Soren Kierkegaard

love is essentially cultivated; a common man who has essentially and pas-
sionately made a resolute decision is essentially cultivated,” he wrote inA
Literar yReview, a view which, incidentally, was unlikely to have been
greeted with approval in the salons where Heiberg ruled.
Kierkegaard could afford to be indifferent about the absence of recogni-
tion from Heiberg’s quarter, however. In just over four years he had become
a literature within literature, and if the present day was against him, he had
the future on his side, not least because of his critique of cultivation, a
critique the Heibergians could not stand. “My claim to literary fame,” he
wrote in the spring of 1846, “is that I always set forth in their entirety the
decisive determinants of the existential sphere with such dialectical acute-
ness and with such primitivity, which as far as I know has not been done
in any other literature, nor have I had any works [on the subject] from
which I could seek guidance.” Here, with great perspicacity, Kierkegaard
emphasized that he was the thinker of primitivity. His thinking was elemen-
tal and basal; it did not owe its existence to the circumlocutions of philoso-
phy or to literary pilferage, but had been hauled up from the most profound
depths within the thinker himself. In this way the thinker of primitivity
differentiated himself decisively from “Prof. Heiberg and his consorts,” who
merely tarted themselves up with borrowed philosophical finery, and
among whom one seldom or never encountered “one single primitive
thought.” It was not without reason that in his little satirical poem Kierke-
gaard had chosen to call Heiberg “a phony fellow,” that is, an artificial char-
acter, airily formed by culture and torn loose from his moorings in nature.
Primitivity was not just Kierkegaard’s private property, because indeed
everyone ought to “have his primitive impression of existence—in order
to be a human being.” And what is true of the individual is true of the
age, for “just as the fundamental failing of the modern age is that it makes
everything objective, so is it also the fundamental misfortune of the modern
age that it lacks primitivity.” “The more primitive sort of thought” had
become marginalized in part because it did not offer showy philosophical
subject matter, but instead doggedly preferred “to remain engaged with
certain fundamental questions,” and in part because this sort of thinking
becomes exceptionally dangerous when carried out under the banner of
theology. “Human beings are perfectible,” Kierkegaard wrote sarcastically,
“one can as easily get them to do one thing as another, just as easily get
them to fast as to live in worldly enjoyment—only one thing is important
to them, that they are just like the others....Yetwhat God wants is neither
the one thing nor the other, butprimitivity.” A primitive relation to God is
a relationship in which one relates oneself unconditionally to the uncondi-
tioned, but in so doing one inevitably comes into profound conflict with