- Kierkegaard
uuuuummmmm......what?
Even though this post is about Kierkegaard, I am by no means an expert on philosophy, and I only have a vague understanding of what the hell he was trying to say in the sentence above. But anyways, I am taking my first ever philosophy course, and it is a course on Existentialism. I'd always been fascinated by existentialist thought and had heard of many of the philosophers associated with this movement, so I am very excited to be finally taking this class. Existentialism, broadly speaking, is a philosophy that believes that there is no inherent meaning in life, and so we must determine meaning for ourselves. It is quite hard to define, because the thinkers that are grouped as existentialists had vastly different thoughts, and, furthermore, many of them rejected the label of 'existentialism'. Even Sartre, who was first to embrace the term 'existentialist', eventually rejected it again!
Anyways, I've been quite surprised to find a lot more "God" in existentialism than I'd been expecting. For example, Soren Kierkegaard, who is regarded as one of the fathers of existentialism, believed in God. However, he was very critical of mainstream Christianity, and critiqued the church in his writings. Nevertheless, I find him fascinating because he takes a totally different approach to belief and God than you'd see in books by most Christians or theologians (ie C.S. Lewis). For my class, we read excerpts from Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, in which he discusses the concept of faith using the figure of Abraham from the Old Testament. Kierkegaard believes faith is a passion, and advocates passionate faith.
The writing of Kierkegaard that I really enjoyed the most, however, was from a book called The Sickness Unto Death. In this book Kierkegaard explains that despair is the sickness of the spirit, and that everyone is in despair. This despair is caused by a sort of inbalance between our self and spirit, between the finite and infinite parts of us. What is interesting, especially, is that Kierkegaard says that it is through this despair that we can become conscious that we have a spirit:
" - there is so much talk about wasting a life, but only that person's life was wasted who went on living so deceived by life's joys or its sorrows that he never became decisively and eternally conscious as spirit, as self, or, what amounts to the same thing, never became aware and in the deepest sense never gained the impression that there is a God and that "he," he himself, his self, exists before this God..."
(from The Sickness Unto Death)
Ah...I don't really know why, but those words really affected me when I first read them, and still do. Maybe, despite the pessimistic talk about 'wasting life' and being 'deceived', it still carries some hope: of being able to become fully aware of oneself and one's spirit, as well as God.
It is because of these wonderful words that you, Mr. Kierkegaard, are my new hero, joining the ranks of my other heroes: Jeff Buckley, James Joyce, Craig Ferguson, Gautama Buddha, and Jesus of Nazareth.
