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Kierkegaard likened himself to Janus, the two-faced god, saying ‘with the one face I laugh, with the other
Living had become a matter of knowing rather than doing, accumulating information and learning things by rote as opposed to taking decisions that bore the stamp of individual passion or conviction. What this led to was the formation of an outlook in which everything was approached through the medium of set responses and automatic reactions; people knew what they were supposed to say, but they no longer attached any real significance to the words they used. As Kierkegaard wrote in the long section of A Literary Review
In fact there are handbooks for everything, and very soon education, all the world over, will consist in learning a greater or lesser number of comments by heart, and people will excel according to their capacity for singling out the various facts like a printer singling out the letters, but completely ignorant of the meaning of anything.
Abraham. He could only fulfil God’s command by acting, not merely against his natural inclinations as a loving father, but in defiance of the deeply grounded moral principle that forbids the killing of an innocent person; furthermore, the moral enormity of the action was compounded by the fact that the person in question was his own son. Thus what he was required to do must have appeared to him, as it does to us, abhorrent on both human and ethical grounds. Yet – as Johannes de silentio points out – he is continually praised, from the pulpit and elsewhere, for his grandeur in setting out to
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It was by resisting these temptations – moral as well as natural – that Abraham withstood the trial to which his faith was subjected. He was prepared, in other words, to follow through to the end the frightening consequences of his paradoxical commitment; therein lay his true claim to the ‘greatness’ which is often, but largely unthinkingly, accorded him.
And in Kant’s view – as presented in his Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone – that was the option which, in a case of the sort described, a ‘conscientious’ individual would naturally and correctly choose.
– in the sense favoured by Lessing, religion was not true because ‘evangelists and apostles’ taught it, but they taught it because it was true. Or, as he put it elsewhere, historical revelation ‘gives nothing to the human race which human reason could not arrive at on its own’.
To realize oneself as a moral agent was to acknowledge one’s place in an established social order; in following its requirements one would, moreover, achieve what Hegel called one’s ‘substantive freedom’, the self-conscious individual finding himself fulfilled and ‘carried out’ in the universal.
The French philosopher, Emmanuel Mounier (1905–50), once characterized existentialism as ‘a reaction of the philosophy of man against the excesses of the philosophy of ideas and the philosophy of things’. This remark is certainly apposite so far as Kierkegaard is concerned.
It was not for nothing that Sartre, in particular, maintained that the ‘subjectivity of the individual’ constituted his point of departure, insisting on the need to recognize what it entailed and to understand that responsibility for what we were or did could not be sloughed off on to some supposedly objective determinant.
Faith, too, presupposes inwardness as a fundamental condition. In the light of the foregoing this suggests that action rather than cognitive thought is the appropriate category to which it should be assigned. And
What is more, it can also be said to constitute the truth. ‘Subjectivity’, Kierkegaard subsequently and insistently goes on to reiterate, ‘is the truth.’
Alternatively, it has been argued that for Kierkegaard the paradox of the incarnation essentially consisted in its being an offence to our sentiments rather than to our understanding:
but the conclusion that he wanted to stress its offensiveness to the intellect as well seems irresistible in the light of his frequent asseverations to that effect. It was surely not for nothing that, when speaking of the ‘martyrdom’ of faith, he referred to it as a ‘crucifixion of the understanding’.
To be a person is to exist in the mode, not of being, but of becoming, and what a person becomes is his own responsibility, the product of his will, even if (as is frequently the case) this is something he does not want to confront and seeks to conceal from himself.
On the contrary, Kierkegaard considers them to be revelatory of our intrinsic character as persons and to feature, in one form or another, in the life-story of every individual.
