Kierkegaard

Soren Kierkegaard - his surname meaning "church garden" - was born on May 5, 1813 in Copenhagen, where he also spent all his days. His father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard (1756-1838), was a wool merchant. His melancholy, pietistic faith, and thoughts of sin, suffering, and grace infected Kierkegaard's worldview. In his poverty-stricken youth, Michael Kierkegaard had cursed God. Later he constantly thought of the sufferings of Christ. Michael's first wife had died childless after two years marriage; he then married his housekeeper Anne, who was already pregnant. Michael had become so successful in the wool trade and with a fortunate investment that he had been able to retire at age forty - he was fifty-six at Soren's birth.

The influence of Kierkegaard's father on his work has been frequently noted. Not only did Kierkegaard inherit his father's melancholy, his sense of guilt and anxiety, and his pietistic emphasis on the dour aspects of Christian faith, but he also inherited his talents for philosophical argument and creative imagination. In addition Kierkegaard inherited enough of his father's wealth to allow him to pursue his life as a freelance writer. The themes of sacrificial father/son relationships, of inherited sin, of the burden of history, and of the centrality of the "individual, human existence relationship, the old text, well known, handed down from the fathers" (Postscript) are repeated many times in Kierkegaard's oeuvre. The father's sense of guilt was so great (for having cursed God? for having impregnated Kierkegaard's mother out of wedlock?) that he thought God would punish him by taking the lives of all seven of his children before they reached the age of 34 (the age of Jesus Christ at his crucifixion). This was born out for all but two of the children, Soren and his older brother Peter. Soren was astonished that they both survived beyond that age. This may explain the sense of urgency that drove Kierkegaard to write so prolifically in the years leading up to his 34th birthday.

In 1830 Kierkegaard entered the University of Copenhagen, where he studied theology, philosophy, and literature. After the death of his mother in 1834, Kierkegaard made his first note into his famous Journal - the last is dated on September 25, 1855. By 1835 Kierkegaard had decided, that first of all he must know himself, before he could know what to do with his life. In 1837 he met Regine Olsen, a teenager, and moved away from home, working as a teacher of Latin at Borgerdydskolen. His father died in 1838 and on the same year Kierkegaard published From the Papers of One Still Living, a critic on H.C. Andersen's novel Only A Fiddler.

In 1840 Kierkegaard became engaged to Regine Olsen, but broke the relationship next year, devoting himself entirely to writing. Regine Olsen married later the literature historian Friedrich Schlegel. The theme of a young woman being the occasion for a young man to become "poeticized" recurs in Kierkegaard's writings, as does the theme of the sacrifice of worldly happiness for a higher (religious) purpose. Kierkegaard's infatuation with Regine, and the sublimated libidinal energy it lent to his poetic production, were crucial for setting his life course. The breaking of the engagement allowed Kierkegaard to devote himself monastically to his religious purpose, as well as to establish his outsider status (outside the norm of married bourgeois life). It also freed him from close personal entanglements with women, thereby leading him to objectify them as ideal creatures, and to reproduce the patriarchal values of his church and father.

Kierkegaard attacked the state church in 1854, after the new bishop was appointed: he had in vain expected recognition as a religious thinker. For his disappointment, also the new bishop avoided to renew the church. He saw that the so-called people's church established in Denmark was "catastrophically usurping the true role of religion." Kierkegaard, himself ordained a minister, never took a position as pastor.

In 1848 Kierkegaard experienced a spiritual crisis. He started to ponder of death and held a sermon at the cathedral. In the 1850s Kierkegaard published Training in Christianity (1850) under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, and Christ's Judgment on Official Christianity (1855) under his own name. When writing series of articles, compiled as Attack Upon "Christendom" (1854-1855), Kierkegaard was suddenly stricken with a spinal disease. He died within a month on November 11, 1855.

Writings:

On the Concept of Irony with constant reference to Socrates (1841) - a dissertation which criticized prevailing Hegelian assumptions.

Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (1846) - He attacked all philosophical system building, and formulated the thesis that subjectivity is truth. "All essential knowledge relates to existence, or only such knowledge as has an essential relationship to existence is essential knowledge." The individual has the freedom to choose his own truth on the subjective basis of faith.

Kierkegaard's work crosses the boundaries of philosophy, theology, psychology, literary criticism, devotional literature and fiction. Kierkegaard brought this potent mixture of discourses to bear as social critique and for the purpose of renewing Christian faith within Christendom. At the same time he made many original conceptual contributions to each of the disciplines he employed. He is known as the "father of existentialism", but at least as important are his critiques of Hegel and of the German romantics, his contributions to the development of modernism, his literary experimentation, his vivid re-presentation of biblical figures to bring out their modern relevance, his invention of key concepts which have been explored and redeployed by thinkers ever since, his interventions in contemporary Danish church politics, and his fervent attempts to analyse and revitalise Christian faith. Kierkegaard burned with the passion of a religious poet, was armed with extraordinary dialectical talent, and drew on vast resources of erudition.

Main Ideas:

Kierkegaard's central problematic was how to become a Christian in Christendom. The task was most difficult for the well-educated, since prevailing educational and cultural institutions tended to produce stereotyped members of "the crowd" rather than to allow individuals to discover their own unique identities. This problem was compounded by the fact that Denmark had recently and very rapidly been transformed from a feudal society into a capitalist society. Universal elementary education, large-scale migration from rural areas into cities, and greatly increased social mobility meant that the social structure changed from a rigidly hierarchical one to a relatively "horizontal" one. In this context it became increasingly difficult to "become who you are" for two reasons: (i) social identities were unusually fluid; and (ii) there was a proliferation of normalizing institutions which produced pseudo-individuals. Kierkegaard's "inverted Christian dialectic" was designed not to make the word of God easier to assimilate, but to establish more clearly the absolute distance that separates human beings from God. This was in order to emphasize that human beings are absolutely reliant on God's grace for salvation.

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 referred increasingly 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 1847). 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.

Like the terms "aesthetic" and "religious", the term "ethics" in Kierkegaard's work has more than one meaning. 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.

From Kierkegaard's religious perspective, the conceptual distinction between good and evil is ultimately dependent not on social norms but on God. 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). This is still ethical in the second sense, since ultimately God's definition of the distinction between good and evil outranks any human society's definition. The requirement of communicability and clear decision procedures can also be suspended by God's fiat. This renders cases such as Abraham's extremely problematic, since we have no recourse to public reason to decide whether he is legitimately obeying God's command or whether he is a deluded would-be murderer. Since public reason cannot decide the issue for us, we must decide for ourselves as a matter of religious faith.

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.

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. we can have faith, or we can take offense. 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.

Influence:

Kierkegaard's real value as a social and political thinker was not realized until after his death. His pamphleteering achieved little immediate impact, but his substantial philosophical, literary, psychological and theological writings have had a lasting effect. Much of Heidegger's very influential work, Being And Time, is indebted to Kierkegaard's writings (though this goes unacknowledged by Heidegger). Kierkegaard's social realism, his deep psychological and philosophical analyses of contemporary problems, and his concern to address "the present age" were taken up by fellow Scandinavians Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg. Ibsen and Strindberg, together with Friedrich Nietzsche, became central icons of the modernism movement in Berlin in the 1890s. The Danish literary critic Georg Brandes was instrumental in conjoining these intellectual figures: he had given the first university lectures on Kierkegaard and on Nietzsche; he had promoted Kierkegaard's work to Nietzsche and to Strindberg; and he had put Strindberg in correspondence with Nietzsche. Taking his cue from Brandes, the Swedish literary critic Ola Hansson subsequently promoted this conjunction of writers in Berlin itself. Berlin modernism self-consciously sought to use art as a means of political and social change. It continued Kierkegaard's concern to use discursive action for social transformation.

This information taken from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/kierkega.htm.
More information on Kiekegaard can also be found here and here.