Carlyle gave his views classic explosive statement in a series of popular lectures (published 1841), Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History. Worship of a hero, he said, was the test of human nobility. “I say there is, at bottom, nothing else admirable! No nobler feeling than this of Admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of man. It is to this hour, and at all hours, the vivifying influence in man’s life.” Carlyle’s hero had many shapes—Divinity (Odin), Prophet (Mahomet), Poet (Dante, Shakespeare), Priest (Luther, Reformation; Knox, Puritanism), Man of Letters (Johnson, Rousseau, Burns), King (Cromwell, Napoleon).
Before offering his dogma of the “Great Man,” Carlyle had made his reputation with a work of history. His French Revolution (1837) also became a literary legend and an object lesson to authors. For comment and criticism he had lent the unique manuscript of the first volume to John Stuart Mill, in whose house it was accidentally destroyed. Doggedly, Carlyle simply rewrote it. When published in three volumes in 1837 it was an enormous success in the bookstores, ending his struggle for money and public notice. Lecture invitations now brought the financial support he sorely needed.
Though praised more often as poetry and rhetoric than as history, the work has its peculiar virtues. Perhaps it justifies G. M. Trevelyan’s claim that Carlyle was “in his own strange way, a great historian.” For Carlyle somehow captures the Paris mob, to whom he is surprisingly sympathetic. He also gives poignant insights into Danton, Robespierre, and other leaders. Finally, the book is an epic of the overwhelming power of grand forces. Carlyle sees the fate of the aristocracy as retribution for centuries of foolish misgoverning—another chapter in the text of Carlyle’s “History as Divine Scripture.”
Carlyle’s later works documented his “Great Man” theory. Ever in his own strange way. For example, by impassioned editing of letters and speeches he offered “Elucidations” of his idol: “Poor Cromwell—great Cromwell! The inarticulate prophet; prophet who could not speak.” He found Cromwell a “greater” man than Napoleon. Later, Carlyle’s monumental six-volume life (1858-65) of another idol, Frederick the Great of Prussia, demonstrated the superiority of the decisive king over the “Anarchy (as I reckon it sadly to be) which is got by ‘Parliamentary eloquence,’ Free Press, and counting of heads.” Wherever Carlyle looked into the past he found what he was seeking. Even in the medieval monastery (despite his anti-Catholic obsession), in Past and Present (1843), he saw the “magnanimous” leadership of the Abbot Samson, in stark contrast to the democratized confusions of his own age.
What is most surprising in this devotee of “greatness” is Carlyle’s sympathy, grounded in his own early struggles, for the common people. This sympathy shows not only in his feeling for the abused masses of Paris in his French Revolution and in his depiction of life in the Abbot Samson’s monastery in the twelfth century. His clues to medieval craftsmanship were taken up by John Ruskin and William Morris and supplied their themes. And he offered a more realistic vision of medieval life than was found in Sir Walter Scott’s recent Ivanhoe (1819). His explosive laments on “The-Condition-of-England question” depicted the miseries of the new industrial working classes and inveighed against laissez-faire and the translation of human relations into cash. He saw the new evils of his England, but offered no new remedies. Nor did his catalog of Heroes suggest anyone who could lead the people out of the industrial wilderness.
Carlyle’s father intended him for the ministry, but Carlyle never felt the vocation for a particular church. His writings, it has been said, were all meant to be read aloud. He aimed somehow to make the world his congregation. The thirty volumes of his collected works—including even his Reminiscences—are, with few exceptions, written in a homiletic style, peppered with capital letters, question marks, and exclamation points. Inspired by Goethe and German idealist philosophy, dismayed by the English utilitarians’ pleasure-and-pain and the “profit-and-loss” Philosophy, Carlyle complained that “loss of religion is loss of everything. . . . Soul is not synonymous with Stomach.” Troubled by the pallor of the established Church in his time, he became the prophet of his own unorganized church. He preached from the text he himself composed from History—“the true epic poem and universal Divine Scripture, whose plenary inspiration no man out of Bedlam or in it shall bring in question.” And in a time when man’s inventive ingenuity had given a newly repetitive and mechanical cast to industry, he tried to make work itself a divine mission. Yeats called Carlyle “the chief inspirer of self-educated men in the ’eighties and early ’nineties.” But since the rise of Nazism and Fascism, Carlyle’s Hero has had an evil and ominous ring, from which he has been stigmatized as a prophet.
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The same age carried a different message on the other side of the ocean. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), like Carlyle, was originally destined for the ministry. His father, pastor of the Second Church of Boston, descended from a long line of New England preachers, originating in the first minister of Concord in 1634. The young Emerson, after graduating from Harvard College, attended the Harvard Divinity School. While still a student he preached in pulpits around Boston. In 1829 he was ordained as assistant pastor of the church where his father had preached, and within a few weeks was put in full charge. His sermons were already freewheeling. He appealed to the younger members of the congregation by his plain untheological but ethical messages. Impatient with church dogmas, he wrote in his journal, “I have sometimes thought that in order to be a good minister it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated.” In 1832 he announced that he could administer the Sacrament only if the bread and wine were left out, since he believed that Christ had not intended the ceremony be a regular observance. So he resigned his pulpit. But he never ceased to be a preacher, though he made his living as a lecturer.
The independence Emerson expressed by leaving his first pulpit was in the spirit of westward-moving America in his time. Like Carlyle, he was surrounded by piety in his early years. But not the dour Calvinism. His father, who died when Emerson was eight, had little influence on his life, and Emerson’s thoughts were shaped by the women in his family. His mother believed in Christianity, not as a theological path to salvation, but as a consolation. She urged her children to be kind “to all animals and insects.” His aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, the dominant influence on his early years, was an incurable optimist with a mystic affinity for nature. Young Emerson saw in her letters “the best writer in Massachusetts.”
While Carlyle had made his debut with a grandiloquent saga of the turbulent Parisian mob, Emerson’s first book was the placid Nature (1836). When his family moved to the country outside Boston where he felt near to nature, his poem began “Goodbye, proud world! I’m going home.” His varied essays sought to describe that identity in the “Oversoul” that others concocted into a philosophic doctrine called Transcendentalism.
Emerson’s feeling of unity with nature meant something too for the relations of men to one another and to history. “Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.” So the relentless American leveler, Emerson merged each into all. While Carlyle idealized inequality, and measured men by their ability to worship “one higher than himself,” Emerson the Seeker saw “the uses of great men” in a series of “Representative Men.” Like Carlyle, he found Napoleon the “great man” of the century, and the idea for his “pantheon” grew out of his immersion in books about Napoleon. But while Carlyle saw Napoleon shaping history by his heroic charisma, Emerson’s Napoleon was “the Man of the World” who “owes his predominance to the fidelity with which he expresses the tone of thought and belief, the aims of the masses of active and cultivated men.”
Emerson goes overboard, denying originality even in the arts. “No great men are original.” “The greatest g
enius is the most indebted man. A poet is no rattle-brain . . . but a heart in unison with his time and country.” So he asked, “What can Shakespeare tell in any way but to the Shakespeare in us?” And further to demonstrate that greatness is not a national but a common human quality, Emerson’s pantheon includes Plato (philosopher), Swedenborg (mystic), Montaigne (skeptic), Shakespeare (poet), Napoleon (man of the world), and Goethe (writer)—but no American.
Emerson the Seeker is less interested in the process than in the moral of history. His Representative Men command our interest not because they shape events but because they embody the common spirit, and help us feel it. “I described Bonaparte as a representative of the popular external life and aims of the nineteenth century. Its other half, its poet, is Goethe, a man quite domesticated in the century, breathing its air, enjoying its fruits, impossible at any earlier time. . . . Goethe, coming into an over-civilized time and country, when original talent was oppressed under a load of books and mechanical auxiliaries and distracting variety of claims, taught man how to dispose of this mountainous miscellany and make it subservient.” For Emerson the flow of experience embodies the common spirit that “great men” express eloquently. So Goethe merits his highest praise because he “teaches courage and the equivalence of all times; that the disadvantages of any epoch exist only to the faint-hearted. Genius hovers with his sunshine and music close by the darkest and deafest eras.”
34
Kierkegaard Turns from History to Existence
Seekers would be slow to turn their quest for meaning from the group to the individual—from history to existence. The prophet of what would be called Existentialism would arise on the periphery of European civilization, in the vanguard of theology, philosophy, and literature for the mid-twentieth century. This anti-ideology insisted on the individual concrete nature of experience. And experience became a name for personal problems.
Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was born in Copenhagen to a father who had risen from dire poverty as a tenant farmer to become rich enough to leave Søren a fortune to support him in a life of writing. Two traumatic personal experiences seemed to dominate his personal consciousness and infected him with an obsessive sense of guilt. Søren’s father, as a boy, had been so outraged by his penury as a tenant farmer’s helper that he had stood on a hill in western Jutland and cursed God. Father and son believed that this had brought a curse on the whole family, causing the death of Søren’s mother and five of his six brothers and sisters. His other obsession was a sense of guilt he brought on himself. At the death of his father, when he was studying theology at the University of Copenhagen, he fell in love with the young Regine Olsen. He proposed marriage to her and she accepted. Then, realizing the gulf between her innocence and his guilt-ridden sophistication, he broke off the engagement. “I was a thousand years too old for her,” he wrote in his diary. He fled to Berlin, where, at the age of thirty, he wrote his first and most important book, Either/Or (1843). A philosophic explanation of his withdrawal, it has been called the longest love letter ever written—and is also the most cryptic. Regine became engaged to someone else. And Either/Or became the Bible of modern Existentialism.
Kierkegaard went on to write many books, all somehow haunted by his sense of guilt and his search for subjectivity. In one of his later books (Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 1846), which might have been a manifesto for the Existentialists, he eloquently explained the reason—even the necessity—for his work:
The more the collective idea comes to dominate even the ordinary consciousness, the more forbidding seems the transition to becoming a particular existing human being instead of losing oneself in the race, and saying, “we, our age, the nineteenth century.” That it is a little thing merely to be a particular existing human being is not to be denied; but for this very reason it requires considerable resignation not to make light of it. For what does a mere individual count for? Our age knows only too well how little it is, but here also lies the specific immorality of the age. Each age has its own characteristic depravity. Ours is perhaps not pleasure or indulgence of sensuality, but rather a dissolute pantheistic contempt for the individual man. . . . Everything must attach itself so as to be a part of some movement; men are determined to lose themselves in the totality of things, in world history, fascinated and deceived by a magic witchery; no one wants to be an individual human being.
The spiritual poison against which Kierkegaard would provide his Existentialist tonic and antidote was G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), whose philosophy of the absolute was dominating Western European thought in the early nineteenth century. Hegel’s view of the world, of history, and the individual, as we have seen, had an appealing coherence and unity. He argued that only in the institutions, activities, and destiny of his people did the individual find a universal life, into which he incorporated himself. Hegel devoted his life to trying to prove that the universe was a systematic whole. And understandably Hegel’s philosophy has appealed to many thinkers in their youth, as it did to young Kierkegaard, after he had given up Christianity. But Kierkegaard soon took an opposite view. And much of his writing became a polemic against Hegel’s disregard of the individual and of the ethical.
Kierkegaard’s subjectivity took bizarre forms. His numerous publications fell into two classes. Many, including those that were most characteristic and most cryptic, and that became most famous, were published under several different pseudonyms. His publications were as prodigious as they were ambiguous. On October 16, 1843, when he had just reached forty years of age, three of his books appeared, each by a different “author,” but all really by Kierkegaard. In addition to his pseudonymous books, which have given him his historic character, many appeared under his own name in a series that he called Edifying Discourses. Dedicated to the memory of his father, these homilies take off from a biblical text, on familiar topics like “Man’s Need of God” and “The Unchangeableness of God.” Kierkegaard insisted that these were “discourses” and not “sermons.” For sermons had the stamp of authority, “that of Holy Writ and of Christ’s Apostles.” Kierkegaard was troubled by the erratic public response to his writings. “I held out Either/Or to the world in my left hand and in my right the Two Edifying Discourses; but all, or as good as all, grasped with their right what I held in my left.”
Though Kierkegaard insisted on the distinctive individuality of each existing self, he remained curiously ambiguous about his own true self. Perhaps we do not take seriously enough Kierkegaard’s sense of humor. In Either/Or he relates that he had been taken up into the seventh heaven where the assembled gods gave him the privilege of making any wish, which they would fulfill.
For a moment I was at a loss. Then I addressed myself to the gods as follows: “Most honorable contemporaries, I choose this one thing, that I may always have the laugh on my side.” Not one of the gods said a word; on the contrary, they all began to laugh. From that I concluded that my wish was granted, and found that the gods knew how to express themselves with taste; for it would hardly have been suitable for them to have answered gravely: “Thy wish is granted.”
Kierkegaard’s wit is easier to grasp than his message. Montaigne, also a forerunner of Existentialism, had explained the problem: “If my mind could gain a foothold, I would not write essays, I would make decisions: But it is always in apprenticeship and on trial.”
Yet we need not be troubled by our inability to sum up and make Kierkegaard’s message intelligible, for his anti-Hegelian argument is that it is not possible to understand existence intellectually. So there can never be a system for existence, because existence is always incomplete and developing. “There is no such thing as repetition,” he insisted as he reached for the uniqueness of each individual and each moment of existence. Yet the illusion of repetition explains much.
The tedium of life requires the intervening acts of the arbitrary existing self, as he explained in Either/Or:
What wonder, then, that the world goes from bad to worse, and that it
s evils increase more and more, as boredom increases, and boredom is the root of all evil. The history of this can be traced from the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored, and so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, and so Eve was created. Thus boredom entered the world, and increased in proportion to the increase of population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together, then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille; then the population of the world increased, and the peoples were bored en masse. To divert themselves they conceived the idea of constructing a tower high enough to reach the heavens. This idea is itself as boring as the tower was high, and constitutes a terrible proof of how boredom gained the upper hand.
But man is misled if he thinks he can relieve boredom by what he sees when he travels. The only relief is to stay home, where the existing individual bores itself into inventiveness. And the littlest circumstances control our existence—“For example: a man who is tired of life and wants to throw himself into the Thames and is stopped at the decisive moment by the sting of a gnat.” But this does not deprive man of his humanity. “The task of the subjective thinker is to transform himself into an instrument that clearly and definitely expresses in existence whatever is essentially human.”
This existential emphasis is wonderfully concrete. The classic parable of the terrifying responsibilities of existence is the story of God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac to prove his faith. For God’s demand violated all the accepted rules of morals and of religious, civil, and family law. Did God have a right to demand such an immoral act of Abraham? And if so, did Abraham have a right to obey the command? Abraham faced a dreadful choice, a personal responsibility. Was there a “higher law” that overrules the moral law? Is there such a thing as what theologians call “the teleological suspension of the ethical”? Abraham seemed ready to act as if he believed so. But God rescued Abraham from the awful choice by providing a ram in the thicket to replace the sacrifice of Isaac. This parable became embodied in the Hebrew conscience as a divine command against human sacrifice.
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