in 1856, in the midst of the controversy, he collapsed on the street while
bringing home from the bank the very last of his inheritance and died shortly
thereafter.
Kierkegaard’s writings are a blend of literature and philosophy. His first
breakthrough into creativity, Either/Or (1843), explicitly sets up a dialectic
between aesthetic Idealism and Christian moralism. Most of the literary punch
comes from the aesthetes he depicts in component works such as the novella
“Diary of the Seducer,” with its confessional tones echoing Goethe’s Young
Werther and anticipating Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground; critical
reflections in “The Immediate Stages of the Erotic or the Musical Erotic,”
which uses philosophical categories to extol Mozart and especially the Don
Juan theme; as well as a Hegelian satire developing the principle “all men are
bores.” The sexuality is not the least of Kierkegaard’s appeal, providing literary
shock value while at the same time it epitomizes themes of Idealism as well as
of bourgeois morality. In parallel with Schopenhauer (unknown at the time),
who describes the will as simultaneously sexual drive and the spirit of music,
Kierkegaard too ([1843] 1959: 41, 63) speaks of sounds as the key to what is
hidden by appearances. Where Kierkegaard breaks new ground is by criticizing
aesthetic Idealism as pseudo-salvation lacking in moral sensibility. Simultane-
ously he uses the categories of aesthetic criticism against rationalized and
passionless theology. Value is in criticism and tension; systematic philosophy
is impossible, and its topics can be approached only through the application
of literary analogies. Theology must be apprehended under the mode of com-
edy; the truths of religion are paradoxical, even absurd, never demonstrable
by logic. The Hegelian dialectic, which Kierkegaard rejects, is nevertheless
employed in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), redeemed by being
left perpetually open-ended. It was from Hegel, more than Schelling, that
Kierkegaard acquired the weapons which he now wielded against all positions.
Kierkegaard’s demand for a Byronic Christianity was put forward at just
the time when the theologians of the Danish church were liberalizing and
accepting the rationalized Hegelian theology. Denmark, which had long been
an absolute monarchy allied to traditional landholding, by the 1840s was
caught up in political reform movements. The National Liberals were gaining
political influence; in the wave of popular uprisings sweeping across Europe,
a liberal constitution was granted in 1849, with a weak elected legislature,
religious tolerance, and an end to censorship (Eagleton, 1990: 190–191).
Kierkegaard sharply opposed every aspect of reform. The Present Age, pub-
lished in 1846 simultaneously with his major philosophical work, attacks the
leveling of modern mass society which he discerned in the movements around
him. Here Kierkegaard seems to have been acting not so much on his personal
class interest as against the liberalizing movement in his own class. The stance
Writers’ Markets: The French Connection^ •^767