Soren Kierkegaard

“Naturally, every person wants to be active in the world in accordance with
his abilities, but this in turn implies that he wants to develop his abilities in
a particular direction, namely in that which is best suited to his particular
personality. But which direction is that? Here I am confronted with a great
question mark. Here I stand like Hercules, but not at a crossroads. No, here
there are a great many more roads, and it is thus all the more difficult to
choose the right one. Perhaps it is precisely my life’s misfortune to be inter-
ested in far too many things, but not decisively in any one thing. My inter-
ests are not all subordinated under one heading, but are all coordinated.”
Kierkegaard expressed his profound admiration for the natural sciences
and all their practitioners—from those who calculate “the speed of the stars”
to those who study “intestinal worms”—but at the same time he was com-
pelled to admit that he thought they often merely stirred up clouds of “par-
ticularities” by means of which they might perhaps guarantee themselves “a
name in the scholarly literature,” but nothing more. Fortunately, however,
there were individual exceptions to these scientists who fragment the world
with such planless efficiency. There were also “natural scientists who by
their speculations have discovered or have sought to discover that Archi-
medean point that exists nowhere within the world and who from this point
have observed the totality and have seen the particularities in their true
light. And in this respect I cannot deny that they have made an extremely
favorable impression on me. The peace, the harmony, the joy one finds in
them, is rarely found elsewhere.” As examples of this sort of natural scientist
Kierkegaard named the physicist Hans Christian Ørsted, the botanists J. F.
Schouw and J. W. Hornemann, plus P. W. Lund himself, but he was none-
theless compelled to conclude: “I have been inspired by the natural sciences
and I still am, yet it seems to me that I will not make them my principal
field of study. By virtue of reason and freedom, it is life that has always
interested me most, and it has always been my wish to clarify and solve the
riddle of life.”
However immodestly proclaimed it may have been, this desire to solve
the riddle of life would seem to have made the choice of theology a natural
one. And yet not. Orthodoxy appeared to Kierkegaard to be a giant with
feet of clay, while rationalism was neither fish nor fowl, more like a sort of
“Noah’s ark,” as Heiberg once put it inFlyveposten, in which the clean and
unclean beasts bed down side by side. The letter ends: “With respect to
minor annoyances, I will note only that I am studying for my theological
examinations, a pastime which is of absolutely no interest and which ac-
cordingly is not proceeding very quickly. I have always preferred free—and
therefore perhaps somewhat undefined—studies.... For itseems to me
that the learned theological world is like the Strand Road on a Sunday