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Article Excerpt
THE HUMOR OF KIERKEGAARD By Thomas C. Oden Princeton University Press 328 pp. $16.95 paper.
My favorite "whimsical" anecdote about a philosopher goes like this: Arthur Schopenhauer once threw an old lady down a flight of stairs. (Note how the first line immediately seizes one's attention.) He claimed it was an accident, of course, but I for one prefer to believe that it was nothing of the sort, and that in fact he took the defenseless crone by her wizened weasand and--with full malice aforethought--flung her over the balustrade to the landing below, uttering a curse as he did so (it more nearly accords with my general impression of the man). Not that he acted without cause; he was never given to caprice. The old lady was a cleaning woman who had made too great a clamor outside his rooms, a transgression than which (as anyone familiar with his essay on noise should know) nothing could have vexed him more; and it was only when his rebukes were met by intolerable impudence that he resorted to force. Curiously, however, the magistrate failed to see the justice in his actions, and sentenced him to pay the woman a monthly pension for the rest of her natural life, which somewhat straitened his finances. When she was finally considerate enough to die, and Schopenhauer saw the notice in the morning obituary., his only reaction was to reach for his pen and write in the margin: "Anus obit, onus abit" (the old woman dies, the debt departs).
The reason this grim little tale so amuses me (quite apart from the magnificent pun, which one hopes was purely extemporaneous), is that the lives of philosophers are so often oppressively, obtundently dreary that any diverting story--even one as macabre as the ordeal of Schopenhauer's poor old Putzfrau--comes to the scholar as a cherished respite. And, for the most part, the works of philosophers mirror the shapes of their lives. The sublime spiritual sterility of the texts of Kant's philosophical maturity, for instance, could scarcely provide a more perspicuous glimpse into the personality of perhaps the single most boring man ever to darken a wigmaker's doorway. The leaden, caliginous bombast of Hegel's prose was a pure emanation of his grindingly pompous soul. The turgidity of Derrida's attempts at playfulness were little more than clinical specimens of his insufferable self-infatuation. As a general rule, to put it simply, if one wanders into one's library in search of mirth, good fellowship, or wit, one does well not to seek out the company of the philosophers.
There are exceptions, however, and none more notable than Soren Kierkegaard. In some sense, indeed, Kierkegaard's life could be written as a kind of dark comedy; despite his premature death, and a great number of sadnesses that afflicted him along the way, there was something enchantingly absurd about his character, a certain benign perversity that often prompted him to make himself willfully ridiculous, and a peculiarly touching element of the ludicrous that clung to him all the way to his early grave. Few philosophers' lives can boast comic (or, for that matter, tragic) material comparable to Kierkegaard's aborted engagement to Regine Olsen, the bizarrely exaggerated symbolic significance he attached to it, his firm expectation of death before the age of thirty-four on account of some unnamed sin of his father's, his intentional provocation of a feud with the satirical review The Corsair, or his splenetic quarrels with the Danish Lutheran church (and so on).
And he had wit. It is said that once, for instance, as he came to a stream spanned by a bridge so narrow that two men could not cross it abreast, nor pass one another upon it, a truculent bourgeois arrived at the bridge's other end and--recognizing Kierkegaard--promptly announced that he would not stand aside for an infamous buffoon. "Ah, yes," replied Kierkegaard, unperturbed, stepping back with a ceremonious sweep of his arm, "I, however, shall." And, of all the diverting tales that can be told about Kierkegaard, none is really any more terrible than that: if he was ever cruel, it was principally to himself, and he managed to live out his brief but prolific philosophical career without once (if you can credit it) feeling the need to heave an elderly charwoman into a stairwell. Moreover, happily, he was possessed not only of wit, but of literary genius; and for this reason he is one of that blessed and select company of modern philosophers whose writings can be read purely for the pleasure they afford.
Thomas Oden's generous anthology, The Humor of Kierkegaard, is a sequel to his deservedly popular collection of 1978, Parables of Kierkegaard. Unlike its predecessor, though, it is--in Oden's own words--intended "as entertainment with no noble purpose." But...
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