ISCAN-lecture 21-11-2007
Jörg Zeller
Ekst. lektor i videnskabsteori
Inst. f. Kommunikation
Aalborg Universitet
Kroghstræde 3
DK-9220 Aalborg Ø
Kontor: 5.233
Tel. 9635 9041
zeller@hum.aau.dk
Scandinavian thinking
To give a lecture on Scandinavian thinking provokes the question if there is such a thing as
Scandinavian thinking at all. To ask this question is to ask if it altogether makes sense to talk
about different kinds of thinking – different not only in the trivial sense that each thinking
subject thinks his or her own thoughts – understood as the content of thinking. Of course
‘Scandinavian thinking’ doesn’t mean all those thoughts Scandinavian people ever have
thought. Instead it could mean – in any case I will assume that it does – the question if there
exist characteristic traits in the way people grown up in a Scandinavian country and educated
inside a Scandinavian culture think.
The answer will of course depend on what we mean by the terms ‘Scandinavian’ and
‘thinking’. Lets take the last first. I will understand ‘thinking’ in a broad sense as the way
people understand their experiences of the world and of themselves in this world. I take the
activity of understanding as a complex and complicated process in the human mind involving
all kinds of conscious experiences like sensations, imaginations, perceptions, memories,
feelings, emotions, moods and furthermore all kinds of both conscious and unconscious forms
of reasoning like concept formation, predication and inference. In other words, I take ‘thinking’
as a comprehensive expression for the ‘working of the mind’.
The question is then if the working of the human mind, i.e. the way a human subject – be it
individual or collective – thinks, is formed in a characteristic way by the peculiarities of its
physical and social environment. If the answer is yes then we can expect to find characteristic
features in the Scandinavian way of thinking that correspond to the peculiarities of the
Scandinavian geography and to the peculiarities of the Scandinavian way of life and of forming
human communities.
Lets first look at what a Scandinavian encyclopaedia has to say about what the terms
‘Scandinavia’ and ‘Scandinavian’ stand for. According to The Great Danish Encyclopaedia
from 2004, ‘Scandinavia’ is first and foremost a common name for the three countries Norway,
Sweden, and Denmark. The same source underlines, however, that there is no natural or
geographic reason for this. There is for instance no land connection between Denmark and
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Norway or Denmark and Sweden. There exists on the other hand a land connection between
Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia and in the consequence thereof to the rest of the
European continent. Something like this holds for Denmark too. On the one hand the peninsula
Jutland has a direct land connection to the northern part of Germany and thus to the other
countries of the European continent. On the other hand, the rest of the country, consisting of
nearly 500 islands, is separated from the continent. Unlike real European island countries like
England, Scotland or Ireland, the Scandinavian countries are both connected with and, by the
Baltic and the North Sea, separated from the rest of Europe. I presume that this geographical
fact lends to the Scandinavian countries a special position between the European continent and
the European island countries. Transferred to the history of thinking, this could have to do with
the tendency of Scandinavian countries to take up a position between continental and overseas
European mentality.
Concerning the question what it is the Scandinavians have in common the quoted
Encyclopaedia notices that there exists a linguistic and cultural reason for using a common
name for the three Scandinavian countries. Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian are members of
the same northern Germanic language family. However, also Icelandic and Faroese are
members of the same family without being called Scandinavian. The Encyclopaedia resumes
that ‘Scandinavian’ is a concept meaning a common history of mentality.
Let me dwell a little on the concept of mentality. As I understand the term, ‘mentality’ is the
characteristic way of a person’s or collective of persons thinking. Here ‘thinking’ is to be
understood in a broad sense as the understanding of our experiences of the world and ourselves
along with the way of our acting on the basis of this understanding. The mentality of a person
or collective is then expressed or realized by the specific way of life of this person or collective.
Thus, I will assume that it makes sense to talk about the mentality and way of life not only of
individuals but also of whole societies and cultural communities.
On this background I will suggest three characteristic traits of Scandinavian mentality and way
of life.
The first trait has historical roots in the original Scandinavian tribe societies consisting of big
families living and working together with domestics or serfs in the countryside in farmhouses
and estates with large distances to the next family. I suppose that this kind of community and
way of life gives rise to close personal relations and a kind of family spirit on the one hand and
to a kind of reserve or uncommunicativeness in relation to strangers on the other hand. The socalled high context character (G. Hofstæde) of modern Scandinavian culture and
communication could be an indication for this – let me call it dialectical - trait of a strong sense
of community and mutual understanding on the one hand and reservation and private talk on
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the other hand. The term ‘dialectical’ should here be understood as meaning the union of
opposite properties. Extending this line of thought a little bit more you have here in my opinion
the source of a strong Scandinavian tendency toward democratic forms of government but also
of a relatively strong reservation toward international cooperation let alone being part of
supranational communities. The Danish membership in the European Union is certainly not a
passionate affair but rather a marriage of convenience, and the Norwegian rejection of
becoming a member of EU speaks for itself. Going one step further in the direction of
questions about worldview or religious faith you find here perhaps also the source of the
Scandinavian inclination to the Protestant version of Christian faith considering the relation to
God as a personal or private matter along with placing great emphasis on the democratic role of
the congregation.
My claim is that the family structure of the early Scandinavian tribal societies still makes itself
felt in modern Scandinavian societies.
To underline this assumption let me quote the description of the early Scandinavian tribe
society from a book on the history of Danish literature:
“The family was the framework for the development and the social life of the individual. The
overall importance of the family has to be understood in relation to the fact that the country
was divided in small societies that hardly had much contact to each other. A forest, a river, a
mountain could constitute sharper boundaries for the individual society than modern man is
able to imagine” (K. B. Jessen & S. H. Larsen 1988, Dansk litteratur fra runer til grafitti,
Systime, 2).
What this dialectic union of early Scandinavian community sense and common sense on the
one hand and private convictions on the other hand can look like when translated to modern
times you can catch a glimpse of in the following quote from the “opinion” page of the Danish
newspaper “Weekendavisen” nr. 46):
“Although the country has had immigration in several decades it is as if the population is
waiting for the foreigners either becoming Danes or leaving the country again. Ways of life that
aren’t Danish are mostly defined as a problem and never as richness. This is supplemented by
some specific problems with Danish culture. It is difficult to come close to Danish people. It is
not at all sure that you can become friends with your colleagues; they have already friends and
children in advance. In Denmark, you are either close or not at all friends with somebody, and
Danish friendships are time-consuming with all these dinners or café-brunches. On this
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background Danes can be very reserved toward foreigners.” (Alessandra Chirico & Thomas
Ekman Jørgensen 2007, Fremmed, Weekendavisen nr. 46, 16. november 2007, 13 (Opinion)).
Let me summarize our findings up to now. I supposed that it is possible to characterize the
Scandinavian mentality and way of life by two dialectical traits – the first grounded in the
geographical position of Scandinavia in relation to the rest of Europe – I talked about
connection with and separation from the continent and the other European islands at the same
time. The second trait stems, I claimed, from the historical roots of modern Scandinavian
society structure in early tribal or family communities. Here you can – in my opinion – find the
source of the dialectical Scandinavian sense of community on the one hand and an inclination
to privacy and reservation toward strangers on the other hand.
I will add a last feature of Scandinavian mentality that again is associated with Scandinavia’s
special geographical location on the globe. Making up the most northern part of Europe, the
Scandinavian countries, especially Norway and Sweden but to some lesser extent also
Denmark are affected by a drastic seasonal change of light and darkness. In my experience
there is a clear indication that this change has an impact on Scandinavian mood and mentality. I
have never met or heard of so many manic-depressive people as in the Scandinavian countries.
It also seems to me that traits of melancholy can be discovered in the mental characteristic of a
great part of Scandinavian thinkers.
In the following I will look at a small selection of Scandinavian thinkers from the last two
centuries who in my opinion in different ways represent some or all of the traits I have
presented in the foregoing as characteristic for Scandinavian mentality. I must confess that my
criterion of selection is largely personal and accidental. Nonetheless there is some order in the
disorder. The selected thinkers follow each other nearly precisely in time-intervals from one
generation to the next. I have chosen six thinkers in all, the first three from Denmark, the last
three from Sweden, Norway and Finland each. In other words I gave myself permission to take
Scandinavia in a something broader sense and reckon also Finland as a Scandinavian country.
I selected the following Scandinavians – and strangely enough, I confess, I didn’t come to think
of a female Scandinavian thinker – as representatives for the Scandinavian way of thinking:
I start with the “Danish teacher, writer, poet, philosopher, historian, pastor, and politician”
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grundtvig), Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig (1783-1872). I
continue with the philosopher Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1841). The next one is the wellknown man of letters, Georg Morris Cohen Brandes (1842-1927) followed by the Swedish
philosopher Axel Hägerström (1868-1939) and the still living Norwegian philosopher Arne
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Dekke Eide Næss (born 1912). My last candidate is the Finnish-Swedish philosopher Georg
Henrik von Wright (1916-2003).
I will present these thinkers and some traits of their thinking in the following way. I will start
with a short biography, then give an overall appreciation of their importance in the history of
Scandinavian thinking and conclude with a quotation of their work.
So let’s start with Grundtvig. Born and grown up in the two last decades of the 18. Century, the
age of Enlightenment and thus of man’s emancipation from higher secular or religious powers
by human reason, the age of the great political revolutions in America and in France, and the
age of an Rousseau-like educational revolution. It is at the same time a period of transition in
the history of thinking, of arts, music, and literature – the transition from a classical to a
Romantic mentality. As you know, Classicism and Romanticism are in a way both coherent
and opposite mental movements. It is no surprise that Grundtvig in his life’s work was
influenced by both of these movements. An important detail of his mental development is that
he as the son of a Lutheran pastor was “brought up in a very religious atmosphere, although his
mother also had great respect for old Norse legends and traditions” (ibid.). The basic forces
propelling his mental development and creativity were, one may say, religious in nature. The
worldview that developed as a result of these propelling forces was in a curious way dialectic –
that is opposite, even contradictory and coherent at the same time. It was religious but not in a
homogeneous way – in fact it was both progressive and reactionary. In periods of his mental
productivity he tried to renew Christianity by Norse pagan mythology, and in other periods he
tried to rework Norse mythology as a preliminary stage of Christianity. His further education
after his childhood in the family home, the vicarage of Udby near Vordingborg on Zealand,
happened from the age of 9 in the house and family of a Jutlandic pastor and at the Cathedral
School of Århus. In the age of 15 or 16 he left this Latin school as a graduate for Copenhagen
to become a student of theology at the University of Copenhagen. He finished his degree in
1803, 20 years old, as a candidate in theology. During his university years and the period
thereafter he was, however, more interested in poetry and literature than in Christian theology.
As a consequence, he started his career as a literary author writing on themes from Norse
mythology. In 1805 he became a private tutor at a manor on the island Langeland. Here he fell
in love with the lady of the house but felt forced to suppress this “illegal” love. As a result of
this “fight of life and death” between his new awakened sensual feelings on the one hand and
his intellect on the other hand he left the manor for Copenhagen in1808 and wrote a lot about
northern mythology and a lot of poetry. Grundtvig was in these years on his way to become a
known writer when in 1910 he was called to his family home and paternal vicarage in Udby to
help his father in his work as a curate. In this function he wrote and preached a sermon that
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resulted in a violent attack on theological or rationalist minded pastors. The reaction on this –
let’s say – “rebellious” sermon was conflicting – on the one hand he became honored for his
preaching but on the other hand reprimanded for the printed version. The result of this external
conflicting reaction was an internal, mental conflict. Grundtvig experienced his first serious
mental crisis. There would follow other mental crisis later on in his long life. I will break off
this biographical sketch here and sum up by quoting an appreciation of Grundtvig’s importance
as a Danish and Scandinavian thinker. The Wikipedia article describes him asfollows:
“He is one of the most influential people in Danish history, his philosophy giving rise to a new
form of nationalism in Denmark in the last half of the 19th century.” (ibid.)
Another source describes his mental influence on Danish self-understanding in the following
way:
“The whole of his work as a poet, as educator and politician should be understood as the
Christian achievements of a pagan hero who called for liberty to himself and offered complete
external freedom to others in order to prove the conflicting forces on equal terms and to
strengthen the good. By thus absorbing the strongest and most conflicting mental powers
Grundtvig transformed and harmonized them into a movement that was effective as a source of
power in Danish ecclesiastic life, youth education and politics until our own days …” (Svend
Norrild 1949, Dansk litteratur fra Saxo til Kai Munk, København: Gyldendalske Boghandel,
207)
To complete his appreciation it should be mentioned that Grundtvig is regarded as the
originator of the Danish folk high school and of the popularisation of Protestant creed in the
Grundtvigian version of the Danish national church and last not least as the mental father of the
Danish national feeling.
I myself take Grundtvig as an outstanding representative for that aspect of Scandinavian
mentality I have associated with the influence of the extreme seasonal shift between darkness
and light. I quote a passage from Grundtvig’s treatise “On the man in the world” published in
1817 that shows the extraordinary metaphorical importance of light and darkness in the
thinking of Grundtvig. Here he writes:
“… if the heart mortally hated the light or let itself be seduced by obstinacy and delusion to
give in to the falling darkness, and still dreading many times, and still sighing at times for light,
and often feeling anxiously the heavy weight of the chains of darkness. This last I dare hope at
least for every heart that is Danish of root and descent, for horror of darkness internal as well as
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external, also when the desire to the trust in darkness is strong, such a dread and sad craving for
light that both can shine on gold and green forests, and warming up and glowing through; such
a fear of going in darkness, desire to the shining and to sun-bathing, I found in my heart even
when the darkness most enveloped me and was most pleasant for me, them I seemed to see and
catch a glimpse of all places on that earth-road and forest path the Danish people in the days of
old set foot on.” (N. F. S. Grundtvig 1983, Om mennesket I verden, Herning: Poul Kristensen,
p. 29)
Here we leave Grundtvig in his mental ups and downs of darkness and light, of Old Norse myth
and popular Christianity and devote ourselves to my next candidate of Scandinavian thinking –
the writer, theologian and first and foremost philosopher, Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, born in
1813, a generation later than Grundtvig, and dead in 1855, a half generation before Grundtvig’s
dead. There exist some parallels in the mental development of these two Scandinavian thinkers.
Kierkegaard as well grew up in a very religious home. His father was a shopkeeper and selfmade man who earned enough money to enable Kierkegaard to live a life without money
worries. About Kierkegaard’s father a Wikipedia article says:
“[he] was a melancholic, anxious, deeply pious, and fiercely intelligent man. Convinced that he
had earned God's wrath, he believed that none of his children would live past the age attained
by Jesus Christ, that of 33. He believed his personal sins, such as cursing the name of God in
his youth and possibly impregnating Ane [i.e. Kierkegaard’s mother described as a quiet and
plain person] out of wedlock, necessitated this punishment. Though many of his seven children
died young, his prediction was disproved when two of them surpassed this age: Søren and Peter
Christian Kierkegaard, a Lutheran bishop several years Søren's senior. This early introduction
to the notion of sin and its connection from father and son laid the foundation for much of
Kierkegaard's
work
(particularly
Fear
and
Trembling).”
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kierkegaard)
It is perhaps worth mentioning that Kierkegaard himself never mentioned his mother in his
works.
Besides the religious home – and in the case of Kierkegaard’s home we deal with a very “dark”
version of religiosity putting a heavy strain of feeling guilty and sinful on the young
Kierkegaard – there are other parallels between Kierkegaard and Grundtvig. After having
graduated from Latin school Kierkegaard also attended the University of Copenhagen in 1830
to study theology. And there – again comparable to Grundtvig’s university years – he was more
interested in literature and philosophy than in theology. He wrote a dissertation on the concept
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of irony and graduated in 1841. Similar to Grundtvig is also Kierkegaards coming-out as a
writer connected with an unhappy love story. In 1840 Kierkegaard got formally engaged with
an eighteen years old pretty young woman from the middle classes in Copenhagen, Regine
Olsen, whom he already had got to know three years earlier, when she was fifteen. The
engagement lasted less than a year before he broke it off in August 1941. It is not quite clear
why Kierkegaard did this – in his Journals he writes that his melancholy made him unable to be
a good husband – but in any case the disengagement, being a kind of a city scandal, became the
source of a rich literary activity in the following years. Kierkegaard went to Berlin and devoted
himself to studying the dialectical philosophy of Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel. In the years
from 1841 to 1843 Kierkegaard wrote several of his most outstanding works like Either/Or
published in 1842, Repetition and Fear and Trembling where he in both a literary and
philosophical way digested his disengagement with Regine Olsen as well as the subsequent
emotional crisis and his critical studies in Hegelian dialectics. It should be mentioned that in
the last decade of his life Kierkegaard was mainly occupied with religious issues and that he –
again comparable to Grundtvig – felt called upon to rethink and reform the fundamentals of
Christian faith. He also attacked representatives of the official Danish church and in
consequence became the target of violent reactions.
Breaking off my sketch of Kierkegaard’s biography in this stadium of his life I quote the
overall appreciation of his work and influence not only on Scandinavian but on European and
Western thinking as a whole that can be read in the Wikipedia-article.
“Kierkegaard strongly criticized both the Hegelianism of his time, and what he saw as the
empty formalities of the Danish church. Much of his work deals with religious problems such
as the nature of faith, the institution of the Christian Church, Christian ethics and theology, and
the emotions and feelings of individuals when faced with life choices. His early work was
written under various pseudonyms who present their own distinctive viewpoints in a complex
dialogue. Kierkegaard left the task of discovering the meaning of the works to the reader,
because "the task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted".
Subsequently, many have interpreted Kierkegaard as an existentialist, neo-orthodoxist,
postmodernist, humanist, individualist, etc. Crossing the boundaries of philosophy, theology,
psychology, and literature, Kierkegaard came to be regarded as a highly significant and
influential figure in contemporary thought.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kierkegaard)
From a philosophical point of view one can complete this appreciation by saying that his
greatest achievement in the history of Scandinavian and Western thinking is probably having
prepared the ground for an existential understanding of the dialectic of thought. ‘Dialectic’ in
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this connection means that thinking is a process moving through changing phases of
affirmation and negation of a concept or idea, which according to Hegel is progressive in the
sense that by negation of a previous negation it not simply returns to the original affirmation
but becomes sublimated or raised to a higher level of understanding. The possibility of this
dialectical raising (in German: Aufhebung) of a concept or thought from a lower to a higher
form of knowledge and understanding is according to Hegel “preformed”, i.e. prearranged or
pre-constructed, as the essential meaning or target of what the concept or thought by the
dynamics of thinking shall become. This Hegelian conviction that a concept or thought always
has been already what it shall become is according to Kierkegaard’s critique of the Hegelian
dialectic not reasonable or provable, but a question of belief or – in more religious terms – a
question of faith. Belief (in Greek: doxa) in something or believing that something is true is in
Kierkegaard’s opinion not rational or justifiable but irrational or paradoxical.
The ultimate paradoxicality or absurdity of our belief holds not only for our worldly knowledge
but also for religious faith or interpersonal human trust. In the last consequence we believe
something or in something because we are prepared or willing to believe it or in it. In this way
Kierkegaard shook both the understanding of our knowledge of the world and ourselves and the
understanding of religious faith to its foundations. No wonder that the contemporary
representatives of a rationally, i.e. theologically, founded Christian faith were also shaken to
their religious foundations.
Kierkegaard was an extraordinarily progressive and revolutionary thinker. In comparison with
Grundtvig his revolution of the foundations of religious faith was not popular and pragmatic –
he didn’t want to popularise and facilitate the way to believe in something or someone – but
altogether subjective and in a way private. According to Kierkegaard, believing in something
or someone is a radical personal and lonely decision, which he compared with a jump or leap in
the dark. It is a qualitative jump resulting in a change from one level of understanding to
another and qualitatively new one. In a way, we could say, Kierkegaard is thinking about the
emergence of something new that cannot be explained by a continuous increase or transition of
quantities to something qualitatively new. The new stage comes into existence by a
discontinuity – not by a, psychologically speaking, rational construction but by an emotional or
passionate leap. There is no guarantee or insurance that this qualitative leap will succeed.
Kierkegaard’s leap into the dark abyss of absurdity can in my opinion be compared with
Immanuel Kant’s practical reason that is forced to risk the freedom of will in order to realize
the reasonable. That is to say that there exists only something reasonable or meaningful in the
world if you dare to throw yourself into making something existing meaningful or reasonable.
There is for instance only love in the world or in the relation between people if people dare to
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throw themselves into loving each other. To love another person becomes thus a leap into the
dark of loving.
As evidence for my assumption that Scandinavians have a special dialectic sense both of
community and privateness I quote a passage from Kierkegaards “Fear and Trembling”
where he discusses the dialectic between ethical demand and paradoxical faith in connection
with Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac on divine demand. Kierkegaard says:
“The ethical in itself is the general, but as the general it is the revealed. The individual is as
immediately, sensuously and psychically, determined the hidden one. It is his ethical task to
unwrap himself from his hiding and to become revealed in the general. Every time he wants to
stay in the hiding he sins and is in temptation from which he only escapes by revealing himself.
Here we are at the same point. If there exists no hiding having its reason in the individual’s
being as an individual higher than the general then the behaviour of Abraham is irresponsible;
he overlooked the interim instances. But if there exists such a hiding we face the paradox,
which cannot be mediated because it is just based on the individual as individual being higher
than the general but the general is just the mediation.” (Søren Kierkegaard 1984, Furcht und
Zittern, Frankfurt a. Main: Syndikat, p. 75-76)
Georg Brandes, my next example of Scandinavian thinkers, published a critical exposition of
Kierkegaard’s biography and thinking in 1877. In this book, titled “Søren Kierkegaard”,
Brandes
describes Kierkegaard as one of the great discoverers in the world of ideas –
comparable to the great discoverers of the so-called new world in geographical reality.
“Kierkegaard’s new world”, Brandes writes, “was the idea: ‘the single’” (Georg Brandes 1877,
Søren Kierkegaard, Kjøbenhavn: Gyldendalske Boghandels Forlag, p. 108). However,
Brandes, in spite of his acknowledgment of the great importance of this discovery in the history
of thinking does not agree with Kierkegaard in its character. Kierkegaard came to compare the
sacrifice of the most precious item in his life, i.e. his love to Regine Olsen, with Abraham’s
sacrifice of the for him most precious, namely the sacrifice of his son Isaac, and he was
convinced to have discovered the very source of religious faith: the paradoxical and passionate
leap into the dark of believing in someone or something – the “credo quia absurdum”. Brandes,
however, meant that Kierkegaard like the geographical discoverers in Renaissance mistook the
discovered new world for something else. Before going deeper into this subject, lets have a
look at Georg Brandes’ biography and mental development.
His full name was Georg Morris Cohen Brandes, and he lived from 1842 to 1927. He was the
eldest of three talented brethren, son of a Jewish middle class wholesaler, Herman Cohen
Brandes, and his very talented wife, Emilie Brandes,
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in Copenhagen. In spite of the
professional similarity between Kierkegaard’s and Brandes’ father, the latter one didn’t have
the same business success. Both Georg and his brethren, Ernst and Edvard, were forced to earn
money already at an early age. In contrast to the mental atmosphere in Grundtvig’s and
Kierkegaard’s families the upbringing of Georg Brandes was not influenced by parental
religiosity. As Stangerup & Billeskov Jensen 1966 describe it, the Brandes parents were:
“members of the Jewish community but the home was marked by the rationalist austerity of the
mother; the three boys grew up without contact with religion” ( Hakon Stangerup & F. J.
Billeskov Jensen 1966, Dansk Litteratur Historie, bind 3, Politikens Forlag, 13.
At school Brandes was exempted from religious instruction but showed otherwise great
intellectual abilities. He graduated in 1859 and in the same year attended the University of
Copenhagen as a student of jurisprudence. Like Grundtvig and Kierkegaard his interest soon
turned to aesthetical and philosophical subjects. During his university years and thereafter he
was associated with a circle of talented friends who confronted him with the, to him up to then
unknown, phenomenon of religiosity. His friends agreed with him in their aesthetical views and
ideals but they were also believers.
Stangerup & Billeskov Jensen write:
“The friends were Greeks but they were also believers; they summarized Humanism and
Christianity in a harmonic, spiritualistic philosophy.” (ibid., 15)
His friends tried to press Brandes to convert to Christianity. The quoted authors continue:
“This resulted in a severe crisis. Nearly three years he fought with the religious problem;
sometimes he was convinced to have been redeemed and sometimes he was again in doubt. He
turned again and again to Søren Kierkegaard, read him again and again but didn’t find a
consoling Christendom with him, no harmony, only the religion of suffering and the demand of
a leap into the dark of paradox. But he wasn’t prepared to this leap. As he didn’t succeed he
did’nt only quit Kierkegaard’s Christendom but faith altogether.” (ibid.)
There isn’t the place here to look at Brandes’ further biography and interesting career as
perhaps the most important and influencing European man of letters at the end of the 19th and
the beginning of the 20th century. As with Grundtvig and Kierkegaard I add an overall
appreciation and conclude with a quotation from his book on Kierkegaard. The wikipedia
article about Georg Brandes describes him as
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“a Danish Jewish critic and scholar who had great influence on Scandinavian literature from
the 1870s through to the turn of the 20th century. Normally he is seen as the theorist behind
"the Modern Break-through" of Scandinavian culture. At the age of 30, Brandes formulated the
principles of a new realism and naturalism, condemning hyper-aesthetic writing and fantasy in
literature. According to Brandes, literature should be an organ "of the great thoughts of liberty
and the progress of humanity." His literary goals were shared by many authors, among them
the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen.
Georg Brandes is widely regarded as having inspired the intellectual leftist movement of the
inter-war period known as Cultural Leftism.”(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Brandes)
My quote from Georg Brandes’ Kierkegaard book reads as follows:
“Of course it was great and beautiful that in a dispassionate time he with full originality
discovered what passion is worth, that in a slack and foolish era he reminded the world what
sensitivity does mean, that in a juste-milieu-period, when people with even greater selfmindedness than before babbled in committees and general assemblies, aped each other and
pushed the person next to them forward, when it came to risk their skins – it was great and
beautiful that he in this time named the word: The Single …” (ibid., 108)
This was Brandes’ appreciation of Kierkegaard’s discovery of a new world, a new continent of
thinking: the thinking of the dialectical structure of the self. However, a few lines further on he
formulates his criticism. Brandes regards Kierkegaard as having mistaken the discovery of a
new world, i.e. an America, of thought as the rediscovery of an original old world, i.e. an India,
of faith. He says:
“But it was a curious blindness, a sickness, almost a madness, of him to believe that this great
America of self understanding was the old wonderland of tradition, that the Single was the
same as the Christian, that this sensitivity was a peculiarity which a special positive religion
had monopolized, or, in order to turn back to our starting point, that his own ethic collision had
something in common with the one of the patriarch Abraham from the Old Testament.” (ibid.
109)
Coming to this point in my lecture I have to face that I haven’t much time left to accomplish
my original plan to look at three more Scandinavian thinkers. Having talked about the three
candidates from Denmark, my intention was to extend my horizon of Scandinavian thinking
with both a Swedish, a Norwegian, and a Finish representative of Scandinavian or Nordic
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mentality. I chose the philosopher Axel Hägerström, born nearly a generation after Brandes in
1868, among other things because he was like Grundtvig the son of a Lutheran pastor and
started at Uppsala University studying theology. After a mental crisis – again comparable with
both Grundtvig, Kierkegaard, and in a way also Brandes – he dropped religion and turned to a
more secular, i.e. philosophical, way of thinking. Hägerström became mainly interested in
practical philosophy and adapted one of the great contemporary philosophical movements, i.e.
Vienna Circle anti-metaphysical neo-positivism, to Swedish philosophical tradition. He
developed the Uppsala school of legal realism based on a kind of “value-nihilism”.
Hägerström, like my two last candidates, Arne Næss and Georg Henrik von Wright, can in my
opinion be understood as a representative for that characteristic feature of Scandinavian
thinking I described earlier as a kind of mediation between continental and overseas European
thinking traditions. I quote a passage from an essay “On the truth of moral ideas”. Hägerström
says here:
“However it should at first be investigated if it is correct to ask about truth or falsehood in
connection with moral ideas. If someone would investigate if gold is right or wrong he would
certainly immediately be laughed at. The history of science, and especially the history of
philosophy is teeming with such even if not immediately apparently false questions. In the
same way as gold neither is right or wrong the moral demanded or right may be such that it
cannot be said if it is valid or invalid of a certain type of action. It could be that if we imagined
a certain action as objectively right and another as objectively wrong we associate with ‘right’
and ‘wrong’ a notion that as such is altogether strange. In this case questions about moral ideas
would be unreasonable.” (Axel Hägerström 1939, Socialfilosofiska Uppsatser, Stockholm:
Albert Bonniers Förlag, p. 45-46).
It is a pity that I do not have the opportunity to say more about the still living excellent
Norwegian philosopher of science, Arne Næss, born in 1912. Although mostly to be reckoned
as a representative of the analytical movement in the 20th century philosophy of science he was
also
prepared
to
mediate
between
Anglo-American
analytical
and
continental
phenomenological or existentialist thinking – so for instance in his book from 1965 on
“Modern Philosophers”. Here he writes about two outstanding analytical philosophers, Rudolf
Carnap and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and about two of the most important phenomenological and
existential 20th century thinkers, Martin Heidegger and Jean Paul Sartre.
I quote a paragraph from the introduction to this book than is evidence for my claim of the
mediating mentality of Scandinavian thinkers like Arne Næss. He says:
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“I one deals with philosophy from some distance – through literature, theology, history of ideas
or contemporary history in general – one will hear a lot about arguing schools and movements.
Viewed from outside this seems to be of great importance. But if you look at philosophical life
in general and study the effort made in connection with philosophical fields of inquiry divided
into problems then the mention of schools and directions is only of subordinate importance.
Much excellent philosophical work is done without connection with a certain school or
direction” (Arne Næss 1965, Moderne Filosoffer, København: Vintens Forlag, p. 14)
I have to come to an end with a few words about one of my own most favourite Scandinavian
thinkers. Georg Henrik von Wright, an extraordinary clear-thinking philosopher, studied in
Cambridge with the famous Austrian philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and under the late
Wittgenstein’s influence became one of the most original and creative logicians, a reformer of
both normative so-called deontic logic and of the foundations of a logic of action. As a
philosopher of science he was not only analytically-minded but also interested in continental
hermeneutic traditions. In a book from 1971, “Explanation and Understanding”, he critically
compares and scrutinizes the positivistic or Galilean as well as the hermeneutic or Aristotelian
tradition of European thinking. Here follows a short quotation from this book:
“As to their views of scientific explanation, the contrast between the two traditions is usually
characterized as causal versus teleological explanation. The first type of explanation is also
called mechanistic, the second finalistic.” (G. H. von Wright 1971, Explanation and
Understanding, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, p. 2).
In the last paragraph of the book he weighs the possibilities of Aristotelian or teleological
studies of social and historical processes against the Galilean ideal of pure empirical and
mathematical science. He says:
“From the relativistic rationalism which views actions in the light of set purposes and cognitive
attitudes of agents must be distinguished an absolute rationalism which attributes a goal to
history or the social process as a whole. This goal can be thought of as something immanent, as
I think we have to understand Hegel’s notion of the objective and the absolute mind (Geist). Or
it can be something transcendental, like various models of world-explanation offered by
Christian theology. It can perhaps aim at a combination of both types of view. But all such
ideas transcend the boundaries of an empirical study of man and society, and therefore also of
anything which could reasonably claim to be ‘science’ in the broader sense of the German
word Wissenschaft. They may nevertheless be of great interest and value.” (ibid., p. 166-167)
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I conclude: I tried in this lecture to give you an impression of the specific character of
Scandinavian thinking. To this end I introductorily put forward three - in my opinion characteristic features of Scandinavian mentality. I called these features dialectical because
they unite opposite propositions like sense of community on the one hand and of privacy or
singularity on the other hand; opposite physical circumstances like the extreme Scandinavian
changes between darkness and light in nature but also, as
I assumed, in Scandinavian
mentality; and finally the again both physical and mental circumstances of Scandinavian
separation from as well as connectedness with the rest of Europe which, if I am right, has
prepared the ground of a special kind of open-mindedness and willingness to mediate between
opposites.
Against this background I stated that, in Grundtvig’s work, a mentality extremely shifting
between darkness and light could be traced. In Kierkegaard’s thinking I tried to accentuate the
dialectical traits of ethical generality and religious singularity. My three last candidates of
Scandinavian thinking I took as representatives of the inclination of Scandinavian thinkers to
mediate between different and in part opposite traditions in European thinking.
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