Soren Kierkegaard

melancholia onlyjust barelymanaged to squeeze for a few moments now
and then. But “essentially” this was a life lived in an unself-conscious en-
chantment into which the artist had been transported by means of artistic
creativity. Productivity was nothing less than a physical need, an appetite:
“Only when I am productive do I feel well. Then I forget all the unpleasant
things of life, all the sufferings; then I am happy and at home with my
thoughts. If I stop for just a couple of days, I immediately become ill, over-
whelmed, oppressed; my head becomes heavy and burdened. After having
gone on day after day for five or six years, this urge, so abundant, so inex-
haustible, still surges just as abundantly—this urge is of course also a calling
from God.”
The productivity was a calling from God, but the hesitation visible in the
words “of course also” betrays Kierkegaard’s need to come up withaddi-
tionaljustification for his literary activity. It was of decisive importance to
him to clarify his understanding of his suffering and the productivity to
which it gave rise. For years he had viewed the suffering as a permanent
psychosomatic conflict that stemmed from extraordinary burdens, both in-
herited and environmental. And as long as he could cling tothisunderstand-
ing of himself, he could be reasonably sure that making use of his melancho-
lia in the service of his writing was justifiable. Sublimating his personal
conflict into writing was legitimatebecausein the final analysis it served an
overarching human and existential purpose: “I have understood my task to
be that of a person who has himself become unhappy, yet who, since he
loves human beings, wants precisely to help others who are capable of hap-
piness.” With this position, theexternaljustification—that of helpingother
people—seems to have been established; all that remained were the varia-
tions: “Thus I believed myself to have been sacrificed because I understood
that my sufferings and my torments made me resourceful in exploring truth,
which in turn could be beneficial to other people.” In the more official
version published inThe Point of View for My Work as an Author, self-imposed
penance, penitence, is installed as a dynamic factor in the sublimation: “My
work as an author was the prompting of an irresistible inner urge, the only
possibility for a melancholy man, the honest attempt of a profoundly hum-
bled man, a penitent, by making every sacrifice and bending every effort in
the service of the truth, to do something good in return, if possible.”
Here Kierkegaard appears to have become mired in his own psychoso-
matic conflict. He believed that it was unavoidable, but—perhaps—he be-
lieved that this was the case especiallybecausethe conflict was the basis of
his art. “Yes,” he wrote in 1849, “if my suffering, my weakness, were not
the basis for all of my intellectual activity, I would of course make another
attempt to deal with it quite simply as a medical matter. After all, if one’s