Søren Kierkegaard
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Born: 1813
Died: 1855, at the age of 42
Country of origin: Denmark
Major Books written by Søren Kierkegaard:
- "Either/Or" (1843)
- "Fear and Trembling" (1843)
- "Philosophic Fragments" (1844)
- "The Concept of Dread" (1844)
- "Christian Discourses" (1848)
- "The Sickness Unto Death" (1848)
- "Training in Christianity" (1850)
Cocktail summary of Søren Kierkegaard's main ideas:
Kierkegaard is often called the first Existentialist. The reason for this is the way he approached questions, and also in the ways in which avoided asking them. Up till his time, philosophers focused on objective answers to the enduring questions, but Kierkegaard was the first to focus seriously on our subjective experience of these same questions. He was less interested in answers, than in trying to understand his own experiences.
Existentialism is not concerned with theory, but in personal experience. You can try to understand an event from 2 sides: from the theory "behind" the event, or in the way in which you experience that event.
For example, you can existentially talk about a glass of water. An Existentialist will explain the glass of water in terms of what it looks like, how it tastes, what it feels like, the feelings he or she gets when drinking it. They will not talk about what water actually is, it's chemical makeup, where it comes from, or what its purpose is. They approach the glass of water from their personal experience, rather than from the perspective of the glass of water's point of view.
This is a subtle point that is often lost when talking about Existentialism. The discipline is often full of confusing terms, but it's a bit clearer if you think of the glass of water. Traditional philosophy will be concerned with objective nature of the glass of water, trying to understand what it is and where it came from. But an Existentialist only cares about how we subjectively experience the water, how it effects us.
This is why Kierkegaard's writings are given the label of Existentialism, although he never used this word. He asked questions subjectively, being more concerned with how he experienced ideas, what his opinions were, rather than any objective explanations "behind" the questions. Give him a glass of water, and he would probably stare at it and ponder its effects on him, rather than trying to understand exactly what water is.
Søren Kierkegaard lived at a key turning-point in the history of
ideas, officially closing the door on Rationalism in Philosophy and
opening a new door that focused on the role of paradox, faith, and
personal opinion in defining the relevance of ideas. He argued that
truth is not defined by Rationalism and Logic, but is instead defined
by Paradox. He also argued that philosophy is only relevant to
the extent that it provides guidance for practical, daily life. He
argued that the point of philosophy is not to produce useless
collections of abstract knowledge, but instead must guide us in how to
live. The Enlightenment began its irreversible decline under the pen of
Kierkegaard.
Kierkegaard is usually considered the first of the Existentialists.
This is largely due to his distrust of Rationalism and his rejection of
the idea that all of knowledge can be packaged into any kind of
rational, all-encompassing theory. He argued that real life is defined
not by Reason and Logic, but by the subtle regions of opinion, personal
choice, and faith. The previous 200 years of philosophy had been
dominated by thinkers who proposed various theories of objective
knowledge that existed outside of subjective opinion, with the
individual and his subjective views being little more than an actor on
a much larger stage. This was especially true of the philosopher
Hegel, who was a favorite target of Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard suggested
that none of this was true, and that the role of the individual is more
relevant than that of "the crowd".
Hegel had published a massive collection of ideas and arguments that
claimed to explain all knowledge and all ideas, which Kierkegaard
referred to as "The System". In Hegel's grand, sysematic theory of
knowledge, there was no role for faith. One simply had knowledge or
ignorance of knowledge. God, for instance, was a subject that was
measured against Hegel's theory of knowledge, and God either passed the
test or he didn't. A person didn't have faith in God, they had
knowledge of God. Instead of religious faith, in Hegel's System, one
put God to the test of Rationalism and ended up with either a fact or a
fallacy. This fact existed objectively, and any differing opinion by an
individual was irrelevant. Knowledge exists "out there", distinct from
individual perception, and subjectivivity was of little importance.
It was this emphasis on objectivity, to the near-exclusion of
subjectivity, that bothered Kierkegaard the most. Hegel was primarilly
concerned with society as a whole. A society, like Hegel's native
Prussia, formed an organism which perceived objective knowledge
collectively and exercised its will as a collective unit. The
individual is seen as simply a part of the family, which is simply a
part of the community, which is a part of society, which is a part of
the State. It was the whole that was important, not the parts. Hegel
argued that objective reality was rational, and society went through a
series of stages in its gradual perception of this reality. But
Kierkegaard argued exactly the reverse: reality is not rational, he
insisted, it is a paradox. Any attempt at explaining a paradox
according to rational arguments, is itself nothing more than its own
paradox. Rationality is an illusion, projected onto an irrational
universe by wishful thinking.
Kierkegaard lived at a time of high celebrity for all things Hegelian.
Hegel was widely viewed as having completed the task begun by the
philosopher Descartes 200 years earlier, who had set out to define
knowledge that was objective and consistent to the rules of Reason.
Having started with the famous "I think, therefore I am" foundation of
Rational philosophy, Descartes set into motion an effort to measure all
knowledge against the standards of Reason and Logic, separating the
realm of objective knowledge from the realm of subjective opinion. This
project of creating a grand-unified-theory of knowledge reached its
peak with Hegel, who proposed that all ideas went through a series of
stages, defined by opposing forces that merged into a synthesis of
opposites, all leading up to the eventual goal of "Absolute Knowledge".
This realm of perfect, objective perception was like the peak of a
mountain, and those who climbed this high would be able to explain all
knowledge according to the laws of one all-encompassing theory.
Kierkegaard argued that all of this was an exercise in futility.
Knowledge cannot be reduced down to a system of rational patterns and
logic, he argued. Knowledge and Truth, and our perception of it, is not
defined by Reason but is instead defined by the irrational. Real life,
he argued, doesn't follow the rules of Reason. Rationalism is just one
part of a much bigger puzzle, and this bigger puzzle is defined by
irrationality, by Paradox, and by our inability to ever see the entire
picture. The goal of human thinking is to recognize the paradoxical
nature of reality and to make choices according to that which we choose
to believe. We must give up the expectation of Reason, and of any
rational purpose to life, and instead make a "leap of faith" towards
the truth we choose, with this "leap" being probably his most famous
idea.
Kierkegaard argued for his own stages of knowledge and perception, but
unlike Hegel's stages these were steps leading to the acceptance of
paradox and making existential choices "in the dark" of irrationality.
He argued that our perception of reality exists in one of 3 realms,
with the perceptive individual passing through all 3 realms towards an
ultimate goal. Each realm leads to a specific crisis, which leads the
individual into the next realm. These 3 realms are the Aesthetic, the
Ethical, and the Religious realms.
The Aesthetic Realm
The Aesthetic realm is defined by an attitude of living for the moment,
seeking out novel pleasures and excitement, with little depth to any
thinking. This aesthetic realm eventually produces a sense of despair,
motivated by a growing "Dread" of boredom. The person who lives for the
moment supposedly becomes gradually aware of a growing sense of dread
that there may be more to life than chasing after novelty. This dread
causes a person to pass in to the next realm, that of the Ethical.
The Ethical Realm
The Ethical realm is defined by a concern for duty and obligation and
altruism. But this kind of thinking also produces its own crisis,
leading to a sense of lost empowerment and diminished autonomy, which
leads to the third and most liberating realm, that of the Religious.
The Religious Realm
The religious realm is defined by a submission to God and a passionate
faith, in total contrast to false rationalism. This submission to God
is defined by faith, which is itself defined by a resignation to
paradox and a blind trust in God. God may be rational within his own
infinite frame of reference, but this realm of understanding is forever
beyond our grasp. We must suspend our ethical understanding when having
faith in God. Our faith in him is truly a blind leap.
This last detail is key to Kierkegaard's ideas: the absence of the
rational in the life of religious faith. He used various Biblical
stories to illustrate this point, most famously with his appeal to the
story of Abraham's sacrifice of his son Jacob. The idea of killing
one's son as a sacrifice to what Abraham believed was an order from God
defies all ethical guidelines. A parent does not kill his own child,
yet this ethical standard is suspended in the Religious realm, and
Kierkegaard argued that Abraham made a blind leap of faith from the
Ethical realm to the Religious realm. The fact that an angel of God
stopped Abraham just before he was able to kill his son is beside the
point, since in the story Abraham fully intended to do so, in spite of
him not really wanting to. Kierkegaard argued that this illustrates the
futility of trying to apply Reason and rationality to issues of
religion. He argued that the Religious realm of thinking was the
highest and most pure realm of perception, but it had nothing to do
with rationality. Religion is, at its root, a paradox.
Another Biblical story that Kierkegaard appealed to was that of Adam
and Eve in the Garden of Eden. He argued that when Adam was ordered to
not eat of the fruit of the knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam was
consumed with a growing Dread, brought on by the oppression of Freedom.
Adam didn't eat the fruit, Kierkegaard argued, simply because he could,
but simply to eliminate his dread and the crushing responsibility of
the possibilities brought on by choice.
Kierkegaard had the unique habit of publishing most of his books under
many different pseudonyms, with the fake writer of one book sometimes
criticizing the ideas of the fake writer of another book, all of them
written by Kierkegaard. He named some of his alter-egos Victor Eremita,
Constantin Constantius, and Vigilius Haufniensis, creating a sort of
split-personality approach to philosophy. He claimed that he used this
technique in order to convincingly argue a particular point of view,
without claiming to hold that view himself. Most of his readers knew
that he was the author behind these names, so the motivation was not to
conceal his true identity.
Kierkegaard introduced an approach to philosophy in which the whole
idea of objective truth, and systematic philosophy in general, is
tossed out of the window. Existentialism (a term with he never
personally used) basically replaces the search for objective truth with
the exploration of subjective experience, of subliminal will, of
personal freedom, and the denial of any objective guiding purpose to
life. Prior to Kierkegaard, many people truly believed that a rational
system of ideas could be discovered that could explain everything, but
after Kierkegaard this goal was abandoned. Kierkegaard argued that
"truth is Subjectivity", proposing that truth is defined not by
objectivity but by the passionate sincereness of a person's individual
belief. This was the birth of Existentialism.
Modern Existentialism comes in 2 basic flavors: Christian
Existentialism and Atheist Existentialism. With regards to Christian
Existentialism, Kierkegaard's goal was to save the life of religious
faith from being drowned by what he considered to be a false
Rationality. The details of religious faith, like belief in God, moral
conviction, spiritual passion, and religious dogma are all things that
are guided by intuition, not by Reason, he insisted. In order to
approach God and the purity of the Religious realm, one must embrace
Paradox and abandon Rationalism. Once a person has accepted the
paradoxical nature of reality and looked beyond Reason, he is ready to
make the leap-of-faith that Kierkegaard is famous for.
For instance, a person may have no good reason to believe in God but he
chooses to do so anyway - he takes a leap of faith in the dark. This
leap is truly done in the dark, with no rational basis or explanation.
What is "true" for one person may not be "true" for another person. Two
totally contradictory ideas can both be considered "true" as long as
each person has passionate faith in their position. Regarding the
question of whether passion outweighs error, like if a person sincerely
believes that the earth rests on the back of a giant turtle,
Kierkegaard argued that since God is benevolent he will guide the
sincere seeker of truth towards reality and away from error. This blind
trust is a basic element of the nature of faith.
This same leap in the dark is applied to other topics besides God. For example, it's used when studying history. There is no proof that Caesar ever existed. No one today is alive who witnessed his life, we don't have his body, and we have no rational basis for believing that he existed, other than pieces of paper written by people who died a long time ago. But we use this flimsy evidence anyway to believe that Caesar existed. Faith reaches far beyond religion.
The other flavor of Existentialism, Atheistic Existentialism, is the
form of Existentialism that is perhaps more familiar today. It is
basically a more consistent application of Kierkegaard's ideas, focusing on
his stress of total freedom from any underlying theory of ideas of
purpose to life. The Existentialism of people like Sartre or Camus
argued that God does not exist and humanity is "condemned to be free".
If our choices lead to error then we have no one to blame but
ourselves. There is no God to appeal to or to be critical of. Our
freedom is total and it is oppressive, and the burden of our freedom is
ours alone. This form of Existentialism argues that so-called Christian
Existentialism is simply Existentialism with left-over baggage, with
its proponents like Karl Barth and Paul Tillich simply unwilling to
cast off the old baggage of an outdated religion. So, technically, the
Existentialism of Sartre and Camus is more honest and more consistent
to the core ideas of Kierkegaard.
In the history of philosophy, Kierkegaard should be viewed as setting
the stage for truly modern ideas. The age of Reason came to a close
under his watch, and with the dawning Romantic Age the focus shifted
away from the life of the mind and on to the life of passion, and
instinct, and psychology. Kierkegaard didn't build his own system of
philosophy or school of thought, since this would have been contrary to
his entire approach to knowledge. He instead loosened the grip of
Rationalism from the study of ideas, but at the same time he cut loose the
anchor that grounded the defense of ideas from all sorts of dumb ideas
which are defended simply because they are believed with sincere passion.
Today's inherited common sense
assumptions that "what is true for you may not be true for me" was born
with Kierkegaard. The "ism" associated with his ideas is one of
a shifting subjectivity which stresses the role of the individual, but
makes objectivity almost impossible to defend. So his legacy is a mixed
one of both the emancipation of the individual and the setting-adrift
of objectivity.
Few people read Hegel today, but many people read Kierkegaard. The fact
that his legacy of the blind leap has outlived Hegel's ideas of
objective knowledge speaks volumes about the current approach to
knowledge and ideas.
Søren Kierkegaard praised & criticized:
- Kierkegaard's importance in the history of Existentialism is
beyond dispute. No person prior to him had considered Rationalism as
being divorced from reality, and the later focus on Subjectivity at the
expense of the Objective clearly had its birth in his writings. He is
praised for allowing the individual to play a key role and influencing
his environment, giving priority to personal choice and freedom where
prior arguments had diminished the role of subjective perspectives.
On the other hand, Kierkegaard has also been criticized for his
argument that Paradox is the foundation of all knowledge. He is
sometimes accused of "throwing the baby out with the bath-water" with
his abandonment of Reason and arguing that choices must be made in a
state of total blindness. For example, his argument that Abraham made
his choice to have faith in God in a total absence of any reason to do
so is countered with the suggestion that his multiple interactions with
God gave him sufficient reasons to believe that God would save his son.
God had told him that his offspring would be beyond number and that his
descendants would be God's chosen people, and these statements filled
the void of blindness and, while it didn't give Abraham total
knowledge, it gave him sufficient knowledge with which to act. So
Abraham's choice was not the leap of faith that Kierkegaard argued that
it was.
It's sometimes pointed out that Kierkegaard was dismissive of the
Rationalist philosophical method, but then turned around to use
rational arguments to attack the traditional proofs of God. He tended
to apply a selective use of reason where it suited him best.
Kierkegaard is also criticized for being responsible for much of the
modern stress of the subjective over objective observation. The fact
that a person may passionately believe in a position doesn't make it
true. Gravity, for instance, has objective effects independent of
subjective opinion: believing that a person can fly when jumping out of
a window doesn't make the belief true. While Kierkegaard may not have
personally believed in the total reliance on subjectivity and blind
trust in intent, the legacy associated with him - his "ism" - has
created this type environment.
Notable Facts about Søren Kierkegaard:
- Religious affiliation:
Søren Kierkegaard was born into a family of devout Lutheran
Christianity. His father was a man of deep religious conviction, marked
by a melancholy obsession with the wages of sin and disapproval of God.
Despite his later drifts away from the established church of Denmark,
Kierkegaard never lost this inherited melancholy and most of his
writings are tinged with a poetic expression of his father's religious
melancholy.
Kierkegaard was passionately religious, but he made a distinction
between what he considered to be true Christianity and what he called
"Christendom". He spent his later years launching a series of stinging
attacks on the established Church hierarchy in Denmark of his day. He
was disturbed by the Danish assumption that everyone born into Danish,
Lutheran society was by default a Christian. He published many articles
accusing the Danish Lutheran church of being little more than an empty
shell, void of the original passion of the early Church. The Church,
naturally, didn't appreciate Kierkegaard's advice and a war of words
was waged in the public press.
Kierkegaard appealed to the early Church father Tertullian to justify
his insistence on paradox as underlying the Christian faith. As early
as the early 3rd century, Tertullian had written "I believe *because*
it is absurd." Kierkegaard insisted that Christianity could not be
intellectually understood. The Christian's task is to understand this
fact, and to build his faith on the foundation of paradox, he insisted.
- Kierkegaard was nicknamed "The Fork" as a child, since he was
once overheard to threaten his food by saying "I am a fork and I will
stick you!".
- Kierkegaard's last name means "Church-yard" in Danish, which is
a name his family acquired while poor tenant-farmers tending a plot of
land owned by a local priest.
- Much of Kierkegaard's writings revolve around his one failed
attempt at romantic love. While a student he had proposed to a woman
named Regine Olsen. But after 1 year he decided that his philosophical
obsessions weren't compatible with romance, so he broke off their
engagement. He pretended to be motivated out of shallow selfishness,
but Regine didn't believe him. He played the role of the heartless cad
in order to protect her reputation, but she saw right through his
charade, but never understood his motivations.
Regine eventually relented and later married her tutor, Frederik
Schlegel, and moved to the Dutch West Indies in the Carribean, where
her husband served as Governor of the entire territory. Ironically, she
and her husband read Kierkegaard's books, but she never saw Kierkegaard
again, despite his attempts to renew contact. She outlived Kierkegaard
by almost 50 years, dying in 1904. When Kierkegaard had died, he had
left his entire estate to Regine. When Regine died, she was buried in
the same cometary as Kierkegaard in Copenhagen, along with her husband.
The 3 of them are still buried together to this day.
- Kierkegaard never worked an honest day in his life. His father
left him a handsome inheritance, so he was able to spend his life as a
writer, occupying his days with writing, talking long walks through
Copenhagen and chatting with the common-folks, and smoking cigars.
- Kierkegaard died at the ripe old age of 42. He collapsed on the
street one day in 1855 and spent a month in a hospital in Copenhagen
before dying of unspecified causes. During his stay in the hospital,
both of his legs were mysteriously paralyzed. At the time, it was
assumed that the cause of death was complications from a fall from he
tree he had experienced many years earlier as a child, which had
produced a life-long curvature of his spine. Modern opinion is that he
may have died of a progressive paralysis, which might explain the
immobility of his legs. He is also thought to have perhaps died of a
staph infection of the lungs. But no autopsy was ever performed, so the
mystery remains. He is buried in his family-plot in Copenhagen.
While he was in the hospital he refused to take Communion, even from
his closest friend who was a Lutheran pastor, since he considered the
Church leaders of his day as mere bureaucrats and didn't represent God.
At his funeral, his nephew Henrik Lund made a big commotion, since it
was conducted with full Lutheran ceremony, and Lund argued that this
was inappropriate, since Kierkegaard had rejected the authority of
modern "Christendom". But he was taken away and later fined.
Quotes:
- "Truth is subjectivity."
- Leap of faith...
- "I am a poet. But I was for religion long before I became a poet".
- "Dread is the dizziness of freedom."
- "Life must be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward."
- "People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."
- "Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays."
- "Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor."
- "Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced."
- "The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life, and
just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great
thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else
than grandiose thoughts in embryo."
- "Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is
putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt
cheap that one begins to wander whether in the end anyone will want to
make a bid."
- "Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good."
- "Repetition is the reality and the seriousness of life."
- "Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my
heart. As long as it stays I am ironic -- if it is pulled out I shall
die."
- "I divide my time as follows: half the time I sleep, the other
half I dream. I never dream when I sleep, for that would be a pity, for
sleeping is the highest accomplishment of genius."
- "Had I to carve an inscription on my tombstone I would ask for none other than 'The Individual'."
Other stuff going on during Søren Kierkegaard's life:
- History:
- Art:
- Music:
- Literature:
- Religious trends: