A Very Victorian Philosopher

In sketching out the major historical periods of Western philosophy during one of our previous classes, the question was raised as to whether the Victorian era might be considered a philosophical "period" in its own right. While it may be the case that there is no such coherent entity as "Victorian philosophy", for the purposes of understanding Soren Kierkegaard one should consider the historical landscape in which the melancholy Dane wrote, which in both chronology and character coincides with some of our common conceptions regarding the Victorian period. This exercise is of value particularly given the attention that Kierkegaard devotes to what he sees as the prevailing spirit of his age. However, to describe Kierkegaard as a Victorian philosopher is true only insofar as it is precisely those habits of thought that he is reacting against (as would Nietzsche, in the late Victorian period).

While it might be oversimplifying things to explain the intellectual climate of Western civilization as a whole in reference to a British monarch, there are definite defining features of this era that are reflected in Kierkegaard's critique of "Christendom", and I may venture to distill them to several key themes. Compared to the tumult of the Revolutionary period, Kierkegaard's Europe is placid in spirit. The institutions of his native Denmark (constitutional monarchy, an ascendant bourgeois capitalism, the established Lutheran Church) are at or near the height of their prestige and self-confidence. Indeed, it is probably difficult for our culture, accustomed as it is to exercises in self-criticism if not self-loathing, to appreciate the collective faith in Christian civilization that was taken as a given in Kierkegaard's era. The rationalism of the Enlightenment had been reconciled to the Establishment and the miracles of modern science were multiplying. A new stage of the European subjugation of the rest of the planet was beginning in earnest,enabled by the massive technological and economic superiority of the first industrial civilization.

At the time, to say "a light shines over the Christian world" may have been cliché, but it was not totally unfounded. Never before and perhaps never since has the belief in progress been so firmly entrenched in the collective consciousness of Western peoples. Indeed, Hegel's dialectial theory of history had ostensibly demonstrated that humankind was destined by its very nature for such progress. It is an age, Keierkegaard writes, of "reflection". Polite society is far too satisifed with itself for much in the way of disruptive passion or action.

It is in the midst of this reflective complacency that Kierkegaard seeks to understand restlessness, passion, anxiety and despair. In the midst of a society that trusts in its collective institutions of state, church, and culture, he exhorts man to live as that "single individual" defined by his own choices. And against the overmighty philosophical systems that purport to prove the progressive direction of human history, he asks "What good does it do me, the individual in the here-and-now? I suffer, I doubt, and I must choose."