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

by Patrick L. Gardiner

All Kierkegaard’s writings, in one way or another, bore witness to the necessity of affirming the integrity of the individual in the face of such trends, and the same can be said to have been true of his life. His work and his personal existence were indeed inseparably intertwined, the connections between the two being faithfully recorded in the copious journals which he kept from the age of 21 onwards and which throw a vivid light upon the labyrinthine recesses of his strange and complex disposition.

Furthermore, he had been made aware at first hand of the cowardice with which people were ready to submit to majority opinion and the lack of respect for the integrity of the individual that was a corollary of this. 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.

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. In the light of this, Kant drew a firm line between hypotheses of the sort put forward in the natural sciences, which were susceptible to confirmation by experiment and observation, and theories which purported to make cognitive claims about a supersensible or transcendent order of things that lay beyond the range of such procedures.

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

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.

What was required – in the first instance, at least – was to bring home to people what ‘it means for you and me and him, each for himself, to be human beings’, and this involved leading them to recognize for themselves, through an appeal to their own inner experience, the considerations that actuated them in adopting a particular mode of living and the limitations it imposed.

Kierkegaard distinguishes three basic modes or ‘spheres’ of existence: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious.

In the first place, it is indicated that the man who lives aesthetically is not really in control, either of himself or his situation. He typically exists ins Blaue hinein; he tends to live ‘for the moment’, for whatever the passing instant will bring in the way of entertainment, excitement, interest. Committed to nothing permanent or definite, dispersed in sensuous ‘immediacy’, he may do or think one thing at a given time, the exact opposite at some other; his life is therefore without ‘continuity’, lacks stability or focus, changes course according to mood or circumstance, is ‘like a witch’s letter from which one sense can be got now and then another, depending on how one turns it’.

Hence it is the mark of the aesthetic individual that he does not seek to impose a coherent pattern on his life, having its source in some unitary notion of himself and of what he should be, but rather allows ‘what happens’ to act upon him and to govern his behaviour. Inward reflection can show this to be so, and when it occurs it is liable to produce a pervasive sense of despair in the person concerned; his entire life – in general, and not merely in particular respects – may be seen to rest upon an uncertain basis and thus appear drained of meaning.

Unlike the aestheticist, who is continually preoccupied with externals, his attention is directed towards his own nature, his substantial reality as a human being with such and such talents, inclinations, and passions, this being something which it constantly lies within his power to order, control, and cultivate.

In other words, the ethical individual’s life and behaviour must be thought of as infused and directed by a determinate conception of himself which is securely founded upon a realistic grasp of his own potentialities and which is immune to the vicissitudes of accident and fortune. He is not, as the aestheticist was shown to be, the prey of what happens or befalls, for he has not surrendered himself to the arbitrary governance of outside circumstances and incalculable contingencies.

Kant contended (as Hume had done before him) that reason, considered by itself and independently of all experience, was confined to operating with ideas or concepts alone; as such, it was powerless on its own account to demonstrate the existence of anything.

Conceptual thinking as ordinarily employed and understood involved abstracting from what was empirically given in reality; moreover, all such abstract thought unavoidably required or presupposed at some point a thinker in the shape of an existing individual. To assert, as Hegel in effect did, that thought was logically prior to existence was to reverse the true order and amounted to reviving, albeit in a confusing and sophistical form, a mode of argument whose fallaciousness had been sufficiently exposed by Kant.

Inwardness was not to be equated with a habit of introspective reflection on our own mental states; that would make it a mode of detached contemplation, not of active involvement, and would amount to assimilating it to the observational outlook Kierkegaard associated with objectivity. Rather, it manifests itself in self-commitment and the spirit in which such commitment is undertaken: a person exhibits inwardness through the resolutions he forms, the sincerity with which he identifies with them, and the degree to which they govern his approach to the situations that confront him.

In Christian belief, which demands acceptance of what is from a rational standpoint uncertain or even absurd, inwardness is ‘intensified to the utmost degree’; as such, it can be said to constitute ‘the highest passion in the sphere of human subjectivity’

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.