A Walk with Kierkegaard

Roger Poole

• Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age– A Literary Review by Søren Kierkegaard, edited and translated by Howard Hong and Edna Hong
  Princeton, 187 pp, £7.70, August 1978, ISBN 0 691 07226 4
• Kierkegaard: Letters and Documents translated by Henrik Rosenmeier
  Princeton, 518 pp, £13.60, November 1978, ISBN 0 691 07228 0

Bernard Levin recently summed up in one sentence the most ambiguous form of mental sickness in our age: ‘But there are those who live by an enervated reason that owns no master in the soul, and who can find arguments that enable them to claim that the atrophy of the moral sense from which they suffer is in fact a form of rational judgment.’ This is precisely what Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was contending about his own age, with a prophetic accuracy which now seems almost uncanny. His word for what Mr Levin is describing here is ‘at raisonere’, ‘to reason’, but to reason in a very special way, a way which, while knowing everything, is unwilling to do anything about it. ‘To reason’ in this way, he said, ‘annuls the passionate disjunction between subjectivity and objectivity’.