being marketed. Its retrospective canon was the subject of an outburst of
anthologies and reprints, popularizing many figures such as the neo-conserva-
tive theologians previously known only to specialists.
The retrospective existentialist canon has two main branches: dissidents
who branched off the tail end of the network of German Idealists, and literary
writers of heavily philosophical content, exemplified by Dostoyevsky and
Kafka. On closer examination, this latter group turns out to comprise network
offshoots of the mainstream German philosophical lineage as well.
The End of the Idealist Network: Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
The most famous of the retrospective early “existentialists” were Kierkegaard
and Nietzsche. In Camus’s version of the canon, The Rebel (1951), Stirner was
also rediscovered and elevated to star quality. In the network (Figures 13.1 and
14.2) they all branch off from the Berlin Hegelians of the 1840s. Stirner was
in the central circle of Die Freien. Kierkegaard was one of the auditors at
Schelling’s lectures, and his own creativity began immediately after this contact
(see Figure 14.2).
A hallmark of the proto-existentialist style is to accentuate the personal
choice points of life, and Kierkegaard’s works are permeated with autobiogra-
phy (Lowrie, 1942). His father was a self-made success as a merchant in
Copenhagen, who brought up his children very strictly, with emphasis on
sin and fear of God. Kierkegaard was a rebellious younger son; he spent 10
years at the university, studying theology but largely carousing, “in revolt
against God” as well as his father. It seems the incentives of a wealthy
inheritance then weighed in, along with pressures of guilt: in 1838, at age 25,
he underwent a religious conversion and reconciled with his dying father,
whereupon Kierkegaard became independently wealthy. For two years he
applied himself to his studies, and finally got his degree in theology. Following
the conventional pattern, he thereupon proposed marriage to an upper-class
woman. Soon after he broke off the engagement; he may have felt guilty about
his previous whoring, and perhaps also saw himself settling down to a con-
ventional marriage resembling his father’s lifestyle, giving up all that he had
revolted against in the first place. It was at this point that Kierkegaard left for
Berlin, where he heard Schelling lecture. This seems to have been a choice point
for him: a conventional marriage and career as a pastor versus an intellectual
career in the stance of a theological rebel. Kierkegaard started publishing
prodigiously upon his return, some 3,000 pages during the years 1843–1848,
sustained by a series of four trips to Berlin.
Kierkegaard proceeded to devote his wealth to publishing his own books;
financial independence enabled him to write whatever he wanted, without con-
Writers’ Markets: The French Connection^ •^765