Eternity Lies Beneath: Autonomy and Finitude in Kierkegaard's Early Writings

Eternity Lies Beneath: Autonomy and Finitude in Kierkegaard's Early Writings VANESSA RUMBLE AMONG the extant descriptions of Kierkegaard by his contemporaries, one particularly vivid portrait captures the reflections of the young theologian on a carriage ride through his beloved Deer Park: The road was so little travelled that it looked in places almost overgrown with grass. There was absolutely no dust .... On either side there were new leaves on the beech trees.... Uncle Peter [Christian Kierkegaard, SCren's eldest brother] had surely said something about how Danish this sort of weather was--or even that it was Scandinavian: it was so light and so bright and so fine; there was no wilderness or heath; it was almost childlike in its purity. But the younger brother [SCren] had replied that such weather was perfectly suited to conceal the Eternal. It was a temptation--he had said that many times--it tempted the mind to dream and to wander. Who could keep hold of a serious thought while enjoying that smooth, billowing grass? Either one had to let one's mind billow and dream like the grass or one had to surrender to one's thoughts, but in that case all this bright, transient lushness became painful. The whole thing was a quaking bog, he had said. Of course it looked as if that green, open plain was solid ground, but the entire thing was a bog, you know. It quaked and quaked, and Eternity lay beneath. He couldn't imagine how his brother could want to be a coachman for so many people across such dangerous ground. And then he had laughed and hummed the aria [from Don Giovanni] and looked around at those sitting behind.... ' Bruce Kirmmse, ed. and trans., Encounters with Kierkegaard: A Life as Seen byHis Contemporm~ ies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 25-27. The story was related by Nanna Boisen Knudsento her son, the Danish novelistJakob Knudsen. Her recollection isof an outingon which she, as a young confirmand, accompanied members of the Kierkegaard family on a carriage ride through Dyrehaven (in 1836). [83] 84 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 35:~ JANUARY ~997 Recounted sixty-one years after the fact by one of those sitting behind, the story may be chalked up to either Dichtung or Wahrheit, according to the reader's pleasure. The passage itself might lead one to dream of Kierkegaard 's own stories of childhood at Nytorv 2 and of the father there who, looking into the face of his youngest child, a sight surely akin to the newly sprung beeches, saw, too, something tempting, something anxiety-provoking. Gazing at his son, the elder Kierkegaard mused, "Poor child, you are in a quiet despair. TMLater, the father's ominous remarks on the severity of human temptation sent SCren rushing to question his mirror.a In its insistence upon the renunciation to be practiced by the idolatrous will in its relation to finitude, the pietism of Kierkegaard's home had a peculiar affinity with the prevalent Romantic sensibility: while pietism prescribed the refusal of finitude, or exacting self-examination in its appropriation, Romanticism cultivated the ironic individual's withdrawal from the finite realm. The appearance of the knight of infinite resignation in Kierkegaard's authorship would thus seem overdetermined, called for by both piety and Bildung. But if the Romantic portrayal of the subject's alienation from finitude echoes the Judeo-Christian proclamation of a fallen humanity, the conception of human freedom presupposed by each is not so easily reconciled. On the one hand, Kierkegaard's Romantic leanings are evident in his emphasis on the choice of the self and the free appropriation of every influence foreign to the subject. The frequent analogy drawn between doubting and faith in his works portrays both as acts of will. As Louis Mackey points out, the subject, exalted by the scope of its freedom, threatens to usurp the God for whom everything is possible: "Unless we allow that I--in my own ethical and human reality-participate in the reality of other beings, then we are forced to the conclusion that I create my own possibilities, tempt myself, and obligate myself. I become my own God...