Soren Kierkegaard

“Parisian Work-Machine for the Maintenance of Shoes and Clothing and
for the Removal of Spots.” Similarly, a pharmacist only just barely squeezed
through the eye of the needle when he applied for a license to extract
paraffin and oil from peat, just as serious questions were put to a brandy
distiller who proposed the extraction of alcohol from night soil .But when
a manufacturer of machinery applied for permission to produce something
as odd as a “bellows to blow air into slaughtered calves and sheep,” the
authorities took a deep breath and denied his request.
Nor was Kierkegaard having any of it .Although he himself had invented
an “air pump” in his magister dissertation, it had been a spiritual construc-
tion and was fashioned in such a manner that Socrates, when he used the
handle, was able to deflate even the most hairsplitting Sophist .Kierkegaard
did little in other respects to contribute to modern industrial society, some-
thing he himself was quick to lament .Thus, one day, out in Frederiksberg
Gardens (or rather, deep insideConcluding Unscientific Postscript), he (alias
Johannes Climacus) sat thoughtfully smoking a cigar and attempted to take
stock of his situation .He was no longer quite young, he had passed the
time with a bit of studies about one thing or another, but he had not been
of any use to the human race .And this pained him .For he saw himself
surrounded on every side by energetic people who were doing everything
they could to make existence more tolerable: “Some by means of railroads;
others with omnibuses and steamships; others with the telegraph; others
with easily understood surveys and brief bulletins about everything worth
knowing; and finally, the true benefactors of the age, who by virtue of
thought systematically make spiritual existence easier and easier, yet more
and more meaningful .And what about you? Here my introspection was
interrupted because my cigar was finished and I had to light a new one.”
No sooner was the cigar lit than Climacus hit on the idea that his contri-
bution to the modern world could be to make everything more and more
difficult, thereby supplying existence with its lost gravity .And for this pur-
pose he chose to place “emphasis on his own little self.” True, to some
extent this meant making a virtue of necessity, but since he had no particular
expertise concerning “China, Persia, the System, astrology, or veterinary
science,” he would, in order to do at least something, perfect his “pen’s
capacity to depict, as concretely as possible, the everyday side of life, which
quite often is different from the Sunday side.”
Here, disguised as Climacus and with teasing gestures, Kierkegaard has
formulated a movement from the objective and the abstract to the subjec-
tively concrete—the movement typical of most of his writings .There can
thus be no doubt about where Kierkegaard’s priorities lay, but this does not
mean that he fell into the naive notion that the possibility of becoming