Søren Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher, theologian, poet, social critic, and religious
author regarded by some philosophers as the father of existentialism.
Born in 1813 in Copenhagen, he lived at the end of the Enlightenment. This era ushered
in enormous advances in technology and human understanding. The thinking of that time was
that life’s biggest problems, including what a human’s true self is, could be solved
through objective means such as through the application of logic and science.
Kierkegaard not only disagreed with this idea, but for that matter, with much of the accepted
status quo in the literature, philosophy, and religion of his day.
Much of his philosophy centered around the concept of how one lives as a ‘single individual’.
As he wrote in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, "subjectivity
is truth" and "truth is subjectivity." An astute thinker, he, of course, agreed that
science and objective facts are important. But prominent systematic philosophers of his
time, such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, weren’t acknowledging that there exist deeper
subjective truths - or truths that separate ourselves from other individuals.
What exactly does he mean by subjective truth? Well, take, for example, the idea of whether
we should become a professional musician as a career. Objective facts may tell us things
like our average salary or the approximate amount of hours we need to practice each day.
But to really understand what it means to be a musician full-time means we have to experience
for itself. We have to pick up a guitar and try to get a music gig to understand if we’re
doing this for a living.
This unique focus on the individual’s lived experience led him by some scholars to be
considered the founder of existentialism. Existentialism is the philosophy that the
world has no intrinsic meaning and that individuals alone are responsible for their actions, decisions,
and purpose.
For Kierkegaard, this responsibility was of utmost importance because our eternal salvation
hanged in the balance of how we act and the life we ultimately choose to live. A profoundly
religious man, Kierkegaard believed God will ultimately judge who we’ve become as a single
individual through the course of our actions.
To understand Kierkegaard’s work better is to understand a little about the man behind
the writing. Sorn’s father, Michael, was a wealthy but deeply melancholy man who took
his guilt and stern religious beliefs out on Sorin and his 7th children. Sorin lamented
that he had been ‘born old’ and never had a fun, carefree childhood. Despite his
business success, Michael Kierkegaard believed he was cursed, and his children would all
die before the age attained by Jesus, age 33. It turned out that young Sorin would indeed
be surrounded by death early in life as all his siblings, save one, would not live to
see that age.
In 1840 Sorin became engaged to Regina Olsen. Despite writing about how deeply in love he
was with her, he mysterious broke off the engagement.
Whether it was a sexual indiscretion, a religious experience calling him to be celibate, or
just not wanting to support a wife and child financially, scholars can only speculate as
to why he really did it.
However, it was a serious turning point in his life as it set a course for him to fully
dedicate himself to writing and philosophy. Not only that, it further established him
as this type of outside figure since he would never marry during his life.
Sorin wrote a prolific amount, his most well-known works today being Either/Or, Fear and Trembling,
and The Sickness Unto Death. He creatively used a “method of indirect communication”
writing under various pseudonyms to convey this sense of personal responsibility for
the reader to make up his mind and sever ties with a perceived expert or all-wise authority
figure.
Sometimes referred to as the ‘poet philosopher’, his writing were filled with passion, irony,
and parables instead of the dry analytical discourse of other intellectuals of his time.
For example, in his work Either/Or, he burst forth,
“If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it; if
you marry or if you do not marry, you will regret both; whether you marry or you do not
marry, you will regret both. Laugh at the world’s follies, you will regret it; weep
over them, you will also regret it; if you laugh at the world’s follies or if you weep
over them, you will regret both; whether you laugh at the world’s follies or you weep
over them, you will regret both.”
When one reflects inward and begins examining their life, it leads to some unsettling questions
and topics that Kierkegaard wasn’t afraid to explore. Two examples found in his works
include death and ‘angst’ or despair.
Death is an objective fact that everyone is aware of, but Kierkegaard believed no one
truly understood death and thought about it, which was needed to live life with passion.
The truth is we could be struck down at any moment our life ended in a flash. However,
the herd goes along not giving a second thought to this, living in ‘death denial’.
‘Angst’ for Kierkegaard was unfocused fear or specifically a "dizziness of freedom."
When one truly looks inward and sees how much freedom and possibilities one has, it’s
anxiety-producing. He asks us to imagine a man standing on top of a clip looking down
at the possibilities he could do and become in his life. The longer he stands, the more
dread he feels.
As he wrote in — The Concept of Anxiety, p. 61,
“Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the
yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his
own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence, anxiety is the dizziness
of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks
down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself.”
Despite its negative feeling, angst is important as it leads to personality responsibility
and awareness of our choices in life independent from what others want us to believe. It brings
us from a state of un-self-conscious immediacy to self-conscious reflection.
So what is the specific process for becoming a ‘single individual’? What’s the end
goal for Kierkegaard? Scholars believe we can categorize his writing into three levels
of individual existence one must pass through.
These are ‘The Aesthetic’, ‘The Ethical’, and ‘The Religious’.
Stage one is the Aeshteic life, a life defined simply by experiencing pleasures, like sensuous
desires and intellectual enjoyment. A good way to combat life’s boredom, the individual
soon realizes she needs more substance and purpose in life.
That’s where stage two: the Ethical Life, comes in.
To function as a mature society, we all have to establish good and bad rules to follow
and be judged by. We understand we’re an integrated part of society and that there’s
a purpose greater than oneself out there.
However, you can still enjoy aesthetic pleasure in life; it’s just ethical principles now
supersede the aesthetic. For instance, the aesthetic excitement and passion of a new
marriage can quickly fade. However, by acting morally and taking care of one’s spouse,
you can learn for yourself that there are things more meaningful than surface-level
pleasures and excitements.
However, to truly live life as a “single individual,” one must take another step
and adopt #3. The Religious Life
For Kierkegaard, living the religious life was something almost no one did and was considered
the highest plane of existence for him.
See, truly finding God, for him, doesn’t happen by mindlessness following ethical rules,
social guidelines, and regurgitating church dogma.
True religion comes when we have a personal commitment and relationship to the Christian
God alone and are willing to supersede ethical principles for God.
In ‘Fear and Trembling’, Kierkegaard, writing under a pseudonym, gives Abraham an
example of someone who reached The Religious Life. Rather than follow normative ethical
rules and spare his son, as murder is wrong, Abraham looks inward and understands God requires
deep inner commitment more than just following rules.
Being rational, of course, Kierkegaard understood this isn’t a simple task. Christian teachings
are paradoxical after all, asserting that God as Christ is both 100% human and 100%
God. Confronted with such a paradox, one can either logically reject the idea and take
offense or live by faith and believe by virtue of the absurd. The absurd here, a concept
that appears through Kierkegaard’s work, is to be seen as an enhancement of faith,
something we all must embrace.
When we suspend our ethical, rational beliefs for religious ones like Abraham did, we embrace
‘The Teleological Suspension of the Ethical’ and take the ‘Leap of Faith”.
Here, we become what he called ‘a Knight of Faith’, or someone who has transcended
ethical and rational objectivity for subjectivity and placed complete faith in himself and God
acting freely from the world.
So, that was just a very brief introduction to Kierkegaard as there’s far more to him
and his work. I encourage you to read some of his writing for yourself if any of this
seemed interesting.
Today most philosophers and those in academia would disagree with Kierkegaard’s religious
conclusions, but history has greatly benefitted from him.
If you’re someone struggling with feelings of despair, anxiety, meaning in life, and
wrestling with your mortality and evitable death, Kierkegaard if he were here, might
say “good job man.”
These feelings, although uncomfortable, indicate you’re on the right path toward understanding
yourself and becoming your unique self. You’ve started the essential inward journey and are
separating yourself from the masses, and herd mentality, so don’t feel too bad.