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More on “the Corsair Affair”

SK beats BerlingskeI promised in an earlier post that I would look more closely what scholars refer to as “the Corsair affair,” which is to say the bullying and harassment of Kierkegaard in the pages of the satirical newspaper Corsaren (the corsair) and the effect it had on him. The illustration above is from the February 11, 1848 issue of Corsaren. I have taken this image from Peter Tudvad’s Kierkegaards København. The text that accompanies it reads:

Corsaren had already promised its readers as 1846 drew to a close, that the paper would not dream of forgetting Kierkegaard, who, with his frequent appearances in the paper that year had helped to increase circulation. The promise was kept. Kierkegaard was flayed more than once by the paper through the use of what was then the entirely novel device of satirical drawings. If Copenhageners forgot how strange Magister Kierkegaard looked, Corsaren once more did them the service of reminding them with a depiction [signalement] on February 11, 1848. The drawing by Peter Klæstrup shows Kierkegaard in the process of attacking Berlingske Tidende because the paper had had the audacity to praise him — a privilege Kierkegaard reserved for only Bishop Mynster.

Corsaren is known today primarily as a satirical paper, or as the Danish scholar Johnny Kondrup observes in an article on Meïr Goldschmidt in Kierkegaard and his Danish Contemporaries, “even a gutter paper.” In fact, however, it was a left-wing political paper. “This was thus the situation when The Corsair was created,” explains Kondrup.

The reading public … had become political and polarized. In the press several conservative, royalist newspapers stood opposite a few liberal organs of opposition, which were distinguished among themselves by their degree of nationalism but were united in their demand for a constitutional monarchy. With The Corsair there arose something new: an organ which was independent of party interests and critical of both the government and the opposition. … Moreover, the paper’s program lay far to the left since it wanted to see the creation of a republic.

Kondrup observes that

[i]n Kierkegaard research it has often been claimed that The Corsair discontinued its persecution of Kierkegaard when Goldschmidt, in October 1846, sold the paper. This is, however, incorrect. First, there were new teasing jabs at Kierkegaard from October 23 and to the end of 1846, although they were few and subdued. Second, the campaign continued in the following years, in the first instance until February 1848, and then very sporadically until the paper ceased publication in March 1855.

“In our perspective,” Kondrup continues however, “the Corsair controversy … concludes with Goldschmidt’s departure from the paper, and this seems to have been Kierkegaard’s perspective as well. He was little exercised by the post-Goldschmidt Corsair and found it harmless” (pp. 112-113).

Kondrup cites as support for this some remarks Kierkegaard wrote as part of the draft of an unpublished article entitled “A Frank Word about Myself as an Author.” Here is the text of the passage in question:

Med den Udbredelsens Proportion, som »Corsaren« nu har, med saadanne Redakteurer, som den nuværende, anseer jeg den for ufarlig, tilmed da der jo nu er saa megen Begivenhed i Danmark. Derimod holder jeg mig fuld forvisset om, | at med den næsten vanvittigt uproportionerede Udbredelse den i sin Tid havde, med et Talent som G. og et saa intriguant Hoved som P. L. M. til Redakteurer var yderst, yderst farlig. Det er min Dom, at der vare Andre, som vare nærmere end jeg forpligtede til at handle under saadanne Omstændigheder: det bliver deres Ansvar, at de taug.

With the circulation [Udbredelsens Proportion] Corsaren now has, with the editors such as those it has now, I consider it harmless [ufarlig], in addition to the fact that there is so much commotion now in Denmark. I am certain, however, that with the exaggerated circulation it had in its time, with a talent such as G[oldschmidt] and a schemer such as P.L.M[øller] as editors, it was extremely, extremely dangerous [farglig]. In my judgment, there were others who had a greater responsibility to take action under such conditions: they are responsible for having remained silent.

The passage is clearly about the potential of Corsaren had in its heyday, to create social and political havoc, not about its pillorying of Kierkegaard or the effect that this pillorying had on him. Kondrup’s interpretation makes no sense when one looks at the passage as a whole. That is, the “danger” to which Kierkegaard refers cannot have been to himself personally, because prior to his public criticism of the paper, neither he nor anyone else had any reason to believe that Corsaren represented any sort of “danger” to Kierkegaard personally.

The “danger” to which Kierkegaard refers was to Danish society. Kierkegaard felt a responsibility to take some kind of action to weaken what he saw as Corsaren’s “dangerous” influence on the public and took this action, because though there were others whose responsibility in this regard he felt was even greater, they failed to act.

Hence when Kierkegaard says he considers the post-Goldschmidt Corsair “harmless,” he means to the general public, not to himself. And indeed, as has been well documented, Kierkegaard continued to complain about Corsaren’s treatment of him from 1846 when it began its attack on him until shortly before his death in 1855.

The kinds of personal attacks made on Kierkegaard by Corsaren amounted to a type of bullying. We typically think of bullying as a problem that is restricted to childhood. Studies increasingly show, however, that the bullying of adults is equally pervasive and can have similarly damaging psychological effects. Most the research on adult bullying has been on what is known as “workplace bullying.” For children, bullying typically occurs in school. For adults, on the other hand, it is typically in the workplace. For an author, whose workplace does not bring him or her into contact with other people, bullying takes place in the media.

“[T]he adult brand of bullying,” explains Stacey Colino in an article in U.S. News, “can include … publicly belittling or humiliating someone, social ostracism or undermining him or her.” Corsaren’s attacks on Kierkegaard did all three things, and not for a few months in 1846, but on and off for years. It publicly belittled and humiliated him. It caused people whom he did not know to openly ridicule him and people he knew to avoid his company. It was clearly designed, as Tudvad explains, to undermine Kierkegaard’s base of support in the less affluent and cultivated contingent of society in that it presented him as arrogant and indifferent to the plight of the common man.

Given Kierkegaard’s frequent positive references to the common man, his penchant for striking up discussions with manual laborers, tradespeople, and servants (a practice not common at the time for a person of his social station), his numerous and keen observations on the plight of the poor, and what Tudvad discovered were his generous contributions both to needy individuals and to charitable causes (see Kierkegaards København, pp. 370-377), it’s likely Corsaren’s campaign to make Kierkegaard appear indifferent to the plight of the poor that is responsible for the fact that this view of him is still widely held. See for example, Peter Gordon’s review of Daphne Hampson’s Kierkegaard: Exposition and Critique, as well as Terry Eagleton’s review of Clare Carlisle’s Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaard had reason to complain about Corsaren’s treatment of him. An appreciation of the extent of Corsaren’s campaign against him makes Kierkegaard appear a lot less self-pitying and a lot more deserving of sympathy.

 

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New, Improved Piety on Kierkegaard!

 

I noticed recently that the “archives” links to earlier posts had disappeared. I contacted WordPress about this and they said it was probably because the blog theme I had originally chosen had been retired. They suggested I select a new theme, so I did. I like this theme because it is streamlined and makes the posts easier to read. It’s a “premium” theme and that means you should no longer see adds on the posts. There are several other changes that I think will improve the site as well. First, I’ve extended the time period for commenting on posts. It used to be something like a week. I think that isn’t enough time to comment on posts of the sort this blog contains, so I’ve extended the period now to 100 days. I’ve also added a page for “resources” with links to online resources such as the wonderful Ferrall-Repp Danish-English dictionary from 1845 to which I frequently refer. I will eventually also add links to important scholarly works that are in the public domain. I welcome suggestions for additions to this page.

I plan also to add a page of “testimonials.” I’ve had many people, both established scholars and graduate students, write to me and tell me that this blog has been an important resource for them. I’m going to collect some of those comments and post them, with the authors’ permission of course, to the “testimonials” page. There are a couple of reasons I want to do this. First, it will be helpful to people who are new to Kierkegaard and hence not in a good position to judge the quality of the posts. Second, it will help to establish to scholars, and university administrators who are not scholars, that this kind of digital scholarship is actually important to the profession. Many older scholars, as well as older administrators, have been slow to appreciate how important online resources can be. I think a page of testimonials will help to show the importance of such resources.

I may be mistaken, of course, but my guess is that blogs such as this will one day supplant in importance traditional scholarly journals. I don’t mean to suggest that journals will cease to exist. I think we’ll always have scholarly journals. My guess, though, is that they will nearly all eventually be exclusively online and that even then much of the cutting edge scholarship will take place outside of them because of how slow they are in getting material to the reading public. The problem isn’t getting the material into print, I believe, so much as it is getting referee reports in a timely fashion. I fear that isn’t much that can be done about that. Refereeing articles for scholarly journals is an important task but it is very time consuming. Sometimes the referees want changes to articles and that further delays the process of getting material into print.

Much of what I post isn’t time sensitive, but some of it is, such as my response to Peter Gordon’s review of Daphne Hampson’s book Kierkegaard: Exposition and Critique in the New York Review of Books. I was able to get that post up when that issue of the NYRB was still in circulation. That prompted a conversation, of sorts, between Hampson and myself that likely would never have taken place had I tried to publish my response to the NYRB‘s piece in a scholarly journal and that conversation contains much valuable information concerning Kierkegaard’s view on science, nature, and miracles. If you found that information helpful, or found the information on other posts helpful, please comment to that effect on this post. I’ll eventually collect such comments and create at “testimonials” page for them.

In other news, I have heard from Baylor that they are planning to publish a paperback version of my book Ways of Knowing: Kierkegaard’s Pluralist Epistemology. That is good news. The original hard cover was reasonably priced, but the paperback should be even more affordable.

I’ll be back soon with a post on the conference I attended this summer in Munich!

 

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Report from the Pacific APA

I chaired a session on practical reasoning at the annual meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association last month. The session was great. The presenter, Ting Cho Lau, was a very sharp graduate student from Notre Dame. His paper was entitled “Tough Choices, Reasons, and Practical Reasoning,” and his argument was that none of the dominant theories of why “tough choices” are tough either adequately explains the phenomenon of toughness or holds out much promise of providing agents with guidance for making such choices.

I won’t go into Lau’s specific criticisms of each of the dominant theories. What will be of interest to Kierkegaard scholars is that Lau argues none of those theories adequately acknowledges that tough choices, such as what career to choose, often involve the shaping of a person’s identity and so among the many considerations that must be looked at is what kind of person it is possible for one to become. Not everyone can, for example, become a great opera star. Even those who are excellent singers by most standards may have to accept at some point that their talents will likely limit them to more minor roles. That kind of self-examination is very difficult and that does indeed go a long way to explaining why at least some tough choices are so tough.

Lau’s paper was clearly presented and well argued. It was also ambitious, though, in that he proposed not simply to give a more adequate account of why tough choices were tough, but also to provide agents with guidance for making them less tough. It seems to me, however, that knowing that a choice is so “tough” because it involves figuring out just who exactly one is and who one is capable of becoming isn’t necessarily going to make the choice any less difficult. It seems entirely possible, in fact, that it might make the choice even more difficult.

The situation is even more complex, I would argue, than Lau presented it as being because the issue is not simply that of determining what kind of person one is capable of becoming, but also of determining what kind of person one wants to become. Usually, we are pulled in various directions with respect to that issue. As difficult as it may be to acknowledge that we may want to become someone (a famous opera singer, for example) that we simply don’t have the talent to become, it is even harder, Kierkegaard would argue, to determine who we really want to become. We want to become good people, people pleasing to God (or, if we are not religious, at least pleasing to our neighbors, or to those in our culture more generally), and yet, and yet, we are also drawn toward decisions that would make us into quite another sort of person.

There is, as Kant would say, a corruption in the subjective determining ground of our will. Or, as Kierkegaard would put it, we are “double-minded.” Arguably, that is the real reason why at least some choices are so “tough.” It isn’t all that difficult, generally, to decide on a career, or on whom to marry. Many people, in fact, would describe these choices as having been made for them, in a sense, by inclinations that were so strong they didn’t really seem like choices. Other sorts of choice, however, are not so easy. Deciding, for example, whether to stick up for a colleague who is being bullied and harassed when doing so might expose one to the same treatment––now that can be difficult!

The session was great, though, and Lau’s paper is a work-in-progress that even in light of the above criticism is better than many a paper I’ve seen published in peer-reviewed journals. The commentator, Susan Vineberg, from Wayne State University was also excellent, and the session as a whole was exceptionally well run. I’m not tooting my own horn there. I was only one of three chairs for three separate papers and actually the weakest link in that chain in that I mistakenly assumed the respondent had the same length of time to present her remarks as had the presenter. Each presenter got twenty minutes and each respondent got ten, so even though the entire session was three hours long, it went by in a stimulating flash.

My favorite session, however, was one of two sessions put on by The Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love. The topic of the session was love and “attachment.” Each of the three speakers was good. The highlight of the session for me, however, was the last speaker, Monique Wonderly of Princeton. Her paper was entitled “Love, Caring, and the Value of Attachment.” Wonderly argued, in terms such as I had used in the speech I gave at my father’s memorial service, that “[a]ttachment figures help to shape our senses of self, imbue us with self-confidence, and can serve as a source of emotional regulation and support even in their absence.”

I am really happy to have discovered The Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love. I knew about its existence before, of course, but for some reason I had assumed it was more about sex than it was about love, or that when it treated love that it was only sexual, or romantic love. I was wrong. The session was wonderful and would have been of enormous interest to Kierkegaard scholars.

There was one session on Kierkegaard. It was sort of a stealth session because Kierkegaard was not mentioned in the title of the session. The title was simply “Political Theology Group.” All the papers were on Kierkegaard, though. Unfortunately, the session was not well run. There were four speakers and a respondent for a two-hour session! It wasn’t clear how much time had been allotted to each speaker or whether any of them ran over that time. There was no time for questions, however, none. Hence there was no discussion whatever and there really should have been because some of the presenters appeared to be laboring under the erroneous view that Kierkegaard was generally contemptuous of the plight of the poor and the downtrodden and that there really wasn’t much in Kierkegaard that would provide a foundation for a positive political philosophy. I won’t rehash that tired argument or my response to it here. Go back and look at the earlier posts on this blog relating to Daphne Hampson’s book and Peter Gordon’s review of it for my comments on that view. Actually, one kind reader of this blog sent me a long list of quotations from Kierkegaard’s works that support his concern for the poor and downtrodden. I am going to use that list in a future post––with proper attribution, of course.

Just as an aside, I should alert readers to the fact that there is going to be a session at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in November the theme of which will be “Truth is Subjectivity: Kierkegaard and Political Theology. A Symposium in Honor of Robert Perkins.” I know some of the speakers already and I can tell you that it promises to be a very good session indeed. Bob Perkins, about whom I will write more later, deserves nothing less. He was a true giant in Kierkegaard scholarship and he will be sorely missed.

There were lots of other great sessions at the Pacific APA meeting, including Onora O’Neill’s Berggruen Prize lecture that included comments from Andrew Chignell of Princeton and Eric Watkins of U.C. San Diego. Yes, that’s right, Andrew Chignell appears to have moved already from Penn to Princeton. And I was so happy and excited to have him here in Philly. That guy is really smart, and, as I learned from that session, a fantastic speaker.