Week Three
Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments
The most radically dissenting philosopher of the nineteenth century, that age of ideology constituted by the range of reactions to the French Revolution, Søren Kierkegaard would not gain an international audience until the 1930s and 40s, when he found recognition as the first existentialist philosopher. In an age of seismic secularization, with Christianity tamed by bourgeois rationalism, Kierkegaard sought to vindicate a supernaturalist Christianity. When most thinkers were focused intensely on social and political matters, Kierkegaard insisted on addressing that single individual: you and me, in our existential relation to God and to the course of our own lives.
“Can the Truth be learned?”
Born in Copenhagen in 1813 (he would die there in 1855), Kierkegaard was the seventh child of a brooding and devout Lutheran father, who imparted to his son a sense of religious dread. He floated through his university days, outwardly a socializing and spendthrift dandy but inwardly unhappy about the vanity of his life. His father’s death concentrated his spirit—five of his six siblings and his mother had already died. He finally completed a dissertation in philosophy and became engaged to Regine Olsen in 1840. Kierkegaard broke off the engagement after a year, the most decisive event of his life: he couldn’t see himself making her happy and couldn’t see harmonizing his vocation as a writer with a settled family life. But giving up Regine caused him bitter suffering, leaving a wound that never healed. He turned away from an ecclesiastical career, instead living off his inheritance in a life of singleness. Later in 1841, he attended lectures in Berlin (also attended by Bakunin, Humboldt, Engels, Ranke, Burckhardt) delivered by Schelling, whom King Friedrich Wilhelm IV had summoned to extinguish “the dragon-seed of Hegelian pantheism.”
The Davenant Institute on the key to Martin Luther’s theology, and view of eternal life.
Kierkegaard’s point of contact with contemporary concerns was Hegel (at least Schelling’s version of him), whose abstract system was his great enemy. Like Marx, Kierkegaard refused the Hegelian identification of the real with the rational, writing, “The deification of the established order is the secularization of everything.” Unlike Marx, he did not wish to empower dialectics by giving it economic substance. Kierkegaard saw the mass conformism of ideology and global capital’s industrial-commercial society hollowing out our inwardness; he wanted to maintain the Kantian reserve vis-`a-vis the power of thought. The most stylistically literary philosopher since Plato, Kierkegaard was not a system builder. He used many pseudonyms; holding vital truth to be subjective/existential rather than propositional, he thought indirect communication the only way to be a true teacher. His vocation as a thinker and writer was to Socratically foster self-knowledge and progress in the strenuous process of becoming a Christian—which even entailed assailing the established Lutheran Church of Denmark in his “attack on Christendom.”