life is absolutely without significance anyway, it just isn’t right to suffer as
I suffer and simply do nothing. But here is the secret: The significance of
my life corresponds exactly to my suffering.”
“What Does the Physician Really Know?”
Traditional medical treatment was not particularly applicable, in Kierke-
gaard’s view. This is made clear by evidence such as a journal entry from
1845 entitled, “Remarks by a Humorous Individual,” which near the begin-
ning includes this merry monologue: “Things here go just as they did with
me and my physician. I complained about being out of sorts. He replied,
‘You probably drink too much coffee and walk too little.’ Three weeks later
I spoke with him again and said, ‘I really do not feel very well, but now it
cannot be because of drinking coffee, for I do not drink coffee at all, nor
because of lack of exercise, for I walk all day long.’ He replied, ‘Well, then
the reason must be that you do not drink coffee and that you walk too
much.’ And so my infirmity was and remains the same, but if I drink coffee
the cause of my infirmity is that I drink coffee, and if I do not drink coffee,
then my infirmity is caused by my not drinking coffee. And that is how it
is with us human beings. All of earthly existence is a sort of infirmity.”
So much for the medical guesswork that would rather hit the wrong
target than hit nothing at all, a caricature which Kierkegaard, by the way,
found so successful that he subsequently made use of it in thePostscript. But
despite all his skepticism about medical confusion, Kierkegaard could not
abandon the notion that there might be a medical way out of his suffering.
Was it a somatic problem or an ethical-religious one? Ought he interpret
his isolation as the unavoidable situation of the extraordinary person, or was
his situation the result of a self-imposed self-enclosedness in which hemade
himself believethat he was acting in accord with God’s wishes—and in so
doing was merely burrowing his way deeper in sin? In principle he shared
the point of view of the pseudonymous master psychologist Vigilius Hauf-
niensis, who dissociated himself from earlier notions of sin as “a disease, an
abnormality, a poison, a disharmony.” The demonic has been studied—
erroneously—from three vantage points: “aesthetic-metaphysical,” “ethical
judgmental,” and “medical treatment,” explains Vigilius Haufniensis who
believes, just like Judge William, that it is a misunderstanding to go to a
physician with problems connected to the demonic, because the demonic
is not “something somatic” that should be grouped with “the natural phe-
nomena, but is a psychical phenomenon, an expression of unfreedom.”
The traditional medical diagnosis is therefore superficial and inadequate,