Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

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:
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July 5th, 1984. This is the beginning of a new series of lectures by Roger Ware, which are called prelude to the 20th century. Tonight's lectures on Kirky guard who lived 18, 13, 18 55 either. Or the sickness entered that purity of heart, the early warning signs of the century of consciousness and anxiety.
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We now come by force of circumstance and ever stability 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 forgone history of ideas, and we have forgotten 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 and our own selectivity and use for our own lives and whatever way we wish to do so. It's appropriate that we begin the roots of the 20th century with Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher who lived about 150 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 sick, freed 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.
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Character guards, father Michael Patterson, Kierkegaard was a helper for a tenant farmer in Denmark, that part of Denmark, but used to be called Gitlind. He was poor 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 the hill, one sunset and raised his fist to the heavens and curse God, the man lived to be 82 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 Soren Kierkegaard would recount throughout his short life. He only looked 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 have related, he felt that God had singled him out to bear the curse.
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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. He has 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 character Garmin. 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 [inaudible] of religiousness. He insists that rescue comes only through the sensuality of the religious in a single individual.
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So Kierkegaard will discover that there is no one else who can do it for you. And there was a specially 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 expression of strength would seem ridiculous to the calculating intelligence of our times. On the other hand, apolitical virtue cell might bring off a feet 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 sensor would let it pass at the meeting itself.
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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 transpose to man's mind, lead magistrate very, very quickly, he becomes convinced. And then 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, Hagle, and for Kierkegaard, as he grew and lived and experienced Hagle came to personify for him, everything that is wrong with philosophy, he will write many times that of Hagle had only prefaced his books by saying, this is a, what if situation? This is an exploration and thought he would have been the most brilliant thinker of all time.
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But the problem was that he was deadly serious about having come to a conclusive universal, absolute philosophy, philosophical system, which whatever after haunt man, one is reminded of the story of the invention of writing, which Socrates gives. And Plato's dialogue, the fakers telling young, Phaedra's 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 thoughts and images pride at having invented writing claims that men will now be able to educate themselves. I do all things in Socrates' words, Pharaoh castigates thoughts we're having led magistrate 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, Hey, go his lead ministry by assuming that because an absolute philosophic system exists, therefore, all we need to do is master this computerized phone book of dialectical truth consulted whenever we wish, but Kirky guard goes even further.
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It makes the stress that man must live his life. Now I think about, and that by bathing 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, Steve, for direct action from existential purchases as a patient in reality. So that, and he will look upon Hegel's philosophy as a source of infinite, sorry. And he considered himself to be a sort of Socratic midwife who was to attend a spiritual rebirth of bam. He was very handsome when he was younger flaming hair and the romantic style.
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The father had amassed an enormous amount of wealth. Almost Kierkegaard says as if to make the hearse more appointments. Father had owned five houses that miraculously escaped the British bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807 in the Napoleonic war era. He had invested the profits from all of his real estate and Gilt edge securities that survived the great 1813 bankruptcy that, uh, plagued Europe at that time as if to prepare the way haircut guard 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.
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His schooling progressed. He entered the universities. He passed through the system. His thesis was on Socratic irony. They 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 obtain a concept of the nothing beyond thought. The thought is always straining to obtain its own axiomatic origins. And yet Kierkegaard will assure us throughout all of his writings that God creates only out of nothing.
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And before he creates anything new, he reduces it to nothing. And thus man is prom 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 a philosophy, oh, here you go. He attempted to try to escape. He has conditioned his life as many do. He says he, he led a debox life. No, 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 Ray, Jean Olson. And she would become for him a figure much like beer treats you became for Dante. The embodiment, the inferior meant in a feminine personality, a feminine form, an ideal of human life and attainable other person through which one could achieve happiness could affect a marriage.
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And he became engaged. And as soon as the engagement was announced and everything seemed to be moving along, character guard was consumed by his sense of dread that he was transgressing. Okay. 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, Bray happy Soren 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 Ray Jean Olson. She was about 17, about 10 years younger than he.
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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 Hagle were holding forth at the university of Berlin. At this time, it was Shelly. He found the lectures in slippers. 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.
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He's not dry at all. Kierkegaard sense of irony and play are devastating. Takes Kuma to the level that Aristophanes's worked with or serve on days. And in either or each volume presents a view of life. They either presents an aesthetic 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. VR 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 say 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 have no sense of humanity. And what was worse. They wanted to inculcate in you the same drab universal characteristics. He wants described Hegel's philosophy as a suction, moving through the universe, sucking yup. Every speck of dust that could preserve its individuality outside of the machine.
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When it came back to Copenhagen, it caught the eye of raging Olsen. Character guard 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 prediction, an ancestor of a friend of mine who is 84 and lives in Baltimore. And eventually in 1847, some seven to eight years later, she would marry Frederick and they would leave the car meant. And she would go off to the west end days 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.
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And when
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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 character guard was his innate sense of balance that when one does something very large over here, one has compensate for it and do something very important and meaningful here. And so he wrote in a matter of weeks, okay, very powerful, little volume. It bears a title, fear and trembling. Very few people pick it up. When I was in university 25 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.
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But fear and trembling is lifeline. In fact, karaoke guard did not upend 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 Solento. John of silence, and it's sub entitled a dialectical lyric. He's already got haggling in mind. One of the great recent books on Kierkegaard is character guards relation to Hagle published by Princeton university press. And it's a very tremendous volume. We don't have time to go in and 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.
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In fact, he has a preface. He has a prelude. He has a kind of generic. 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. Yes. Okay. In the preface, give you just a few lines. Johana stays Cilento rights, 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 was anybody who will want to bid every speculative price, fixer who conscientiously directs attention to the significant March of modern philosophy in a very private docent tutor and student, every Croft year and caught here in philosophy is not content with doubling everything but goes further.
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And he goes on in this vein. Then in the prelude, he comes little closer to his thing after having disparaged, the whole notion of philosophy and his time and of ideas being on clearance sale tables of Hawking in the prelude. He begins once upon a time, there was a man who has a child had heard the beautiful story about how God tempted Abraham and how he endured temptation, kept the faith. And the 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 pro the pro you continues in that way. Then in the third prefatory section, a panegyric upon Abraham Kierkegaard becomes a little closer to the bone and writes if there were no eternal consciousness in a man,
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If
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At the foundation of all they're away, only wildly seizing power, which riving 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 leafy Jenna forest, if the one generation replaced the other, like the song of birds in the forest, if the human race pass 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 rest it from its small, how empty then and comfortless life would be.
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Then he comes to a section called problem, Octa, he's now going through a practice pro you attended the, and now it comes to the problem on her. In this book, I'm trembling. He writes an old proverb fetched from the outward invisible 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 does not work, gets the bread and that he who gets, who sleeps, gets it more abundantly even than the man who works in the outward world. Everything has made parable payable to the bearer. This world is in to the law of indifference. And to him who has the ring, the spirit of the ring is obedient. Whether he be a neuro den or a Latin, and he who has the world's treasure has it. However he got it. Finally, she gets to the first problem. And he asked the question in this kind of world in this kind of a situation, given the ideas float in our speculative background, is there such a thing I use this 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?
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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 a universal, it applies to everyone which may be expressed from another point of view, by saying that it applies every instance, it reposes eminently in itself. It has nothing without itself, which is its telos, but is itself tell us 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 tell us in the universal and his ethical task is to express himself constantly in it to abolish as 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.
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He writes Abraham either was a murderer incapacity, or that we are confronted by a paradox, which is higher than all meditation 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 inexplicably, 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. Amen can become the tragic hero by his own powers, but not a night 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.
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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 temporary as an individual in possession of having to teach the universal or his character guard would say more subtly, that there is only through the individual, a chance for the express 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 what 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 take it out in large enterprises. Napoleon's empire, the new world Hegel's system of philosophy, the tremendous development of, uh, Curtis, uh, culture and civilization, always these large structures and Kierkegaard says the battle of reality is not fought on any of those fields. It is brought in one place only, and that is the single individual alone. And someone has to go first.
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And he says over and over again in his journals, I fear that I am the one who has to step. And so he writes in the present age, castigating, these system thinkers, but these are only the excuses of reflection and the real position and reflection remains unchanged for it is only altered within reflection. Even if a certain injustice has 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 it's uncertainty is filled with hope. A passionate tr tumultuous age will overthrow everything, pull everything down. But the revolutionary age that is at the same time, reflective and passion was transforms that expression of strength into a feat of dialectical reasoning. It leaves everything standing, but cunningly empty is that of significance. He will say that the problem of the modern age is that where we're 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.
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And so the criticism which Turkey guard begins to develop for himself begins to penetrate further and further into his life. He had written either or in 1843, 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 lines, 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 live an existential line of development that actually happens because some one is living that life.
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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 was no philosophy. That's really true. There's no logic that actually without laws holds everything together, only you and the dreadful, the 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.
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He again, talks about Socrates. He's always going back to Socrates. Kierkegaard felt that he was the Socrates 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 theme, 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, Hey, the lifelong student of human nature had not yet been able to make up his mind, whether he was a stranger monster than Typhon or creature of a gentler and simpler sort partaking of something divine. This incidentally is found in one of the myths and the faders. We're using the failures in our Saturday class at
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Whirling rainbow. Uh, and
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The failures is Paul poignant myths, which Socrates's giving Andre huge plane tree along by the Alyssa's 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, Simi D seemingly disguised as reasonable. Was there something divine that actually manifests in math if you'd 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 sliding late of the paradoxical for the paradox is the source of the thinkers. Passion. Don't be in a hurry to resolve things, let that paradox seize,
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Let it Bumble. It's
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The source of the thinkers, passion and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling okay, a poultry mediocrity, but the highest pitch of every passion is always true, will its own downfall at the apex of its development. It wishes its own Surmont 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 car and must in one way or another prove it's 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.
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And in broaching these quandaries, they do not just simply apply to Hagle, but they apply to any systematic logical system, any form of integration, spread over a thinking pattern, pattern. It applies to governments, religions, philosophies, any collective structure that man has ever made or ever will. Mate karaoke guard, having written the small book, then turn and wrote a concluding unscientific postscript to the philosophic, fragments about 600 pages saying that, uh, 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 Buffalo, we've all been led astray to thinking that there were tremendous minds or groups of vines 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 were 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 men as an individual. And so in the concluding unscientific postscript character, God begins to disturb
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The age. He was
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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
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He's glad
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That he's in very simple circumstances, just two rooms now, but that was a little uncomfortable because they reflected sunlight off downtown buildings. And Copenhagen seemed to almost blind him in the afternoons and he can't write, he becomes more frail. He takes to wearing how his features become a little more gaunt. People are drawn to him. He seems almost like a magical being. He's a great rock and tour and conversation since lighting 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. And then he'll surface again. And he'll seem to be affable for a few hours and just the most wonderful person.
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Then he'll be gone again. Book
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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.
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And in fact,
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Character guide will become more and more interested almost in emptying out his entire fortune in publishing his own words.
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When he finally did die in
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1855, 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 10 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 in 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 refreshments. 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.
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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 we're 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 way anymore. One sample man and a million touch existence, just one in a million, every 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 say 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 is hurt there is as it were a transformation in the whole of existence, as it actually happens in ferry store. 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 illusion and isn't all mine actually exist. The angels grow busy. They look about with curiosity to see what is going to happen for what that is really interest them.
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On the other side, dark and sinister demons who have just sat idle for a long while, knowing their fingers, jump up and stretch their limbs. This is something for us. They say where 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 and 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 become surprised that it isn't boring at all. Well, let's take a break and we'll come back.
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[inaudible]
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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 13 weeks, 13 lectures on the age of revolution on the larger than life stupendous figures that just baffled the world. Napoleon said, um, 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 it. The geniuses, the larger than life character, who would take everything over.
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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 is our life. We're going to live this life in ways which are appropriate to us. And it doesn't matter what they said or what has obtained. This is a sample it's character guard, singled out haggle. I have singled out then a selection for you, a paragraph to give you the kind of very subtle philosophizing that Hagle was capable of is a first rate mind. No doubt about it. The Kierkegaard critique is also first rate and still obtains today. It's still what to say when they get, I gave that Nobel prize to Juan Ramos, him and Edison in the early fifties. He said, if they give you ruled paper, right? The other way, I don't just assume that they know what's good for you. They don't, it may turn out that you, 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
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Obscures, who you are to your own self,
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But it's not even just a simple situation because they come in this kind of a form too. They come with the wings on furled and all kinds of fireworks. And you think, oh my God, who could answer that? The fateful subject? Yeah. 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 holy 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 believers heaven is nothing more than an imaginative projection created by a dialectical inversion of the world, within which self alienated spirits 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 itself alienation. But the other is that which spirit rising above the first constructs for itself and the ether of pure consciousness. The second world standing in opposition to a strange mint 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 and being conscious of the two different worlds and which embraces them both. This is what we call in the west high pollute.
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We need a diagram. If we present a form, we say, okay, all right, we have a form. It exists.
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We can
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Say that this is a unified form. It's a shape, which we recognize symbolically or a signal level, or just as a demonstrative figure. But there's a background which permits that form to be seen
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The background and
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The form exists together. And a complimentary 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 the relationality between the two. And it's this relationality, this bridge in between the form and 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 labyrinthian structures, that's a net. And the first person's going to get caught in that as 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 Jills himself in his mind, this is what God is saying. I won't do. He's saying that on the first level, he can't do it. You're saying I'm constitutionally unable to,
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To buy it. I can
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Label it, whatever they want, they can reduce the price. I can't buy that idea. I can't buy that worldview. The 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 labyrinthian web black structures are helping me get rid of the soar 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, and certainly not in a 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, okay, 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 pay. I got the prices. This was okay. Pardonable perhaps a necessary device for deluding people.
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Is
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It something like that that we need now in the world of the 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 NIDA, does it need to be trained to virtuosity and self-deception or is it not rather sufficiently perfected already in the art of deceiving itself or rather is not the thing most needed and honest seriousness, which don't was. And incorruptible points to the tasks, an honest seriousness, which lovingly watches over the tasks, which does not frighten men and to being over hasty and getting the highest task accomplished, but keeps the tasks young and beautiful and charming to look upon yet difficult with all and appealing to Nobel minds for the enthusiasm of noble natures is aroused only by difficulties.
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And so Kierkegaard begins to modify what he presented in and either, or he says it, wasn't not just a contest between the aesthetic life and the ethical, but there's a third line. There's the religious life, there's the religious life. And so he wrote a great word called stages on life's way. The original passage is 150 years ago that finally I'm 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, we dissolve it. So then he realizes that the concept of dread of anxiety, which is different from fear, you fear a tiger. You could fear something objective, but anxiety is ambiguous. It doesn't have an object, right? He says, perhaps it's because they 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.
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Character guard 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 to people astray. And he finally comes to a statement in 1842 he's 29 years old. And in his diary, he writes the nature of original sin has often been considered. And yet the principle category has been missing because the principal category is dread. That is what really determines it for a dread as a desire for what one fears that secretly after all, it's a desire for
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What one fears,
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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 accountable menace, but that want is the real snare. So character guard begins centering him in the early 1840s, even before his first publications on the fact that the, 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 began then manipulating the world to distract ourselves. So we don't have to think about this situation, anything about this situation.
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We can think about anything, especially objective situations, facts, persons, things in the world that really satisfying. We can really get bound up in them. We want this or that other person for our own. We want this kind of a wealth, this kind of a job. We need this situation. All of these then become manipulate it. 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 in other, an alienation.
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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, yeah, 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 valid 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, not the largest arm of systematic mentality structure building for him is what he calls the church. This is a church that has made the largest structure. One that even dwarfs the philosophic, universal lessons of hang on when he goes individuals.
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And so he writes in 1848, the year of many revolutions in Europe, in his journal, fundamentally he says a reformation which did with the Bible would now be just as valid as Luther is doing away with the Pope. All that about the Bible has developed a religion of learning and law to a point of mirror 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 in measurable 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. And that is to say that one never really begins to live. We get caught into this referential consulting, other otherness, and we feel that 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 lift, 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
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Just so,
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So later on, Kierkegaard will write in 18 50, 1 of the most powerful passages in his journals. If there's a little subtitle, he interrupts the flow of the journal. And he says on diabolic possession in mind, 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 on Moz gives itself up to evil. How nowadays it happens on Moss. That is why people flock together in order that natural and animal hysteria should get hold of them in order to feel themselves stimulated in flame.
(01:07:41):
The scenes on the blocks, Berg are the that's a section of Copenhagen are the absolute patents to this demonize pleasure where the pleasure consists in losing oneself in order to be volatize into a higher potency. We're being outside oneself. One hardly knows what one is doing or say or who or what is speaking through one. While the blood courses faster, the eyes are bright and staring the passions, see, oh, depths of confusion, the seriousness of life, the love of life it's forgotten. And so character, God 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 buy now begin to Intuit sort out, but that the cures to that also are false. And he gives an example. He says right now in Copenhagen, who in modern times has been used so much by persons and professors and their lectures and sermons as Blaise Pascal, the great French writer and Pasco, his ideas are appropriated, but Pascal's asceticism and his hair shirt, his monastic hair shirt are omitted or else they are explained to why they were just part of his day.
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They no longer concern us. Brilliant says Kierkegaard. Pascal was original in every other respect, only not in Dennis, but was a set of CISM really so general in his day, lived in the 16 hundreds 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 debt, but as for their lives, as for the characters of those people. No thank you. They will have none of that. So we learned nothing except how to fortify. The ideational thrown nuts of delusion. Where's the cure Turkey art says it exists only in one place in a single solitary individual who refuses to be built by it. All who decides that his life is really does. And that even with its problems, he will take it. And so Kierkegaard sets the tone for the roots of the 20th century. He turns away from every conceivable system and we come next week to a thinker who took it another step, further Frederick Nietzsche, and the 20th century begins to loom more and more like one of those archetypal ages, which good and evil really do come into play.
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Face-to-face
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On the field of the only real battlefield or wherever is a real human being actually exists as an individual. Well, we'll see nature next week. Thanks for [inaudible].

END OF RECORDING