I am just finishing up “Søren Kierkegaard: Subjectivity, Irony and the Crisis of Modernity” an online course in Coursera with Jon Stewart, PhD, professor at the University of Copenhagen. Just a brief note or two (actually three):
~1. Kierkegaard had a fresh an unusual insight into Socrates: like Hegel he saw Socrates as revolutionary and his thought represents a turning point in Western ideas. However, while Hegel was disappointed that Socrates never left us a clear an affirmative set of philosophical teachings, Kierkegaard saw the real value of Socrates as his pure negativity. His relentless interrogations were maieutic only and he Kierkegaard saw his own mission in life as doing the same.
~2. Kierkegaard, in his disputatious rebellion against the official Danish (Lutheran) Church (well, actually he was in perpetual dispute with damn near everybody) rejected doctrines that attempted to explain difficult beliefs such as the “God-man” of the Christians. These were paradoxes and we must leave it at that.
~3. Kierkegaard thought that it was useless to accept a belief, doctrine, or really anything we learn. We must “appropriate” such knowledge. Using the subjective freedom espoused by Socrates, we must make knowledge our own.
Here is my assigned essay from the course. And I would just add my own cantankerous gripe. While Stewart’s course was wonderfully lucid and well-prepared, the assignment of the essay violates one of the basic tenets of your Freshman English class, or in least in the way I taught it: Don’t attempt to write a topic broad enough for a textbook in just a brief essay. So out to the side in red ink I write on this, “Topic too broad, narrow this!” But it was the assignment, no argument, so here is my attempt, my try (go ahead and look up the definition of “essay”).
Assigned: What did Kierkegaard learn from his study of Socrates? Why is this connection between Socrates and Kierkegaard still relevant in the world today?
Certain of the outcome of the trial, Socrates says: “…to fear death, gentlemen, is nothing other than to regard oneself as wise when one is not” and that in fact, death may not be the greatest of evils as is thought by all men but the “greatest of all the goods for man.” Socrates says that in this he may only appear wise, but only because he does not indulge in the “reproachable…ignorance of believing one knows what one does not know.” (Plato, Socrates’ Defense, 27). Guided by an inner daemon, Socrates is content to go to death as he as lived, ceaselessly questioning the customary way of thinking and promoting the revolutionary concept that that wisdom is found not by consulting the gods but by finding within himself the truth. Soren Kierkegaard, centuries later, is inspired by the courage of Socrates to challenge the customary, or “universal”, thought by seizing the subjective freedom to question what is thought of as certain, justifiable, and wise. In a break from one of his other intellectual guides, G.W.F. Hegel, the Danish thinker fully accepts the negativity and irony of Socrates, and reproaches the adherents of Romantic despair as well as the complacent church. Like Socrates, the life, thought, and writings of Kierkegaard are consistent in the assertion of the individual freedom of thought, the primacy of the subjective, and the right to question not only the temper of the times but its social and political thought. He reexamined Hegel and prominent teachers, artists and even his own church and Christianity’s most enduring beliefs.
Probably Kierkegaard took from Socrates a mien that was more about doubt than about certitude, more about process than about conclusions. Plato reports that after subjecting a poor slave of Meno with his relentless interrogation, that Socrates asks, “Do you observe, Meno, that I am not teaching the boy anything, but only asking him questions…?” (Plato, Meno, Project Gutenberg, unpaginated text file). Socrates admits “Some things I have said of which I am not altogether confident. But we shall be better and braver and less helpless if we think that we ought to enquire, than we should have been if we indulged in the idle fancy that there was no knowing and no use in seeking to know what we do not know;–that is a theme upon which I am ready to fight , in word and deed, to the utmost of my power.” (Plato, Meno). So Kierkegaard, during the political and social tumult of revolutionary Europe following hard upon the former certainties of the Enlightenment, bravely confronts and even embraces irony and paradox but was ready to fight the excesses of irony which he saw as despair and alienation. These difficulties he saw as worthy of relentless questioning: Does the Romantic literature of the day inspire worthy individualism or is it so self-indulgent that subjective freedom of thought leads to relativism and a flight from the world of actuality? Does an age of irony necessarily result in nihilism and cynicism? Is it worthy to pose careful parsing of biblical mysteries or is this a form of modern sophistry in the face of apparent paradox? Does individual autonomy and critical thinking lead to solipsism or are there objective and eternal truths that can be known? Does moral truth arrive in a list of customary rules or is virtue only found in reflective morality, critical reflection?
Kierkegaard was writing in the midst of the Romantic era. A period of the sturm and drang of warfare, political and industrial revolutions and defeat. The Age of Enlightenment, with its science and careful thought, held reason to be the highest ideal. But the high ideals of reason and modest individualism were seen as cold and science could raise up fearful monsters. In Kierkegaard’s time emotion was the high ideal and individualism was taken to excess, ancient verities were dismissed, and the youthful aesthetes came to look at life itself as useless and meaningless. The method or thinking process of Kierkegaard was to approach and critique these excesses with the irony and reflection of severe questioning that leads to some fundamental truth, to wrest from alienation a connection with truth. Certainly the Socratic method used by Kierkegaard was not an easy road back to the complacent universal culture that was promoted by modern Sophists or the Enlightenment scholars. He writes “This universal culture reminds us of what is offered for sale in our time by scholarly vendors of indulgences under the name of enlightenment.” (Kierkegaard, Concept of Irony, 203-204).
And today, a full 200 years from the birth of Soren Kierkegaard, the culture is still confronted with both the despair of nihilism and the comfortable certainties of unexamined faith. Both religion and politics seem to be in an unending existential crisis. Is there any way to find truth within ourselves, or any worth in an examined life when we are trapped between moral license and doctrinaire extremism? The questioning of Socrates and the uses of negativity espoused by Kierkegaard may be the way to light a path along a dark path of alienation. No doubt to follow in the way of Kierkegaard is to take a dangerous road, alone and unafraid of the dark.
Bravely, in Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard takes on the story of Abraham and Isaac, which must surely be one of the most unsettling stories in Western culture. To be commanded by God to destroy his own son, Abraham is faced with a moral dilemma of enormous proportions. Choose the love for God or child; choose a higher telos or choose the normative ethic, the natural law written into Abraham and everyone and demanded by culture and law. Kierkegaard says this story contains a teleological suspension of the ethical, that is, an ethic of a higher sort. He is both admiring of Abraham and appalled by him, he writes. He concludes from his critique of this story, both awesome and awful, that his examination does not lead him to a justification of the lesson. If examined without casuistry, without forcing the lesson into a commonplace or acceptable doctrine, then one is left in silent acceptance. It is a lonely feeling, for the story must remain a paradox and really only soundless faith is the lesson to be learned. “This paradox cannot be mediated.” (Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 56).
From Socrates, Kierkegaard revives the primacy of the subjective, the individual in the world of ideas and received wisdom. At the end of the Enlightenment and beginning of the Romantic epochs, he is critical of the two excesses: the Age of Reason with its cold calculations and the Romanticists’ dismissal of every form of ethic and tradition. He writes: “The subjective thinker, therefore, has also esthetic passion and ethical passion, whereby concretion is gained. All existence-issues are passionate, because existence, if one becomes conscious of it involves passion. To think about them so as to leave out passion is not to think about them at all, is to forget the point that one indeed is oneself and existing person.” (Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, from Google Books, The Essential Kierkegaard, 226). The authentic person, fully exists and this involves passion and the difficult appraisal paradox: “Paradox is the passion of thought” (Philosophical Fragments, 37). And in our present times, he would have likewise seen the anxiety and despair of people unmoored from belief and loss of authenticity as the “existing person” disappears. Not a loss of self, but a full engagement of self is achieved by wanting “to discover something that thought itself cannot think” (Philosophical Fragments, 37).
His Socratic methods are equally appropriate in the 20th and 21st centuries. Cold science and passionless logic brought crimes of eugenics and later, with cold precision, the ovens of genocidal madness. And then comes totalitarianism where individuals dissolve into states. As a reaction there now exists, for some persons, massive indulgence in escapist literature, passionless art, and collapse into corruption, licentious abandon, pleasure seeking, and anomie. For others an flight into thoughtless and extreme fundamentalism where individuals are servants of belief and violence against innocents is ethics. An answer, possibly, is the path followed by Kierkegaard where subjective freedom is respected and each person takes on the heavy responsibility for self-reflection and commits to the ultimate respect for others individual freedom.
One view of Kierkegaard’s connection to Socrates is that he perceived in Socrates self-appointed role a search for the authentic individual, or individual authenticity. He saw in his own time passionless endeavors, nihilism, and witnessed individuals swallowed up in a mass and overbearing culture. Today as well, the mass culture, exacerbated and promoted worldwide by the internet may well devour individuality and the uniqueness of persons so that existence becomes an unconscious and unexamined life. The Socratic antidote provided by Kierkegaard is a passionate and essential embrace of individual thought, the examined life recommended by Socrates. Where one is faced with the impossible task of sorting out an absolute paradox of faith, a reflective acceptance of contradiction is prescribed. “Do I contradict myself? Very well I contradict myself, I am large I contain multitudes” wrote the American poet in the ending year of Kierkegaard’s life. (Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, Stanza 51). It requires a burden of considerable proportions to take on contradiction, paradox, faith, and tenets of current culture to embark on a journey toward the authentic self, upon a road where the self must confront paradox, tradition, religion, self-deception, and even existence.
What value is to be found in Kierkegaard’s Socratic method of the examination of belief and in the importance of subjectivity to a non-Christian? If Kierkegaard’s thought can lead him to declare that Socrates was a Christian, then the very idea of what it is to be a Christian may be applied to anyone, even those who know nothing of Christianity or reject it. To live authentically, to live not just to exist, to live passionately, to bring together the finite within with the infinite, this could be a worthy achievement for anyone. Perhaps it is the most vital, the critical and fundamental endeavor for anyone. In a world in which everyone seems to make a connection in some electronic or virtual way, people may be deceived that such relationships are real or important in any substantial way. Such a deception leads to despair, where the most important relationship is the self to the self. Despair is drowning in a sea of the finite, the trivial, the least important. It is a fatal illness. A recognition of the authentic self requires a relationship with the infinite. “Man is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal…” (Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, Chapter 1: That Despair is the Sickness Unto Death, Google Books, page 9). To get there is the most important challenge of selfhood and such a challenge requires a Socratic examination over a lifetime.
Two Strikes 