SKC Workshop Spring 2025

Niels Peter Bock Nielsen

(Lund University, Sweden)

Existential Prosaics

A human life is made of a series of moments. Some grand, others less so. Generally, we value the grand, dramatic moments as more meaningful and more existentially crucial than the minor, humble everyday moments. But maybe our intuitions are wrong. Maybe the direction towards either existential salvation or perdition is chosen not in dramatic events, but in these ordinary, so-called boring moments of everyday life.  In my research on Kierkegaard and Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, I study how the authors express similar views on the importance of these ordinary moments, and how our tendency to overvalue the dramatic can be existentially detrimental. They are what in the post-bakhtinian research has received the inherently contradictory term “ideologues of prosaics”. Prosaics is a concept that was developed by American slavists Caryl Emerson and Gary Saul Morson to understand Tolstoy’s works, and in my presentation, I wish to argue that it can be used to understand Kierkegaard’s as well. Prosaics is not the sentimental view that embracing everyday life will automatically solve the individual’s problems. Rather it is the claim that the most crucial choices, good or bad, are made in the ordinary. As such the prosaic is both the problem and the solution. In readings of The Seducer’s Diary, Fear and Trembling, and Works of Love, I wish to illuminate Kierkegaard’s deep concern with problems of prosaics, and the role ordinary moments play in his understanding of a meaningful life.