Archetypes of Wisdom

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Archetypes of Wisdom

• Douglas J. Soccio
• Chapter 14
• The Existentialist Søren Kierkegaard

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Learning Objectives

• On completion of this chapter, you should be able
  to answer the following questions
• What is existentialism?
• What was the Kierkegaard Family curse?
• Who was Regina Olsen, and what role did she play
  in Kierkegaards philosophy?
• What is inauthenticity?
• What is authenticity?
• What does Kierkegaard mean by becoming a
  subject?
• What are the three Stages on Lifes Way?
• What is Kierkegaardian Leap of Faith?
• What does Kierkegaard mean by edification?

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Existentialism

• Existentialism refers to any philosophy that
  asserts that the most important philosophical
  matters involve fundamental questions of meaning
  and choice as they affect actual individuals.
• Existentialists point out that objective science
  and rationalistic philosophy cannot come to grips
  with the real problem of human existence.
• Existentialists believe that general answers,
  grand metaphysical systems, and objective
  theories cannot address the concrete concerns of
  living individuals.

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Søren Kierkegaard

• The work of Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was
  virtually ignored during his lifetime partly
  because he wrote in Danish, partly because of
  what he wrote, and partly because of his
  brilliant use of sarcasm and irony.
• Kierkegaard rebelled against both the system
  and objectivity, so his work confounds easy
  classification.
• His unscientific and unsystematic attacks on
  conventional Christian theology and dogma, on
  science, and professional philosophy took the
  form of satirical essays, parables, anecdotes,
  and real and fictional journals.
• Kierkegaard saw himself as a disciple of
  Socrates, and like Socrates, Kierkegaards life
  and work make a seamless whole.

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Kierkegaard and the Family Curse

• Born in Copenhagen, Denmark, the youngest of
  seven children, Søren was deeply and permanently
  influenced by his father Michael, a strict and
  devout Lutheran.
• Michael Kierkegaard lived his life without peace
  of mind for his two great sins cursing God
  and having sexual relations with a housemaid
  right after his wife had died.
• Søren carried his fathers legacy a sense of
  despair and melancholy, and an obsession with the
  possibility of a finite individuals relationship
  with an infinite God.

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The Life of Kierkegaard

• In 1830, Kierkegaard enrolled in the University
  of Copenhagen to study theology, but soon
  discovered it did not interest him as much as
  philosophy and literature.
• He spent the next ten years drinking and
  attending the theatre.
• In 1838, just before his father died, Søren
  returned to theology, passing his exams with
  honors in 1840.
• Then, at the age of twenty seven, Kierkegaard
  fell in love with a fourteen-year-old girl,
  Regina Olsen, and the two became engaged when she
  turned seventeen.

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The Universal Formula

• Kierkegaard quickly broke off the engagement, but
  struggled for the rest of his life to explain why
  (one possibility is the conformity marriage
  suggested).
• In 1843, weeks after his sacrifice of Regina,
  he fled to Berlin, writing Either/Or, A Fragment
  of Life, his first important work, and
  Repetition An Essay in Experimental Psychology,
  through which he hoped to reconnect with her.
• Kierkegaard interpreted the story of Isaac being
  returned to Abraham to mean that if you give up
  something for God, you get it back plus the love
  and salvation of God.
• Applying this universal formula to himself, he
  reasoned that if he gave up Regina to devote
  himself to God, he would get both.

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The Christian

• Struggling with the existential predicament of
  choice and commitment, Kierkegaard grew
  increasingly interested in what it meant to be a
  Christian.
• He became convinced that institutionalized
  Christianity suffers the same inauthenticity as
  other institutions.
• Inauthenticity results when the nature and needs
  of the individual are ignored, denied, obscured,
  or made less important than institutions,
  abstractions, or groups.
• Authenticity is the subjective condition of an
  individual living honestly and courageously in
  the moment without refuge in excuses or reliance
  on groups or institutions for meaning and purpose.

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That Individual

• On October 2, 1855, Kierkegaard visited his
  banker brother-in-law to withdraw the last of his
  money. Going home, he fell to the street,
  paralyzed from the waist down.
• Destitute, helpless, and weak, Søren Kierkegaard
  died quietly November 11, 1855 at the age of
  forty-two, and was buried in the huge Cathedral
  Church of Copenhagen.
• The most interesting epitaph for Kierkegaard is
  found in his own words
• The Martyrdom this author suffered may be
  briefly described thus He suffered from being a
  genius in a provincial town The standard he
  appliedwas on the average too great for his
  contemporariesYet he himself was that individual
  if no one else was, and became that more and
  more.

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Truth as Subjectivity

• The major existential issue is, How am I to
  exist?
• As Kierkegaard pointed out, any choice, once
  made, rules out all other possibilities.
• The basic fact of Kierkegaards project, as he
  referred to his existentialism, is the dilemma of
  lived choices
• I must find a truth for me, to find the idea for
  which I can live and die.
• For Kierkegaard, no amount of objective, abstract
  knowledge could ever provide a meaning for life.
• Truth is a subjective condition, not an objective
  one.
• Kierkegaard rejects any descriptive or systematic
  approach to dealing with that individual.

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Objectivity as Untruth

• For the most part, philosophers have agreed that
  arguments should be evaluated rationally and
  objectively.
• But Kierkegaard vehemently disagreed, considering
  objectivity and impartiality to be dangerous
  delusions.
• Not only is impartiality impossible, but claims
  of objectivity and disinterestedness are always
  lies.
• Preferring objective impartiality to subjective
  involvement is itself a bias.
• Favoring objectivity is a form of partiality.

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Objectivity as Untruth

• Moreover, reason is a mere abstraction, a
  noble-sounding term that conceals an individual,
  subjective choice.
• To complicate matters even more, the impersonal
  quality of objective language reduces the
  uniqueness of individual existence to mere
  generalizations, abstractions, and features held
  in common.
• What is individual is not described.

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The Present Age

• Kierkegaard lamented what he termed the massing
  of society.
• In contemporary society the crowd overwhelms
  the individual, yet the individual feels lost
  without the crowd.
• Modern people are anonymous creatures who depend
  upon experts to point the way towards salvation.
• Rather than being themselves, modern people
  simply conform to an abstract type.
• Modern people are reduced to numerical equal at
  the expense of their own authenticity.

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Becoming a Subject

• For Kierkegaard, an individual exists
  (specifically as a Christian) when the individual
  appropriates his or her belief by taking it up
  subjectively.
• There is a qualitative difference between what we
  often call existence and what Kierkegaard means
  by truly existing.
• To act is not merely to behave but to assent with
  ones whole being, even though one lacks
  sufficient objective information.

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Stages on Lifes Way

• According to Kierkegaard, Without God a man is
  never essentially himself (which one is only by
  being before God) and therefore never satisfied
  with being himself.
• Kierkegaard offers a series of sketches and
  descriptions of a dialectical process that
  involve what David E. Cooper calls, intimations
  of a self-reflective kind that indicate, however
  inchoately, something about themselves.
• What Kierkegaard refers to as stages on lifes
  way are three explicit ways of choosing to live
• The aesthetic stage.
• The ethical stage.
• The religious stage.

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The Aesthetic Stage

• The aesthetic stage is a futile fight against
  boredom, characterized by the pursuit of
  pleasure, especially sensuous pleasure.
• It is the lowest of Kierkegaard's three stages on
  life's way.
• He considers it immoral, exemplified by Don Juan.
• The aesthetic is primarily concerned with
  individual experience, and individual sensory
  experience in particular.
• An aesthetic experience could range from
  animalistic lusts to a deep appreciation of
  music, but it always relates to the single
  individual to something else.

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The Ethical Stage

• The second of Kierkegaards stages, the ethical
  stage, is a way of life that involves making
  commitments to the norms and customs of ones
  society.
• It is devoted to the general (universal)
  principles that are continually revised according
  to changing humanistic values.
• One acts for the betterment of others rather than
  for oneself.
• The ethical stage is secularly moral and
  exemplified by Kantian ethics.

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Something Higher than Ethics

• Hegel considered the ethical to be the highest
  form of life, and Kierkegaard agrees that it is
  the highest that can be understood.
• However, Kierkegaards Fear and Trembling argues
  that there is the third category that of the
  religious and that the religious is higher than
  the ethical.

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The Religious Stage

• For Kierkegaard, the religious stage of life is
  the highest. It is the only authentic way of
  living.
• Only the religious life acknowledges our dual
  nature and provides a way for the individual to
  transform the particular into the universal.
• The religious stage involves a teleological
  suspension of the ethical.
• It can only be achieved by a leap of faith,
  exemplified by Abrahams willingness to sacrifice
  his son Isaac.
• From any perspective but that of faith, what
  Abraham did was absurd.
• Only faith allows us to be our authentic,
  existing selves.

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Discussion Questions

• Sketch and analyze Kierkegaards critique of
  false Christianity by contrasting Kierkegaards
  existentialist idea of faith with the more common
  conceptions of faith as belief. How are they
  similar? How are they different?
• What, for Kierkegaard, constitutes being a
  Christian? Why did, and do, so many people who
  see themselves as Christians find Kierkegaards
  point of view offensive and wrongheaded? What do
  you think?

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Chapter ReviewKey Concepts

• Existentialism
• Inauthenticity
• Authenticity
• Objectivity
• Impartiality
• Massing of society
• The crowd
• Aesthetic stage
• Ethical stage
• Religious stage