Back in my college days, I spent time acquainting myself with the work of Soren Kierkegaard, a philosopher from Denmark who lived in the mid-1800s. Kierkegaard is considered the father of a twentieth-century school of philosophy called Existentialism, which was hugely influential to me. The Existentialists, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, argued that there’s nothing about human existence that is definitively the case – nothing you can know definitively about being human by virtue of, for example, membership in a given religious group. Basically, it means there’s no rulebook. Existentialism insisted that as a human being you have the right to make choices, period. In fact you can’t avoid making choices. And not only that; you’re also personally responsible for the outcome of the choices you make; your decisions.
Kierkegaard would have disagreed with many of the Existentialists conclusions beyond these basic tenets. He was a Christian philosopher, for one thing, explicitly, whereas the Existentialists largely rejected religion. The battle he fought with many of his own contemporaries, especially the religious leaders of the day, was mainly over what it meant to be a Christian. His detractors believed in establishment religion – they insisted you could be born into the Danish church, and that as long as you blindly accepted your place in Danish society, including the state religion, you were good to go. You were a Christian.
Kierkegaard, though, insisted that being a Christian meant having a personal experience with God – an all-consuming, life-changing experience. He also believed you came into this relationship with God via the absurd, because religious belief couldn’t be reduced to a series of logical steps or conclusions. Religious belief required a leap of faith, which leap was at its root nonlogical. Not illogical. But not based on some inevitable logical conclusion.
I give this background on Kierkegaard to introduce you to him, and to say that Kierkegaard was in a way the first blogger and first self-publisher. In his day there was no internet, of course. Electricity had barely begun to be harnessed. But, rereading some of his works, I’ve been struck how devoted to his writing he was, how carefully he wrote, how passionate he was about his ideas, and how masterful and entertaining at expressing them he was. Now, Kierkegaard wasn’t blogging on the ten recipes you can make in 20 minutes, or eight picturesque towns you must see in Portugal. He wrote about matters crucial to know about being human.
But, like a dedicated blogger, Kierkegaard wrote every day. He sat in his small apartment in central Copenhagen and thought and wrote on the subjects he cared most deeply about. And when he had finished his latest manuscript, he walked it over to a local printer – his publisher – and paid to have the piece printed, bound, and published. His fellow philosophers were his primary readership. On average his works sold a few dozen copies. He wasn’t even taken seriously as a thinker and writer until other influential writers and philosophers discovered him long after his death.
Kierkegaard didn’t have an agent. He didn’t have a large, influential publisher behind him of the type we think of today. Just a man who would set up and print his works for a fee. So, in a real sense Kierkegaard was a doggedly persistent, utterly determined self-publisher. His daily writing habits, and the passion he carried them out with, remind me very much of a blogger. Had it been available, I have no doubt Kierkegaard would have made good use of today’s technology. He would have been a Danish blogging, ebook-writing fiend!
I find Kierkegaard’s example heartening, and worth following. I’m working on my first novel – I’ve been working on it for years. And I know I’ll self-publish, because there’s no precedent for the book I’m writing, nothing like it that I’ve seen anywhere. I have no choice but to publish it myself. I’m actually excited at the prospect. One day soon, I’ll upload the book to Amazon and the other online bookstores. And the act will be very much akin to Kierkegaard walking his latest manuscript over to the printer, as he regularly and repeatedly did, back in Copenhagen a hundred and fifty years ago.