Clare Carlisle's Reading List

"It’s not the most appealing book title, but The Sickness Unto Death is one of the clearest statements of Kierkegaard’s mature philosophical position. He wrote it at the end of the 1840s, when he’d already written some of his most famous works. In it, he defines human beings as spiritual beings. He says that human beings are not self-sufficient; we’re not autonomous, but rather all dependent on God. Whether we know it or not and whether we like it or not, we all have a relationship with God. Obviously, that’s a view situated within a particular religious tradition. For Kierkegaard, that’s what a human is: a being who is not self-sufficient. And he argues that when we fail to understand our own relation to God, we’re in despair. So, he diagnoses this condition of despair which, actually, turns out to be something that everyone suffers from, he says. To a greater or lesser extent, we’re all turning away from God and so turning away from our true nature as dependent beings. But then, he diagnoses various different forms of this despair. It might take the form of a kind of melancholy, or it might take the form of a more defiant attitude to life where you think that you don’t need (and don’t want) God. It’s a very psychologically acute book. No, this is a book that he wrote under the name of a pseudonym: Anti-Climacus. Many of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authors are people who say they’re not religious. They don’t really have faith; they don’t understand what it is to be a Christian, or what it would be to have faith in God. But Anti-Climacus is a pseudonym who claims to be more religious than Kierkegaard would want to assert himself. Kierkegaard was very hesitant to claim authority for himself as somebody who had it all sorted, who knew what it meant to be human being, who really did possess faith and who had a relationship to God. When he wants to explore the question of living in relation to God, he uses a pseudonym with more authority on that question than he himself wanted to claim. In a way, he saw himself as a reader of this book rather than the author. He didn’t want to put himself above his readers and preach to them, but he still wanted to explore a question that required a more religious standpoint than the one he wanted to adopt as an author. It does connect with a famous book by Kierkegaard called The Concept of Anxiety . In The Concept of Anxiety , Kierkegaard identifies anxiety as a fundamental human experience. Again, it has the sense of a diagnosis of anxiety as part of the human condition. It’s not a psychological phenomenon for Kierkegaard, but something that belongs to the very structure of being human. It’s in our constitution as human beings, he argues, to be anxious, and this has to do with our consciousness of our freedom and our mortality and so on. The Sickness Unto Death follows on from this, because his diagnosis of despair is quite similar. It’s not a psychological state—it’s not about feeling miserable or unhappy or hopeless—but to do with the fact that we have a certain constitution as spiritual beings, and that we’re somehow incomplete unless we really live in God. He also thought that really living in God was extremely difficult to do, perhaps impossible. So, again, we have that sense that everyone is, to some degree or other, in despair. Yes, definitely. He became an increasingly anti-institutional and anti-establishment figure, and the two establishments that he had complicated, ambivalent relations with were the university—the whole institution of academia—and the Danish State Church. He was a student at the University of Copenhagen for ten years, so that was the world he was in, and yet he was very critical of it. It was the same with the Church. Like almost all of his Danish contemporaries, he was baptised into the Danish State Church, grew up in the Church, and nearly became ordained in the Church. But he had a very ambivalent relationship with it from his childhood onwards. As time went on, this ambivalence actually shifted into outright opposition, and he became very polemical and launched a public attack on the Church in the last year of his life. “Kierkegaard is a very undogmatic writer. He’s not telling readers what to believe; he’s not expounding a doctrine” In his own time, his writing tended to appeal to people who felt that they didn’t necessarily fit in with organised religion. For example, there are some surviving letters from a couple of women who read his books, which describe how whenever they went to church, they found it difficult to concentrate on the sermon. They were going for some kind of guidance—ethical or spiritual—but they just didn’t connect with what they heard. Then, they found Kierkegaard’s books and in them discovered something that really did connect with whatever it was they were searching for. For the last century and a half, Kierkegaard’s appeal has continued. He’s often read by people who are part of an organised religion, and he’s now a staple part of the undergraduate philosophy and theology curriculum. But he also continues to appeal to people who are unsure of their religious identity, yet interested in exploring those questions. He’s a very undogmatic writer. He’s not telling readers what to believe; he’s not expounding a doctrine. He is much more interested in what you might call spiritual questions than in defending religious belief and identity in a more conventional way."

"My fourth choice is a book by Christopher Barnett called Kierkegaard: Pietism and Holiness . When I read it, I thought: how can I have been thinking and writing about Kierkegaard without really knowing about this? This book focuses on a key aspect of the intellectual context and background to Kierkegaard’s thinking: Pietism. Pietism is a movement within Lutheran Christianity, which was about concentrating on living a holy life. In a sense, it anticipates existentialism, since this ideal of holiness was less about believing certain doctrines and more about a religion of the heart. It was a devotional movement which prioritised feeling and emotion over belief and reason. This was really an important part of the culture that Kierkegaard grew up in. Indeed, many German and Danish thinkers of the nineteenth century had Pietist backgrounds—most of the leading German Romantics, for example. So, the Romantic emphasis on feeling actually came out of the Pietist tradition, which emphasised religious feeling. It’s a very important cultural and intellectual force that shaped Kierkegaard’s authorship. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . This book gives a really nice history of Pietism, explaining what the issues were and then showing how Kierkegaard’s thinking was shaped by that Pietist heritage. For me, it made sense of a lot of Kierkegaard’s thinking to see it from this perspective. Pietism is not discussed much these days: a movement like Romanticism is more recognisable and occupies more of a place, perhaps, in our contemporary culture—we recognise Romantic art, and so on—whereas Pietism is something that specialists know about. But beyond this, it tends to be a forgotten aspect of the cultural heritage of the modern world. It was principally a reaction against a rationalising shift within Lutheranism. Pietism reacted against that, just as Romanticism reacted against the rationalism of the Enlightenment. It’s part of a broader resistance to rationalist ways of thinking. Another important aspect of Pietism, which is also really important for Kierkegaard, is the critique of organised religion. Some influential Pietists were quite anti-clerical and anti-establishment. That’s another important theme that Kierkegaard takes from Pietism: being critical of the establishment, being critical of institutional religion, and elevating the individual’s experience of God above these hierarchical ecclesial structures, and prioritsing the individual’s inward, heartfelt relationship to God. But this is not the individual in isolation but the individual in community, because the Pietists were often socialist and communitarian as well as anti-establishment. They had communes, for example, where they had their own laws, more or less separate from the state. So, various elements of this Pietist culture found their way into Kierkegaard’s thinking and his critique of conventional institutional religion. In a way, Kierkegaard’s whole project as a writer was to challenge what he called Christendom—the social, institutional, established religion—and to search within that for a more authentic kind of faith. Or maybe not even faith , but a more authentic quest for truth and for meaning. “That’s a crucial part of Kierkegaard’s emphasis on seeking and pursuing and desiring: this sense of the erotic pursuit of truth” ‘Faith’ is a word that is used a lot when discussing Kierkegaard, as if his philosophy is all about believing in God without any evidence or reason. But I think what’s more fundamental for Kierkegaard is the desire and longing for God—a sort of spiritual quest. Faith can sometimes give the impression of something you possess, a kind of certainty of belief; whereas for Kierkegaard, it’s much more about desire and longing and finding ways to pursue that longing. Finding ways to express an inarticulate desire for God in your life, even though you might not really know what God is, or what finding God would look like. It’s a sense of being drawn along a spiritual path without necessarily knowing what the destination is. That’s quite different from many institutional religions, which present doctrines as readymade religious teachings: truths that are non-negotiable, that you just sign up to, rather than this more open-ended questing relationship to religion, which actually echoes Socratic philosophy. Socrates’s life was devoted to a search for knowledge which was, in a way, elusive. He saw the philosophical life as open-ended. That’s a crucial part of Kierkegaard’s emphasis on seeking and pursuing and desiring: this sense of the erotic pursuit of truth. You don’t really know what it’s going to look like when you find it. Yes, definitely. Many of the thinkers who identified themselves as existentialists in the twentieth century—Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir would be the most famous examples—were explicitly atheistic. Existentialism can have connotations of a humanist and individualistic quest to find or create meaning for yourself, and even creating yourself, making yourself into a certain kind of person through your choices and decisions; whereas, for Kierkegaard—and this is the central point in The Sickness Unto Death— human beings don’t make themselves, and we’re always dependent because we’re created. We’re in search of the ground of our being, which is not ourselves. This is one of the reasons why it’s really important to understand Kierkegaard’s roots in Pietism, for example, which connects him to an older Catholic devotional, mystical tradition of Christianity. That’s also in the background of much existentialist thought, but when we look at existentialism from a secular viewpoint, this background gets overlooked. For me, it’s impossible to read Kierkegaard in a secular light. He wasn’t a dogmatic Christian, but he was preoccupied with the question of how to live religiously. What would it mean to live in relation to God?"