“You think so?”
“I don’t think I’ll ever get to understand what it’s like being another
person. No two people in the whole world are alike.”
“And the woods?”
“They don’t seem the same any more. They’re like a whole universe of
wondrous tales.”
“It is as I suspected. The blue bottle is individualism. It is, for example,
S0ren Kierkegaard’s reaction to the idealism of the Romantics. But it also
encompasses another Dane who lived at the same time as Kierkegaard, the
famous fairy-tale writer Hans Christian Andersen. He had the same sharp eye
for nature’s incredible richness of detail. A philosopher who saw the same
thing more than a century earlier was the German Leibniz. He reacted against
the idealistic philosophy of Spinoza just as Kierkegaard reacted against
Hegel.”
“I hear you, but you sound so funny that I feel like laughing.”
“That’s understandable, just take another sip from the red bottle. Come
on, let’s sit here on the step. We’ll talk a bit about Kierkegaard before we stop
for today.”
Sophie sat on the step beside Alberto. She drank a little from the red
bottle and things began to merge together again. They actually merged rather
too much; once more she got the feeling that no differences mattered at all.
But she only had to touch the blue bottle to her lips again, and the world about
her looked more or less as it did when Alice arrived with the two bottles.
“But which is true?” she now asked. “Is it the red or the blue bottle that
gives the true picture?”
“Both the red and the blue, Sophie. We cannot say the Romantics were
wrong in holding that there is only one reality. But maybe they were a little bit
narrow in their outlook.”
“What about the blue bottle?”
“I think Kierkegaard must have taken a few hefty swigs from that one. He
certainly had a sharp eye for the significance of the individual. We are more
than ‘children of our time.’ And moreover, every single one of us is a unique
individual who only lives once.”
“And Hegel had not made much of that?”
“No, he was more interested in the broad scope of history. This was just
what made Kierkegaard so indignant. He thought that both the idealism of the
Romantics and Hegel’s ‘historicism’ had obscured the individual’s re-
sponsibility for his own life. Therefore to Kierkegaard, Hegel and the
Romantics were tarred with the same brush.”
“I can see why he was so mad.”
“S0ren Kierkegaard was born in 1813 and was subjected to a very
severe upbringing by his father. His religious melancholia was a legacy from
this father.”
“That sounds ominous.”
“It was because of this melancholia that he felt obliged to break off his
engagement, something the Copenhagen bourgeoisie did not look kindly on.
So from early on he became an outcast and an object of scorn. However, he
gradually learned to give as good as he got, and he became increasingly what
Ibsen later on described as ‘an enemy of the people.’ “
“All because of a broken engagement?”