Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

Transcript (PDF)

Prelude to the Twentieth Century
Presentation 1 of 13

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
Either/Or, The Sickness unto Death. Purity of Heart.
The Early Warning Signs of the Century of Consciousness and Anxiety
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, July 5, 1984

Transcript:

We now come by force of circumstance inevitability to the roots of the 20th century. We have been working for four years now to try and establish some kind of sensible history. We have foregone history of ideas and we have foregone histories of states or histories of civilizations and we have moved purely person by person through the ages. We’re doing this because the 20th century is a problem because our lives have to be lived out in the midst of a junkyard of problems. And so it’s with some expectation that moving person by person we may ascertain some shape of a lifeline of dependable resources which we ourselves can call upon in our own selectivity and use for our own lives in whatever way we wish to do.

So, it’s appropriate that we begin the roots of the 20th century with Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, who lived about a hundred and fifty years ago and who reiterated in his life’s work the importance of the individual. If there is a talisman of truth for Kierkegaard it is that at least the individual exists. Not in some Cartesian sort of doubt but in an existential affirmation. And it is not a triumphal forest journey of Siegfried that Kierkegaard refers to, but the fact that dread exists in the world and it exists only in human beings. And from the certainty of this suffering we existentially stand out and exist.

Kierkegaard’s father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, was a helper for a tenant farmer in Denmark – that part of Denmark that used to be called Jutland. He was poorer than poor, and when he gained the age of maturity he was so chagrined and embarrassed by his servitude, by his utter poverty, by his ignorance. He found nothing attractive in himself or in his life. He ran to the top of a hill one sunset and raised his fist to the heavens and cursed God. The man lived to be eighty-two and he never forgot what to him was a moment of supreme blasphemy. And he felt, personally, all his life, that he was laboring under a curse for this blasphemy. He would have seven children, but his son Søren Kierkegaard, would recount throughout his short life – he only lived to be in his early forties – that he seemed to have been born with a supreme melancholia and having learned from his father the circumstances which I’ve related, he felt that God had singled him out to bear the curse. And so, from childhood, this frail boy, physically unable to carry himself with other youngsters, discovering that he had but one attribute that distinguished him. His insightful mind, his incredible intelligence.

And all of that intelligence came to bear upon the problem which could be phrased: Is there such a thing as a divine curse on man? And if there is, what do you do to expiate it? What in the world can you do to free yourself from this condition?

There have been numerous studies on Kierkegaard. One of the most recent, published by the University of California Press just a year or two ago, called Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard by Mark Taylor. He writes, “Since Kierkegaard believes the leveling that dissipates individual selfhood ‘can be halted only if the individual in individual separateness gains the intrepidity of religiousness,’ he insists that ‘rescue comes only through the essentiality of the religious in the single individual.’ ”

So Kierkegaard will discover that there is no one else who can do it for you and there is especially no doctrine that can do it for you. And there is no such thing as salvation by an age, he writes in a small booklet of his, The Present Age, he says,

“A revolutionary age is an age of action; ours is an age of advertisement and publicity. Nothing ever happens but there is immediate publicity everywhere. In the present age a rebellion is, of all things, the most unthinkable. Such an expression of strength would seem ridiculous to the calculating intelligence of our times. On the other hand a political virtuoso might bring off a feat almost as remarkable. He might write a manifesto suggesting a general assembly at which people should decide upon a rebellion, and it would be so carefully worded that even the censor would let it pass. At the meeting itself he would be able to create the impression that his audience had rebelled, after which they would all go quietly home – having spent a very pleasant evening.”

He’s referring to the Communist Manifesto. That the qualities of action when transposed to man’s mind lead man astray very very quickly. He becomes convinced, and in his enthusiasm convinces everyone else, that we have agreed upon the idea. Therefore it must be real. And he found as the favorite dragon to attack the great German idealist philosopher Hegel. And for Kierkegaard, as he grew and lived and experienced, Hegel came to personify for him everything that is wrong with philosophy. He will write many times that if Hegel had only prefaced his books by saying this is a ‘what if’ situation, this is an exploration in thought, he would have been the most brilliant thinker of all time. But the problem was that he was deadly serious about having come to a conclusive universal absolute philosophical system which would ever after haunt man.

One is reminded of the story of the invention of writing which Socrates gives in Plato’s dialogue the Phaedrus. Telling young Phaedrus the beautiful rhetorician who prides himself on words and especially written words and he gives the myth of the invention of writing done for the ancient Egyptian pharaoh by the magus Thoth and in his pride at having invented writing claims that men will now be able to educate themselves to all things. And in Socrates words, Pharaoh castigates Thoth for having led man astray infinitely. For he says, “they will consider that wisdom having been written down and stored somewhere they can get it at any time and will not apply themselves in their own lives to achieve an understanding of that wisdom.”

And Kierkegaard will go even further. He will say, Hegel has led me astray by assuming that because an absolute philosophic system exists therefore all we need do is master this computerized phone book of dialectical truths consult it whenever we wish. But Kierkegaard goes even further. He makes the stress that man must live his life, not think about it. And that by baiting himself to believe that having thought it through that he has in fact done something. When all he has done is lure himself away from the capacity for direct action, from existential participation in reality. So that he will look upon Hegel’s philosophy as a source of infinite sorrow. And he considered himself to be a sort of Socratic midwife who was to attend a spiritual rebirth of man.

He was very handsome when he was younger, flaming hair and the romantic style, wealthy. The father had amassed an enormous amount of wealth almost Kierkegaard says as if to make the curse more poignant. The father had owned five houses that miraculously escaped the British bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807 in the Napoleonic War era. He’d invested the profits from all of his real estate and gilt-edged securities that survived the great 1813 bankruptcy that plagued Europe at that time.

As if to prepare the way, Kierkegaard says, so that there was no excuse for him not to succeed in life and there was no way that he could miss that. The reason he could not succeed in life he could not join other men was that he was consumed with an inner anxiety that was unrelenting. His schooling progressed. He entered the universities. He passed through the system. His thesis was on Socratic irony, the ironic sense of sensing that truth as a background forever eludes one who manipulates the forms of discourse. That there is no way for the philosophy which manipulates form to penetrate through to its own conditional context. And he will say in his work that it seems a curse upon the philosophic mind to always desire what it cannot attain: a concept of the nothing beyond thought. That thought is always straining to attain its own axiomatic origins. And yet Kierkegaard will assure us, throughout all of his writings, that God creates only out of nothing and before he creates anything anew he reduces it to nothing. And thus man is pronged on a paradox of reality. And the more he spins with his mind, some cocoon to bridge the prongs of that paradox, the more he transforms himself from a spiritual being into an animal. And that this progressive debasing of man had reached an apotheosis in his time with the philosophy of Hegel.

He attempted to try to escape his condition, his life, as many do. He says he he led a debauched life. Not very debauched according to today’s standards. He ingratiated himself with a family whose young daughter he fell in love with. Her name was Olsen, Regine Olsen, and she would become for him a figure much like Beatrice became for Dante the embodiment, the enfigurement, in a feminine personality, a feminine form, an ideal of human life, an attainable other person through which one could achieve happiness, could affect a marriage. And he became engaged and as soon as the engagement was announced and everything seemed to be moving along, Kierkegaard was consumed by his sense of dread. That he was transgressing. That what had been laid upon him was a mission made necessary by the blasphemy of his father. And that there was no room in this universe for a happy Søren Kierkegaard. That he would have to use his mind, like a knight uses his sword. He would have to become a sword-wielding mental knight of faith to find his way through this morass in which he found himself.

He was unable to kindly break away from Regine Olsen. She was but seventeen, about ten years younger than he, so he attempted to make himself look frivolous and foolish in her eyes and this only exacerbated his own inner sense of anxiety until finally he withdrew himself from Copenhagen and went to Berlin. He went to Berlin where the inheritors of Hegel were holding forth at the University of Berlin. At this time it was Schelling. He found the lectures insipid. He stayed for six months and while he was there he found a way out of his impasse, at least temporarily.

He poured himself out onto paper; he wrote books. And the first book that he wrote was a gigantic two volume work called, Either/Or. And Kierkegaard had an enormous poetic sense of writing and composition. He was a talented writer. He came from the same generation, the same part of the country, that Hans Christian Andersen came from. He could tell a beautiful story. He’s entertaining to read. He’s not dry at all. Kierkegaard’s sense of irony and play are devastating. He takes humor to the level that Aristophanes worked with, or Cervantes. And in Either/Or, each volume presents a view of life. The Either presents an esthetic view of life that life is meant to be enjoyed and therefore we are obligated to enjoy it, to use our capacities to increase our sense of pleasure. The Or is the ethical quality of life, that life has a structure. It has a serious nature. One must learn this structure and integrate one’s nature into this meaningfulness.

And so Either/Or was in his hands as a manuscript when he came back to Copenhagen. He had intended to stay a year and a half in Berlin but he came back after six months. The qualities of the German university were just anathema to Kierkegaard. They had no sense of humor. They had no sense of humanity. And what was worse they wanted to inculcate in you the same drab universal characteristics. He once described Hegel’s philosophy as a suction moving through the universe sucking up every speck of dust that could preserve its individuality outside of the machine.

When he came back to Copenhagen, and caught the eye of Regine Olsen, Kierkegaard simply shook his head and refused to say a word to her. She began at that time to keep company with one of the very famous German Romantic writers of the age Friedrich Schlegel – an ancestor of a friend of mine who is eighty-four and lives in Baltimore. And eventually, in 1847, some seven to eight years later, she would marry Friedrich Schlegel and they would leave the continent and she would go off to the West Indies and spend the rest of her life there.

But for Kierkegaard what was important to him was to publish with his own money the Either/Or. His books almost never sold. And when the publication came out he immediately after having written a big book, wrote a small book to go along with it. One of the characteristics of Kierkegaard was his innate sense of balance that when one does something very large over here one has to compensate for it and do something very important and meaningful here. And so he wrote in a matter of weeks a very powerful little volume. It bears a title, Fear and Trembling. Very few people pick it up. When I was in university twenty-five years ago, it used to have an Edward Gorey cover on it that made you want to just put it down and walk slovenly away, and get a beer somewhere.

But Fear and Trembling is lively. In fact Kierkegaard did not append his own name. He very often used pseudonyms and they were all meaningfully made up names. The pseudonym for Fear and Trembling is Johannes de Silentio, John of Silence, and it’s subtitled A Dialectical Lyric – he’s already got Hegel in mind. One of the great recent books on Kierkegaard is, Kierkegaard’s Relation to Hegel, published by Princeton University Press and it’s a very tremendous volume. We don’t have time to go in in that depth in this lecture but these studies exist. So, “A Dialectical Lyric” but the sense of humor does not stop there. He has a preface. In fact he has a preface. He has a prelude. He has a panegyric. He has a number of little introductions before he even gets to the actual text of the book, which is in fact a series of three problems, all related to the question of Abraham and Isaac, Abraham sacrificing his son.

In the preface give you just a few lines, Johannes de Silentio writes, “Not merely in the realm of commerce but in the world of ideas as well our age is organizing a regular clearance sale. Everything is to be had at such a bargain that it is questionable whether in the end there is anybody who will want to bid. Every speculative price-fixer who conscientiously directs attention to the significant march of modern philosophy, every Privatdocent, tutor, and student, every crofter and cottar in philosophy, is not content with doubting everything but goes further.” And he goes on in this vein.

Then in the Prelude he comes a little closer to his theme after having disparaged the whole notion of philosophy in his time and of ideas being on clearance sale tables a hawking. In the prelude he begins:

“Once upon a time there was a man who as a child had heard the beautiful story about how God tempted Abraham, and how he endured temptation, kept the faith, and a second time received again a son contrary to expectation. When the child became older he read the same story with even greater admiration, for life had separated what was united in the pious simplicity of the child. The older he became, the more frequently his mind reverted to that story…” And the– the Prelude continues in that way.

Then in the third preparatory section, A Panegyric upon Abraham, Kierkegaard becomes a little closer to the bone and writes. “If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath all – what then would life be but despair? If such were the case, if there were no sacred bond which united mankind, if one generation arose after another like the leafage in a forest, if the one generation replaced the other like the song of birds in the forest, if the human race passed through the world as the ship going through the sea, like the wind through the desert, a thoughtless and fruitless activity, if an eternal oblivion were always lurking hungrily for its prey and there was no power strong enough to wrest it from its maw – how empty then and comfortless life would be!”

Then he comes to a section called Problemata. He’s now gone through, a Preface, a Prelude, a Panegyric, and now he comes to the Problemata in this book Fear and Trembling. He writes, “An old proverb fetched from the outward and visible world says: ‘Only the man that works gets the bread.’ Strangely enough this proverb does not apply in that world to which it expressly belongs. For the outward world is subjected to the law of imperfection, and again and again the experience is repeated that he too who does not work gets the bread, and that he who sleeps gets it more abundantly [even] than the man who works. In the outward world everything is made payable to the bearer, this world is in bondage to the law of indifference, and to him who has the ring, the spirit of the ring is obedient, whether he be a Noureddin or Aladdin, and he who has the world’s treasure, has it, however he got it.”

Finally he gets to the first problem and he asks the question, in this kind of a world in this kind of a situation, given the ideas afloat in our speculative background, is there such a thing? And he uses philosophical terms here. “Is there such a thing as a teleological suspension of the ethical?” Is there a condition in this universe for man, where all the rules are suspended and he has total freedom? What would that condition be like? What would happen? What is there to know about man if that is possible? He writes,

“The ethical as such is the universal, and as the universal it applies to everyone, which may be expressed from another point of view by saying that it applies every instant. It reposes immanently in itself, it has nothing without itself which is its telos, but is itself telos for everything outside it, and when this has been incorporated by the ethical it can go no further. Conceived immediately as physical and psychical, the particular individual is the individual who [had] his telos in the universal, and his ethical task is to express himself constantly in it, to abolish his particularity in order to become the universal.”

And of course this problem is directly related to Hegel’s all encompassing German idealistic absolute system.

Then he comes in the first problem to the notion that the story of Abraham actually contains for us a teleological suspension of the ethical. He writes, “Abraham [either] was a murderer [incapacity], or [that] we are confronted by a paradox which is higher than all mediation” – and all mediation. The story of Abraham is the story of an individual who became, temporarily, higher than the universal. This is the paradox which does not permit mediation. It is just as inexplicable how he got into it as it is inexplicable how he remained in it. If such is not the position of Abraham, then he is not even a tragic hero but a murderer. To want to continue to call him the father of faith. To talk of this to people who do not concern themselves with anything but words is thoughtless. A man can become a tragic hero by his own powers but not a knight of faith. When a man enters upon the way in a certain sense the hard way of the tragic hero many will be able to give him counsel to him who follows the narrow way of faith. No one can give him counsel and no one can understand him. Faith is a miracle and yet man is excluded from it. And for that in which all human life is unified in passion and faith is definitely a passion.

So Kierkegaard comes to Fear and Trembling by presenting three problems associated with the position of man as Abraham, finding himself temporarily, as an individual in possession of having to teach the universal. Or as Kierkegaard would say more subtly that there is only through the individual a chance for the expressed manifestation of understanding of consciousness to come into a growth to come into a development and that when man finds himself by circumstance raised above the universal, he must then courageously accept that responsibility and let that new teaching, that new creativeness, express itself through him. He must volunteer himself. And he will say then that this is in fact something that the age of revolution never understood never fully appreciated always tried to taken out in large enterprises: Napoleon’s Empire; the New World; Hegel’s system of philosophy; the tremendous development of Goethe’s culture and civilization. Always these large structures. And Kierkegaard says the battle of reality is not fought on any of those fields. It is fought in one place only and that is the single individual alone. And someone has to go first. And he says over and over again in his journals, I fear that I am the one who has to step forward. And so he writes, in The Present Age, castigating these system thinkers.

“But these are only the excuses of reflection and the real position in reflection remains unchanged, for it is only altered within reflection. Even if a certain injustice is done to the present age when it is compared to a complete and closed period, such a qualification is only a reflective qualification; and then, in [turn], its uncertainty is filled with hope. A passionate tumultuous age will overthrow everything, pull everything down; but a revolutionary age, that is at the same time reflective and passionless, transforms that expression of strength into a feat of [dialectical reasoning]: it leaves everything standing but cunningly empties it of significance.”

He will say that the problem of the modern age is that we are being duped progressively, being duped by empire expectations, by religious systems, by philosophical systems, which are leaching out significance and value exactly where it needs to be – in the individual, who actually does exist.

“Instead of culminating in a rebellion it reduces the inward reality of all relationships to a reflective tension which leaves everything standing but makes the whole of life ambiguous: so that everything continues to exist factually [while] by a dialectical deceit… it supplies a secret interpretation – [that all this doesn’t really exist].” And so the criticism which Kierkegaard begins to develop for himself begins to penetrate further and further into his life.

He had written Either/Or in 1843 and Fear and Trembling very soon after. The next year found him producing a small work which is called Philosophic Fragments, or a Fragment of Philosophy. In other words, there is– there is no system possible; we have only fragments, philosophic fragments. If there is an integration of these fragments that can only happen because some one, some person steps into those fragments with their life, with their intelligence, with their experience and makes of those fragments clues for a life really lived an existential line of development that actually happens because someone is living that life. So he says the most that anyone can do, given even the most brilliant mind of the age, is to present the best philosophical fragments that are possible and hand them over. These are yours if you will live that life. No one can live it for you. No one can tell you how to live it. There is no system that really works. There is no philosophy that’s really true. There’s no logic that actually, without flaws, holds everything together. Only you in the dreadful, anxious quality of your wondering are able to take this.

And so, he writes in here under chapter three, entitled The Absolute Paradox. Kierkegaard gives it in this way. He again talks about Socrates. He’s always going back to Socrates. Kierkegaard felt that he was the Socrates of– of his time:

“In spite of the fact that Socrates studied with all diligence to acquire a knowledge of human nature and to understand himself, in spite of the fame accorded him through the centuries as one who beyond all other men had an insight into the human heart, he has himself admitted that the reason for his shrinking from reflection upon the nature of such beings as gods and goddesses, Pegasuses and Gorgons, was that he, the life-long student of human nature, had not yet been able to make up his mind whether he was a stranger monster than Typhon, or a creature of a gentler and simpler sort, partaking of something divine.”

This incidentally is found in one of the myths in the Phaedrus. We’re using the Phaedrus in our Saturday class at Whirling Rainbow and the Phaedrus is full of poignant myths which Socrates is giving under a huge plane tree along by the Ilissus River.

Kierkegaard goes on, “This seems to be a paradox.” What is the paradox? The paradox is that Socrates does not know whether he himself is really the most monstrous form. Is man the most monstrous form seemingly disguised as symmetry? Seemingly disguised as reasonable? Or is there something divine that actually manifests in man? You would like to know. But the fact that he could go either way is a paradox.

Kierkegaard says, “This seems to be a paradox. However, one should not think slightingly of the paradoxical; for the paradox is the source of the thinker’s passion,”

Don’t be in a hurry to resolve things. Let that paradox seethe. Let it bubble.

“...is the source of the thinker’s passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity. But the highest pitch of every passion is always to will its own downfall…” At the apex of its development it wishes its own demise. “...the highest pitch of every passion is always to will its own downfall; and so it is also the supreme passion of Reason to seek a collision, [somewhere in this universe to encounter forcefully to seek a collision] though this collision must in one way or another prove its undoing. The supreme paradox of all thought is the attempt to discover something that thought cannot think.”

And so in the Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard begins to broach these tremendous quandaries. And in broaching these quandaries they do not just simply apply to Hegel, but they apply to any systematic logical system, any form of integration spread over a thinking pattern. It applies to governments religions philosophies any collective structure that man has ever made or ever will make. Kierkegaard having written the small book then turned and wrote A Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophic Fragments – about six hundred pages – saying that he had– he had raised issues that he hadn’t really thought about before. In fact, he says, it seems as if very few people have thought about this in recent centuries he says,

“In fact, in our time it seems as if we have all been buffaloed. We have all been led astray to thinking that there were tremendous minds or groups of minds who refined all of life had in fact produced a sophisticated civilization where all we had to do was just live” – just enjoy it just go along and make money. He says, “But in fact I’m beginning to discover that none of this is true. There are no systems that work. There are no religions that work anymore. There are no philosophies that are able to actually hand us an ability to live anymore. There are no governments that really look after man as an individual.”

And so in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard begins to disturb the age. He was publishing all of these works by himself. He sold the big house that he was living in and he moved into a two room flat. He records in his diary that he’s glad that he’s in very simple circumstances, just two rooms now, but that it’s a little uncomfortable because the reflected sunlight off downtown buildings in Copenhagen seemed to almost blind him in the afternoons and he can’t write.

He becomes more frail. He takes to wearing a hat. His features become a little more gaunt. People are drawn to him. He seems almost like a magical being. He’s a great raconteur in conversation, scintillating to talk to. But he will go from a great story that he has just delivered, into a brooding silence and walk off and maybe not be seen for several weeks. Then he’ll surface again and he’ll seem to be affable for a few hours and just the most wonderful person. Then he’ll be gone again. Book after book will come out and he’ll publish his own works. Almost none of them will sell. Almost all of them were written with pseudonyms and in fact Kierkegaard will become more and more interested almost in emptying out his entire fortune in publishing his own works.

When he finally did die in 1855, at the age of 42, he had just spent the last of his fortune publishing the last issue of a periodical called The Moment – The Moment. It ran for ten issues and he supplied all of the writings under various pseudonyms. And so he died broke having left this mountain of manuscripts and books. The Collected Works of Kierkegaard run to about 27 volumes in the Princeton edition. The Journals are where Kierkegaard actually exists and at the end of the journal, Kierkegaard records something about himself which I think is worth closing out before we have our refreshment and then we’ll come back and have some more of him.

He writes, “One must take the world as it is.” This is a secret. “One must take the world as it is or: life is what one makes it, though of course understood to mean: one must take the world as it is, that is the content of the life of all these millions of sample-men and of life. Existence does not really notice the existence of all these millions, where existence is concerned the same thing happens to the sample-man as to the stickleback [fish] in relation to the net which is set to catch bigger fish, the net is certainly there (and existence is also a net) in order to catch fish – but the sticklebacks have free passage. The fact that sample-men become masses does not help, they do not in consequence weigh any more: one sample-man and a million touch existence,” – Just one in one million ever touch existence – “...which produces them lavishly out of a horn of plenty.”

“But as soon as there is a man with originality [and he] comes along, and consequently does not say: one must take the world as it is...” He does not say this. “...but saying: whatever the world may be, I remain true to my own originality, which I do not intend to change according to the good pleasure of the world; the moment that word is heard, there is as it were a transformation in the whole of existence, as it actually happens in fairy stories – when the word is said the magic castle, which has been under a spell for a hundred years, opens again and everything comes to life: again in the same way existence becomes all eyes.” And the man begins to see that it isn’t Delusion, that isn’t all might actually exists. “...The Angels grow busy, they look about with curiosity to see what is going to happen, for what that is really interests them. On the other side: dark and sinister demons who have just sat idle for a long while gnawing their fingers – jump up, and stretch their limbs: ‘this is something for us’ they say, for they have waited long for something of the kind, for the sample-men give them nothing to do, no more than the angels have anything to do with such men.”

So one man touching reality produces a transformation in existence. All of a sudden there is good and evil, there are angels and demons, there’s a lot of work to do, and man becomes surprised that it isn’t boring at all.

Well let’s take a break and we’ll come back.

For those who are just coming tonight, if it’s just a single lecture you’re losing some of the comparative flavor which I just assume is ongoing. We had just done thirteen weeks, thirteen lectures on The Age of Revolution on the larger than life stupendous figures that just baffled the world. Napoleon said, “I have awakened all ambition, I have rewarded all merit, and I have enlarged the boundaries of human glory,” as he was stepping, straddling Europe. And he meant it was an age that everyone was just baffled by the geniuses, the larger than life character who would take everything over. And so Kierkegaard is a reaction against that. He’s someone who’s saying wait a minute. The show is not over. We’re not going to buy this bill of goods. We’re not customers for life. It is our life, we’re going to live this life in ways which are appropriate to us. And it doesn’t matter what they say or what has obtained.

This is a sample. Since Kierkegaard singled out Hegel, I have singled out then a selection for you a paragraph to give you the kind of very subtle philosophizing that Hegel was capable of as a first-rate mind. No doubt about it. But Kierkegaard’s critique is also first-rate and still obtains today. It’s still what to say. When they gave the Nobel Prize to Juan Ramon Jiménez in the early 50s. He said if they give you ruled paper write the other way. Don’t just assume that they know what’s good for you. They don’t. It may turn out that you in your own life coincide with others later on but you’ve got to live your own life first. That’s the first.

“Otherwise, just assuming that what they’re giving you to be right or appropriate obscures who you are to your own self. But it’s not even just a simple situation because they come in this kind of a form too. They come with the wings unfurled and all kinds of fireworks and you think, ‘My God, who could answer that?’ The faithful subject attempts to escape the dissolute world of culture by fleeing to the transcendent realm of perfection. Undisturbed by antagonism and discord, this strategy ultimately fails to resolve the existential dilemma of a strange spirit and actually constitutes a further dimension of self-alienation. The ostensibly wholly other sphere in which fulfillment is believed to be possible remains inseparably bound to and conditioned by the fragmented world of lacerated consciousness. As a matter of fact, the believer’s heaven is nothing more than an imaginative projection created by a dialectical inversion of the world within which self-alienated spirit suffers.”

Hegel writes in, The Phenomenology of the Spirit, the world of this spirit disintegrates into two. “The first is the world of reality or of its self-alienation but the other is that which spirit rising above the first constructs for itself in the ether of pure consciousness. The second world standing in opposition to estrangement is for that very reason not free from it, on the contrary it is really only the other form of that estrangement which consists precisely in being conscious of the two different worlds and which embraces them both.”

This is what we call in the West, highfalutin’, we need a diagram. If we present a form, we say, all right, we have a form that exists. We can say that this is a unified form. It’s a shape which we recognize symbolically or in a signal level or just as a demonstrative figure. But there’s a background which permits that form to be seen. The background and the form exist together in a complementary relationship. You can’t have the form without the background and the background is not apparently a background until the form is there to present it. But what is precarious is that the human mind pays attention to and develops its whole mental structuring not on the form or the background but on a relationality between the two. And it’s this relationality, this bridging between the form, and in the context out of which forms come, that sets up the web of ideas. And if you organize those webs of ideas into nice complicated labyrinthine structures that’s a net. And the first person is going to get caught in that is yourself. And what you can’t do when you’re in that relationality you can’t relate to the form or the background, but you begin doubting whether they exist or not and whether there’s only relationality. And so man, progressively jails himself in his mind.

And this is what Kierkegaard is saying I won’t do. He’s saying that on the first level he can’t do it. He’s saying I’m constitutionally unable to to buy it. They can label it whatever they want. They can reduce the price. I can’t buy that idea. I can’t buy that worldview. There’s something inside me that’s just rushing me, pell mell through life, in a way in which I can’t ignore the fact that none of these labyrinthine web-like structures are helping me get rid of the sore I have in my own life, my own person. And the only place that there can be any healing or integration is in that life somewhere, the actual life – not in any forms, not in any backgrounds no matter how transcendental they are, and certainly not in any mental relationality that somebody could tell me about. None of that is important because what’s important is that my life is right now confused and I’m trying to find some way to live that life. So in the epilogue in Fear and Trembling, he gives us a little vignette.

He says, “One time in Holland when the market was rather dull for spices the merchants had several cargoes dumped into the sea to peg up prices. This was a pardonable, perhaps a necessary device for deluding people. Is it something like that we need now in the world of spirit? Are we so thoroughly convinced that we have attained the highest point that there is nothing left for us but to make ourselves believe piously that we have not got so far – just for the sake of having something left to occupy our time? Is it such a self-deception the present generation has need of, does it need to be trained to virtuosity in self-deception, or is it not rather sufficiently perfected already in the art of deceiving itself? Or rather is not the thing most needed an honest seriousness which dauntlessly and incorruptibly points to the tasks, an honest seriousness which lovingly watches over the tasks, which does not frighten men into being over hasty in getting the highest tasks accomplished, but keeps the tasks young and beautiful and charming to look upon and yet difficult withal and appealing to noble minds. For the enthusiasm of noble natures is aroused only by difficulties.:

And so Kierkegaard begins to modify what he presented in Either/Or. He says there’s not just a contest between the esthetic life and the ethical life but there’s a third life. There’s the religious life – there’s the religious life. And so he wrote a great work called Stages on Life’s Way. The original passages, a hundred and fifty years ago. That finally a human being matures and sees that all these polarities that he’s been setting up for himself are also delusive techniques that something inside him wants to keep this game going on, does not want you to solve it. So then he realizes that the concept of dread, of anxiety – which is different from fear. You fear a tiger. You can fear something objective but anxiety is ambiguous. It doesn’t have an object. Why, he says. Perhaps it’s because the feeling of dread comes from intuiting that it is our own capacity that’s leading us down this delusive path and it doesn’t want to be objectified into any place, person, thing, focus that can be seen and understood. And so it keeps itself beautifully described as ambiguous, anxious feelings – free floating anxiety.

In his journals Kierkegaard says I seem to have been chosen by my life to deal with this problem, that this seems to be why I am here. And, in his diary, as he writes, he deprecates the philosophers who have led people astray and he finally comes to a statement in 1842, he’s twenty-nine years old. And in his diary he writes,

“The nature of original sin has often been considered, and yet the principal category has been missing – [because the principal category] is dread, that is what really determines it; for dread is a desire for what one fears,” – that secretly, after all it’s a desire for what one fears – “...a sympathetic antipathy; dread is an alien power which takes hold of the individual, and yet one cannot extricate oneself from it, does not wish to, because one is afraid, but what one fears [also] attracts one. Dread renders the individual powerless, and the first sin always happens in a moment of weakness; it therefore lacks any apparent accountableness, but that want is the real snare.”

So, Kierkegaard begins centering in, in the early 1840s, even before his first publications, on the fact that the culprit if there is a culprit is our own self which gets bound up in the short circuit of secretly wanting what it fears and then fears to make it clear what it wants. And this begins this cycle. And so we begin then manipulating the world to distract ourselves so we don’t have to think about this situation anything but this situation. We can think about anything, especially objective situations, facts, persons, things in the world, that really satisfy we can really get bound up in them. We want this or that other person for our own. We want this kind of wealth, this kind of job. We need this situation. All of these then become manipulated and in fact we become very clever. We not only manipulate them but we preempt all of the situations by organizing a whole life pattern to try and ensure that we’re going to get these distractions and keep them coming. And through this habitual way we delude ourselves to thinking that we have done something real.

But our own inner self knows that we haven’t done a thing. Nothing has happened. And so the dread continues and becomes obtrusive and we seek to objectify it as if it must be something else other than us. Definitely an other – an alienation. And he says this is just about where Hegel’s philosophy seems to come in and provide beautiful rationales of how we get alienated from ourselves. And he says none of it is true. None of it ever happens. So he says we have to get rid of at least temporarily of all the systems that there are. We have to junk the whole world if necessary, all the traditions. What’s really valuable there will re-occur – it’ll all come back if it’s really valuable. And Kierkegaard begins then to realize that the ultimate form of systematizing that has come down to his own time is not Hegel’s philosophy after all. But the largest form of systematic mentality structure building for him is what he calls the church. That it’s the church that has made the largest structure, one that even dwarfs the philosophic universalism of Hegel and his individuals. And so he writes in 1848 the year of many revolutions in Europe in his journal.

“Fundamentally,” he says, “a reformation which did away with the Bible would now be just as valid as Luther’s doing away with the Pope. All that about the Bible has developed a religion of learning and law, to a point of mere distraction. A little of that knowledge has gradually percolated to the simplest classes so that now no one any longer even reads the Bible humanely. As a result it does immeasurable harm; where life is concerned its existence is a fortification of excuses and escapes; for there is always someone and something which has been looked into, and it seems as though one had first of all to have the doctrine in some perfect form before one could even begin again to live – that is to say, [that] one never really begins [to live].”

We get caught into this referential consulting otherness and we feel that if we could just get it perfect once if we could just get the story straight once then we’d be okay. And then we could go ahead with confidence and live. But we never do; we never get it straight. And so we’re always deferring the real existential life that is really ours to live and it doesn’t get lived. And the inner dread builds just so.

So, later on, Kierkegaard will write, in 1850, one of the most powerful passages in his journals. He gives it a little subtitle. He interrupts the flow of the journal and he says, “On diabolic possession in modern times.” He says, “In contradistinction to the Middle Ages and those periods with all their discussion of possession, of particular men giving themselves to evil, I should like to write a book: …and show how mankind en masse gives itself up to evil, how nowadays it happens en masse. That is why people flock together, in order that natural and animal hysteria should get hold of them, in order to feel themselves stimulated, inflamed… The scenes on the Blocksberg are the” – that’s a section of Copenhagen – “...are the absolute pedants to this demoniacal pleasure, where the pleasure consists in losing oneself in order to be volatilized into a higher potency, where being outside oneself one hardly knows what one is doing or saying, or who or what is speaking through one, while the blood courses faster, the eyes are bright and staring, the passions seethe. O, depths of confusion, the seriousness of life. The love of life is forgotten.”

And so, Kierkegaard begins to paint a picture, portray a picture, but it becomes even more poignant. Not only is there this falsity which exists in all of its ramifications which you can by now begin to intuit and sort out but that the cures to that also are false. And he gives an example.

Hhe says, right now in Copenhagen, “Who in modern times has been used so much by parsons and professors” – in their lectures and sermons – “as Blaise Pascal?” The great French writer Pascal. “His ideas are appropriated – but Pascal’s asceticism and his hair-shirt” – his monastic hair-shirt – “are omitted; or else they are explained away; they were just part of his day; they no longer concern us. Brilliant!” says Kierkegaard, “Pascal was original in every other respect – only not in this. But was asceticism really so general in his day…” He lived in the 1600s. “...or had it not been done away with long ago, so that it was for Pascal to reassert its rights in face of the whole age? Everywhere it is the same; everywhere that infamous and disgusting cannibalism whereby men eat the ideas, the opinions, the expressions, the moods of the dead – but as for their lives, as for the characters of those people; no thank you, they will have none of that.”

So we learn nothing, except how to fortify the ideational thrown nets of delusion. Where is the cure? Kierkegaard says, it exists only in one place – in the single solitary individual who refuses to be bilked by it all. Who decides that his life is really his and that even with its problems he will take it?

And so Kierkegaard sets the tone for the roots of the twentieth century. He turns away from every conceivable system and we come next week to a thinker who took it another step further Friedrich Nietzsche and the twentieth century begins to loom more and more like one of those archetypal ages which good and evil really do come into play, face to face, on the field of the only real battlefield there ever is a real human being who actually exists as an individual.

Well, we’ll see Nietzsche next week. Thanks for coming.