Existentialist Mode of Thinking

Soren Kierkegaard’s Religious Existentialism

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• Existentialism in the most general terms can be defined as a philosophical movement focused on the analysis of individual existence and the individual’s unique experience.

• Existentialism emphasizes the individual’s responsibility for his/her existence.

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• Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard and German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche were the 19th century sources – one religious, another antireligious - of what became the existentialist movement in the 20th century.

S. Kierkegaard F. Nietzsche1813-1855 1844-1900

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• The 20th century German philosopher Martin Heidegger, influenced by both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, was extremely influential in the further development of non-religious existentialism, most explicitly represented by the French philosopher J. P. Sartre.

M. Heidegger J. P. Sartre 1889-1976 1905-1980

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Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

• European existentialist philosophy profoundly influenced American thought during the 20th century, starting with Soren Kierkegaard, who is often considered a father of existentialism.

S. Kierkegaard1813-1855

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• Soren Kierkegaard was the persistent critic of the fusion of religious faith with Reason, considering faith to be intrinsically irrational.

• His opposition was to the development of Christian civilization towards a form compatible with Reason.

• Such rational Christianity was represented by G. W. F. Hegel.

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• Kierkegaard criticized Hegelian Idealism for its attempt to integrate faith and Reason as well as individual and community into one progressive unity.

• Kierkegaard claimed that human life is marked by discontinuity between differing ultimate perspectives that cannot be integrated.

• We must simply choose among them. 7

• Kierkegaard argues that while rationality is fundamentally social, religion is a matter of one’s personal relation to the Absolute.

• The name of that relation is faith, and faith is essentially irrational and asocial.  

• The role of philosophy is to bring us to the point of recognizing the mystery of faith, not to explain it.

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• For Hegel, there was no aspect of human life and no feature of reality that was not commensurable, that couldn’t be put together, and that couldn’t be synthesized and integrated as a part of the whole.

• Kierkegaard criticized Hegel’s attempt to incorporate all forms of human experience – what Hegel called shapes of spirit – into one comprehensive form.

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• For Kierkegaard, the human life consists of different moments or forms of living, which cannot be reconciled.

• One has to make choices between incompatible ways of life - this is the essential part of Kierkegaard’s existentialist legacy.

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Kierkegaard introduces three irreconcilable life perspectives, or modes of life: • the aesthetic (sensual); • the rational (ethical and social);

• the religious.

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• The first mode of life is the aesthetic; • The aesthetic life is dominated by pleasure or, more precisely, by what is exciting.

• The aesthetic perspective is not intrinsically immoral; it is amoral.

• A person in the aesthetic mode of life is not intentionally looking to do immoral things; he simply does what he does without moral concerns.

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• The aesthetic perspective is described in Kierkegaard’s Diary of a Seducer.

• The protagonist applies a thoroughly planned strategy to win a woman’s love and after the victory abandons the woman.

• The aim of this aesthetic character is not to be cruel; it’s to do something pleasant or interesting.

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• Kierkegaard claims that the fundamental problem of the aesthetic phase of one’s existence is boredom, and the dynamics of sexual seduction is a means of escaping from boredom.

• To escape from this “aesthetic” stage of life altogether, there is a need for a “leap” into a passionate commitment to another mode of life – either ethical (rational) or religious.

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• The second mode of life is the ethical. The ethical is intrinsically social and rational;

• This is the form of life in human society.

• We act and explain our acts according to reasons shared among the members of society.

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• What people call “normal life” usually means “ethical life.”

• Kierkegaard doesn’t mean that in this mode of life we never do anything wrong;

• What he means is that the social life is rule-governed and motivated by reason.

• We communicate with each other because we want to live in social harmony.

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• The most extreme case of the ethical consciousness is what Kierkegaard calls the knight of infinite resignation.

• The knight of infinite resignation has achieved the highest degree of ethical consciousness.

• Not everyone in the ethical mode of life is capable of this kind of behavior.

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• The knight of infinite resignation is capable of resigning himself to the destruction of all his hopes and desires.

• He gives up all aesthetic {sensual) concerns for the sake of of moral obligation.

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• The third and most important for Kierkegaard is the religious mode of existence.

• Unlike the Hegelian religious consciousness, for Kierkegaard, the religious is not a synthesis of other perspectives.

• The religious mode of life doesn’t include anything aesthetic (sensual) or ethical (rational and social).

• The religious perspective means an unmediated relation of the individual to God.

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• Kierkegaard’s main task is to try to understand the essence of this third category, the religious life.

• His claim is that it has never been understood, and the Hegelian attempt to merge the social, the rational, and the religious had made this task even harder.  

• The religious, by its nature, cannot explain itself to us, and the ethical is constitutionally incapable of understanding the religious.

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• It’s common for people to think that religion and ethics work together. But for Kierkegaard the ethical view of religion is a misinterpretation.

• The ethical and the religious are incommensurable.

• This incommensurability is exemplified by the actions of the biblical God’s that violate basic human ethical laws.

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• Even the primary Christian value – forgiveness - is unethical, according to Kierkegaard.

• Ethics requires rules of justice. The rules determine what is wrong and how the wrong is to be punished.

• The rules of justice are supposed to be obeyed, and there are consequences if they are violated.

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• Forgiveness, in Kierkegaard’s language, is the intervention of the religious to undermine the requirements of ethics and justice.

• Even though a criminal deserves to be punished, he might avoid punishment because of forgiveness.

• That’s how religion cancels one of the crucial demands of ethical perspective.

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• Kierkegaard claims that religious faith cannot be supported with Reason or rationality, as Hegel and the whole Scholastic tradition before him argued.

• This argument has run throughout the history of Western thought, especially in the Christian era:

• Are faith and Reason compatible?

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• Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century started Scholastic tradition by merging Christianity with Aristotle.

• For Aquinas, Reason and faith were compatible:

• Reason doesn’t take us away from faith; a rational understanding of the world created by God, brings us closer to God.

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• For Kierkegaard, however, faith is essentially irrational.

• Moreover, truth itself is subjective.

• It is determined by the inward personality of the individual.

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• Philosophy should focus on how the individual experiences the world, not how the world is.

• All scientific knowledge is, therefore, a second-class knowledge.

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• Being human is something that cannot be understood through the kind of rationality we apply to nature.

• For Kierkegaard, as well as for Heidegger after him, the ultimate question is how to choose a way of life.

• When one is trying to decide whether to live the aesthetic, ethical, or religious life, objective science will be of no help.

• The choice is passionate, not intellectual.

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• This is the basic problem of human existence:

• I can’t be sure what choice is the right one, but I must choose.

• For Kierkegaard the story of the biblical Abraham is an example of this kind of choice.

• In his Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard calls Abraham a knight of faith .

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• In the biblical story, an angel of the Lord commands Abraham to kill his son Isaac, and Abraham intends to obey.

• The question Kierkegaard is trying to answer:

• What Abraham experiences as he prepares to kill his son.

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• According to Kierkegaard, Abraham does not hope that God’s request is simply a test of Abraham’s faith.

• Neither is Abraham’s obedience a result of resignation - a rational perspective similar to a Buddhist conclusion that attachment leads to suffering.

• Kierkegaard’s Abraham makes no rational decision to resign himself to the will of God and accept consequences.

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• Instead, Kierkegaard argues, Abraham irrationally believes in the coexistence of two incompatible events: that he kills Isaac, but that somehow Isaac will remain alive as a confirmation of God’s love.

• Kierkegaard emphasizes that Abraham’s faith is irrational, incompatible with Reason.

• Faith means commitment to the irrational.

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• Faith is not related to the rational or to the ethical.

• God’s command to kill Isaac is absolutely unethical for Kierkegaard.

• Ethics is the domain of human social relations, and in the domain of normal human relations, the murder of an innocent child is unethical;

• That is, God’s command throws Abraham out of the social-ethical domain.

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• Faith is individualistic and cannot be communicated.

• It is incommensurable with the social, the rational, and the ethical, which always go together.

• Being rational means being able to give social reasons, that is, give other people socially acceptable explanations for one’s actions.

• Communication is a necessary component of rationality.

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• The name of one of Kierkegaard’s books is Either/Or.

• The book explains that the ethical, the religious, and the aesthetic are incommensurable, with no bridging among them.

• Among these ultimate forms of life, we must just choose ours.

• We choose without reasons, because the reasons that could be given for a choice can only come from the form of life we’re currently living.

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• For example, if I live the ethical form of life, this form of life can’t give me reasons to leave it behind. It will give me the reasons to stay ethical.

• That’s why Kierkegaard introduces the concept of “leap” as a passionate commitment to another mode of life.

• That’s how Abraham made his decision to obey God’s will and kill his son.

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• Kierkegaard insists that faith is not rational, not social, and not communicative.

• The knight of faith cannot explain or justify his faith. Abraham cannot explain his actions to another human being. The motives of the knight of faith are irrational, so no one will understand them.

• Religious faith cannot be communicated from one person to another because there is no relationship between their religious experiences.

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• Kierkegaard distinguishes between a “knight of faith” and a “knight of resignation.”

• The knights of resignation’s resign from the earthy pleasures of life can be explained (communicated) in social terms.

• The faith of the knights of faith, on the other hand, is inward, hidden, and personal.

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• The only person who has a chance to understand the knight of faith is anther knight of faith.

• Most of us can only see them from either the aesthetic point of view or from the ethical point of view, both of which are misunderstanding.

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• There exists individual’s non-comprehended separateness and isolation from others.

• Unlike secular existentialists, Kierkegaard believes that our true nature can fully exist only in a direct relation to God.

• This authentic spiritual connection to God is not mediated by any other individual or by an institution.

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• Kierkegaardian Christianity is offensive to human reason.

• If you believe in Christianity because it makes sense you have misunderstood Christianity.

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• Kierkegaard’s God unlike Hegel’s is utterly transcendent, detached from this world.

• Cultural and political history are not God’s autobiography in Hegelian sense.

• Kierkegaardian God speaks only to individuals and ignores institutions.

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• Kierkegaard emphasizes the necessity, on the one hand, yet the contradictoriness and offensiveness, on the other hand, of the God-man relationship.

• The individual’s relation to God is not sustained and must be renewed at every moment.

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Soren KierkegaardFear and Trembling

• Philosophy cannot and should not give faith, but it should understand itself and know what it has to offer… and least of all should fool people out of something as if it were nothing…

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• I am convinced that God is love;

• this thought has for me a primitive lyrical validity. When it is present to me, I am unspeakably blissful; when it is absent, I long for it more vehemently than does the lover for his object.

• But I do not believe; this courage I lack…

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• Our age is not willing to stop with faith, with its miracle of turning water into wine; it goes further, it turns wine into water.

• Would it not be better to stop with faith, and is it not revolting that everybody wants to go further?

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• If men in our times have no desire to stand fast by love, where will they end: in worldly cunning, in mean calculation, in wretchedness and misery, in all those things which render man’s divine origin doubtful.

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• The love of God is…incommensurable with the whole of reality…

• The movement of faith must constantly be made by virtue of the absurd, yet in such a way… that the things of the world are not lost but entirely regained.

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• The knight of faith… belongs entirely to the world… One can discover nothing of aloof and superior nature…

• He takes delight in everything. He is not a poet. He is not a genius. But every moment of his life he purchases his leisure at the highest price;

• for he makes not the least movement except by virtue of the absurd.

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• With infinite resignation he has drained the cup of life’s profound sadness; he knows the bliss of the infinite; he senses the pain of renouncing everything, the dearest things he possesses in the world;

• and yet finiteness tastes to him just as good as to one who never knew anything higher… He has this sense of security in enjoying it as though the finite life were the surest thing of all.

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• And yet and yet the whole earthly form he exhibits is a new creation by virtue of the absurd.

• He resigned everything infinitely, and then he grasped everything again by virtue of the absurd…

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