From fairy stories to philosophy

At first sight it seems unlikely that Hans Christian Andersen could have much to do with Søren Kierkegaard, beyond the fact that both of them lived in nineteenth-century Copenhagen, and that they are the only Danish authors who are famous outside Denmark. What do fairy tales have to do with philosophy? What could the creator of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, “The Ugly Duckling”, “The Little Mermaid” or “The Snow Queen” have in common with the author of Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, The Concept of Anxiety and Sickness unto Death? And what could connect the most popular storyteller in history, whose 200th anniversary last year was celebrated all round the world, to the grim Lutheran who came fourteenth in a BBC poll to find our favourite philosopher, with a derisory 1.65 per cent of the vote?

Dinah Birch claimed in these pages (May 20, 2005) that Andersen appeals to the kind of readers who can see beyond “the values of rationality”, and that “those with more confidence in the disciplines of logic are inclined to be hostile”. And she suggests that Kierkegaard, who was notoriously cool about Andersen’s writings, had a heart so hardened by logic that he was unable to respond to the anguish of the little mermaid or the ugly duckling. His “grown-up judgement was affronted”, she says, “by Andersen’s unapologetic translation of a child’s self-centredness into fictional form”, and the so-called “fairy-tales for children” struck him as “crude, perhaps a betrayal of the dignity of art”. The idea of the philosopher as an autistic old duffer who cannot follow the intricacies of a child’s imagination will strike many chords; but it does not quite fit the basic facts about Kierkegaard and his work.

He was of course a philosopher, but he was a philosopher of an anti-philosophical kind: he was repelled by abstract doctrines, and always preferred quirky, subjective comedy to systematic, impersonal theory. “I would be as willing as anyone to bend a knee and worship the system”, he wrote in one of his many comic voices,

if only I could catch sight of it. But so far I have had no success . . . . Once or twice I have come very close to kneeling, but the moment I spread my handkerchief on the ground to save my trousers from getting dirty, I have addressed an innocent question to one of the initiates. “Tell me frankly,” I ask, “is it now completely finished – because if it is, I will kneel down before it, even if it means ruining my trousers.” . . . But they always reply, “No, I’m afraid it’s not quite ready yet”. So once again the system is late, and my act of worship has to be postponed . . . .

But a system that is never completed is not really a system at all, and Kierkegaard suspected that there was an essential reason why the ancient philosophers were always making flustered excuses and asking us to come back another day. There are, he suggested, aspects of human existence that will never be swept up in the train of intellectual progress. “However much one generation may learn from another”, he writes,

there is one thing it will never be able to learn from its predecessor, and that is the genuinely human factor. In this respect every generation begins afresh. Its task is the same as that of every previous generation, and it gets no further, unless its predecessor happens to have shirked its duty and deceived itself . . . . No generation has ever learned from another how to love, no generation can begin other than at the beginning, and the task of one generation is never any shorter than that of its predecessors, and if anyone, unlike the preceding generation, should be unwilling to stay with love but wants to go further – then it is nothing but idle and foolish talk. But lots of people find it hard to set aside their belief in universal progress, even in the field of love. “We must keep moving!” they say. “We must go further!” And if their mania for moving forward is typical of the present age, it is also a very old story.
The desire to make progress is of ancient standing. Heraclitus the obscure . . . once said: “You can never step into the same river twice”. And the obscure Heraclitus had a disciple who did not remain standing there but went further and added: “You cannot even do it once!”

In his desire to improve on his master, the pupil replaced an acute consciousness of universal change with a boring affirmation of absolute stasis. “Poor Heraclitus”, Kierkegaard remarked: “Poor Heraclitus, to have had such a disciple!” For Kierkegaard, modern progressive philosophers – especially the followers of Hegel – were just like the disciple of Heraclitus the obscure. They had no feeling for the fragility, unpredictability and eccentricity of philosophical insight. Their itch for endless improvement made them imagine that wisdom could somehow overflow the limits of an individual lifetime, and that the ordinary lessons of life, having once been learned by our laborious ancestors, could now be taken as read, and need not detain us any longer.

At an early age, Kierkegaard decided that the best weapons against the relentless philosophical optimism of his time were humour and irony rather than theoretical argumentation. There were of course plenty of precedents for making laughter the arbiter of philosophical disputes: Montaigne’s essays, for example, or the English tradition from Hobbes to Shaftesbury and Bentham, which made ridicule into the acid test of truth. But as far as Kierkegaard was concerned – and he argued the point at length in a remarkable dissertation for Copenhagen University, called “The Concept of Irony, with continual reference to Socrates” – the recourse to laughter went back to the very beginnings of philosophy, in ancient Greece.

Philosophers have always recognized Socrates as the founder of their tradition, but according to Kierkegaard they have had a blind spot when it comes to his peculiar sense of humour. Socrates was, as everyone knows, an ironist, and his teaching operated in the gap that irony opens up between inside and outside, or between real meanings and ostensible ones. Irony involves a certain reticence about one’s own opinions, if not deliberate concealment and deceit, and the kinds of philosophers who are addicted to progress and explicitness were bound to treat it “as if it were identical with hypocrisy”. In fact they would not tolerate irony at all unless they could confine it to clearing away some preliminary misunderstandings and warming up an audience before they got on with the systematic business of frank and literal assertion. But in trying to keep irony within definite bounds they were overlooking the possibility that certain kinds of knowledge – including perhaps the most important ones of all – do not lend themselves to definite and positive formulations.

They were also forgetting that Socrates himself had never put his own opinions on display, preferring to offer himself to the citizens of Athens as a universal intellectual sparring partner and an all-round ironist. It was as if he had no particular point of view, and no personal convictions or beliefs, but only a repertory of dialectical dodges and feints with which he would lead his conceited challengers on till they ran out of words and had to confess that they had no idea what they were talking about. The Socratic ironist, Kierkegaard reminds us, denies his real self in order to “produce himself poetically” and keep the flame of doubt burning bright. The true philosophy of Socrates, like the true religion of Jesus, depended on losing the illusion of self-sufficiency; and “if we need to be wary of irony as a seducer, we must also praise it as a guide”.

The reason why Socrates was the greatest as well as the earliest of philosophical teachers was that he was an ironist through and through. He was a diaphanous butterfly, flitting before his pupils but always eluding them, fascinating but not domineering, and perplexing them so thoroughly that they were bound to end up wanting nothing to do with him. He realized that no one would ever understand a philosophical truth that had simply been picked up from a teacher, and he knew that the last thing a teacher should crave was the affection or gratitude of his pupils. “The essence of the Socratic”, as Kierkegaard put it, “is that the pupil . . . is able to thrust the teacher away; . . . and the art and heroism of Socrates was that he put his pupils in a position where they could spurn him.” Becoming a philosopher was as tricky as becoming a Christian, and equally fraught with the dangers of pride, complacency and self-deception. The principal question was how to begin. “If only I could find a teacher!” as Kierkegaard exclaims in another of his ironical voices. But he does not mean a teacher who would tell him about ancient languages or literatures or the history of philosophy. “The teacher I am looking for – in a different way, ambiguously and doubtfully – is one who can teach me the ambiguous art of thinking about existence and existing.”

The young Kierkegaard wanted to be an ambiguous teacher just like Socrates, except that he was going to work through literature rather than the spoken word. He would devise writerly techniques for upsetting people’s prejudices, leaving trapdoors through which he could make his escape and leave his readers baffled as to who he really was or what his own opinions might be. “Having an opinion is both too much and too little for me”, he wrote; “it presupposes a sense of well being and security in existence, like having a wife and children in this terrestrial world – something which is not granted to those who have to keep going day and night and still lack a steady income.”

Kierkegaard’s principal writings are among the most singular inventions in the entire philosophical canon – playful, paradoxical and teasingly pseudonymous – and historians have had the greatest difficulty explaining what inspired them. He could have been influenced by the self-referential fictions of Sterne or Diderot, except that there seems to be no evidence that he knew anything about them. His fascination with the stage might also have something to do with it – not only the Mozart operas he wrote about in Either/Or, but also the plebeian farces he enjoyed on his visits to Berlin and wrote about in Repetition. But I suspect that the answer lies nearer home, in his awkward relations with the work of Hans Christian Andersen.

Copenhagen was still a small walled city in the first half of the nineteenth century, so it was inevitable that Kierkegaard and Andersen would be acquainted with each other, at least to the extent of exchanging nods of recognition when they met in the street. No one knows when they first set eyes on each other, but in his autobiography Andersen mentions an encounter in 1837 which was evidently not their first. Both of them were members of a rebellious younger generation, but their experiences of life could hardly have been more different. Andersen had been born in provincial Odense in 1805, his mother an illiterate, hard-drinking washerwoman and his father a cultivated cobbler who died in his early thirties, leaving the eleven-year-old Andersen to fend for himself and move away to Copenhagen to seek his fortune. (It seems he also had a sister who went there to work as a prostitute, though Andersen preferred to put it about that he was an only child.)

Kierkegaard, on the other hand, was the seventh child of a pious Copenhagen businessman who would live to the age of eighty-one, always supporting his son financially, and providing him with a legacy that should have allowed him to spend the rest of his life as a pampered dandy. At the time of their meeting in 1837, Kierkegaard was twenty-four and a student, still under his father’s thumb, and he had published nothing apart from a few forgettable pieces of student journalism; while Andersen was thirty-two, and already had fourteen books to his name, comprising verses in a rustic, Romantic style, European travelogues, and above all some long sentimental novels, of which he had just published his third, known as Only a Fiddler!. He was also on the point of becoming a prodigious international success: his novels would shortly be translated into English, and a spin-off poem called The Fiddler would soon be given an unforgettable musical setting by Robert Schumann.

Andersen was apprehensive about the young Kierkegaard nevertheless. Apart from resenting his careless wealth, he was as nervous as a writer can be about how his work would be received. Looking back, he reckoned that Kierkegaard had begun by despising him, but noted that “since that time I have had a better understanding with this author, who has always met me with kindness and discernment”. In 1848, indeed, Andersen presented Kierkegaard with a two-volume edition of his collected stories, with the inscription “Either you like my little works Or you don’t like them; they are nevertheless sent without Fear and Trembling, and that is something at any rate”. The following year Kierkegaard sent him a copy of the second edition of Either/Or, to which Andersen responded by saying: “You have given me really great pleasure by sending me your Either/Or. I was, as you can well understand, quite surprised; I had no idea at all that you entertained friendly thoughts of me, yet I now find it to be so. God bless you for it! Thank you! Thank you!”.

In 1837 Kierkegaard would already have been well aware of Andersen’s precocious success, and he had probably read some of the novels and poems. He may also have been acquainted with a few of the crystalline fairy stories on which Andersen’s reputation would eventually rest. (“The Princess and the Pea” and “Thumbelina” had appeared in 1835, “The Little Mermaid” and “The Emperor’s New Clothes” in 1837, a few months before Only a Fiddler!.) It is tempting to imagine him reading them, and perhaps identifying Andersen’s naked monarch with the second-century Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, who propounded a pagan philosophy of spiritual self-sufficiency that Kierkegaard had always found vacuous. Alternatively he could have seen himself as acting the part of the little boy when he launched his broadsides against the Danish Church.

But there is no direct evidence that Kierkegaard paid any attention to Andersen’s tales, and the chances are that he went along with the general opinion of his contemporaries, that they were an artistic aberration and an abuse of Andersen’s talents. But he did make an extended study of Only a Fiddler!, a three-decker novel which tells the story of a poor boy called Christian, whose natural genius as a violinist is destined to be buried by the poverty he has been born into. Christian’s story is intertwined with that of a Jewish girl, Naomi, whose gifts will be equally squandered, though in her case the enemy of promise is not destitution but excessive good fortune. The contrast between Christian and Naomi – which could be taken as a metaphor for the contrasting situations of Andersen and Kierkegaard – makes for a story that is affecting and entertaining, but also extremely erratic and undisciplined.

Andersen would claim that his novel was “a spiritual blossom born out of the terrible struggle that went on in me between my poetic nature and my harsh surroundings”, but that is no excuse for its self-indulgent prolixity. And while the book contains passages of the same Kafka-like clarity as the best of the fairy tales – Christian’s attempt to walk from Copenhagen to Sweden across the frozen sea as the ice begins to break, for instance, or Naomi’s escape from Copenhagen disguised as a young man with a delicate little moustache – it is so burdened with raw opinions about the world’s cruelty towards young men of genius that it never lifts off and enters the sphere of pure poetic invention, or of what Kierkegaard would call irony.

Andersen himself eventually became dissatisfied with Only a Fiddler!, but as he would remember in his autobiography, it had the precious attribute of bringing him into communication with Kierkegaard:

The novel Only a Fiddler! made a strong impression for a short time on one of our country’s young and highly gifted men, Søren Kierkegaard. When I ran into him in the street, he told me he was going to write a review of my book, and that I should be more satisfied with it than I had been with any of the earlier reviews, because, he said, they had all misunderstood me!

In the event Kierkegaard would spend the best part of a year working on his review. It probably embodies as much creative effort as the novel itself, and it was in any case Kierkegaard’s first sustained exercise of his talents as an author. The periodical that originally commissioned the piece had folded by the time Kierkegaard finished it, so he arranged to publish it as a little quarto book comprising a few preliminaries followed by seventy-nine dense pages entitled “Andersen as a novelist”. Andersen was said to have been sick with anxiety before it came out, and according to his autobiography he was not particularly happy when it did.

When the critique appeared, it did not please me at all. It came out as a whole book, the first, I believe, that Kierkegaard has written; and because of the Hegelian heaviness in the expression, it was very difficult to read, and people said in fun that only Kierkegaard and Andersen had read it through to the end.

The review was indeed heavy going, though Kierkegaard was a far better exponent of the art of the very long sentence than Hegel ever was. But it was not as negative as Andersen implies. It is notorious for the remark that “Andersen totally lacks a life-view”, but Kierkegaard was offering a literary judgement rather than a personal appraisal: his argument was that Andersen’s novels do not perform the kind of “transubstantiation of experience” that one expects from great works of art, and that they lack that “deeper unity, which allows a novel to have its centre of gravity in itself”.

It was certainly presumptuous for a feckless young student to mount that kind of lofty criticism of a hard-working and accomplished man of letters. But despite later rumours, Kierkegaard was not setting himself up as a rigorous logician rebuking an imaginative novelist, but writing as a reviewer always should – as one writer sharing some reflections on the difficulties of authorship with another. And his complaint was not that Andersen’s novel is insufficiently rational, but on the contrary that it is inadequately “poeticized”, and that it remains excessively opinionated and doctrinaire, and not ironical enough.

No reader will disagree with Kierkegaard’s main complaint about Only a Fiddler! – that there is too much Andersen in it. Andersen’s novels, as Kierkegaard puts it, “stand in so physical a relation to him that their genesis is to be regarded more as an amputation than as a production from himself”. They give the impression of a kind of Zwielicht – a twilight or shady double lighting – in which it is impossible to separate Andersen as a living and breathing human being from the poetic existence of his “narrating individual’s own consciousness”, or what later critics might call narrative voice or point of view. “When such a life-view is lacking,” Kierkegaard continues, “the novel either seeks to insinuate some theory . . . at the expense of poetry, or it makes a finite and incidental contact with the author’s flesh and blood.” The trouble with Andersen as a novelist was that he failed to “separate the poetic from himself”, treating his books like sausage skins and stuffing them with miscellaneous resentments and a “mob of depressing reflections about life”. The novels contain “a sort of residue of the author’s finite character which, like an impudent third party or a badly brought up child, keeps butting into the conversation at inappropriate places”. On present form, Andersen was one of those authors who offer us little except “an unpoetic overflow of their own . . . personality”.

Kierkegaard was particularly unimpressed by Andersen’s treatment of children, for example in the description of Christian arriving at a dance hall and trying to win acknowledgement of his musical genius. “With hat in hand he bowed politely in all directions”, Andersen writes; and then adds: “but no one noticed.” The snag, as Kierkegaard points out, is that the reader is left wondering whose voice is speaking these words. “Who makes this comment?”, he asks. “It cannot possibly be Christian . . . . It is Andersen himself who makes the observation, presumably wishing that the people in the dance hall had spotted the great genius at once . . . . Andersen himself, getting angry once again.” Despite his bottomless literary inexperience at the time, Kierkegaard was preternaturally perceptive about what was to become the key issue in his own writings, and the leading problem of literary narrative ever since: namely the question, “Who says?”. Andersen had not worked out how to depict the consciousness of others, as opposed to duplicating his own. And when it came to children, he was constantly bringing in adult perspectives, telling us for instance that a child’s mind is filled with “little things”, without realizing that from a child’s point of view they would not seem little at all. “When he depicts childhood”, Kierkegaard remarks,

we do not encounter remarks that are as it were taken out of a completely childlike consciousness. Instead . . . he speaks as an adult about the impression made by life and then adds at appropriate intervals that one must not forget about childhood, and the creative power of the child’s imagination. In short, he . . . simply takes the tenor part and puts a treble clef in front of it.

It is a sharp criticism, but not unfair; and it does not contain the slightest trace of the rancorous philosophical hubris that defenders of Andersen like to attribute to Kierkegaard. And it is possible that it achieved what must be the highest ambition of reviewing, namely providing an author with an insight into what he ought to do next: perhaps it was Kierkegaard who persuaded Andersen to give up writing long novels and concentrate on short tales instead.

Whether or not Andersen learned anything from reading Kierkegaard’s review, there can be no doubt that Kierkegaard learned a lot from writing it. He had not yet started his dissertation on Socratic irony, and it would be five years before he published his first real book, Either/Or, and launched himself into producing thirty more books, as different from each other as could be, before his death at the age of forty-two. (Andersen survived him by twenty years, to die, aged seventy, in 1875.) But it was in this early study of Andersen’s shortcomings as a novelist that Kierkegaard first took stock of the literary instruments that he would need in order to put humour at the service of philosophy, renouncing the self-centred attitudinizing that he found both in Hegelian treatises and in Andersen’s novels, and learning to “poetize” himself into the condition of a pure ironist.

After going on for more than seventy pages about the distinction between the real author and the fictional authorial voice, Kierkegaard performed the first of his serious literary jokes: he spun round on his heel to thank Andersen for his gifts to Danish literature, adding hopelessly that “I wanted to speak these words to Andersen rather than write them down because such utterances will otherwise on the whole be very exposed to misunderstanding”. Having concluded the review by writing the thing he said could only be spoken, Kierkegaard went on to compose a crafty preface. It is signed by “the publisher”, and it claims that the author, one Søren Kierkegaard, is the publisher’s “sincere friend” and alter ego, even though “our opinions nearly always differ and we are perpetually in conflict with one another . . . as if we were two souls residing in one body”. Anyway, as he was saying, Kierkegaard had asked him to publish the review, and he duly set about doing so. “But then what happens?”, says the exasperated publisher; “it turns out that he has great objections to it!” Hence the book has had to be published not as “Andersen as a novelist”, but under the wholly uninformative and thoroughly misleading title “From the papers of one still living, published against his will, by S. Kierkegaard”.

“From the papers of one still living” can be taken as an allusion to the practice of publishing people’s papers after they have died, though it may also refer to the fact that Kierkegaard’s father died while he was writing the review, making Kierkegaard himself into a somewhat bewildered survivor. Maybe it also involves an irony at the expense of the idea of a “life view”, for it would appear that no one can really achieve the detachment of a Socratic ironist as long as they are still clinging to this life. There is certainly a lot of literary trickery going on here, but it is clear that Kierkegaard was trying to learn from Andersen’s mistakes, and that it was Andersen, in spite of himself, who was teaching Kierkegaard the ambiguous art of becoming a writer, and indeed becoming a philosopher too.

This is an edited version of a lecture given last year at the British Library.