Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter — Issue 42: September 2001

Søren Kierkegaard til hverdagsbrug. By Johan de Mylius. Copenhagen: Aschehoug, 1998.

156 p.

Poul Houe

University of Minnesota

In his Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan confirms what Kierkegaard wrote about the press as a medium abdicating existential points of view for a mosaic of communal news. Unlike the confessional linearity of a book, witness Kierkegaard, the journalistic mosaic is a democratic form appealing to participating collectives. While Kierkegaard could not agree more, he dissents from McLuhan's positive valorization of the new phenomenon. Accordingly, it may seem the irony of fate that Kierkegaard, of all writers, has ended up dismembered and then reassembled in an anthology of short excerpts from his entire oeuvre (although chiefly and preferably from Either-Or and most notably from "Diapsalmata"). If reading someone against the grain was ever a serious intervention, this must be the case in point.

Yet, there is also a case to be made in favor of Johan de Mylius' iconoclastic idea. In a sense the object of his 'edition' is the iconoclast par excellance -- to say nothing of the advocate of the common man -- who could hardly have serious objections to being served up for everyday use; as a matter of fact, the common man is a staple of the selection (17, 26) and one often appearing in contradistinction (25, 33) to more motley crowds (14-16, 19-20), sometimes referred to as the public, the masses, and democracy (98-99, 121) or as a multitude situated over against an individual (100-01) who knows himself/herself as this particular single individual.

And further, isn't fragmentation at least as a communicative form quite consistent with Kierkegaard's own alterity of viewpoints and pseudonymous agencies? The volume at hand will doubtless be catering to insipid dinner conversations, entering quasi-existentialist chatrooms, and dropping isolated words of wisdom into floods of platitudinous commencement speeches. Yet, isn't the author of The Point of View the one who himself admonishes, "if you can find exactly the place where the other is and begin there, you may perhaps have the luck to lead him to the place where you are."

It may be argued that de Mylius in this anthology is twisting this particular point of view and taking words way out of Kierkegaard's own reach and context and deeply into the chatty discourse of our climate. Or, to put it differently, that he -- de Mylius -- is running the risk of falling between Kierkegaard's and McLuhan's two chairs. Still, isn't such risk-taking indispensable for taking food for thought to places where such nutrition may have been in short supply? The question obviously should not be restricted to this publication alone but should be seen as pertaining to the entire industry of more or less well-intended introductions and other recent short-cuts for Kierkegaardian beginners.

And the answer is blowing in the wind. Rather than speculating further about the final impact of a book like this, suffice it to mention some pros and cons which may or may not impact the outcome. Bear in mind, though, that whether viewed as pros or cons, the basis of recourse for my assessment of the book as a container of food for thought is constituted by the thoughts it engenders, not the degree to which they may be attributable to Kierkegaard and/or the arrangement by de Mylius.

I begin with noting the obvious, namely, how many words of wisdom and pithy sentences such a Kierkegaard collation inevitably contains. If anyone had been living under the illusion that lowly entertainment, titillation of jaded appetites, or pandering to populist sentiments are chiefly contemporary vices, the anthology makes abundantly clear that the din of modern TV soaps and sitcoms are but updated versions of rampant nineteenth century bedlam (14-16). Rather more surprising is the volume's no less abundant collation of commonplace or vacuous bon mots and serpentine formulations (19-24, 26-28, 30-31, 33, 38), indeed of some entirely disappointing extracts, especially from the section dedicated to women (45-49).

Far more compelling to contemplate or to simply enjoy are the snapshots of the moment (16-17, 31-32), of silence (15, 34-35), of possibility (37), and of humor and jest (40). Sparks are flying from collisions between passion and reflection (102) and between knowledge and action as life-changing inducements (70); between history and nature with regard to temporality (78); and between the eternal and the temporal as matters of light versus darkness (78). Of nature existential descriptions abound. Its speech is unspeakable and secretive as a speaking silence, indeed as a purling stream (76-77). As such its silence is quite unlike the human voice, which like so much else is dwarfed by the divine (78-79). Sequential renditions of remembrance, recollection, and repetition (52-57) remind of the love of recollection (80) and of love as debt, youth and unchangeableness (80-81). The existential choice, while perhaps not sequential, appears composite in its own way as it passionately transforms what has happened by transferring it from necessity to freedom (73-74). Needless to say, a central avenue of passion is poetry reverberating pain and suffering (111) -- and so much superior to the poet behind it (107).

For each and every concept or notion referenced on this laundry list, its bearing on the unprepared reader's mind may bear little resemblance to the authentic Kierkegaardian lexicon. Intangible that so scantily contextualized pronouncements are destined to be, it would appear that a number of Kierkegaard's biographical turns and truly down to earth concerns in journals and fictional guise would fare better, i.e., leave less room for interpretational conjecture and subjectivistic whim on the reader's part. But lo and behold, under an umbrella of anthological reductions such as the one before us, ambiguities tag along and leave the reader's imagination quite at liberty.

de Mylius has a predilection for money and finances and the role these play in authors' lives. It showed in his 1993 chronology of Hans Christian Andersen's life and work, and it resurfaces in Søren Kierkegaard til hverdagsbrug (100 f., 138, 141, 143-45, 146 f., 152, 153, and 156). But all specificity aside, the jury is still out on this matter. On the last page of his Kierkegaard book's chronology de Mylius concludes that "Kierkegaard's rather considerable fortune and earnings of different sorts all went up in plain consumption dictated by a life style characterized by his secretary Israel Levin and other observers as extravagant" (156).

Yet if the reader of these lines should happen upon the memoirs of Troels-Lund, e.g., the excerpt in Bruce Kirmmse's (ed.), Encounters with Kierkegaard (181), he or she will be startled by finding that rather than caused by excessive overconsumption Kierkegaard's financial predicament may well have been occasioned by his religious animosity towards sound investments and accretion of interest on money. For clarification of the issue, there is, of course, Brandt and (Rammel) Thorkelin's seminal treatment in Søren Kierkegaard og pengene (new. ed. 1993), but few of de Mylius' readers can be expected to research such matters beyond the anthology at hand, and what they here get out of its food for thought may not be entirely consistent with the complete scholarly record.

Be that as it may, open-ended impressions of the same nature and with the same attendant shortcomings issue from other socio-cultural 'facts' in de Mylius' Kierkegaard. His chronology treats us to several pieces of information about Denmark's new railroad and wire services (147, 151, 155), and Kierkegaard's physical trips to Northern Zealand, to his paternal home in Sædding in Jutland, to Kullen, and the four times to Berlin, are dutifully recorded, as are his various addresses in Copenhagen. But what does the information tell us about his particular mode of mobility or Wanderlust (a title under which his peregrinations have recently been treated in an interesting history of walking by Rebecca Solnit)? Does he foreground any state of (post)modernity, and if so, does he do it inadvertently or otherwise?

The questions have to do with Kierkegaard's potential relevance to common people's everyday lives in the new millennium. Those are quite likely the people profiled by Paul Hammerich in the guidelines for contributors to the new and recently completed Danish National Encyclopedia. Their prototype is Lexi -- a girl who can read, though her mother named her after a famous international television personality. In addition, she is young, finishing high school with good grades and wanting later to become a nurse, perhaps a physician, an then to get married and have at least 1 1/2 child, a small car and a big dog. Right now her interests include aerobics, watercolors, choir song, chess, the Middle East, and boys. Put yourself in Lexi's place when you write for us, was Hammerich's order in his guidelines, typically titled, Write -- plain and simple!

I have little doubt that readers such as Lexi will form a primary group of users of Søren Kierkegaard til hverdagsbrug. Somehow, at least in Denmark, he is a must on her generation's mental agenda, all providing he can be fit in between the aerobics and the boys. In his Preface, where he gives a good number of reasons for composing the anthology but also a few for hesitating to do so, de Mylius is particularly concerned with his subject's dubious popularity in fitness centers, which he calls Kierkegaard's "absolute opposite" (10). Even so, the clientele here belongs to an age group whose social values and educational priorities take for granted the paradigm exchange which Kierkegaard, as de Mylius describes him in his Afterword (130-31), contributed to ushering in more than one hundred fifty years ago. But while Kierkegaard then posited the conditions and values of the individual in opposition to the systemic thinking prevalent within the culture of his day, today's challenge lies in this very culture's own systemic bent. The Location of Culture has itself become problematic, as Homi Bhabha argues in a book with this title.

In this context Kierkegaard's role in everyday discourse may well be limited to reigniting sentiments of discomfort with current cultural affairs. For everyday users of his writings, such as Lexi, rigorous interrogations into our cultural epistems are probably out of the question. Phrases and catchwords culled from de Mylius' book are quite likely sufficient to satisfy many audiences' need of a sense of direction. And presumably such colloquial and pedagogical formats are in high demand because contemporary culture is so saturated with simulacra and because many of its traditional domains have surrendered to biotechnological resolutions.

Kierkegaard's existential approach remains for many a viable alternative to this scientific boom. Like much poetry and fiction, he asks, according to de Mylius, for possible attitudes to life (132), and for ways to get through the possible and into a reality that can give life meaning. This innermost reality is what de Mylius hears as Kierkegaard's voice behind the polyphony of possible voices. Unlike de Mylius, we may have our doubts about the existence of any unifying voice behind the voices, but there is hardly any doubt that such an existential voice is indeed what Lexi wishes to hear in the midst of her busy mosaics of everyday communal and private activities. The question to her is twofold, though: will her time and spirit after all allow her to hear it, and even if they will, is it really Kierkegaard she is hearing and not simply his mcluhanian replacement echoing her own mosaic existence?