Harsh judgments were unanimously voiced against him. Instead, he concocted a series of nested narratives, defying the reader to say where Kierkegaard himself can be found. The putative manuscripts encompass critical essays, the seduction diary, aphorisms, letters. For A, life should be nothing but a series of interesting sensations. B is an older, married man who writes a series of letters to A chastising his frivolity. B argues that marriage represents not the death of romantic love but its fulfillment on a higher, more serious plane.
Whatever his readers may have imagined, he was not a cynical sensualist like A. He had courted Regine with the utmost propriety and was devastated by the end of their relationship. But Kierkegaard could not become a contented husband like B. He left Regine, Carlisle argues, because marriage would mean sacrificing the freedom, the open-endedness, that he saw as the essence of an authentic life. Kierkegaard preferred to remain dizzily suspended over the abyss of his own freedom, the only position that allowed him to keep writing.
He believed that the most important commitment we can make is to God, and his work grew increasingly concerned with religious faith. Moriah, it was contrary to every natural feeling and ethical principle. Because the story is so familiar, it is easy to glide past its transgressive implications. Imagine, Kierkegaard writes, that a Danish pastor in the nineteenth century made the sacrifice of Isaac the subject of a Sunday sermon, and one of his congregants was inspired to go home and murder his own son for the sake of God.
Abraham had a kind of faith that even the most religious people lack: he believed that God had the power to suspend morality. More, he trusted that somehow God would make it possible for him to kill Isaac and still keep him, which is logically impossible. Why was I not consulted, why not made acquainted with its manners and customs?
Is it not a voluntary concern? And if I am to be compelled to take part in it, where is the director? Whither shall I turn with my complaint? The only way to live in this painful existence is through faith.
But to Kierkegaard, faith is not a mental conviction about doctrine, nor positive religious feelings, but a passionate commitment to God in the face of uncertainty. Faith is a risk the "leap of faith" , an adventure that requires the denial of oneself. To choose faith is what brings authentic human existence. This is the "existentialism" that Kierkegaard is considered the founder of—though later existentialists had significantly different agendas than his.
In his later writings— Works of Love , Christian Discourses , and Training in Christianity —he tried to clarify the true nature of Christianity. The greatest enemy of Christianity, he argued, was "Christendom"—the cultured and respectable Christianity of his day.
The tragedy of easy Christianity is that existence has ceased to be an adventure and a constant risk in the presence of God but has become a form of morality and a doctrinal system.
Its purpose is to simplify the matter of becoming a Christian. This is just paganism, "cheap" Christianity, with neither cost nor pain, Kierkegaard argued. It is like war games, in which armies move and there is a great deal of noise, but there is no real risk or pain—and no real victory.
Nor is it employed for egotistic ends. Aesthetic irony is transformed into religious humor, and the aesthetic transfiguration of the actual world into the ideal is transformed into the religious transubstantiation of the finite world into an actual reconciliation with the infinite. Language and all other media of representation belong to the realm of the ideal. No matter how eloquent or evocative language is it can never be the actual. Therefore, any representation of faith is always suspended in the realm of ideality and can never be actual faith.
In fact Johannes Climacus acknowledges this implicitly when at the end of Concluding Unscientific Postscript he revokes everything he has said, with the important rider that to say something then to revoke it is not the same as never having said it in the first place.
His presentation of religious faith in an aesthetic medium at least provides an opportunity for his readers to make their own leap of faith, by appropriating with inward passion the paradoxical religion of Christianity into their own lives. These works include those by Anti-Climacus, who represents the Christian point of view par excellence , beyond where Kierkegaard placed himself. Kierkegaard also used many biblical figures and stories with poignant and striking effect in the religious writings he published under his own name.
As a poet of the religious Kierkegaard was always preoccupied with aesthetics. In fact, contrary to popular misconceptions of Kierkegaard which represent him as becoming increasingly hostile to poetry, he increasingly referred to himself as a poet in his later years all but one of over ninety references to himself as a poet in his journals date from after Kierkegaard never claimed to write with religious authority, as an apostle.
His works represent both less religiously enlightened and more religiously enlightened positions than he thought he had attained in his own existence. Such representations were only possible in an aesthetic medium of imagined possibilities like poetry.
It is used to denote both: i a limited existential sphere, or stage, which is superseded by the higher stage of the religious life; and ii an aspect of life which is retained even within the religious life. These social norms are used as reasons to make sense of, or justify, an action within a community. Even human sacrifice is justified in terms of how it serves the community, so that when Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia he is regarded as a tragic hero since his community understands that the sacrifice is required by the gods for the success of the Greek expedition to Troy Fear and Trembling.
Kierkegaard, however, recognizes duties that cannot be justified in terms of social norms. That is, Abraham recognizes a duty to something higher than both his social duty not to kill an innocent person and his personal commitment to his beloved son, viz.
However, he cannot give an intelligible ethical justification of his act to the community in terms of social norms, but must simply obey the divine command. In order to raise oneself beyond the merely aesthetic life, which is a life of drifting in imagination, possibility and sensation, one needs to make a commitment.
That is, the aesthete needs to choose the ethical, which entails a commitment to communication and decision procedures. The metaethics or normative ethics are cognitivist, laying down various necessary conditions for ethically correct action. These conditions include: the necessity of choosing seriously and inwardly; commitment to the belief that predications of good and evil of our actions have a truth-value; the necessity of choosing what one is actually doing, rather than just responding to a situation; actions are to be in accordance with rules; and these rules are universally applicable to moral agents.
The choice of metaethics, however, is noncognitive. There is no adequate proof of the truth of metaethics. The choice of normative ethics is motivated, but in a noncognitive way. The Judge seeks to motivate the choice of his normative ethics through the avoidance of despair. For Judge Wilhelm, the choice of normative ethics is a noncognitive choice of cognitivism, and thereby an acceptance of the applicability of the conceptual distinction between good and evil. Therefore it is possible, as Johannes de Silentio argues was the case for Abraham the father of faith , that God demand a suspension of the ethical in the sense of the socially prescribed norms.
Since public reason cannot decide the issue for us, we must decide for ourselves as a matter of religious faith. These analyses amount to a subtle moral psychology, which borders on virtue ethics. It is not enough simply for God to issue a command; we need to hear and obey. But obedience is not straightforward. We can obey willingly or begrudgingly. We can refuse altogether. We can be selectively deaf, or be so filled with our egotistical desires that we are altogether deaf to our duties.
In order to obey we first need to cultivate faith, since obedience to a divine command is nonsense unless we at least believe the command has come from God. To imagine the enormity of the consequences of sin, yet to relish the possibilities of freedom, engenders anxiety. We need to learn to navigate the treacherous maelstroms of despair, to recognize the self-absorption of demonic states, to veer away from prudence and vanity, and to avoid mere conformity to social mores.
We need to cultivate hope, patience, devotion, and above all love. But we also need to be vigilant about our capacity for self-deception and be prepared to suffer for love and for our ultimate spiritual identity. Kierkegaard styled himself above all as a religious poet. The religion to which he sought to relate his readers is Christianity. The type of Christianity that underlies his writings is a very serious strain of Lutheran pietism informed by the dour values of sin, guilt, suffering, and individual responsibility.
Kierkegaard was immersed in these values in the family home through his father, whose own childhood was lived in the shadow of Herrnhut pietism in Jutland. For Kierkegaard Christian faith is not a matter of regurgitating church dogma. It is a matter of individual subjective passion, which cannot be mediated by the clergy or by human artefacts. Faith is the most important task to be achieved by a human being, because only on the basis of faith does an individual have a chance to become a true self.
This self is the life-work which God judges for eternity. Anxiety or dread Angest is the presentiment of this terrible responsibility when the individual stands at the threshold of momentous existential choice.
Anxiety is a two-sided emotion: on one side is the dread burden of choosing for eternity; on the other side is the exhilaration of freedom in choosing oneself. But the choice of faith is not made once and for all. It is essential that faith be constantly renewed by means of repeated avowals of faith. This repetition of faith is the way the self relates itself to itself and to the power which constituted it, i. Christian dogma, according to Kierkegaard, embodies paradoxes which are offensive to reason.
The central paradox is the assertion that the eternal, infinite, transcendent God simultaneously became incarnated as a temporal, finite, human being Jesus. There are two possible attitudes we can adopt to this assertion, viz. What we cannot do, according to Kierkegaard, is believe by virtue of reason. If we choose faith we must suspend our reason in order to believe in something higher than reason.
In fact we must believe by virtue of the absurd. According to Johannes Climacus, faith is a miracle, a gift from God whereby eternal truth enters time in the instant. This Christian conception of the relation between eternal truth and time is distinct from the Socratic notion that eternal truth is always already within us—it just needs to be recovered by means of recollection anamnesis.
The condition for realizing eternal truth for the Christian is a gift Gave from God, but its realization is a task Opgave which must be repeatedly performed by the individual believer. Crucial to the miracle of Christian faith is the realization that over against God we are always in the wrong. That is, we must realize that we are always in sin. This is the condition for faith, and must be given by God. The idea of sin cannot evolve from purely human origins. From the young age Kierkegaard was disabled and suffered from complications after his fall from a tree when he was a boy.
He was also strongly influenced by his father's depression and stubborn belief in a curse that all his children were doomed to die by the age of His philosophy and writing was also influenced by Regine Olsen, the love of his life and the muse for his writings.
He and Regine met in , while they were students at University, and they became engaged in , but he harbored some undisclosed secret of dark and personal nature.
A year later he chose to break off the engagement rather than to reveal his secret to Regine. She married another man and refused to see Kierkegaard ever again. He sank into psychoanalysis of the ethical and emotional aspects of breaking off in his book 'Repetition' which he published under the pseudonym Constantin Constantinus. At that time he was suffering from melancholy, probably a form of depression coming from his own trauma and disability. In his writings Kierkegaard used the word 'marriage' as a trope for the universal demands made by social mores.
Kierkegaard's works deal with problems of choice in many aspects, ranging from emotions and feelings of an individual, to religious, philosophical, and political aspects of human society.
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