Kierkegaard's Existentialism

The Theological Self and the Existential Self

George Leone

• Publisher: URLink Print & Media, LLC
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781647533120
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

BOOK SUMMARY/SYNOPSIS:

Kierkeggard's Existentialism is a study of the self, and what it meant to Kierkegaard to become a self. From his first writing in which Socrates is

portrayed as the true existential self, to his last writings that focus on Jesus as the theological self, Kierkegaard sought to express his own spiritual development. At the same time he wanted to expose the falseness that the Church of his day had become. Thus, Kierkegaard raised the cry against Christendom to return to the true understanding of Christianity, personified in the existential reality of the founder, Jesus.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Leone is a retired professor of Counseling and Philosophy, with graduate degrees in each. He lives in relative seclusion in New Mexico.

PART 1 

The Theological Self

CHAPTER 1 

The Choice

Early in his life Kierkegaard became vaguely aware of a fundamental difference between merely believing something and truly knowing that which one might merely believe. This difference seemed to involve a further distinction between life lived only in segments and life lived fully. Beliefs, whether political, social, moral, or spiritual, inevitably lead to a life that is fragmented and lived in segments. This is because beliefs can never be more than partial in their impact on a person’s life. To say, for example, “I believe that God is in his heaven and all is right with the world” has an impact only on my need for a sense of security in life. Such a belief does not reach into my actual lived experience that the world is often a tragic place.

More to the point for Kierkegaard was the Christian dogma that was prevalent in Copenhagen and throughout Denmark in general during Kierkegaard’s lifetime of 1813-1855. This was the Lutheran form of Christianity into which Kierkegaard was born and in which he was steeped. Later in his life, toward the end in fact, he was to focus intently on what Luther represented and its effect on Christianity. But early in his life, Kierkegaard realized that merely believing or even understanding the meaning of Christianity was not enough if “…it had no deeper significance…” for him and his life (Dru, 1958, 44). This thought was entered in Kierkegaard’s journal on the first day of August 1835. That day was apparently full of insight for Kierkegaard as suggested by several entries he wrote. He realized that “…the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die” (44). This idea “…was what I lacked in order to be able to lead a complete human life and not merely one of understanding… (45). Kierkegaard did not want to base his life upon “… something that is called objective–something that is in any case not my own…” (45). Truth, as idea and as thought, had to permeate his entire being, for “[w]hat is truth but to live for an idea?” (45).

Mere knowledge was not sufficient for Kierkegaard. In drawing a parallel between knowledge and pleasure using a metaphor from the Book of Genesis, he said “I have tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and often delighted in its taste. But the pleasure did not outlast the moment of understanding and left no profound mark upon me” (46). He sought for the principle, the fundamental idea, of his life. He did not, however, find his self, “…which was what I was looking for…” (46). Kierkegaard followed this thought with another that goes to the heart of his life and thought. “One must know oneself before knowing anything else. It is only after a man has thus understood himself inwardly and has thus seen his way, that life acquires…significance” (46).

Kierkegaard, however, was aware that he was “…still far from having reached so complete an understanding of myself…”; however, out of a “…profound respect for its significance, (I have) tried to preserve my individuality…” (46-47). That is, Kierkegaard resisted the power of others’ statements of what is true to pull him into their orb. He, rather, sought to master them, to study them individually and examine their importance in others’ lives, “…at the same time guard(ing) against going, like the moth, too near the flame” (47). The result of this effort was expressed in a profound statement in which Kierkegaard clearly made a choice.

And so I stand once again at the point where I must begin my life in a different way. I shall now try to fix a calm gaze upon myself and begin to act in earnest; for only thus shall I be able, like a child calling itself “I” with its first conscious action, to call myself “I” in any deeper sense. (47)

These reflections in Kierkegaard’s journal have their precursors in certain incidents in Kierkegaard’s life just after he entered the university to study theology in 1830. Kierkegaard was born into a strongly religious family immersed in Lutheran Christianity. As the last of seven children he was doted upon, especially by his father. As a result the two of them shared a deeply loving relationship. Yet it was a melancholic household, made so by a curious blend of the dark aspects of Lutheranism, on the one hand, and the basic fault of the father, on the other. Added to this was the death of Kierkegaard’s mother and three siblings within three years of each other beginning in 1829.

The basic fault of Kierkegaard’s father was a secret guilt that he, the father, carried since childhood. Kierkegaard learned that his father had cursed God when he was only twelve years of age. The father’s guilt and sense of sin weighed heavily upon him and all his life he felt that God cursed him in return. This created in Kierkegaard’s father a melancholic personality that formed the emotional atmosphere in Kierkegaard’s childhood.

In 1835, the same year as his insightful journal entries, but prior to them, leading up to them, Kierkegaard experienced what he called “The Great Earthquake” (Lowrie, 1970, 68-76). He put it all together in his mind: his father’s guilt, the loss of his mother and siblings, the melancholic darkness, the Lutheran doctrine of fundamental human sinfulness, and his father’s strong desire and prompting for Kierkegaard to study theology (Collins, 1965). In his journal entry he saw that “[t]here must be a guilt upon the whole family, the punishment of God must be on it…” (Dru, 1958, 39). A year later, in 1836, he wrote, “[i]nwardly torn asunder…I was, without any expectation of leading a happy earthly life…without hope of a happy and comfortable future…” (40). Two years later, in 1838, Kierkegaard’s father died, and his imagination interpreted that loss as “…the last sacrifice which he made to his love for me…in order that if possible I might still turn into something” (60).

Though Kierkegaard had entered the university to study theology in 1830, he had been ambivalent about this course of study. He remained because his father wished it. Then, upon the death of his father, Kierkegaard felt it was his debt to his father to finish the master of arts degree in theology. He envisioned himself as a pastor with a congregation and a family of his own (Capel, 1964). In 1841 Kierkegaard finally completed his examination for the masters of theology. Right after that he became engaged to Regine Olsen and began working on his dissertation, The Concept of Irony (Kierkegaard, 1841/1989).

When Kierkegaard completed his theology degree, rather than feel that he had done this for himself he saw that the last wish of his father was now fulfilled (Dru, 1958). He felt that he was living his life according to his father’s preferences for him, right down to the engagement with Regine. In Kierkegaard’s days there was nothing more socially upright and laudable as to be a married pastor. But for Kierkegaard there was nothing more false and damaging to his integrity. Already in his dissertation he had presented Socrates as the image of a true individual, one who will not shape his life according to others’ standards. Socrates was he who always stood on his own two feet in “…the infinite…freedom of subjectivity…” (The Concept of Irony, 211). Kierkegaard had too much of an inherent sense of integrity to allow himself to go any further with a falsely chosen life. He broke off the engagement with Regine, took Socrates as his model, and launched himself into becoming who he really was. Stirred on by his inherited melancholy that he did not want to subject Regine to, he, as Socrates did in ancient times, sought a firmer ground for his life’s happiness, while at the same time being, as was Socrates in his time, a gadfly. Where Socrates was a gadfly to the populace of Athens, Kierkegaard became the gadfly to the populace of the state-sponsored church, which he called Christendom.

Thus, the extensive statement of Kierkegaard, quoted earlier, expresses simultaneously the fact that he could not be false to himself, that he did not feel that his happiness lay in following any prescribed set of values, including those given by the church, and that, therefore, his work in life was to examine closely all that claimed objective validity as set standards for how to live life. Kierkegaard wanted above all to truly discover something that he could live and die for. His life’s works, the many volumes of it, represented this attempt to work out what this was. He was to take nothing for granted, especially Christendom and its values, though he came to ultimately make a sharp distinction between Christianity and Christendom. The only thing given from which he could begin was not a thing at all, at least not as a given thing in the objective world. For, where Kierkegaard began, the one “thing” he could not help but to begin with, was himself, the individual man.

CHAPTER 2

The Aesthetic and the Ethical

Kierkegaard began the two-volume work, Either/Or (Kierkegaard, 1843/1944), with a series of quips in which he encapsulates the polarity of human existence. He praises love and praises emptiness. He complains of meaninglessness and of fullness. He is full of contradictions in the opening pages of the first volume, the one that elucidates what it means to live for pleasure, the aesthetic life. In the second volume his concern is with what it means to live for duty, the ethical life. In this, his first major work, Kierkegaard holds before us two diverse ways of being.

The Aesthetic

If we live as Don Juan we live for the pure eroticism of immediate life. If we live in immediacy we live for the intensity of erotic, aesthetic arousal. One’s whole self is centered on the quest for and conquest of the object of one’s erotic desire. Pleasure is one’s goal in life and one’s meaning for living. The more intense the pleasure the more one feels a meaning in life. Thus, the person who lives in immediacy is living for the emotional intensity that comes with the highest form of pleasure, the erotic. Also, the stronger the feeling or emotion, the more a person feels alive.

Kierkegaard distinguishes between three stages of the erotic. In the first stage desire appears as only a vague possibility, almost as a dream, in which the object is presented as an enticement. The second stage is marked by desire beginning to seek for its object in the world. Desire in effect says that the erotic object is not just a dream. It is really possible that the desired object can be realized in actuality. Kierkegaard then says that the third stage is when desire becomes the action of desiring. What he means is that desire belongs to a person, a real self. It is the person’s self that recognizes itself in both the act of desiring and in having the object before it as the symbol of what the self can be, that is, what the self is potentially (Either/Or, I, 74-86).

When the object is still only the dream of possibility, the self sees it as the image of what it, the self, can be. The self does not yet have a firm grounding beyond the immediacy of life, that is, a grounding in itself. The self’s grounding in immediacy is in the immediacy of desiring (Either/Or, I, 95). This gives the self a hope, but since hope is the “yet to be realized,” the hope is for what the self can be. However, since the self does not yet realize that it hopes for what it can be, the form this hope takes is as desire for an object which the self takes to be that through which it can become what it hopes to be. It sees itself, in other words, as a specific object that is already in the world.

This is the kind of dialectic that Kierkegaard envisages as leading from an impersonal desire to a personalized form of it, and thence to the creation of a self through the object. This is the theme that is repeated throughout Kierkegaard’s writings. The self seeks itself. Life is a quest to become the individual that one potentially is. The form of this quest begins naturally enough with a desire. However, though we begin with a ...