Introduction

Welcome to the Greatest Philosophers In History series: where we do an in-depth exploration of the most fundamental ideas and views on life of the greatest philosophers in human history. In this episode, we will be exploring the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard. Søren Kierkegaard was a profound and prolific 19th century writer and philosopher in the Danish Golden Age of intellectual and artistic activity. Although he would argue that he wasn’t a philosopher since all he did was write about life, how we choose to live and what it means to be alive, centred in the individual or “existing being”. He is regarded as the father of Existentialism. Existentialism is a philosophy that emphasises the existence of the individual and subjectivity. The core philosophy is the problem of existence. What is existence? Kierkegaard insisted that every individual should not only ask this question but should make his very life his own subjective answer to it. This stress on subjectivity is one of Kierkegaard’s main contributions. The idea of the subjective experience, the one thing we all probably have in common, has long been ignored by philosophers, it was left for simpletons. For almost two millennia, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle reigned supreme. Kierkegaard helped build the foundations of Existentialist thought. However, it wasn’t until a century after Kierkegaard’s death that Existentialism gained rapid popularity, with the emergence of French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre. Examining the problems of existence, angst, and the absurd. In the realm of science, we’ve come a long way, a great progress has been undergone. However, in the individual realm, no progress has been or can be made. We all suffer and enjoy the same condition, the human condition, and have done so since time immemorial. The individual sees the world he wills to see, and this depends upon the values he lives by, the ones that make him what he is. Kierkegaard argues that the values that make the individual what he is, also makes the world what it is. Søren was the youngest of seven children, however, they all soon died, and he was left with his only sibling, Peter, who became a bishop. Søren had a slight physical handicap, often sickly and frail, yet highly gifted and his father’s favourite. It was his father’s second marriage, to a housemaid, that gave birth to Kierkegaard, when his father was 57 years old. It came within a year to his first wife’s death. As a child, Søren was a strange kid among his peers. It is thought that he developed his sharp wit and quick thinking as a result of this, as well as with the guidance of his father. He could explore within himself many different forms of consciousness and ways of life, as he said Kierkegaard’s father was a firmly religious and deeply melancholic man. When he was 11 years old, looking after sheep, numb with cold, hungry, and alone – he stood on a hillock and cursed God. He wasn’t able to forget this 71 years later. Kierkegaard’s father went on to become one of the richest merchants in Copenhagen and died at 82 years old, leaving a large sum of money to his son. After the death of his father, Kierkegaard underwent a transformation of faith in the profoundest sense, to love god, which he considered to be the resolution of the fundamental misfortune of his being and the purpose of his existence. As a student in Copenhagen, he fell in love with Regine Olsen. However, at the age of 27, he still had no career. He contemplated two options: to marry Regine or to become a pastor, as his father had desired. His hatred of the established church didn’t help him with becoming a pastor. Alternatively, he could develop the other side of himself, his strange personality, and special gifts, in which case he should remain an outsider and become a writer. The meaning of Kierkegaard’s whole life hung under a decision and he now saw that choice is everything. He said: He ended up breaking off his engagement to Regine Olsen, causing much pain and scandal. As a result, he had been ostracised by society. Kierkegaard had made up his mind to become a freelance writer living of money left him by his father. His starting point for his writing was inevitably himself, he had to understand and explain his own strange personality. The public mockery and caricatures by the satirical magazine Corsair forced Kierkegaard into deeper isolation. But this only increased his determination to counterattack. To the public, his writings, with his huge cast of characters, seemed like a kind of theatre, just as the church seems to be concerned with Christianity. The difference between the theatre and the church is essentially that the theatre honestly acknowledges itself to be what it is, while the church is a theatre which dishonestly tries in every way to hide what it is. He wrote: “A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; they applauded even more. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to the general applause of wits who believe it's a joke."

Kierkegaard’s “Philosophy”

Kierkegaard wrote furiously all day and sometimes through the night as well. In 1843, he published nine books, containing the most detailed analysis of the possibilities of human existence yet done by anyone, using many pseudonyms, tricks, and other stratagems to deceive the reader into the truth. The purpose of all this was to make the reader come up with his own conclusion. He explores different possibilities of human life, with the object of sharing that Christianity is the spiritual discipline that leads us to true selfhood, that tunes our individuality to the highest pitch. He’s interested in nothing but what he calls inwardness or subjectivity. Or as he says: Karl Marx, a contemporary of Kierkegaard’s, saw us cooperating with historical forces. The historical process itself becomes the sole redeemer and what the individual does is no longer important, it is all merely objective, rejecting life that starts from the individual person. Kierkegaard took the extreme opposite point of view. The leading edge of reality is nothing but our own personal decisions, the choices we make settle what we become, and what kind of world we’re going to find ourselves in. It is a philosophy action and will. Life’s chief task is to become an individual. And you can only become an individual by action and decision. The divergence between Kierkegaard and Marx in the 1840s remains fundamental to us to this day. He feared that in modern consumer society the individual was becoming absorbed into the crowd, a mere member of a herd. The spiritual life of the individual was being stifled by communal, political, and religious illusions. He says: All extraordinary men who had previously lived, had aimed at spreading Christianity, his task was to put a halt to a lying diffusion of Christianity. For him, Christianity which wants every man to be an individual has been transformed by human clumsiness into precisely the opposite. He famously wrote in his diary: He hated the crowd and the social scene. When religion is integrated into society, the social scene becomes the religious scene. Kierkegaard wanted to be an individual, but he couldn’t be an individual without being part of society. We define our meaning in life trying to come up with rational decisions, despite living in an irrational world. Kierkegaard assigned the authorship of his books to invented authors, and he even made up the editors and compilers. So, you might have a book by Kierkegaard that begins: Kierkegaard’s hero was Socrates, who is understood through Plato since we don’t have any of his writings. For Kierkegaard, Socrates is an ironist, who uses double meaning. He famously said: He didn’t have any philosophical system, his whole life was a personal preoccupation with himself, he just asked questions, which led to his death sentence, and he ended up killing himself. Kierkegaard saw himself that way. The one thing Kierkegaard does not want to do, is to allow you to systematise him, systematising thought kills life. He saw that with Hegel, whom he wasn’t particularly fond of. Philosophy, for Kierkegaard, is not about understanding concepts, but rather about the human experience. He uses pseudonyms as masks for personalities, his most famous being Johannes Climacus. They could be positions that he holds in some way, but his main point is to occupy all positions philosophically. He would sometimes publish different books in a single day, and these books would comment on each other from completely contrasting perspectives. Thus, it becomes too difficult to ascertain which propositions Kierkegaard himself upholds.

Either/Or. The Two Stages: Aesthetic vs Ethical

In his first book Either/Or he portrays two life views: the aesthetic and the ethical. Kierkegaard wants you to think about them as individual existences. In other words, at any given time, you’re always going to be in one of these existences, an individual is either aesthetic or ethical, even though they might overlap. The aesthetic is the first stage on life's way. It is the Greek word for beauty, however it encompasses the realm of sensory experience and pleasures, such as music, seduction, and drama. To live the aesthetic life to the fullest one must seek to maximise those pleasures. It is one way to fight boredom. Anticipation of an event often exceeds the pleasure of the event itself. However, it is presented as an immature stage, an aesthete’s pleasure is brief, and one can never do something for the good of someone else. Eventually, one must begin seeking ethical pleasures. The second stage is the ethical. We know that doing things for others without personal motives can actually be enjoyable. Ethics are the social rules that govern how a person ought to act. It is what psychoanalyst Freud calls the superego, the internalised ideals that we have acquired from institutions and society. It is based on a coherent set of rules established for the good of society. As Kant would say: However, the ethical still lacks a self-exploration, since one is to follow a set of socially accepted rules. Therefore, one can choose either to remain oblivious to all that goes on in the world, or to become involved with the world. Kierkegaard did not try to convince the reader about picking one of them, but rather show that philosophy is about the human experience. Sometimes philosophy can get too abstract and lose its practicality. Kierkegaard brings philosophy down to the human level, and that’s where we’ve got to search for meaning.

Stages On Life’s Way. The Third Stage: The Religious

His next book Stages on Life’s Way was written as a continuation of his masterpiece Either/Or. In it, Kierkegaard introduces a third stage: the religious. Kierkegaard was a Christian, but if you compared him to every other Christian you’ve ever met, he’s a completely different creature. He wanted to become, as he put it: “a Christian in Christendom”. Christendom was represented by the Danish Established Church, which in Kierkegaard’s view, made individuals lazy in their religion, many of the citizens were officially “Christians” without having any idea what it meant to be a Christian. He wanted to know how to live an authentically religious life while surrounded by people who are falsely religious. Religion had merged with culture, and for that reason, religion had died. For Kierkegaard, the relationship with God is a personal matter. He was a heavy critic of the established church for he saw it as a distraction and interference from the personal relationship a true Christian must undertake. He considers the religious life to be the highest plane of existence. So, in the aesthetic life one is ruled by passion (the inner world), in the ethical life one is ruled by societal regulations (the outer world), and in the religious life one is ruled by total faith in God. Thus, one can never be truly free. True faith doesn’t lead to freedom, but it relieves the psychological effects of human existence. One must embrace the absurd – having faith in God, although one cannot believe in God since there is no rational evidence. He famously said that: In other words, the highest belief and goal of life is not to understand the highest, but to act on it. Just as finding your way through a forest, when you come to a parting of the way, you pause, reflect, and then strike out along your chosen path. Commitment brings you back into the forward movement of life, faith is immediacy after reflection.

Fear and Trembling. The Religious vs The Ethical

In Fear and Trembling, he focuses on the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham who is childless after 80 years, prays to God for a son. He is granted his wish, and 30 years later, God orders him to kill his son, but at the last second God spares Isaac. He presents this story in four different viewpoints: in one Abraham kills his son in accordance to God’s will, telling his son that he is doing it by his own will, and not by God’s. This is a lie, but he would rather have Isaac lose faith in him than lose faith in God. In the second version, Abraham decides not to kill his son, and his faith is shaken. In the third version, Abraham decides not to kill his son and prays to God to forgive him for having thought of sacrificing him. And in the final version, Abraham cannot kill his son, and Isaac begins to question his own faith due to Abraham’s refusal to do what God commanded.

Teleological Suspension of the Ethical

Kierkegaard essentially claims that the killing of Isaac is ethically wrong but religiously right. The tension between ethics and religion causes Abraham anxiety. For Kierkegaard Abraham performs what he calls a “teleological suspension of the ethical”. In other words, he suspends his ethical standards when he decides to kill Isaac, however he has faith in the righteousness of the end that God will bring about. He puts his religious concerns over ethical concerns, thus proving his faith in God. The book details the relationship between the ethical and the religious in much the same way that Either/Or details the relationship between the aesthetic and the ethical.

Knights of Infinite Resignation vs Knights of Faith

In the same book, Kierkegaard distinguishes between knights of infinite resignation and knights of faith. The knights of infinite resignation allow themselves to resign from the nature of the world. Reconciling oneself to loss. Kierkegaard uses the story of a princess and a man who is deeply in love with her. The knight of infinite resignation gives up their being together in this world. It would amount to the expression of an eternal love, which would assume a religious character, an eternal form that no one can take away from him, this allows the pain caused by his unsatisfied desire to reconcile him spiritually. On the other hand, the knight of faith does exactly the same as the other knight did, but he takes it one step further: he places complete faith in himself and in God, and since with God all things are possible, even if it is humanly impossible to be together, he still believes that in this world, they will be together, through divine possibility.

Anxiety and Angst

Kierkegaard spends most of his writing talking about concepts such as anxiety, angst, the absurd and despair. Anxiety and angst One of his famous quotes is: His concept of anxiety or angst is one of the most profound pre-Freudian works of psychology. Human beings enjoy a freedom of choice that we find both appealing and terrifying. It is the anxiety of understanding freedom when considering undefined possibilities of one's life and one's power of choice over them. Angst is one of the primary features of Kierkegaard’s philosophy. It is deeper than anxiety, it is a sort of dread, however – dread without an object. Which is worse than dread, you don’t see it coming, you just know something is wrong. We have an infinite number of possibilities, and when we have to choose one, we become overwhelmed at the sheer amount of them. If you ask someone if they are an individual, they will undoubtedly say yes. However, one may possess the ability to freely act, but if one never uses it and gets lost in the infinite, thinking about an endless sea of possibilities, they are effectively not capable of freely acting. The other part Kierkegaard emphasises is the finite. That is, not considering enough possibilities and just mindlessly going around the demands of culture and social expectations. The scary part is that most people are less aware of this, they see everything they do as their own choice. However, some people live a complete lie. They live because of what their mom and dad, friends, and society tell them that’s what one does. Suppose a man that finds his high school sweetheart, they graduate together, they marry and have kids, they get a house mortgage and work at a normal job and so on. This man didn’t do all of this because he wanted to, but because that’s what he was expected to do. He then realises he’s been living a lie, divorces and quits his job. He moves out to find something meaningful in his life, he works in a fast food chain and romanticises about his future day after day, month after month, year after year.

Leap of Faith

For Kierkegaard, the only way out of this is to take a leap of faith, which may be the ultimate irrational experience, but for him it is the most reasonable thing you can do, And when you make that choice, you can actually act on it and be an individual. It is the ultimate subjective experience. This is his justification on why you should take a leap of faith towards true Christianity.

The Absurd

The world is absurd, and we must live in it. He says: We are afraid of death, but we are also afraid of existing forever. He says: One can try making sense of life by laying a worldview or template on it, but Kierkegaard would guarantee you that the template would eventually shatter and break.

Find Your Own Truth

So, what do you do? Keep trying to make new templates and see if one works for you? Or maybe the template’s the problem? Kierkegaard would tell you to start with yourself. He wrote in his journal: Subjectivity. Not trying to find your identity in a system that somebody else created, and probably isn’t working for them either. What is the use of working through all philosophical systems and construct a world which one does not live, but only holds up to the view of others? The view must be taken up into one’s own life, and that is what Kierkegaard viewed as the most important thing. One must take full possession of one’s existence and accept responsibility for it. Existence is a colossal risk; we can never know whether the way we choose to live is the right way. Anyone who realises this fully, is bound to feel angst according to Kierkegaard. Such subjective truths supported by no objective evidence are grounded on nothing. We thus come to know the nothingness of existence, the utter uncertainty and illusion. The only way out of this madness, is to take the leap of faith. The individual is thus saved from this madness, by his subjective inwardness being related to God.

Kierkegaard’s Final Moments

By 1855, at the age of 42 – Kierkegaard was worn out, and the money he had inherited from his father was gone. He collapsed in the street; he was taken to his deathbed in a hospital where he refused to take the Holy Communion from the priest and he wouldn’t see his brother Peter, who was a bishop. He ended his life with a savage assault on Christendom, attacking an illusion. The established church was supporting the rapid modernisation of Danish society, in the belief that the new liberal state would be a continuation of Christendom by other means. There was a surprisingly big crowd at the funeral and a protest was started against the way in which the established church had taken possession of the body of the man who had so publicly defied it. Disorder ensued. A fitting end to someone who was always an oddity, an outsider, an exception