When Thought Must Be Lived

Kierkegaard, Ibsen, Solstad, and Seriousness

In the spring of 1852, two men found themselves in the same city: Copenhagen.

One was Søren Kierkegaard, thirty-nine years old and already the author of most of the work that would later make him one of Europe’s most important thinkers on human existence. The other was Henrik Ibsen, twenty-four years old, on a study trip from the Norwegian Theatre in Bergen. He attended performances, studied the art of the stage, and met people in Danish cultural life.

But he did not meet Kierkegaard.

Dag Solstad begins his contribution to Kierkegaard, Ibsen and the Modern more or less here: with the meeting that never took place.

It is a good place to begin. For posterity nevertheless brought them together. The philosopher and the dramatist came to stand close to one another, not because any simple line of influence between them can be documented, but because each, in his own way, explored the same fundamental question:

How should a human being live?

Already here we can sense something that will return throughout this essay. A thought reveals its true content only when it is no longer merely something we think, but something we have to live with.

Perhaps Influence Is the Wrong Question

Much has been written about Kierkegaard’s possible influence on Ibsen. Georg Brandes saw connections between them early on, and the question of Ibsen’s relationship to Kierkegaard has remained part of scholarly discussion ever since.

Solstad takes another path.

Ibsen himself claimed that he had read little Kierkegaard and understood even less. Solstad sees no compelling reason to distrust this statement. The decisive question, therefore, is not whether Ibsen can be traced back to Kierkegaard through a demonstrable line of influence.

They may belong together in another way.

They may have seen something of the same thing.

This is an interesting thought beyond literary history as well. We are often concerned with influence: Who read whom? Who borrowed what? Where did an idea come from? Such questions are important. But they can also obscure another question: Can two people, without standing in any direct relationship of dependence, encounter the same problems because those problems belong to human life itself?

What does it mean to be oneself? What do we owe to others? How far can a person follow a conviction before that conviction begins to damage the life it was meant to serve?

This is where the connection between Kierkegaard and Ibsen becomes interesting for practical philosophy.

The Dramatic Space

Solstad formulates the difference between the two precisely. Kierkegaard was a philosopher. Ibsen was a dramatist. When Ibsen thought, Solstad writes, he did so within “the dramatic space.”

This means that in Ibsen, thought is not allowed to remain undisturbed as thought.

It has to enter the world.

It acquires a body and a voice. It acquires a spouse, a child, a neighbour, an opponent. It encounters the wishes, fears, and expectations of other people. What may appear on paper as a pure principle becomes, in the drama, an action with consequences.

Here lies a transition from philosophy as thought to philosophy as lived experience.

We may say that a person should be true to himself. We may defend duty, freedom, responsibility, and authenticity. But such concepts become truly difficult only when they no longer concern “the human being” in general, but a particular person living together with other particular people.

Ibsen allows thoughts to meet resistance.

Drama thus becomes more than an illustration of philosophy. It tests philosophy against life.

Brand and Uncompromising Truth

Brand is perhaps the clearest example.

“Nothing or all.”

Brand refuses to live half-heartedly. He refuses to accept a gap between conviction and action. Life must correspond to the truth he professes.

There is something compelling in this. Perhaps especially in an age when compromise can easily become another word for convenience. Brand reminds us that a person may have to stand for something, even when doing so comes at a cost.

But Ibsen does not allow the principle to stand alone.

Brand lives among other people.

His demand for consistency has consequences for Agnes, for the child, for those around him, and ultimately for himself. An ideal intended to make life truthful can also make life merciless.

Here I want to go one step further than Solstad himself does.

For this can be read in the light of Aristotle’s concept of phronesis – practical wisdom.

Practical wisdom is something other than merely knowing the correct principle. It concerns the ability to judge what is right in the concrete situation, in relation to this person, under these circumstances. It requires judgement because life is never identical with the rule.

This is why the distinction between principle and practical wisdom is so important. A moral principle can be noble and still be applied in a destructive way. A person may be right in the abstract and yet act wrongly in the concrete.

Brand possesses the principle.

The question is whether he possesses the wisdom.

Peer Gynt and the Art of Evasion

If Brand represents the uncompromising demand to become one with his ideal, Peer Gynt stands almost at the opposite pole.

Peer, too, wants to be himself.

The problem is that he continually finds new ways of avoiding it.

He changes roles, stories, and images of himself. When reality becomes uncomfortable, he finds a detour. He can become something else somewhere else. He can tell himself a new story.

Brand wants to be whole.

Peer slips away.

Where Brand risks destroying life by refusing compromise, Peer risks losing himself through endless adaptation. One makes the ideal absolute. The other makes the self so fluid that the question finally arises: Is there anything left beneath all the roles?

Here Ibsen comes close to Kierkegaard’s analyses of despair.

In The Sickness Unto Death, the human problem is precisely bound up with one’s relationship to oneself. One may despairingly will to be oneself, but one may also despairingly refuse to be oneself. Both possibilities imply that one’s relationship to one’s own life has become disordered.

Brand and Peer can thus be read as two very different attempts to solve the same problem.

One holds on too tightly.

The other holds on to nothing.

Between them lies the question that practical philosophy must continually ask: How can a person remain true to himself without becoming closed to others, and remain open to the world without losing himself?

Kierkegaard’s Individual Human Being

In Kierkegaard we find a persistent resistance to turning the human being into an abstraction.

It is not “the human being” who must exist.

It is I.

No one can choose for me. No theory can love for me. No philosophical understanding can abolish the distance between what I know and what I actually do.

I may understand love without loving.

I may write about courage and still be cowardly.

I may know what I ought to do and still fail to do it.

It is precisely this distance that makes Kierkegaard so relevant to practical philosophy. He reminds us that insight does not automatically become life.

At the same time, Ibsen adds something that philosophical writing finds harder to show: this individual human being never exists alone. My choice enters into your life. My self-understanding affects others. My attempt to remain true to myself may become a burden to those closest to me.

In Kierkegaard, the human being is confronted with himself.

In Ibsen, the human being is also confronted with others.

Why Solstad?

But why is it precisely Dag Solstad who sees this connection?

He is more than a guide into the relationship between Kierkegaard and Ibsen.

It is natural to read his interest in light of his own authorship. There too we encounter people who discover that life cannot simply be undone. Small actions can acquire unexpected weight. A person may suddenly see himself from the outside and understand that the life already lived is not merely a provisional draft.

In Shyness and Dignity, an apparently modest event can alter an entire person’s relationship to himself and to those around him. In the autobiographical project that includes 16.07.41, the question of the life already lived also becomes unavoidable: This happened. This was my life. It may be reinterpreted, but it cannot be lived again.

Perhaps that is why Solstad is drawn to a word such as “seriousness.”

Not because seriousness means solemnity.

But because life has consequences.

Seriousness

Toward the end of his text, Solstad tries to put into words what connects Kierkegaard and Ibsen.

His answer is simple:

Seriousness.

They were not humourless. Quite the contrary. Kierkegaard’s irony is part of his entire philosophical form, and Ibsen’s drama can be ruthlessly funny.

But beneath the irony lies seriousness.

A choice may have consequences we did not foresee. A word cannot always be withdrawn. One human being can harm another. Something may be lost.

And life has a limit.

We are going to die.

That is why the question of how we live is not merely an intellectual question.

This, I think, is what Solstad sees in Kierkegaard and Ibsen. Each, in his own way, refuses to let thought remain without consequences. In Kierkegaard, the individual must answer for his life. In Ibsen, we see what happens when ideas enter the home, marriage, family, and society.

Thought is tested against reality.

The Modern Human Being

The book is called Kierkegaard, Ibsen and the Modern.

Part of what is modern is that more and more of human life has been left to the individual himself.

Tradition determines less. Family, social position, and religion no longer provide equally unambiguous answers to who we should be. We have gained greater freedom to shape our own lives.

But freedom is not merely liberation.

It also means responsibility.

When no one else can simply tell me who I am to be, I myself must face the question. And as the number of possibilities increases, anxiety does not necessarily diminish. It may just as easily grow.

Brand chooses one answer: to make life identical with the ideal.

Peer chooses another: constantly to keep his possibilities open.

Between them stands the modern human being.

And perhaps we are still standing there.

We have more possibilities than either Kierkegaard or Ibsen could have imagined. We can change profession, place of residence, lifestyle, identity, and community. We can present ourselves in ever new ways.

But the fundamental question has not become any easier:

How am I to live this life?