Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855)

just some random notes on this book I scooped up from my blog stonesoferasmus.com : A few years before his engagement to Regina Olsen, he seriously considered suicide. Kierkegaard grew up in a strict, religious family. His father was a melancholic, religious man who believed that God’s wrath was imminent. The father’s dire religious overtones hung over the family like a doomsday saying. Kierkegaard's father read to his son stories from the bible from an illustrated tome that depicted graphically the violence of the crucifixion. I think the young Kierkegaard was seared by those images of a brutally beaten Christ hanging on a cross.
The central story of Sickness Unto Death is an interpretation of the rising of Lazarus by Christ recounted in Chapter 11 of John's Gospel. Lazarus, the brother of Martha and the Mary who annointed the body of Jesus with oil and dried his feet with her hair, is ill and near death. Kierkegaard reads the story as an explanation of despair. Christ says Lazarus's sickness is not unto death (John 11:4). The disciples misunderstand Jesus to mean physical death, but Jesus means spiritual death, the death caused by despair. Raising Lazarus from the dead is the greatest "sign" Christ performs in John's Gospel. In fact, it is the culmination event of many minor "signs" Jesus performs. Kierkegaard reads the story as an allegory on despair. Raising Lazarus from the dead is meant to serve a point: that death won't kill Lazarus. To raise him from the dead only for him to die, physically later on, is to suggest that Christ has saved him from the death caused by inner despair.
I wrote on Kierkegaard as an undergraduate philosophy major. I went to Cophenhagen to visit his grave, which turned out to be a great pun for in Danish graveyard is "kierkegaard" so when I asked someone where was the grave of Kierkegaard they thought I was asking where was the churchyard. It is fitting that Kierkegaard's name means graveyard.
On my way to Copenhagen I took a ferry from Germany to Denmark in a train. The train enters the ferry via built-in tracks. It was late at night. I was sitting next to a German girl who was going to Denmark for a summer job. Since we were talking to each other, when the train boarded the ferry, we both went on deck to look out into the sea. I remember looking down into the dark wine waters and feeling vertigo and this sudden desire to plunge into the vortex.
Perhaps what Kierkegaard was trying to say is that we can die way before our actual deaths. Feeling the vertigo made me feel alive but at the same time hearkened a baleful note to my mortality. I recognized the horrific contingency of my being, that I won't last long. Kierkegaard's point was that we succumb to death long before we physically die in a kind of covering up of our selves. Famously Kierkegaard defines the self as a relation that is in relationship with its own self. Sometimes this relational structure becomes muddled, scratched over, hidden and we become lost to our self. We are unmoored from our relationship to our very self.
The greatest form of despair is the despair that does not even know it is in despair.
To know I am in despair is the first step to not be in despair. In other words, to know that I am born, introduced to this world without any instruction, or even with my permission, so I recognize that I am not at home in this world. To be in despair is to kid myself into thinking that I am at home in the world when really I am not.
Heidegger was influenced by Kierkegaard. What Heidegger has to say about anxiety is closely mirrored to Kierkegaard's theory of the self. Dasein (Heidegger's neologism for the human being, which means literally being-there) is a being whose very being becomes an issue for it. This is very close to what Kierkegaard was trying to say. And I think it is what Walker Percy was trying to say in all of his novels: we are strangers in a strange land.
That night on the ferry to Denmark I wanted to jump into the void for it promised an escape. Not that I had any external reason to be in despair. At that time in my life I was feeling pretty good. But the recognition came to me that what defines human being is despair.
I think it was Thoreau who said the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. I think he was onto something. And so was I at that moment. Since then I have forgotten. Only to find my notes on Kierkegaard in a notebook from my college days which I reconstructed to write this blog post. The me of 2000 when I was 20 is sending a message to me of 2012 at 32. I think that is how it works. There is no essential self. Just fragments. Thank god we can communicate.… (more)

Soren Kierkegaard (S.K.) was the youngest of seven children. He was born 5 years before Karl Marx, on the same date, 5/5 (May 5). His brother, Peter, was eight years older and a Danish theologian who publicly criticized Soren's writings a few times. The following details might help explain why S.K. wrote what he wrote and lived how he lived. He had an older brother, also named Soren, who died (1819), a sister, Maren, who died (1822), a sister, Nicoline, who died (1832), a brother, Niels, who died (1833), and a sister, Petrea, who died the same year his mom died (1834). He started studying at the University of Copenhagen in 1830 and published his first book review one month after his dad died in 1838. He then wrote feverishly for 17 more years until his death in 1855. (This review is for everyone, but not everyone will like reading the book, Fear and Trembling: A New Translation.)

Hegel annulled the individual and (like Meta Facebook) treats the human organism "team" as a bell-curve for behavioral analysis of trends. Even so, as S.K. knew, it is the individual who has to live (and die), who has mental activity, who sometimes has variant thoughts--Shall I dwell on this thought of which I am afraid, or shall I not? Freud himself cowered (and fainted) from some of his thoughts (about visiting Rome, about Egypt, and while at the Acropolis)--while trying to establish equal footing with his parents and while trying to maintain dominance over the students in his field. Society would like to keep people's thoughts Privatissium (concealed), but S.K. contends that greatness depends upon being able to convert one's thoughts into outward actions, against the recommendations of Hegel.

"Trembling" is not an everyday word. S.K. uses it in his title even though few people are able to associate it anymore with the idea from Philippians. Tolstoy concluded that the theology of the Russian Orthodox church was a mix of nonsense, and thanks to the Christological pantheistic righteousness of the Pauline epistles, and the efforts of schools like the Union Atheism Seminary, "[i]t is easy to explain the whole of existence, faith included, without having a notion of what faith is..." In fact, people who do not want the truth to be told often go to church so they can rest in the cliché (which they believe to be false)--"what [the pastor] said, that is the truth." A pragmatist believes in whatever works to get a particular outcome, yet "his soul is puffed up, it is not upright in him; ... [for] the righteous shall live by his faith (Habakkuk 2:4 ASV). Philippians 2:12 says it this way--"work out your own salvation with fear and trembling..."

Words can be false or true or pragmatic. (Pragmatic words are a mixture of false and true.) S.K. starts his Problemata pages with a proverb that indicates that the one who works gets the bread while his observation (of life) is that the ones who do the least work have the most bread available. S.K. draws attention to the jarring divergence between his classroom theological studies and life in the land of the living; the weariness borne from the distinction between categorial imperative ethics and reality. Aesthetics and ethics are different critters--the modern Hollywood "happily ever after" endings being a good case in point. Aesthetics are only pragmatic, empty words.

Family boundaries are indistinct, shifting, and shifty. S.K. began his voluminous writing years shortly after splitting his father's inheritance with his brother Peter, and this was fresh in his mind as he wrote this book about Jewish money, about Jewish family ties, and about Abraham (the originator of the Jewish faith). Slithering money corporation cartel family gangs are those which establish secret living trusts (i.e. "frauds"), in the name of stewardship, to create pragmatic slavery "for the ones you love." In a sense, death (or "life") insurance is a form of sex insurance--"procreate and we'll pay you (someday)." "Friendly liars" is an oxymoron as perhaps also "false explanations in a family" is not a family.

Exposed as he is, the man who behaves in opposition to universal, or cultural, norms must build a tower as his support system. Descartes was an honest thinker who did this while S.K. also describes the hypothetical knight (or dame) of faith who bends the universal, who translates himself into the new universal, and who lets himself be read by everyone, uncovered and exposed.

Possibility #1, possibility #2, possibility #3, and possibility #4 are the interpretations that occurred to S.K. (as Johannes de Silentio) as he tried to explain and understand the meaning of the reading assignments of Isaac, Sarah, and Abraham on which this book is based. He grapples with the ideas of preferred beneficiaries, concealment, self-preservation, idolatry, fatherhood, child weaning, unspoken words, and, of course, faith. As Marty alluded to in his confession, Bio Marty Vita: Life Life Life, God is not the Creator of Nature; in this life, God is the possibility.

Step to it and grow up. Wean the child. Leave childish things behind, for faith is a childhood illness. However, S.K. ascertains that it is not. I can relate to his ideas, because when I had immersed myself in "the entirety of love," not lacking "the courage to attempt and to venture everything," after surveying my "situation in life..." when I was younger I headed to NYC in a wave of faith. Is "the courage of faith... the only humble courage"? As S.K. describes in the Epilogue, a disciple of Heraclitus went further than his teacher by saying that one cannot walk into the same river even once--lol. As we all know, to go further and farther and to do more, one must necessarily venture a single, frightful first step.

Dying on Earth, for many people today, as well as in the past, is like an army of martyrs sacrificing to the doctrine of the world whose lives are crushed with groans and sobs (per Tolstoy, My Religion). This is one way to live (and die), but S.K. writes that "the hero always dies before he dies..." or, as Paulo Freire indicated to J. Kozol (The Night Is Dark and I Am Far from Home), "A young man is going to have to die in certain ways in order to become the kind of man he needs to be." There is a sort of human longevity that comes from joining or forming a corporation, there is a sort of family longevity, and there is also a form of longevity that comes from melting into a principle--by faith, as S.K. has described. None of these are infinite longevity, however. Therefore, perhaps you should read this book. It might make you mad; you might find it ridiculous; but it might just push you up to a higher level of living before you one day succumb to your eventual dying.

Twenty years ago, I read some excerpts of Fear and Trembling from the W. Lowrie translation. It used words like else, stupid, Thee, abyss, and particular, while this B.H. Kirmmse translation replaced these words with "strange," "foolish," "you," "gulf," and "single individual." If you like Fear and Trembling, other works to consider reading are Leo Tolstoy (biography) by E.J. Simmons and The Philosophical Works of Descartes by G.R.T. Ross and E.S. Haldane. #HofferAward #didyougetajahbyet… (more)