Soren Kierkegaard

caricatured and ridiculed by the whole mob, from the simple people to the
aristocrats; all in order to explode illusions....ButA.S.isnotlike this at
all; in this respect he does not resemble S. A. at all.”
This personal perspective leads to a deeper problem of principle which,
after a bit of dialectical rotation (as we will see), will come back to Kierke-
gaard in a quite personal form: “Schopenhauer makes light of Christianity,
jeers at it in comparison to the wisdom of India. Now that is his business.
I have nothing against Schopenhauer’s mighty rage against this ‘villainous
optimism’ which is the special province of Protestantism in particular. I am
very happy that he shows that this is not Christianity at all.” Here, as else-
where, Kierkegaard was extremely tolerant of those who openly renounce
Christianity, but he nonetheless had to protest against one quite specific
circumstance, namely that Schopenhauer had identified living with suffer-
ing, “because then Christianity is abolished.” Because if life wasalready
sufferingfrom the very beginning, Christianity would be deprived of “some-
thing that helps make it negatively identifiable” and become a “pleonasm,
a redundant observation, gibberish. Because if to be a human being is to
suffer, then it is of course ludicrous that there be a doctrine that proposes
the following definition: To be a Christian is to suffer.”
Kierkegaard was very anxious to emphasize Schopenhauer’s error in hav-
ing identified life with suffering. His carefree and superficial epoch had
surely benefited from being “raked over the coals by melancholia,” but life
is happiness, life is not suffering. Life only becomes suffering when Chris-
tianity intervenes. In this connection Kierkegaard invokes Johannes Clima-
cus, whosePostscripthad already formulated “the principle, that to be a
Christian is to suffer,” and thus every notion of wanting to “kill or mortify
the lust for life” can only make sense if the individual exists in relation to a
transcendent authority external to the individual, a God, who commands
the individual to mortify the flesh.
Despite the differences anddisagreements that characterizedthe two men,
Schopenhauer’s pessimism had a productive effect on Kierkegaard and in-
tensified his own criticisms. And after his encounter with Schopenhauer,
Kierkegaard, who otherwise rarely gave a thought to future students of
theology, made an exception: “Just as during epidemics one puts something
in one’s mouth to avoid, if possible, becoming infected by breathing the
disease-laden air, so one could recommend to students of theology who
must live here in Denmark amid this nonsensical (Christian) optimism, that
they ingest a little dose of Schopenhauer’sEthicsevery day to protect them-
selves against infection from this nonsense. With me it is a different matter.
I am protected in another way.”