Kierkegaard: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions Book 58)

by Patrick L. Gardiner

As a thinker he may be regarded as awkward, controversial, difficult to classify; but he is certainly not ignored.

Admittedly his opinions on this score, like the pronounced antipathy he came to feel towards the Church, were voiced most stridently towards the end of his career. None the less, his hostility to the academic establishment was continuous with an earlier and deep-rooted suspicion of something that he believed to be endemic to the intellectual climate of his period.

‘illusions of objectivity’, exhibiting itself, on the one hand, in a tendency to smother the vital core of subjective experience beneath layers of historical commentary and pseudo-scientific generalization and, on the other, in a proneness to discuss ideas from an abstract theoretical viewpoint that took no account of their significance for the particular outlooks and commitments of flesh-and-blood human beings.

More potent, at any rate in its subsequent effects, was the atmosphere of gloom and religious guilt that emanated from a parent who believed that both he and his family lay under a mysterious curse and who, notwithstanding his worldly success, lived in constant expectation of divine retribution. Thus, in a retrospective entry in his journals, his son could speak of ‘the dark background which, from the very earliest time, was part of my life’ and recollect the ‘dread with which my father filled my soul, his own frightful melancholy, and all the things in this connection which I do not even note down’ (J 273).

As a boy he was physically weak and maladroit, and at the same time acutely self-conscious about what he felt to be his unprepossessing appearance; in consequence, he played no part in games and tended to be a natural prey to bullies. He was, however, far from being defenceless in other respects. He quickly became aware of his superior intelligence, admitting later that this provided him with an effective weapon by which to protect himself against those who threatened him.

During his first year he covered preliminary courses in a wide range of subjects; they included Greek and Latin, history, mathematics, physics, and philosophy, and he passed all the relevant examinations with distinction.

He spent money freely on clothes and drink, running up debts which he relied on his father to pay; he also attended a round of parties, frequented cafés and restaurants, and was continually to be seen at the theatre and opera where, in his own words, he appeared as ‘a man in modern dress, glasses on his nose and a cigar in his mouth’.

‘what good would it do me if truth stood before me, cold and naked, not caring whether I recognized her or not?’

at one point, indeed, he seems even to have found the conception of a single-minded master criminal an appealing one.

This period of Kierkegaard’s life, in which an outward display of gaiety and insouciance can be said to have masked a deep sense of personal inadequacy and confusion, lasted until the sudden death of his father in 1838. In view of the peculiarly close yet uneasy relationship which had subsisted between the two, it was to be expected that the event would produce a powerful emotional impact. What was perhaps less predictable was the form it took. Out of a family of seven children only two had survived, and Kierkegaard appears to have assumed that his father was destined to outlive himself and his brother as well. When this did not happen he interpreted his father’s death as involving some sort of ‘sacrifice’ which had been made on his behalf so that ‘if possible I might turn into something’ (J 62). Hence, notwithstanding a comfortable inheritance that removed any practical incentive for acquiring the degree, he now saw himself as under an obligation to fulfil his parent’s wish that he should complete his university course and he at once started seriously to prepare himself for the examination.

On the surface he may have given the impression that all was well, conscientiously doing everything that might have been expected from one in his position. Even so; he maintained that he regretted making the proposal the day after it was accepted and as the months passed his doubts and anxieties were to become increasingly acute, though always apparently carefully concealed. Almost a year passed before he took the step of returning the ring, asking Regine to forget the man who sent it and to forgive him as being one who was not capable of making a girl happy.

It must be admitted, all the same, that he was somewhat evasive about the nature of the reasons that lay behind it; at times he spoke of a consciousness of personal inadequacy deriving from his ‘melancholy’, at others of a fundamental incompatibility of temperament, and at others again of his own calling as an ‘exceptional’ individual which ultimately ruled out the possibility of his ever entering into so demanding a relationship with someone else.

The suggestion that acquaintances from whom he might have expected support were deserting him may or may not have been justified, but it is certainly indicative of the almost paranoiac feeling of isolation that he suffered at this moment of his life.

With such experiences behind him, he finally discarded his previous notion of retiring to a country parish and became convinced instead that current ‘literary, social and political conditions’ required the services of an ‘extraordinarius’ who was ready to speak out in the name of the truth. The truth in question was that of Christianity and he regarded his own intellectual gifts and cast of mind as properly fitting him for the task. It was, indeed, with the sense of one endowed with a providential mission that he decided to remain faithful to his literary vocation, speaking of the need he felt once more to ‘steer into the open sea, living in grace and out of grace, entirely in the power of God’ (J 192).

Kierkegaard’s single-handed attack on the clerical establishment was pursued with a polemical force and a sarcastic venom that have reminded some recent commentators of the zest with which his contemporary, Karl Marx, sought to unmask the ideological pretensions of 19th-century capitalist society. It undoubtedly occasioned anger, even alarm, in some quarters, and representations were made demanding action against what was regarded as disruptive agitation. But his violent foray into the field of public controversy turned out to be short-lived. Early in October 1855 he collapsed in the street, dying in hospital a few weeks later.

Readers who come to his work in the expectation of being confronted by clear lines of argument, proceeding from carefully formulated premisses and issuing in determinate conclusions, will often be disappointed; in this respect his characteristic modes of presenting his ideas stand in sharp contrast, not only to the rigorous procedures adopted by systematic theorists like Descartes and Spinoza, but also to the more informal patterns of demonstration favoured by such empirically minded writers as Locke and Berkeley. Nor, again, was he centrally concerned with topics of the kind that formed the focus of philosophical attention in the 17th and 18th centuries; questions concerning the fundamental structure of the universe or the nature and scope of our knowledge of reality were not amongst those that he principally sought to pursue. And

Peterson's way for writing and presentation. He doesn't formulated logical arguments with premises. He is a specuated thinker struggling with personal and social direct conflicts rather than purely philosophical.

The very conception of the ‘speculative’ thinker, set apart from the contingencies of everyday living and coolly contemplating existence from a privileged vantage-point, was apt to arouse his suspicion, even antipathy; amongst other things, he was prone to treat it as involving a bland indifference to what mattered to people as individuals whose real interests found no recognition at the hands of ‘systematists and objective philosophers’. In the light of all this it is perhaps not surprising that some critics have portrayed him as being an extreme representative of the Romantic revolt against the ideals of the European Enlightenment, while in the eyes of others he has been viewed as an anti-philosopher rather than a philosopher, not merely out of sympathy with the aims of dispassionate enquiry but actively intent upon undermining the assumptions of those who pursued it.

Thus, if from one standpoint Kierkegaard’s writings may seem to reflect concerns deriving from his personal life and character, from another they can be regarded as responses to what he himself clearly conceived to be the challenge presented by pervasive tendencies in the moral and religious thinking of his age.

He himself never wavered in the belief that it was necessary to come to terms with the achievements of natural science in the exploration of the physical world; more specifically, he never questioned the significance of the Newtonian world-picture or sought to minimize the importance of its implications for the future of systematic enquiry. At the same time, however, he was acutely aware of the disputes that had arisen at a philosophical level as to how much such enquiry could properly be said to encompass.

in his Critique of Pure Reason he undertook to demonstrate that neither reason nor sensory experience was by itself sufficient for the acquisition of knowledge: both were essential. According to Kant, it was true that human cognition necessarily conformed to an underlying framework of a priori forms and concepts which were imposed by the mind upon the data supplied by the senses; at the same time, the legitimate application of these was confined to the sensory sphere and any attempt to extend them to establish truths concerning what obtained outside that sphere must always be unjustified.

Immanuel Kant

‘All knowledge of things out of mere pure understanding or pure reason is nothing but illusion, and only in experience is truth.’

Furthermore and again like Hume, he realized that they entailed consequences which were of more than merely academic interest. For they apparently impinged, with destructive effect, upon the various efforts that had been made over the centuries to prove propositions fundamental to the Christian religion, above all those concerning the existence and nature of God: in Kant’s opinion, it unquestionably followed from his criticisms that ‘all attempts to make a purely speculative use of reason in reference to theology are entirely fruitless and of their inner nature null and void’.

Kant’s reaction was both more complex and less dismissive and was epitomized in his claim – by no means ironical in intent – that he had found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith. What did this somewhat cryptic assertion amount to?

Faith and knowledge

What he did maintain was that nothing whatsoever at the theoretical level could be known about such a realm. Thus the cognitive claims of speculative theology, inasmuch as they purported to provide us with demonstrable truths concerning the supersensible, were certainly unacceptable; but so, too, were the arguments of those who contended that it was possible conclusively to demonstrate their falsity: in this respect the atheist was no better off than the theist.

as he put it in his Critique of Practical Reason, ‘the highest good is possible in the world only on the supposition of a supreme cause of nature’, and this – in so far as it acted ‘through understanding and will’ – could only be God.

In putting forward such considerations, Kant was emphatic that the existence of God, freedom, and immortality could only be established from ‘a practical point of view’. From a theoretical standpoint they could be neither proved nor disproved; in other words, there could be no knowledge here of the kind we have in the case of, say, scientific or mathematical truths.

Making room for faith’ in the sense he had in mind did not mean trying to rehabilitate contentions which had been stigmatized by a host of Enlightenment critics as ‘superstition’. On the contrary, it was a ‘faith of pure practical reason’, securely founded in the authoritative deliverances of the moral consciousness, that he sought to legitimize; nothing less would do.

Though presupposed by our ethical thinking, they could not on that account be accredited with objective validity: what propositions the ethical standpoint committed us to was one thing, whether they were actually true was another, and while they might represent convictions that were integral to the adoption of that standpoint, any certainty they thereby acquired was ‘not logical, but moral’.

To many of his successors it at least appeared evident that he had finally dispelled all hope of providing a rational justification of theological claims along orthodox lines.

G. Fichte (1762–1814)

F. D. E. Schleiermacher

Thus, in an essay entitled On the Foundation of our Belief in a Divine Government of the Universe, Fichte

The concept of God as a ‘separate entity’ or quasi-personal agency was an unthinkable one, defying coherent analysis. It should be replaced by the conception of a ‘moral world order’ to which we necessarily belonged as practical beings and in which we could be sure that good actions would infallibly succeed and evil ones just as certainly fail: belief in such an order was, moreover, a ‘fundamental presupposition’ of the moral consciousness and on this account did not admit of argument or demonstration.

As his early unpublished manuscripts indicate, he was at first inclined to adopt a standpoint that was in some ways reminiscent of Kant’s. Thus he initially referred to morality as constituting ‘the end and essence of all religion’, Jesus himself being portrayed as propounding a Kantian-style ethic which was finally subject to nothing beyond the free exercise of ‘universal reason’.

In the words of a significant manuscript written in 1800, the time had come to ‘deduce this now repudiated dogmatics out of … the needs of human nature and thus to show its naturalness and its necessity’.

For in his mature writings he came to view religion as a mode of consciousness that had progressed to a point from which it could be seen to reflect certain fundamental insights into the nature of reality as a whole.

For Hegel believed that, as traditionally understood, these dogmas were themselves symptomatic of oppositions inherent in our thought and knowledge which it was the task of his own philosophy to overcome.

the extent of human knowledge and had found most recent expression in the Kantian claims that ultimate reality consisted of unknowable ‘things in themselves’,

Reality, that is to say, would no longer appear to us as something irreducibly independent and external, and spirit, through the medium of human consciousness, would arrive at a complete and satisfying understanding of itself.

For religious conceptions as they historically evolved could be seen to exhibit a developing insight into the spiritual significance of the world, an insight that attained its highest form in Christianity – the ‘absolute religion’. In his opinion, however, it was vital to realize that the insight in question had been formulated in figurative or mythical terms. Taken literally and at their face value, religious doctrines were rationally unacceptable; moreover, they were apt to lead to radical misunderstandings.

Christian doctrines of the fall and of subsequent redemption through the incarnation of Christ were susceptible to an interpretation that showed them to be consonant with Hegel’s notion of the manner in which spirit overcame internal divisions, ultimately returning to itself and achieving complete fulfilment and comprehension of its nature through man. In this sense Christianity was not, or not merely, a matter of subjective faith, practical or otherwise. Correctly viewed, its contents could be seen to be rationally acceptable and objectively valid.

that the God of religion was no more than the externalization, in an imaginary and idealized form, of man’s own nature and fundamental attributes.

As Feuerbach himself succinctly put it, the secret of theology had finally been shown to be anthropology.

Kierkegaard in fact showed himself to be far from unsympathetic to Kant’s original insistence that religious convictions were a matter, not of knowledge, but of faith; this was indeed an aspect of the Kantian approach which he was subsequently to explore in his own individual fashion and at considerable length.

were sophisticated Danish thinkers – such as Kierkegaard’s one-time tutor, Martensen – who had been deeply impressed by ‘the latest German philosophy’ and who maintained that Christian orthodoxy had nothing to fear from its implications. In their view this philosophy, far from threatening the cherished truths of religion, demonstrated how they could be both preserved intact and at the same time fully harmonized with the demands of reason by invoking the mediating categories of the Hegelian system.

My principal thought was that in our age, because of the great increase of knowledge, we had forgotten what it means to exist, and what inwardness signifies, and that the misunderstanding between speculative philosophy and Christianity was explicable on that ground. I now resolved to go back as far as possible, in order not to reach the religious mode of existence too soon, to say nothing of the specifically Christian mode of existence … If men had forgotten what it means to exist religiously, they had doubtless also forgotten what it means to exist as human beings; this must therefore be set forth. But above all it must not be done in a dogmatising manner, for then the misunderstanding would instantly take the explanatory effort to itself in a new misunderstanding, as if existing consisted in getting to know something about this or that.

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.

As Kierkegaard remarked elsewhere, ‘no man, none, dares to say I’; instead, a species of ‘ventriloquism’ had become de rigueur – the ordinary person had become a mouthpiece of public opinion, the professor a mouthpiece of theoretical speculation, the pastor a mouthpiece of religious meditation. All were in different ways submissive to abstractions to which they attributed an independent reality. Rather than confront the fact that everyone is finally accountable to himself for his life, character, and outlook, they took refuge in a depersonalized realm of reified ideas and doctrines.

It would be a mistake to suppose that he was therefore opposed to objective enquiry as such, though this charge has sometimes been made against him. The methodical and collaborative pursuit of disinterested knowledge was perfectly justified when carried out within its proper limits, as in the case of the historical and natural sciences. Confusion and self-deception arose, however, when people allowed the attitudes appropriate to such pursuit to impinge upon matters that lay outside its true domain.

At the level of everyday consciousness and behaviour religious beliefs were entertained in a purely nominal or abstract way, with no reference to the concrete contexts of practical choice that would lend them life and meaning; while at the hands of philosophers and theologians they had been translated into the language of theoretical speculation and treated as if they were answerable to objectively conceived standards of truth that wholly transcended the subjective needs and points of view of particular human beings.