“There is yet another man in me, not the physical, but the personal man.”

— Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Personality’, 1917

Personality, said Rabindranath Tagore, resides in our lived philosophy and our art. The Bard of Bengal was comfortable in his artistic skin. In his music, paintings, prose and poetry, we see the depth of his own personality – his “personal man”. A distinctly Tagorean term for the “reflective self”, the personal man’s truest manifestation was, of course, Tagore himself.

His creative drive for harmony between man and nature, individual and society, East and West, reshaped Indian philosophy and literature, and his 1917 Personality lectures in America introduced the heart of his philosophical approach to a new English-speaking audience.

Since moving to Santiniketan in 2019 I’ve had the opportunity the learn more about the extraordinary man behind the philosophy. Tagore was unique, and his impact immeasurable. But I was curious. What similar thinkers, if any, existed in the western tradition?

When Covid-19 first came into our lives, it was perhaps no surprise that the existential novel made a comeback. As people experienced a new kind of isolation many turned to such books for reflective insight, from the Russian classics, to Albert Camus’ The Plague. I wasn’t immune. But as I went back to basics I found myself in the company of one unlikely individual.

In Europe the reflective self, or “personal man”, found its most fervent intellectual expression in the father of existential philosophy, Søren Kierkegaard. The Danish philosopher was from a different cultural milieu to Tagore’s, and from another generation – he died in 1855 six years before the Indian sage was born – but he also considered himself a poet, not a philosopher, and he stood in the same tradition of such free-thinking individuals who sought unity in thought and life; creative types who dared to question the zeitgeist of their age, and the conventional wisdom of their peers.

‘Philosopher of the heart’

Railing against the Danish State Church as well as the prevailing Hegelian philosophy of his day, Kierkegaard placed emphasis on what it means to live in the world as a human being, viewing the individual not through the lens of religious or rationalised dogma but, rather, under the microscope of subjective feeling.

It was he who once said, “Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced”. Striving to re-establish the connection of philosophy with our personal lives, Kierkegaard wanted to rise above abstruse technical debates and detached, systematic ways of understanding the world. He made sense of reality not through abstractions, but through poetry and the exploratory act of writing, and his unique style, heavy in its use of metaphor and irony, reasserted the importance of human uniqueness and the “inner life”.

This goes some way to explain why the Swedish feminist writer, Fredrika Bremer, a contemporary of Kierkegaard’s, described him as a “philosopher of the heart”, and how his philosophical investigations – akin to Tagore’s lyrical meditations – went on to reshape philosophy and literature in his own part of the world.

In his autobiographical novel, Johannes Climacus: or De omnibus dubitandum est (Everything Must be Doubted), Kierkegaard writes of a young boy who wants to become a philosopher, whose mind is layered with fresh thoughts every morning, like “new-fallen snow”. This points early on to a poetic mindset, but also reveals, as the novel’s Latin subtitle suggests, a deep questioning mind.

A self-proclaimed “Socrates of Christendom”, Kierkegaard would come to draw on the true Socratic tradition. Exercising a rigorous scepticism, he got to the core of the issues of his day, questioning absolutely everything, from unassailable facts held up on the pedestal of objective reason to the shibboleths of the Lutheran Church, whose canon shaped his own formative years as a Christian.

Though an introvert at heart, spending long nights writing obsessively in his study, by day Kierkegaard would immerse himself in the life of the city in which he lived, taking what he called “people baths”: walking the busiest crowded streets and talking to strangers in his quest to understand the human condition. He was mocked for his stooping gait and melancholy nature, and for his adversarial attacks on intellectual orthodoxies he became known as the Gadfly of Copenhagen – a twist on the sobriquet originally reserved for his philosopher hero.

His outspokenness left him open to scrutiny and judgement, yet even in the face of public humiliation and ridicule he continued to write prolifically, publishing an astonishing body of work, from his poetry and literary discourses, to searing social commentaries and polemics.

A humanist on the fringes

But who was the personal man? Clare Carlisle’s brilliant new book, Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard, brings to life this most complex and flawed of characters. She tells of how Kierkegaard’s niece, when seeing her uncle on his deathbed aged just forty-two, spoke of piercing blue eyes that “shone like stars” and which betrayed an incredible depth and spiritualism. If eyes really are the mirror of the soul they said a lot about the man.

Others said Kierkegaard’s eyes displayed “a mixture of good nature and malice”. For someone who understood that good and evil are to be found in every human heart, this tells us something of the battles that raged in his own, and of the internal contradictions he spent a lifetime trying to reconcile.

Characterised by “oscillation between retreat and blistering immersion in the world”, as Carlisle succinctly observes, Kierkegaard’s was a life torn between reclusion and societal duty. We see such oscillation also in his writing: between earnestness and satire; despair and humour.

Kierkegaard set the standard for a long line of existential philosophers and writers who looked for understanding in such paradox and irony; who saw value in self-exploration and independence of thought; who criticised the shallowness of modernity; and who sought meaning in the Absurd. Some were merely responding to the emergency of life in their own age, but they asked the same existential questions in their stories and dramas, and it was Kierkegaard who set the stage.

Many of Kierkegaard’s most ardent admirers have been atheists: Woody Allen being the obvious contemporary example, as his 2015 movie Irrational Man – largely inspired by William Barrett’s book of the same name – attests. But he exerted a particular influence on many poets and writers who stood at the very edges of religious orthodoxy: WH Auden, Herman Hesse, JD Salinger, Franz Kafka, even the so-called Catholic novelists, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, reveal a “Kierkegaardian” streak, showing how deeply his thought permeated into twentieth-century western culture and literature.

In Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, for example, the sacred and profane memories of Charles Ryder chart an outright journey through Kierkegaard’s “three stages” of life: from the aesthetic, to the ethical, to the religious. The two writers hailed from very different Christian worlds. Indeed it is not clear whether Waugh was overly familiar with Kierkegaard’s writings, but, reading between the poetical lines of love and suffering, he explored the same existential themes, through characters who, like Kierkegaard, sought meaning and hope in this world, not the “next”. Taking account of these similarities one might consider it not entirely coincidental that Waugh, upon visiting Denmark in 1947, wrote in his diary that he was “a highly popular writer among the Danes”.

Owing to crippling anxiety and bouts of nihilism Kierkegaard suffered from what today would be diagnosed as a form of clinical depression. He took his own prescription, overcoming his despair with his famous Leap of Faith. Like these later authors Kierkegaard viewed humans as instinctually spiritual beings, who, in a world suffering from a deep spiritual malaise, must be responsible for creating their own world of meaning.

Some concluded that such spiritual issues were really just existential ones. Each held very different notions of what spiritualism is and means, yet – religious or otherwise – they agreed on one point: that the task of learning to be human starts anew with each person.

Kierkegaard recognised this more than anyone, but he was deeply concerned about the loss of the free-thinking self in the modern age. In The Sickness unto Death he wrote:

“A self is the last thing the world cares about and the most dangerous thing of all for a person to show signs of having. The greatest hazard of all, losing the self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss – an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc – is sure to be noticed.”

Here we see a little of Kierkegaard’s sardonic humour, but of course there was a serious side. Indeed, Kierkegaard said of the modern individual that he:

“…no longer belongs to god, to himself, to his beloved, to his art or to his science, he is conscious of belonging in all things to an abstraction, just as a serf belongs to an estate.”

‘Life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards’

In our self-seeking lives we are also, ironically, quietly losing our selves. In Kierkegaardian terms it would seem that we yearn for the ethical and spiritual life but are unable to see beyond the aesthetic, especially in a materialistic, digital world with endless opportunities for instant gratification but where enduring satisfaction eludes us at every turn. In the anxiety of our freedom, we continue – as Kierkegaard prophetically warned – to seek distraction.

Kierkegaard’s antidote was a passionate “inwardness”, from which each individual can discover afresh what it means to be human. His legacy is still very much alive in literature, and in an existential age new generations will be drawn again to his timeless ideas. But in an online world of soundbites and competition for attention – where blind conviction carries the day – his ideas hold little currency. He did, however, have his own catchy soundbites, like the memorable, “Life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards”.

Indeed, during a viral pandemic we’ve seen some of the best and worst parts of humanity. We’ve managed to get a pretty good look at ourselves, and amid renewed lockdowns and uncertainty we may look back and realise that there’s room for a little more care of thought and contemplative doubt, especially in a divided world drowning in information but starving for reflective wisdom. Perhaps Kierkegaard is more relevant than ever as we live life forwards.

Kierkegaard wrote with a restless pen fuelled by a fire within. His writings were an act of self-reclamation, but above all they were an act of reclamation for the soul of society. He sought to rescue the genuine self from the spiritlessness of the age by tapping into its mindset.

Many are still struck by the acuity of Kierkegaard’s modern psychological insights, though it is perhaps not surprising when we consider that it was the great poets and novelists who did most to advance the field of psychology. After all, even Freud once said: “Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me”.

Writing in 1838, in a piece entitled From the Papers of One Still Living, Kierkegaard claimed to revere the true poet who overcomes his own mundane existence by transforming his personality into an ideal: an “immortal spirit”. Four thousand miles away, and three quarters of a century later, Rabindranath Tagore could almost have been referring to one such Danish poet, when he wrote:

“[T]he one cry of the personal man has been to know the Supreme Person...Man does not forget to proclaim in languages of solemn rhythm...that in the heart of his world he has met the Immortal Person. In the sorrow of death, and suffering of despair, when trust has been betrayed and love desecrated, when existence becomes tasteless and unmeaning, man standing upon the ruins of his hopes stretches his hands to the heavens to feel the touch of the Person across his darkened world.”

Tagore once said of the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy that he was “the conscience of Europe, crying out in the wilderness”. But there was another. For it is in the personal man of Søren Kierkegaard that we mourn its long-forgotten heart.