Kierkegaards Revolt against Hegelian Essentialism

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Kierkegaards Revolt against Hegelian Essentialism

• Hegel allegedly dissolved the individual into a
  conceptual system, but the individual is unique.
• The individual is morally responsible, but
  escapes responsibility by losing himself in the
  crowd. The crowd, the mass, Hegels spirit, is a
  lie.
• Seek self-fidelity, not self-realization (Hegel).
• Be a person, do not depersonalize yourself. A
  person exists over time, makes commitments,
  becomes responsible for the future, strays from
  them in the present, and returns them in the past.

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• 4. If you do not return to past commitments, your
  personal identity changes.
• 5. Commitment occurs in subjective truth, in a
  passionately subjective appropriation of an
  objective uncertainty.
• 6. Objective certainty is impersonal. It is
  incapable of creating personal identity.
• 7. Though Kierkegaard viewed himself as an
  apologist for Christianity and not as a
  philosophy, his analysis of what it is to be a
  person is the best in the history of philosophy.

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• AESTHETIC MAN
• We start out living anonymously by borrowed
  beliefs, inauthentically in a crowd, mass or
  group.
• Lifes road then consists of three types of
  personal identity aesthetic, ethical, and
  religious.
• Aesthetic man revolts against the crowd, the
  parents, seeking fulfillment by an endless string
  of momentary experiences. These experiences may
  be aesthetic, musical, sexual, alcoholic,
  drug-induced, or generally hedonistic. He ends in
  despair, dissipation and dispersion. No center or
  meaning to his life.
• Not everyone has to go literally through the
  aesthetic stage. You may go through it in
  imaginations by observing others.

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• ETHICAL MAN
• Aesthetic man overcomes despair by converting to
  ethical man, who seeks fulfillment by belonging
  to institutions like marriage, a profession,
  citizenship, and participation in world history.
  Hegel illustrates ethical man.
• Aesthetic man is committed only to himself, but
  ethical man is committed to others. Aesthetic man
  believes that obligation detracts from
  experience, ethical man lives out of obligation.
• But ethical man, too, ends in despair when he
  realizes the impossibility of living up to moral
  obligations like the categorical imperative.

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• RELIGIOUS MAN
• The moral law is not optional to ethical man.
  Awareness of the inability to live up to an
  inescapable ideal of moral perfection causes is
  the awareness of sin, a new form of despair.
• Ethical man resolves this despair by a leap of
  faith, throwing himself into the hands of the the
  lord.
• Ethical man stills reason in him and commits
  himself to doing whatever God commands, even to
  the point of breaking the moral law.
• Religious man is Christian, but renounces
  Christendom and the Christian church as idols.

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• 5. The church is a finite human institution. God,
  the infinite, utterly transcends anything finite.
  To be a Christian is not to be born into
  Christendom or to be a member of a church. It is
  to go through lifes road and to be converted to
  accepting salvation from sin through Christ.
  There are very few Christians.
• 6. Since Christians must be reason asleep, and
  since reason is natural to man, Christian faith
  is never certain, but is a constant struggle with
  doubt. The Christian is never sure he believes,
  since he is asked to believe that the infinite
  became finite in Jesus, that the eternal became
  temporal. All this is not just beyond reason, it
  is against reason.

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• 7. The biblical story of Abraham and Isaac
  illustrates the difference between religious and
  ethical man.
• 8. Kiekegaard is at the origin of the
  neo-Orthodox movment in Protestant theology in
  the 20th century Barth, Tillich, Niebuhr. This
  movement stressed the reality of sin in human
  affairs.
• 9. The most common criticism of Kierkegaard is
  that it is a form of irrationalism. If a blind
  leap of faith into Christianity is possible, why
  not into Nazi ideology or Islamic fundamentalism?