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Updated: May 10, 2025
Of Danish thinkers, J.L. Heiberg and S. Kierkegaard were almost the only ones discussed. Heiberg was certainly incessantly criticised, but was treated with profound reverence and as a man whose slightest utterance was of importance.
And possibly Hegel was as infinitely interested as Kierkegaard in his own concrete, individual existence, although the professional decorum of the state-philosopher compelled him to conceal the fact. Faith in immortality is irrational. And, notwithstanding, faith, life, and reason have mutual need of one another.
But I did not find any positive inspiration in my studies until I approached my nineteenth year. In philosophy I had hitherto mastered only a few books by Soeren Kierkegaard. But now I began a conscientious study of Heiberg's philosophical writings and honestly endeavoured to make myself familiar with his speculative logic.
Nielsen had recently, from the cathedra, announced his renunciation of the Kierkegaard standpoint he had so long maintained, in the phrase: "The Kierkegaard theory is impracticable"; he had, perhaps influenced somewhat by the Queen Dowager, who about that time frequently invited him to meet Grundtvig, drawn nearer to Grundtvigian ways of thinking, as Broechner sarcastically remarked about him: "The farther from Kierkegaard, the nearer to the Queen Dowager."
"What he writes is as flat as a drawing," she would say. Or she would remark: "He ought to be more than a collaborator of Kierkegaard." It was only much later that she discovered his genius. Bjoernson, on the other hand, she worshipped with an enthusiastic love; it was a trouble to her that just about this time he had become very cool to her.
For the purpose of explaining the world and existence and such is the task of reason it is not necessary that we should suppose that our soul is either mortal or immortal. The mere enunciation of the problem is, therefore, an irrationality. Let us hear what our brother Kierkegaard has to say.
"If of two men," says Kierkegaard, "one prays to the true God without sincerity of heart, and the other prays to an idol with all the passion of an infinite yearning, it is the first who really prays to an idol, while the second really prays to God." It would be better to say that the true God is He to whom man truly prays and whom man truly desires.
And not only do we not believe with reason, nor yet above reason nor below reason, but we believe against reason. Religious faith, it must be repeated yet again, is not only irrational, it is contra-rational. Kierkegaard says: "Poetry is illusion before knowledge; religion illusion after knowledge. Between poetry and religion the worldly wisdom of living plays its comedy.
In the philosophy of this man Kant, a man of heart and head that is to say, a man there is a significant somersault, as Kierkegaard, another man and what a man! would have said, the somersault from the Critique of Pure Reason to the Critique of Practical Reason. He reconstructs in the latter what he destroyed in the former, in spite of what those may say who do not see the man himself.
At times, when his nerves were overstrained, he was fatigued by the riot of rhymes which pursued him through his dreams, and which his memory vainly strove to recapture. For academic philosophy and systems of philosophic thought he had a great impatience. The vexed question of what he owed to the eminent Danish philosopher, Sören Kierkegaard, has never been solved.
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