Soren Kierkegaard

monograph on anxiety makes it reasonable to look to his own problematic
inner life as its primary source.
Thanks to his own analyses, Kierkegaard did indeed manage to distance
himself from demonic self-enclosedness, but we must not forget that he also
spoke of ajustifiedself-enclosedness, for which he seems to have had quite
unlimited sympathy. Vigilius Haufniensis formulates the problem like this:
“Always keep in mind that according to my terminology, one cannot be
self-enclosed in God or in the Good, because that sort of enclosedness
means precisely the greatest sort of expansiveness. The more definitely con-
science is developed in a person, the more expansive he is, even if in other
respects he closes himself off from the entire world.”
The final clause, with its apparently harmless “even if,” makes all the
difference. Is it precisely here that the demonic Kierkegaard’s modification
of Vigilius Haufniensis’s theory of openness is to be found? Is that little
“even if ” in reality the great disavowal of the saving power of communica-
tion? Is it Kierkegaard’s own private proviso, his mental reservation? Or do
the words say the opposite, that is, that the relationship with God liberates
a person in relation to himself and his fellow human beings? Who would
not prefer to believe in this latter possibility?
Nonetheless, neither here nor at other points can we completely escape
from the impression that it was perhaps less the case that Kierkegaard was
ruled by his self-enclosedness than that the self-enclosedness was ruled by
Kierkegaard, for the sake of his creativity, his writing, his art. Unlike open-
ness and rashness, self-enclosedness and melancholia are aesthetically pro-
ductive factors that bind the artist to the world and make him breathe
deeply; this was something Kierkegaard had experienced and had expressed
in writing: “In this melancholia I have nonetheless loved the world, for I
have loved my melancholia.” “Sweet is the joy of melancholia,” wrote
Ossian, the legendary Irish warrior and bard, whom Kierkegaard para-
phrased inStages on Life’s Way, where he wrote, “Sweet is the sorrow of
melancholia.”
Posterity has very much doted on the Kierkegaard who doted on his
melancholia and wrote page upon page about his unspeakable sufferings,
hisvita ante acta[Latin: “previous life”], the thorn in the flesh, the wound
that would never heal, the traumatic experiences of childhood (or rather,
the traumatic lack of a childhood), but in all this it has often been forgotten
that Kierkegaard’s unhappiness, his sorrow and his despair, alsointerested
him—and he was rarely so depressed that he did not feel like writing about
it. There are no signs of depression in the abnormal, clinical sense of the
term, which would have left large chronological gaps in the journals. On
the contrary, the perseverance that characterizes the entire literary enterprise