2209. Harvie, Ferguson wrote: The Church and Bourgeois Respectability Kierkegaard’s polemical attitude towards the modern public, particularly as it was represented in journalistic literature, was never a straightforward antagonism. He had a dread of the public, a ‘sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy’, which no doubt absorbed and reflected, among much else, his ambivalence towards his father. Thus, the withering attacks he directed at bourgeois institutions culminated in contempt for the hypocrisy and doublemindedness’ of conventional respectability which utterly failed to embody the real bourgeois values with which Kierkegaard identified himself. He condemned the superficiality, the lack of seriousness, the inconsistency and ‘lightness’ of respectability; above all he was outraged by the sentimental piety and complacency of the class which his father had so clearly represented without himself being sentimental or complacent. The physiognomy of the present age failed to express the inner consistency of its values, and significantly Kierkegaard did not reject bourgeois values in themselves. Enlightened rationality, moral individualism and a liberal constitution, he realized, were in tune with the modern age; in fact, they were the modern age that lay, partially obscured, within the superficial flux of the Present Age. Kierkegaard attempted to bring to the surface and make visible these values, and had no intention of rejecting what he took to be the real character of modernity in favour of its inexpressive mask. Kierkegaard’s commitment to the underlying values of bourgeois modernity, throughout the intensifying attack on bourgeois philistinism, is thrown into sharper relief by his simultaneous rejection of those intellectual, social and religious movements which had their roots in the premodern age. His powerful attack on Hegelianism, thus, is at the same time a rejection of Copenhagen’s outmoded aristocratic culture associated with the court. Hegel’s philosophy was introduced into Danish intellectual life through the varied literary and theatrical activities of Heiberg. His celebrity, his aristocratic style of life, and his unchallenged position as the arbiter of Danish high culture associated Hegel with a romantic ‘golden age’ which had already passed. Kierkegaard, thus, first encountering Hegel through Danish spokesmen (Heiberg and Martensen), saw him, rather oddly, as expressive of aristocratic values. After a brief flirtation with Heiberg’s circle, into which he had little chance of being accepted, Kierkegaard turned his back on the trappings of court life, and became the most sophisticated critic of Hegelianism. Equally he rejected Grundtvig’s ecclesiastical populism, rooted as it was in a premodern rural idyll. Grundtvig attempted to merge Christianity with Scandinavian mythology, and attracted a large following in rural areas neglected by the late, and rapid, modernization of Copenhagen: when one regards the world of the spirit with Norse eyes in the light of Christianity, one gets the impression of a universal historical development of art and learning that embraces the whole life of man, with all its energies, conditions and achievements. Not that rural religious and social life was directly anti-bourgeois. Throughout the eighteenth century Pietism had taken root in the countryside, and a tradition of religious emotionalism, in opposition to both the more formal aspects of orthodox Lutheranism and secular Enlightenment culture. Pietism, integrating religious ideas with a strictly moral conception of everyday life, also stressed the religious significance of individual conversion and its heightened emotional state, and might be viewed as a form of ‘ecstatic religion’. Their meetings were imbued with a ‘sultry and almost sensuous atmosphere’. But, at the same time, like English Puritanism ‘it was essentially a bourgeois religion’. Indeed, the agrarian reforms dating from the second half of the eighteenth century had created, by the time of Kierkegaard’s youth, a ‘kind of rural bourgeoisie, in place of the premodern peasantry’. Anti-conventicle legislation in the mid-eighteenth century and the growing liberalism of the established Lutheran church helped to create, as a reaction to it, a significant revivalist movement of which Grundtvig became the articulate spokesman. Kierkegaard’s elder brother, Peter Christian Kierkegaard, himself a rural priest, became a supporter of Grundtvig’s revivalist movement, and, in contrasting his brother’s ‘practically ecstatic’ writings to the ‘sober-minded’ orthodoxy of the leading academic theologian, Martensen, hinted that Søren was at least a sympathizer with their cause. Kierkegaard, however, in spite of his fierce attack on the Danish church, had no interest in reforming its liturgy or organization. And as for the idiosyncrasy of his own writings he argued that ‘the peculiar characteristic of my ecstasy is that it is borne by a sobermindedness of equal dimensions’. For Kierkegaard, that is to say, modern religious life, whether as a liberal elitist church open to every enlightened secular tendency, or as the popular revivalism that reflected national feeling, like all other aspects of modern culture, lay on the surface of the ‘Present Age’. Kierkegaard’s distrust of the public, his theatrical management of his own public image, and his rejection of contemporary political and religious positions as superficial, constitute a kind of preliminary statement of the more penetrating critique of modernity offered in the authorship itself. It would be misleading to regard his journalistic work as ‘social’ and ‘political’, as opposed to the ‘aesthetic’, ‘philosophical’ and ‘religious’ dimensions of reality explored by the pseudonyms and the ‘upbuilding’ works. These latter works are also, and not merely by implication, critical commentaries on the Present Age. The fundamental difference between the journalistic writings and the authorship is that the former addressed the experience of modernity in its own terms. They are, after all, pieces of journalism, and, therefore, part of the reflective process through which the Present Age views itself. The ‘authorship’, however, anatomized modernity from a series of eccentric viewpoints. The serious import of these writings is most easily appreciated, then, by connecting them with those major figures in the development of modern thought who most clearly announced the break between the modern age and everything which lay in the past, and, even more clearly, in terms of the way in which the distinction between ‘reality’ and ‘appearance’ came to be understood by them as a conditioning limitation on the experience of ‘selfhood’. This can be indicated briefly in relation to views originating with Rousseau and Kant who, themselves located on the edge of the Enlightenment tradition, inspire both the Romantic movement, and the development of German Idealism which together form such an important point of departure for Kierkegaard’s most ‘serious’ works. [Melancholy and the Critique of Modernity]
Posted on: Fri, 22 Aug 2014 10:12:40 +0000
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