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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Graphic Guides
- Sprache: Englisch
Father of existentialism or the Eeyore of philosophy? Known as the first modern theologian, Søren Kierkegaard was a prolific writer of the Danish 'golden age'. A philosopher, poet and social critic, his key concepts of angst, despair, and the importance of the individual, influenced many 20th-century philosophers and literature throughout Europe. Dave Robinson and Oscar Zarate's brilliant graphic guide explains what Kierkegaard means by 'anti-philosophy', and tells an illuminating story of the strange life and ideas of a man tortured by his attempts to change the very priorities of Western thought.
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Published by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DPEmail: [email protected]
ISBN: 978-178578-015-8
Text copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd
Illustrations copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd
The author and illustrator has asserted their moral rights
Originating editor: Richard Appignanesi
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
A Radical Change in Philosophy
The Fork
The Father
The Paterfamilias
The Mother
The Doomed Family
The Curse of God
The Prophecy
Relief
Student Life
The Holy Alliance
Futility
Reconciliation
Father and Son
The Irony of Socrates
Regine Olsen
A Dreadful Mistake
The Broken Engagement
Strange Deceiver
Escape to Berlin
Finding a Way
The Lectures
The Hegelian Dialectic
Objects and Thoughts
Individuals and Communities
The Individual Submerged
Kierkegaard’s Criticism of Hegel
The Future and the Past
Humanity Is Not an Idea
Truth and Commitment
Fictional and Real People
Is this Fair?
The Outsider
The Philistines
The Crowd
The Writer’s Existence
Either/Or
Against Consensus
The Reader’s Choice
The Aesthete
Don Juan
“Diary of a Seducer”
The Aesthetic Life and Despair
Emptiness
Disillusionment
Escape from Life
Judge Wilhelm
Marriage and Commitment
Choose Despair
Ethics, the Individual and the Eternal
Who is Judge Wilhelm?
The Religious Life
Stages and Leaps
The Religious Stage
Freedom Is a Choice
Books, Books, Books …
The Swelling Mind
The Imagined Future
Indecision
“Being Present to Oneself”
Repetition is in the Present
What is Existence?
No Guide to Choice
Dread, Despair and Guilt
The Eccentric Dane
Beliefs and Uncertainty
A Faith Based on Reason?
Natural Theology
Religion and Philosophy
Incompatibilists
Negative Theology
Pascal’s Wager
The Ultimate Incompatibilist
State Christianity
Rational Christendom
True Christians
Demonstrating Existence
The Ontological Argument
The Reasoning Irrationalist
Hans Lassen Martensen
Hegel’s Christ
The Folk Religion
Kierkegaard’s Christ
The Transcendent God
Objective and Subjective Truth
The Leap of Faith
Faith and Proof
A Way of Life
Fear and Trembling
The Divine Command
The Ethical and Religious Spheres
The Religious Sphere
Beyond Civic Duties
The Reader’s Choice
The Knight of Faith
The Concept of Dread
The Meaning of Dread
Adam’s Temptation
The Fear of Freedom
Inheriting Original Sin
Sex and Sin
The Age of Anxiety
Further Stages
The Nightmares
The Sickness Unto Death
Our Task of Therapy
Willpower and the Self
Neglect of the Self
What is the Sickness?
Being a True Christian
The Monastery in the World
The Applicant Pastor
The Wild and the Tame
Bishop Mynster
The Instant
The Corsair Incident
“The Present Age”
The Modern Public
Last Years
Sickness and Death
The Deathbed
The Legacy
Kierkegaard the Aesthete
The Production Line
How to Approach Kierkegaard
The Father of Existentialism?
Who is an Existentialist?
The Anonymous Crowd
Indifference to Choice
The Objectively Subjective
Passionate Belief
Existence and Human Presence
Responsibility and Commitment
Cowardice
Existentialist Key Words
What Does He Mean?
Subjective Truth
Are We Really “Free”?
The Issue of Determinism
Is the Mind Transparent?
The Uncertainty of Freedom
Social Products
The Abstraction of Freedom
Kierkegaard’s Grandchildren
Modern Theology
Existentialist Theologians
Postmodern Anti-Philosopher
Is There a “True Self”?
Adorno, Irigaray, Derrida
The Open Reading
Further Reading
About the Author and Artist
Acknowledgements
Index
A Radical Change in Philosophy
For over 2,000 years, philosophers had insisted that their primary task was to establish what counted as certain and reliable knowledge. Søren Kierkegaard violently disagreed. The job of philosophy wasn’t to tell us what we could know. It had to tell us what we should do.
WHAT GOOD WOULD IT DO ME TO DISCOVER SOME SO-CALLED OBJECTIVE TRUTH?WHAT I REALLY NEED TO HAVE CLEAR IN MY MIND IS WHAT I MUST DO, NOT WHAT I MUST KNOW.
The Fork
Søren Kierkegaard was born on 5 May 1813, the youngest child of Michael Kierkegaard. His family nickname was “Fork” because, as a child he had once threatened his dinner.
I AM A FORK AND I WILL STICK YOU!I WAS ALREADY AN OLD MAN WHEN I WAS BORN.
He was a frail child who suffered from a curvature of the spine, probably brought about by an earlier fall from a tree. He also suffered from mysterious fits that left him weak. And for the whole of his life he had an aversion to sunlight. Full-length portraits usually show him sporting an umbrella.
The Father
His old father was a remarkable man. He had been born in Jutland, as a landless serf, of an appallingly poor family.
We were called KIERKEGAARD, or “CHURCHYARD” – AFTER A PLOT OF LAND THE FAMILY FARMED THAT BELONGED TO THE LOCAL PRIEST.
He moved to Copenhagen at the age of 24 and rapidly became one of the most successful merchants in Denmark. By the age of 40, he was rich, so he retired from commerce and devoted the rest of his life to reading theology. He was a very intelligent and religious man – a great autodidact who enjoyed discussing Christian doctrine with the various churchmen he invited to his large town house.
The Paterfamilias
Michael Kierkegaard was also an authoritarian father who demanded correct behaviour and obedience from his seven children and was careful with his money. His religious views were a complicated mixture of orthodox Lutheranism, Moravian piety and an obsessive spiritual melancholy. It was a dark and grim Christianity that stressed the inevitability of sin, punishment and suffering. Søren had to learn a lengthy catechism and recite it to his father every day.
As A CHILD I WAS STRICTLY AND EARNESTLY BROUGHT UP TO CHRISTIANITY – HUMANLY SPEAKING, INSANELY BROUGHT URA CHILD TRAVESTIED BY A MELANCHOLY OLD MAN. TERRIBLE!
The Mother
Søren’s parents were old when he was born. His “heavy minded” father was 56, and his mother Anne, 45. His mother had been the family’s former domestic servant, illiterate, and she seems to have made little impression on any of her children. The father ruled, and was both feared and admired by all his children, especially Søren.
THE RELATIONSHIP WITH MY FATHER, THE PERSON I LOVED MOST, WAS WITH A MAN WHO MADE ONE MISERABLE.
The Doomed Family
But out of the seven Kierkegaard children, only two survived. The young family and their mother were gradually obliterated by accidents, disease and complications of childbirth. Only Søren and his brother Peter remained. And their father thought he knew why. “The Great Earthquake” happened in 1835 when the old man told the truth at last. Søren was 22.
SOME PUNISHMENT FROM GOD IS UPON US!I HAD ALWAYS SUSPECTED THAT MY FATHER WAS HARBOURING SOME TERRIBLE SECRET THAT SOMEHOW EXPLAINED THIS APPARENTLY RELENTLESS ANNIHILATION.
The Curse of God
God had rewarded Michael Kierkegaard with material prosperity, but was progressively punishing him by finishing off his children, all of whom would die before they reached the age of 34. (Like Christ, crucified at 33.) But why?
WHEN I WAS A SMALL BOY OF 11 YEARS, AS I TENDED SHEEP ON THE JUTLAND HEATH, SUFFERING GREATLY, STARVING AND IN WANT, I STOOD UPON A HILL AND CURSED GOD.
The Prophecy
He also confessed to pre-marital sexual relations with his second wife, while she was still a servant, which probably didn’t please God much either. But it was his angry childhood blasphemy that had done for them all.
GUILT RESTS UPON THE WHOLE FAMILY. IT MUST DISAPPEAR, BE STRICKEN OUT BY GOD’S MIGHTY HAND. OUR REMEMBRANCE MUST BE CUT OFF FROM THE EARTH AND OUR NAME BLOTTED OUT.
Relief
Both boys seemed to have accepted their father’s deranged explanation of the family’s misfortune. They immediately became convinced that they would both die young. So 12 years later, Søren was very pleasantly surprised to find himself still alive.
MARVELLOUS THAT I AM 34 YEARS OLD. IT IS QUITE INCOMPREHENSIBLE TO ME.
Student Life
Søren became a student at the University of Copenhagen, studying theology and philosophy to become a pastor of the Lutheran church. But, perhaps because of doubts about his longevity, he gave up his studies halfway through. He moved out of his father’s house, lived the life of a scandalous aesthete and devoted himself to a life of pleasure and amusement, which his father (surprisingly) seems to have funded.
I WAS LEADING MY LIFE IN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT CATEGORIES.
The Holy Alliance
He soon discovered the joys of reading literature, as opposed to theology, and became an opera enthusiast. He caroused with several good friends who called themselves “The Holy Alliance”. They discussed philosophy, girls and the opera, and Søren pretended to be more dissolute and outrageous than he actually was. By this time, he was developing more objective reservations about his father’s extreme religious views, and even entertained serious doubts about his own Christian faith. And like most philosophy students then and now, he was worried about what to do with his life. Philosophy itself certainly didn’t seem to have the answers.
Futility
The young Søren was a naturally serious individual, not really cut out for the life of a dissolute rake, even if he did his best. He ran up bills with booksellers, tobacconists and restaurants. He got drunk with his fellow students and maybe even had a sexual experience or two. But the life of pleasure soon came to seem forced and futile. He sank into a deep, almost suicidal despair at his lack of direction, and felt completely remote from the lives of his friends, who all found him wonderfully witty, if rather aloof.
ONE BLOWS ONE’S BRAINS OUT, BING, BANG, BOVER, THEN THE STORY IS OVER.I HAVE JUST COME FROM A PARTY OF WHICH I WAS THE SOUL: WITTICISMS FLOWED FROM MY MOUTH, ALL LAUGHED AND ADMIRED ME, BUT I WENT AWAY AND WANTED TO SHOOT MYSELF.
Reconciliation
Fortunately, in May 1838, when he was 25, he seems to have had some kind of mystical experience that rekindled his religious enthusiasm. “There is an indescribable joy which blazes in me.” He became reconciled with his now ailing father but, three months later, the old man died. This affected Søren deeply.
He HAS NOT DIED FROM ME, BUT FOR ME, IN ORDER THAT, IF POSSIBLE, SOMETHING MAY BE MADE OF ME.
In his mind, returning to his father and God were more or less the same thing. He came to believe that his father had sacrificed himself so that his son could continue to preach God’s message to the world.
Father and Son
Kierkegaard undoubtedly had some kind of complicated “father fixation”. He projected the personality of his own very odd and stern father onto that of the authoritarian God he wrote about for the rest of his life.
I LEARNT FROM HIM WHAT FATHER-LOVE IS, AND THEREBY I GOT A CONCEPTION OF THE DIVINE FATHER-LOVE.
He also seems to have inherited some of his father’s mental instability. His religious frame of mind was equally obsessive, melancholic and guilt-ridden.
The Irony of Socrates
In 1840, after many years of interrupted study, Kierkegaard finally completed his degree in theology and was looking forward to becoming the pastor of a small country parish. He wrote a student thesis, “On the Concept of Irony, with Special Reference to Socrates”. In this essay he praises Socrates for his attacks on conventional ideas and accepted wisdoms, and his impressive ironic detachment. Socrates mocks all those who are “fossilized in their limited social conditions”.
I WAS ALREADY INDIRECTLY EXPRESSING MY OWN PERSONAL DISLIKE OF WELL-REGULATED SOCIETIES – COPENHAGEN IN PARTICULAR.
“Everything was perfect and complete and did not allow any sensible longing to remain unsatisfied. Everything was timed to the minute: You fell in love when you reached your 20th year, you went to bed at ten o’clock. You married, you lived in domesticity and maintained your position in the State. You had children.”
Regine Olsen
By now Kierkegaard was in love with 18-year-old Regine Olsen. She was both pretty and intelligent, and he had admired her for some time. In September 1840, he proposed to her and was accepted.
HER FATHER SAID NEITHER YES NOR NO, BUT NEVERTHELESS HE WAS WILLING ENOUGH. I ASKED FOR AN OPPORTUNITY TO TALK TO HER. SHE SAID YES.
A formal engagement of one year was agreed upon. So Kierkegaard was well on the way to becoming a highly respectable member of Copenhagen society, as his father would have wished.
