Method Thinkers

'Did you bring some Schnapps?', W. says. I brought some Schnapps. — 'Is it chilled?' It's straight from the freezer, I tell him, as Danes serve it.

Aalborg Akavit, for our picnic. Did Kierkegaard drink Aalborg Akavit?, W. wonders. Undoubtedly! Kierkegaard would certainly have drunk it in his early years, his pagan years, W. says. He probably drank himself blind on Aalborg Akavit before his return to his faith, just as we must drink ourselves blind on Aalborg Akavit, we who are lacking in faith, in Kierkegaard's faith.

And did I bring the herrings? Yes, I brought the herrings, a disc shaped packet of crispbread and some cod roe sandwich paste from the grocery in Ikea. And we have some ryebread, too. – ‘Good’, W. says, ‘we're well prepared’. To think like a Dane, you need to eat and drink like a Dane, we agree. And here we are in the north of England, pretty much at the same latitude as Copenhagen, ready to eat and drink like Danes. We're well prepared.

We're method thinkers, we’ve decided. A bit like method actors. It's a question of immersing ourselves in what we study. Of plunging into it. We have to become more Kierkegaardian than Kierkegaard, he says. More Danish than the melancholy Dane!

It's a bit like reverse engineering, W. says. We begin with the finished product, i.e., the complete works of Kierkegaard in the Hong and Hong editions, and work our way back to the mind of the writer who wrote them. And not only to the mind! To the cultural world of the thinker, in this case, the cultural world of Denmark of the nineteenth century. To the physiognomy of the thinker, in this case, a melancholy disposition, a heaviness of the soul. We must move from the outward to the inward, and only then, having reached the secret centre of the work, its engine room, so to speak, might we work our way back out again.