The SPCK Introduction to Kierkegaard

Introduction

At one level, Kierkegaard’s aim is straightforward: to strip you, the reader, naked at two in the morning, to sit you in front of a mirror and to force you to think about your life. His books are addressed to ‘that solitary individual’ who may be willing to listen to what he says and to ask questions about his or her own life. He demands a willingness for self-examination, which many usually seek to avoid; he demands a willingness to take off the masks which everyone wears in everyday life and to be ruthlessly honest about what is true and false. Kierkegaard considers that we are all prone to self-deceit and he gives us his readers no peace until we can see ourselves truthfully, as a prelude to making decisions about the manner in which we should live.

In J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, the young wizard Harry discovers the mirror of Erisaid. This is a remarkable magical mirror; those who stare into it will see nothing less than the deepest desires of their hearts. It does not necessarily reveal the future. It reveals what the person yearns for most and this desire may or may not be satisfied in the future. The mirror enables people to confront and to address their desires, to ask whether or not this is what they should desire or what they really want to desire, and it gives them an opportunity to change the direction of their lives. Professor Dumbledore, Harry Potter’s inspiration and guide, says to him that those who look into the mirror and sees nothing else but themselves, just as they are, would have nothing more to desire and would be truly happy. Kierkegaard would have approved of the mirror as it would at least force you and I to engage with reality.

It might seem from this that Kierkegaard is a psychologist – and so he is, well before Freud or Jung. However, he is also a brilliant philosopher and Christian theologian. He brings the three disciplines together in a remarkable way. Yet, though he is a philosopher, theologian and psychologist, there is also a sense in which he would have rejected all these disciplines. This is because they can be used to objectify knowledge so that it ceases to relate to the individual. In their technicalities, cleverness and desire to develop a complete and coherent account of what it is to be human, they lose sight of the real experience of humanity and become ‘untrue’ and irrelevant in a sense. In all his writings he is passionately committed to communicate from heart to heart, to help ‘his reader’, that person who reads his works at a distance in time and place, to think deeply about his or her life and to make decisions about how to live – and how to die.

Kierkegaard has been described by many as ‘the father of existentialism’. This is misleading. Existentialism was a twentieth-century movement particularly influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre which emphasized personal autonomy, individual freedom and the capacity for individual choice. In that Kierkegaard was concerned with the individual and with philosophy that related to life, the description of him as ‘the father of existentialism’ may be relevant, but for many existentialists, truth depends on the individual and Kierkegaard would have rejected this. Kierkegaard was a philosophical realist maintaining a correspondence theory of truth in the classical tradition; as such, his work can illuminate the debate between realism and non-realism in contemporary philosophy. His great philosophical opponent was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). Hegel saw truth emerging through history as a result of the dialectical process. A view was put forward (a thesis) and this view met strong opposition from those who rejected it entirely and who put forward a totally opposed view (the antithesis). Initially these views appeared irreconcilable but, Hegel held, they became reconciled over time (the synthesis). As the new synthesis was accepted it became in effect a new thesis, which would provoke an antithesis … and so the process continued.

Hegel’s philosophical nickname was ‘Both/And’ since he held that two seemingly contradictory statements can both be true. He was the forerunner of philosophies which claim that truth depends on the situation, that it is not absolute but relative. Kierkegaard saw himself, by contrast with Hegel, as ‘Either/Or’ – either statements are true or they are false, depending on whether or not they correspond to the state of affairs which they describe, not on how those affairs are perceived. This is a traditional realist position and one of great contemporary relevance.

Kierkegaard challenged and criticized the Christian milieu in which he lived, but he did not really address the issue of other world religions and their truth-claims. His work can and should be applied to the issue of contemporary inter-religious dialogue, however, and this book will attempt to do so.

Today, there is real interest in Kierkegaard’s approach from a range of different countries and cultures. His philosophy is seen to have enduring and widespread relevance, but it is not a simple approach, it is not possible to say, ‘Read this book by Kierkegaard and you will be clear about his argument’. His many books and articles are written from multitudes of perspectives, often under pseudonyms and sometimes under layers of pseudonyms. He makes considerable demands on the reader just because his message is that the search for truth and meaning demands personal engagement and struggle. There are no easy answers, so Kierkegaard does not try to package his teachings to make them accessible and palatable. The greatest demand is that the reader should have an interest in his or her own life and how it is lived. This, for Kierkegaard, is the starting point of good philosophy. The word ‘philosophy’ means ‘love of wisdom’ and wisdom can only be gained through experience and reflection. Any so-called philosophy which does not engage the individual, reflect the life they have experienced and affect the life they go on to live is no more than tiddly-winks – a game that may pass the time but is of no more significance than that. He was critical of much of the philosophy of his time, and would have been even more critical of much contemporary philosophy, as it failed to engage with real life. He looked back to the model of the great Greek philosophers, who saw philosophy as an essentially practical discipline – the sorting and drawing together of experience to provide truths about how life should be lived, how countries should be governed, issues of Justice, Truth and the Good Life. For Kierkegaard, philosophy should not be an abstract discipline but should be grounded in what it is to be human, and it should have relevance to all aspects of our existence. He wrote, ‘I also know that in Greece a thinker was not a stunted existing person who produced works of art, but he himself was an existing work of art’ (CUP 303).

Kierkegaard had an abiding interest in the nature of love between human beings, although he forces his reader to go beyond superficial categories. If you say to someone, ‘I love you’, Kierkegaard would want you to ask yourself precisely what you mean by these words. He does not think the issue is at all clear. The same applies, but on a deeper and more profound level, with the question ‘What does it mean to be a self?’ Kierkegaard argues that the answer is far from obvious and, indeed, he maintains that most people are not selves at all. Being a self, being an individual, is challenging and it is something that few attempt. Instead we ‘construct ourselves’ so that we are acceptable to others – we become a copy; we put on a mask. Truly being a self is too hard and one of Kierkegaard’s main aims in forcing us to look at ourselves is to ask ourselves who we are:

    The biggest danger, that of losing oneself, can pass off in the world as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. is bound to be noticed. (CUP 62–3)

In other words, most of us forget who we are – we become so focused on creating a mask that is pleasing and acceptable to our peers, our colleagues, our parents, our partners that, beneath the mask, we never realize that ‘I’ as an individual has ceased to exist:

    They use their abilities, amass wealth, carry out worldly enterprises, make prudent calculations, etc. and perhaps are mentioned in history, but they are not themselves. In a spiritual sense they have no self, no self for whose sake they could venture everything. (CUP 64–5)

The lack of being an individual, our failure to be a self, leads to despair – a fact which most of us may never acknowledge. We convince ourselves that life is ‘happy’, that there is meaning and purpose to our lives, when often this is not the case. We throw ourselves into activity of various kinds which is subconsciously designed to prevent us having to think deeply about ourselves at all. However, instead of considering despair as negative, Kierkegaard actually believes that the pain of despair can help us to recognize our situation. Thus despair is positive as it can force us to look at ourselves more deeply – to consider who we are. This can be a prelude to our taking charge of our life, beginning the long, painful, slow journey to being an individual:

    In his ignorance of his own despair a person is furthest from being conscious of himself as spirit. But precisely this – not being conscious of oneself as spirit – is despair, that is to say spiritlessness … the despairer is in the same situation as the consumptive; he feels best, considers himself to be healthiest, can appear to others to be in the pink of condition, just when the illness is at its most critical. (CUP 75)

So Kierkegaard wants to challenge and question the person who appears happy on the surface, who seems to lead a successful life, who has all the outward marks of what the world considers success. He wants these people to slow down, to be still, to look at themselves in a different way; and then, perhaps, they may come to recognize the façade they have constructed and the despair in which they actually live. Bringing people to this point is not easy – it will not be achieved by lecturing or criticizing them. It will not be achieved by persuading them to read more or to take a degree in philosophy or psychology. All these can merely be new forms of activity which prevent the individual looking closely at him- or herself. Kierkegaard is passionate about bringing people to a state in which they actually address the question of who they are, but he recognizes that subtlety is needed to do this. They have to be brought to recognize something that they do not want to recognize. They have to be brought to think in ways they do not want to think; they must be forced to look behind the masks they have constructed when to do so means feeling the despair they do not want to feel. To achieve this Kierkegaard employs what he terms ‘indirect communication’.

Kierkegaard did not wish to found a new philosophic school; he did not see himself as an innovator. He was the fire chief who, when a fire breaks out, takes charge of proceedings. The matter is urgent, time is short and action is required. The fire chief may forcefully point out what needs doing but, in the matter of your own life and death, the response is down to you, ‘that solitary individual’ to whom this book is dedicated.

1

Kierkegaard’s life

Søren Kierkegaard’s father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, was born in a poor village in Jutland where he suffered from cold, hunger and loneliness. One day, at the age of 11, Michael Pedersen was on the wild Jutland heath caring for cattle. He was alone, cold and wet and, because of his sufferings, he stood on a little hill, raised his hands to heaven and cursed God, who was so cruel as to allow him to suffer so much. The memory of this curse was to remain with him for the rest of his life. His uncle rescued him by taking him to Copenhagen to work in his clothing business. He eventually inherited his uncle’s fortune, built up a successful cloth and trading business and became a wealthy man. He married at 38 and retired from business at the age of 40. His wife died two years after the marriage, and before the accepted mourning period was complete, on 26 April