Soren Kierkegaard

Worst of all, of course, was that Andersen had been utterly unable to
manage his hero, the semiautobiographical Christian, who was portrayed as
a misunderstood genius but who was most of all a “sniveler” and a conceited
“sap,” who had to go through so awfully much before he—at last, thank
God!—perished. In the biography of Andersen that accompanied the Ger-
man edition ofOnly a Fiddler—and in late July 1838 had been summarized
inKjøbenhavns Morgenblad—it was revealed that every time Andersen was
confronted with an important decision he would burst into tears. This was
probably the source for Kierkegaard’s “sniveler.” A genius is too sensitive
for this world, that is Andersen’s message. This was much too sensitive for
Kierkegaard, who rebuffed Andersen’s sap of a genius with this fiery rejoin-
der: “A genius is not a little candle that goes out in the wind, but is a raging
fire that the storm merely incites.” Geniuses are inextinguishable; they are
not mere bunches of matchsticks in the hands of a fate, blue with cold, that
needs something with which to warm itself.
Kierkegaard reserved for a later occasion a more positive definition of the
sort of life view that could have guided Christian safely through Andersen’s
novel—the absence of which was the real cause of the novel’s failure. At
one point, however, Kierkegaard does write that a life view presupposes
that one does not “permit one’s life to fizzle out too much.” Indeed, he
generally emphasizes a sort of self-censorship as the precondition for being
able to “win a competent personality for oneself,” because it is only “such
a dead and transfigured personality—not the multifaceted, earthly, palpable
personality—that is and ought to be capable of producing anything.”
Therefore, not just anyone is capable of producing; this is something re-
served for the very few. And here readers are requested to fasten their seat
belts and hold on to their hats and reading glasses: “A life view is in fact
something more than an epitome or a sum of propositions maintained in
their abstract neutrality. It is more than experience, which as such is always
fragmentary. It is in fact the transubstantiation of experience; it is an unshak-
able self-certainty that has been won in a battle against the whole of the
empirical world, whether it has oriented itself only with respect to all
worldly relationships (a merely human standpoint, Stoicism, for example),
thereby keeping itself free from contact with a deeper empirical world—or
has discovered what is central both for its heavenly and its earthly existence
by directing itself toward heaven (the religious), thereby winning true
Christian conviction.”
And this is not so inconsiderable, especially if one bears in mind that this
requirement for a writer to die away from the world has been set forth by a
twenty-five-year-old university student who has himself scarcely got started
with life, but who nonetheless gives a successful author, eight years his