Soren Kierkegaard

supposes that there are no miracles....Thewhole business remains infi-
nitely puzzling, even if one assumes that Easter fell very early that year, say
on April first, so that in addition to becoming an Hegelian the doctor also
became an April fool.” Heiberg in fact received thePostscripton March 29,
that is, just a couple of days prior to the day reserved for April fools, a
coincidence that can only be chalked up to the malicious kindness of fate.
Being ignored by Heiberg also provoked Kierkegaard into productivity,
however. For no matter how much Heiberg’s silence wounded Kierke-
gaard’s vanity, at the same time it freed him from any further obligations to
the literary authorities of the day, to elitist aesthetic notions of decorum, in
sum, to the cultural paradigm that the pampered connoisseurs of the period
wished respected. Thus it is symptomatic that the word “cultivation” [Dan-
ish:Dannelse, used in the sense in which German uses the termBildung]
occurs relatively infrequently—but always in a positive sense—in Kierke-
gaard’s writingbeforeHeiberg’s review ofEither/Or, while after Heiberg’s
review the word occurs extremely frequently, and nearly always in a nega-
tive sense. The everyday hero in the second part ofEither/Or, Judge Wil-
liam [Danish:Wilhelm]—and it is scarcely an accident that he shares his
name with the principal character in Goethe’sWilhelm Meister, the bildungs-
roman par excellence—is replaced by marginal figures, by exceptions like
Abraham and Job, who are so tenebrous, discontinuous, and conflict-rid-
den, that their lives come to depend on external intervention and thus, if
they are able to succeed at all, can do so only by virtue of the absurd.
Kierkegaard does not write bildungsromans butanti-bildungsromans, novels
that tell not of the integration but of the disintegration of the self.
This tendency was already visible inFear and Trembling, which with its
theme—Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac—as well as with the related question
concerning the teleological suspension of the ethical, constituted an almost
aggressive violation of the definition of the bildungsroman. “What is culti-
vation, then?” Johannes de silentio asks. And he has the answer ready at
hand: “I should have thought it was the course through which the individ-
ual runs in order to catch up with himself; and the person who will not run
through that course is helped very little, even if he is born in the most
enlightened age.” Thus, to be cultivated is not to adopt or ingest the norms
and values of one’s culture (the “universal” of Judge William); it is to catch
up with oneself, that is, to begin anew with oneself, which in turn means
to reflect on one’s own existential primitivity, one’s precultural givenness,
one’s passion. Kierkegaard thus dismantled the intellectual matrix embed-
ded in the concept of cultivation, shifting the focus from grasping things
intellectually to being gripped emotionally, and in doing so he quite deliber-
ately placed nature ahead of culture. “A maidservant who is essentially in