but nothingness itself and his own finitude – and make it the core of Being and Time, mentioning Kierkegaard only in the footnotes. Sartre would take his choice – the idea that a person is what he makes of himself, that existence precedes essence – and declare that this is precisely why there is no God. Camus would take his leap and refuse to jump: Camus's absurd man stands at the same abyss as the knight of faith, looks into it, and stays on this side, calling Kierkegaard's leap an evasion. All three live off his inheritance. All three strike out the testator.

This site already holds them – Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus. Now you know whose account they were settling. Kierkegaard asked their questions first: what anxiety is, and how a man is to stay himself among "everyone." Remove him, and they lose the interlocutor they were arguing with, whether they named him or not.

Kierkegaard would have answered all this in advance. He never took himself for a model to be copied: he called himself a "corrective" – a pinch of spice thrown into a dish to give it a particular taste, something it is disastrous to make the norm for everyone. To turn him into the founder of a school is itself the error he warned against. And the single individual got its name long before any quarrel with the crowd – in a quiet dedication: in 1843, on the day he turned thirty, he sent into the world a little book of edifying discourses that sought "that single individual whom I with joy and gratitude call my reader."

And there remains an honest question, a sharp one for us. Kierkegaard's single individual stands before God – it is that gaze that makes him single, that draws him out of the crowd and gives him a name. What becomes of the single individual once you take away the One he stands before? Will the separate person hold on his own, without an absolute to steady him – or crumble back into the crowd, into the public, into "everyone thinks so"? That is the question of the next lecture, and it is put by another Christian, from the far side of the century.

In this house we do not show our people combed and tidy, so here is the dark part.

Begin with Regine, because she is easy to overlook while you admire the depth of his sacrifice. He made the sacrifice; she paid for it too. The break nearly killed her; she could not recover for years, and her father feared for her life. Kierkegaard told himself he was setting her free – but he decided that for her, without asking, and played the villain to rob her even of the dignity of an understood grief. He watched her from a distance to the end of his days, noting down every chance meeting in the street, and left her everything. The ring she had returned he had refashioned – the diamonds set into a small cross – and wore it himself until he died. Regine outlived him by forty years. She married, went with her husband to the West Indies, and in the spring of 1855, a few months before his death, crossed his path in the street and said quietly: "God bless you – may all go well with you." It was the first time he had heard her voice in fourteen years; that same day she sailed across the ocean.

There was injustice in his last war too. Among the Danish pastors that The Moment branded as a class were plenty of honest, kindly men who served their parishes quietly and had done nothing to deserve being held up as hypocrites before a whole country. A polemicist who strikes at an institution strikes living people as well; Kierkegaard struck hard and not always with aim.

And the root of it all lay deeper than any book. Kierkegaard set it down in his journal as another man's "dreadful case": "a little boy, herding sheep on the Jutland heath, in hardship, hungry and benumbed with cold, once stood upon a hummock and cursed God – and the man could not forget this when he was eighty-two years old." Eighty-two was the age at which his father died. When his brother, Bishop Peter Christian, came upon the passage after Kierkegaard's death, he knew it at once: "This is our father's story, and ours too." The father grew rich, rose in the world – and was sure all his life that God would punish his line for that moment on the heath. This black certainty, this inherited melancholy, passed to the son along with the money. "From birth I was given a heavy burden of melancholy," Kierkegaard would write. The man who taught the West to stand alone before God carried all his life his father's terror of that same God. Out of that terror both his greatness and his wound were built.