Søren Kierkegaard,1813-1855

“By far the most profound thinker of the nineteenth century”

- Ludwig Wittgenstein

"An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. 
He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air."
-Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

"Wege entstehen dadurch, dass man sie geht."
- Franz Kafka

Paul Klee, Der  Seiltänzer or Tightrope Walker, 1923

Sören Kierkegaard, a man more likely to be misinterpreted than any other. For some he is ‘the gloomy Dane’, neglecting the very obvious acute sense of humour that informs his work, and which informs his work not just as some optional piece of decoration but as something intrinsic to his fundamentally religious view of the world.  For others, he is just a bad case of religious fideism, someone who if he has to choose will always choose irrational belief over rational enquiry and science. If there is one thing that a close reading of Kierkegaard should free us from it is this kind of positivist assumption about the world. Or so I would wish to claim, for both standpoints are arguably examples of what Wittgenstein described in the Investigations as the bewitchment of the intelligence by the way we talk about things. In this case it might be ‘bewitchment’ – eine Verhexung unsres Verstandes - that leads us to think that we have to choose between ‘religion is plain nonsense’ and some kind of irrational ‘fideism’. We meet this contrast often enough in our lives today. Bertrand Russell himself wrote to Lady Ottoline Morrell in 1919, ‘I had felt in his (Wittgenstein’s) book (the Tractatus) a flavour of mysticism, but was astonished when I found that he was a complete mystic. He reads people like Kierkegaard and Angelus Silesius, and he seriously contemplates becoming a monk.’ For Russell and Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath and Waismann and all those others in Vienna Circle (which was Wittgenstein’s own intellectual background) there is a world of sense and a world of nonsense. There is the other side as well, one which sees (or at any rate back in those distant years saw) the authority of the Church as sufficient warrant of unchallengeable truth. Both sides imposed clear limits to what could be intelligibly said about the world, like a desert divided by a Grand Canyon. My own view is that Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein saw things differently from their nineteenth and twentieth century contemporaries and that they have much in common, however wildly different they appear at first glance.

This might seem an odd way to approach Kierkegaard. I am doing this because I think that there are real parallels and because I want to enlist in a thoroughly rhetorical manner the reputation of the Austrian to defend the work of the Dane. Wittgenstein once declared that while he was not religious, he did see every problem from a religious point of view. The driving force behind both is a kind of ethical imperative. Here is how one recent writer puts it, ‘Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard are united in their common aim of paving the way, in their writings, for an authentic existence – an existence that is free of self-deception and illusion. In both authors this rigorous demand is an ethical one, and, although both Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard would agree that philosophy cannot help one to become the kind of person capable of leading such a life, it can certainly clear away the conceptual confusions and obstacles that might stand in the way of leading it. Indeed it seems to me that Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard both desire the kind of reader for whom, ideally, philosophical clarity would lead to existential clarity, that is, to a breakdown of the distinction between a ‘contemplative’ and ‘partisan’ conception of philosophy. This is the ethical lynchpin uniting their work.’ (A Confusion of the Spheres, by Genia Schönbaumsfeld, OUP 2010, from whom I have also taken the Russell quotation in the first paragraph).

Kierkegaard’s concern with existential realities led him to explore new territory. He was we might say trying to map out the ways in which we might intelligibly talk about things – those profoundly ethical concerns – that are so hard to ground, that is to say, so hard to substantiate in terms of our everyday practical beliefs and attitudes. We can see this in the earliest extracts printed in Edward and Edna Hong’s The Essential Kierkegaard which we are taking as the basis of our reading.  Look, for example, at this quotation from the Early Journal Entries (page 8),

“What I really need is to get clear about what I am to do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find my purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth that is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die. Of what use would it be for me to discover a so-called objective truth, to work through the philosophical systems so that I could, if asked, make critical judgements about them, could point out the fallacies in each system; of what use would it be to me to be able to develop a theory of the state, getting details from various sources and combining them into a whole, and constructing a world I did not live in but merely held up for others to see; of what use would it be to be to be able to formulate the meaning of Christianity, to be able to explain many specific points – if it had no deeper meaning for me and for my life? And the better I was at it, the more I saw others appropriate the creations of my mind, the more tragic my situation would be, not unlike that of parents who are forced to send their children out into the world and turn them over to the care of others. Of what use would it be for me for truth to stand before me, cold and naked, not caring whether or not I acknowledged it, making me uneasy rather than trustingly receptive. I certainly do not deny that I accept an imperative of knowledge and that through it men may be influenced, but then it must come alive in me and this is what I now recognize as the most important of all. This is what my soul thirsts for as the African deserts thirst for water. This is what is lacking, and this is why I am like a man who has collected furniture, rented an apartment, but as yet has not found the beloved to share life’s ups and downs with him. This was just what I did before...”

The rest of this passage is worth reading again, I think. He goes on to say that this was why he threw himself into law i the hope that it would give him ‘an organic view of criminal life’ and a kind of technology for sorting out the muddles and messes of life. But this would be a way of losing himself by becoming a kind of operator, an acteur on life’s stage. He says implicitly something similar in the first extract where he describes the deep attraction of the Brazilian jungle and the ‘paradisiacal happiness and joy’ of working in it as a palaeontologist – like the Peter Lund he is writing to -  but he rejects this in favour of a completely human life. Kierkegaard wrote this in 1835 at the age of twenty-two and we can see here clear intimations of his future thinking. We can lose ourselves in our perceptions of the world around us. Think for example of a young boy who sees a picture of Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon and loses himself in a dreaming identification with this romantic hero. Or you might think of Milton’s Satan stuck in an attitude of defiant and self-deceiving heroism. The way we see the world makes us what we are and shapes our lives. These are just some of the many varieties of the aesthetic life, the life of perception and art. Leaving this behind as we must if we are to grow up means taking up an ethical stance and ultimately – for Kierkegaard at least – an explicitly religious view of life, though what he understands by that is something we should not prejudge. But on the other hand, it is, I think, clear that attaining a completely human life is a kind of deepening of experience. We do not have to reject the world of experience in any way, but instead our experience is fashioned and transformed by a deeper, more interior perspective.

Jacques-Louis David's Napoleon Crossing the Alps

We should keep in mind something of the philosophical background that Kierkegaard stepped into as a young man in Copenhagen and Berlin. Kantian philosophy had seemed to point irrevocably towards sceptical conclusions. Kant had demonstrated the way the structures of the mind itself cut up and presented the contents of the world to us. The thing-in-itself – das ding-an-sich – seemed to retreat infinitely away from us, a mere ghost of a suspicion. Even the colours and simple objects around us turn out to be the products of our mental projection. We read the world according to our own constitutional language, but what that world is really like we can never know.  All that we have then are images or perceptions. Johann-Gottlieb Fichte, the founding father of German Idealism, formulated the consequences of the Kantian revolution in The Vocation of Man (1800):

“Images are: they are the only things which exist, and they know of themselves after the fashion of images, images which float past without there being past which they float ... I myself am one of these images; nay, I am not even this, but merely a confused image of the images. All reality is transformed into a strange dream, without a life which is dreamed of, and without a mind which dreams it...”

He goes on to say that maybe even space itself does not exist, but is perhaps merely the creation of ‘the wonderful power of productive imagination without which nothing at all in the human mind is capable of explanation.’ This is an argument which pushes us to ask if that is all there is to life? Isn’t there something else, some higher pattern for human life? (This quotation is taken from George Pattison’s book, Kierkegaard, the Aesthetic and the Religious, SCM Press 1999). Perhaps all we need to note here is that this idealist view put renewed pressure onto questions of human identity - What is it to be a human being? How can we make ourselves fully human?

The third brief extract comes on page 12. We can, I think, now perhaps see something more in it:

“Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backward. But then one forgets the other clause - that it must be lived forward. The more one thinks through this clause, the more one concludes that life in temporality never becomes properly understandable, simply because never at any time does one get perfect repose to take a stance – backward.”

Our knowledge, our science and technologies are the products of reflection. They are indispensable for life, but they are separate from our moment-to-moment existence. Our knowledge will shape our view of life and similarly all those preconceptions we have about ourselves and other people – our images of Napoleon, the roles and fashions we adopt – will seal us in and perhaps close us off from the uncertainties of the coming hour. The real problem of life is our relation to time and contingency. It is the problem of how we live and respond in time. At least we can take this as a hint to test out as we read on.

The problem then becomes something like the romantic poet Hölderlin's bleak vision. Here it is in a modern English translation:

                Yet it's our lot

                          To wander homeless;

                          Suffering men fade away,

                          Fall blindly

                          From one hour to the next,

                          Like water thrown

                          Year after year,

                          From rock to rock,

                          Down into the great unknown.

                                

Yes, we say, that's how it is, but is that all there is? We can take that as an image of Kierkegaard's question. And of Kafka's comment, Wege entstehen dadurch, dass man sie geht. Paths come into being because people walk them. Well, maybe. Let's hope we'll see.

Reading: I would suggest that we read up to page 83 for our first session on 19 September. We probably won’t get to discussing Either/Or , but that is because I would like to suggest that we take something of a side-trip and look at an article by someone quote unrelated on what we mean by the concept of a person. I will try to prepare this tomorrow so that you should receive it on Wednesday. Please be patient if it arrives a day late. I’m having a hard life!