The “Father of Existentialism”, Soren Kierkegaard, was born
in 1813 in Denmark's capital, Copenhagen. Denmark
at the time was standing at the threshold between the Middle Ages and modernity.
From this vantage point, Kierkegaard could see modernity
from a perspective we can only dream of today.
He saw that the modern age wasn't just mass-producing products,
it was mass-producing people.
Kierkegaard called this mass-produced populace “The Crowd”.
From his earliest writings, he attacks the media and the political
and cultural tendencies giving birth to this population of living stereotypes.
This led Kirkegaard on the philosophical
quest for true individuality.
He railed against the dominant philosophy of his day
the philosophy of George Wilhelm Hegel,
Hegel's elaborate philosophical system
promised absolute knowledge through science of logic.
Kierkegaard couldn't have disagreed more.
As the great Pre-Socratic Heraclitus once wrote,
much learning does not teach insights.
With that in mind, Kirkegaard called for a return
to the living philosophy of the ancient Greeks.
Back then, greatness wasn't about the books and knowledge
you produced, but also the life that you led.
For Kirkegaard philosophy could not exist
in isolation from our everyday lives.
But there was one crucial difference between Kierkegaard
and the Ancient Greeks. He was a Christian.
For him, this was an even more demanding ideal,
because this life was now the decider between eternal damnation
and eternal salvation.
All these streams converged into one quest for Kierkegaard
How to become a true “Christian in Christendom”.
And in his eyes, this had nothing to do with attending church or being dogma.
The central theme of Kierkegaard’s philosophy is faith.
For him, this means far more than reading the words of the gospel.
It means living them.
It means action, as we see with Abraham.
Faith is a personal experience between the individual and God.
This experience transcends reason.
It's a work that is never complete
a choice you must constantly renew.
For Kierkegaard, this living repetition of faith
is the making of the true individual.
Since this faith transcends reason
you won't find as in a book as Hegel promised.
But you have to live it.
Kierkegaard was acutely aware of the danger of mass
producing a new breed of pseudo individual.
Replacing Hegelians with Kierkegaardians
would do little for the cause of individualism.
And so to get around this, he came up with a philosophical style
he called indirect communication.
This philosophical model was Socrates,
the irritating gadfly of Ancient Athens.
Socrates’s stream of ironic question,
buried past the stereotyped answers of the culture.
Right these easy answers.
He forced his conversational partners to think for themselves.
Kierkegaard designed his style to do the same
writing under 20 different names,
each with their own personal honesty, some admirable, some scandalous.
Kierkegaard forced his readers to think for themselves
and to find their own individual faith.
That's everything for this brief taster of Kierkegaard and the next video.
We're going to do a deeper dove on the Danish philosopher's work.
We were looking at his three stages of life.
The nihilistic, Aesthetical stage, the responsible
carry a heavy burden Ethical stage, and the ultimate Religious stage.
We'll also give a more detailed look at what Kierkegaard means by faith
and its place in the existential movement.
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Another over five.
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