Sunshine Recorder

The Danish philosopher’s revisionist take on an ancient Greek tragedy grappled with the way acts of love, guilt and redemption are intertwined.

Perhaps the most central theme in Soren Kierkegaard’s religious thought is the doctrine of original sin: the idea that we share in some essential human guilt simply by being born. But guilt is an important concept also in Kierkegaard’s secular writings. He thought that the modern era was defined by its concept of guilt. Kierkegaard’s 200th birthday gives us an occasion to assess the modern relevance of his legacy and the viability of his own view of modernity.

Kierkegaard thought of Socrates as the person who first discovered human autonomy — the fact that we are free to determine our own actions and therefore responsible for those actions. This insight undermined the ancient worldview, which found its perfect representation in tragic drama, where characters bring about their own ruin because they are fated to do so. In his 1843 essay “Ancient Tragedy’s Reflection in the Modern,” Kierkegaard grappled with this question partly through an analysis of the work of Sophocles. In the play “Oedipus the King,” the gods have cursed the tragic hero with a fate to commit two terrible crimes.

The curse is visited upon his children, too, including his daughter who in the follow-up play “Antigone” commits a crime of her own. Sophocles thus invites us to think of this curse as something like a hereditary disease, passed on from parents to children. In Antigone’s crime and punishment we see the reverberation of her father’s misfortune, and if original sin is sometimes called “hereditary sin,” Antigone’s is a “hereditary guilt.” Such a concept is nonsensical to the Socratic mindset. We are responsible only for what we do—not for what happens to us, or for the actions of others.

Oedipus’s crimes are to kill his father and marry his mother; Antigone’s is to defy the state. She is sentenced to live burial for burying her brother, a traitor, against a state prohibition. But in the midst of this horrible destiny is a relief. Sophocles allows both the fictional character Antigone and the spectators to take comfort in the fact that her transgression against the state is done out of obedience to a divine mandate to honor one’s family and, moreover, that her own terrible fate is ultimately the work of the gods. She is then only partly responsible for the deed and for bringing the subsequent punishment upon herself. Fate and divine mandate are the heroine’s ruination, but they also absolve her of guilt and, by precluding any real choice, redeem her from anxiety and regret.

Part 1: What Does it Mean to Exist?
For Kierkegaard, the most pressing question for each person is the meaning of his or her own existence.

Part 2: Truth of Knowledge and Truth of Life
Kierkegaard understood that, when faced with a choice in real life, no amount of knowledge can resolve the dilemma.

Part 3: The Story of Abraham and Isaac
Abraham believes that the God who commands him to do what is most terrible and painful is also the God who loves him.

Part 4: The Essentially Human is Passion
The human being is above all an erotic creature: a being who, conscious that she lacks something, reaches out beyond herself.

Part 5: The Task of Becoming a Christian
Kierkegaard suggests that people who are Christians ‘as a matter of course’ are deceiving themselves.

Part 6: On Learning to Suffer
Kierkegaard suggests that by courageously confronting suffering, a person can find great joy in life.

Part 7: Spiritlessness
Not to recognise yourself as a spiritual being is the greatest danger and the greatest loss of all.

Part 8: God and Possibility
For Kierkegaard God is the fact of possibility: what makes us free – but also gives rise to anxiety.

In the course of what is now titled “Continental Philosophy,” three figures stand out as preeminent thinkers able to probe the innermost depths of the human psyche in a way previously unknown since perhaps Shakespeare: Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.   These three were more or less contemporaries, and all shared a similar fascinating interest—that of tearing down the ideological idols of their day, and in particular, the facade the individual post-Enlightenment “modern man” conceived himself to be.  While these men certainly had differing worldviews and would likely have debated such grand topics as the precise meaning of God and man’s relation to Him in the universe, they shared a similar distaste for hypocrisy, lies and falsehood, and made it partly their authorial iconoclastic goal to unmask such veils.

Francis Bacon had made it his goal as an early Enlightenment luminary to tear down what he perceived to be idols in his Novum Organon—idols of the tribe, cave, marketplace and theater.  Idols of the tribe meant the destruction of abstracted social ideals foisted upon reality; idols of the cave referred to  myopic interpretations of reality according to a particular fancy of some individual academic; idols of the marketplace refers to the misappropriation of word and thing, assigning an undue identification between the two, assuming that out talking an opponent has then caused the reality of the topic under discussion to actually exist as such; and idols of the theater, where ideas are erected on a false presupposition of theology or metaphysical speculation, becoming ensconced in the public discourse.¹ This tractate encompasses the impetus of the Enlightenment and its obsession with what Rene Guenon called the “reign of quantity.” Everything is measured and classified according to some quantitative stricture of man’s reason.  Scientific knowledge, or more specifically, scientism, becomes the dominant paradigm by which all things are measured, be it religion, politics, economics and the marketplace, all things are in potentia capable of rational formalization and, like a big algorithm, all of humanity’s ills simply await the solution of the academy and its laboratory calculators. 

Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky would take this same methodology and turn it in on itself.  Is it possible that Bacon and his Enlightement progeny were guilty of the very things he sought to destroy?  Did the philosophes erect idols of their own?  For Nietzsche, the influence of Soren Kierkegaard must first be mentioned.  Kierkegaard had struggled with the complacency and formalism of the Lutheran official church of his day, resulting in an introspective journey that would cause him to even question the nature of the self. Kierkegaard did not, however, analyze the self from some kind of privileged, abstracted “scientific” view as is found in someone like Descartes and his cogito, but rather in the dialectical relationship of the self with itself and the other.  In The Sickness Unto Death, the self must come to despair (the sickness), and reveling in its own finitude, find solace in a relationship with an infinite God.  For Kierkegaard, this is the only way to escape the continual dialectic fallen man is trapped in by virtue of being a son of Adam.

For these three secular masters of suspicion [Marx, Nietzsche and Freud] the illusion that must be unmasked are those of self-interest masquerading as duty and virtue, and egoism pretending to the world and to itself that it is altruism.  Nietzsche’s example of the spirit resentment giving rise to a demand for revenge but posing as love and justice is a kind of paradigm.  But sin is no more than selfishness via-a-vis my neighbor.  It is also the failure to love God with all my heart.  Human self-deception now includes the will to autonomy from God alongside the will to dominance over my neighbor. Inevitably its introduction into the story adds the whole new dimension to the art of suspicion.²

Herein enters Nietzsche’s departure from Kierkegaard, while retaining his “art of suspicion.”  Rather than succumb to a moral system that leads to inevitable failure and misery (the Christian scheme), fomenting in ressentement and hatred for others under the guise of “love,” while plunging further and further into sickness to find “salvation” from the self that is supposedly created good by God, Nietzsche turns Kierkegaard’s suspicion on Christian morality itself, as well as upon the Enlightenment.

For Nietzsche, the Enlightenment had given rise to critique, or the art of suspicion, and in so doing, had tossed aside God.  This is the meaning of the famous “God is dead” phrase.³ Rather than being a factual claim about what Nietzsche believed in regard to some ontological scheme (as its often misinterpreted to mean), it’s a descriptive statement about the current and future state of Western Civilization and its relation to the Judeo-Christian God.  The Enlightenment had successfully critiqued previous metaphysical and theological assumptions inherited from the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Galen, Ptolemy, Augustine and Aquinas, only to find itself still seeking a grand narrative that amounted to the exaltation of an idealized and abstracted view of “man” or “mankind” or “humanity.”  With Immanuel Kant, for example, extrapolating a categorical moral imperative should logically lead to a world government where humanity is guided by reason and harmony—a veritable scientistic utopia!  Yet with Kierkegaard and then Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky (as we shall see), we begin to see the problem with this abstraction.

Yet Descartes’ cogito was not something Kierkegaard, Nietzsche or Dostoyevsky could completely avoid.  The seeds of individualism had been laid. Descartes, himself somewhat of a rationalist, could not have foreseen the existential dilemma his cogito would create, but his turning of man’s gaze in on itself to deconstruct the psyche would result in the existentialists deconstructing the mythos of the Enlightenment.

The way we negotiate anxiety plays no small part in shaping our lives and character.  And yet, historically speaking, the lovers of wisdom, the philosophers, have all but repressed thinking about that amorphous feeling that haunts many of us hour by hour, and day by day. The 19th-century philosopher-theologian Soren Kierkegaard stands as a striking exception to this rule. It was because of this virtuoso of the inner life that other members of the Socrates guild, such as Heidegger and Sartre, could begin to philosophize about angst.

Though he was a genius of the intellectual high wire, Kierkegaard was a philosopher who wrote from experience. And that experience included considerable acquaintance with the chronic, disquieting feeling that something not so good was about to happen. In one journal entry, he wrote, “All existence makes me anxious, from the smallest fly to the mysteries of the Incarnation; the whole thing is inexplicable, I most of all; to me all existence is infected, I most of all. My distress is enormous, boundless; no one knows it except God in heaven, and he will not console me….”

Is there any doubt that were he alive today he would be supplied with a refillable prescription for Xanax?

On virtually every third page of Kierkegaard’s authorship some note about angst is scrawled. But the adytum of Kierkegaard’s understanding of anxiety is located in his work “The Concept of Anxiety” — a book at once so profound and byzantine that it seems to aim at evoking the very feeling it dissects.

Perhaps more than any other philosopher, Kierkegaard reflected on the question of how to communicate the truths that we live by — that is the truths about ethics and religion. In the process, he devised a method of indirect communication, which involved the use of pseudonyms.  Writing in “The Concept of Anxiety” under the guise of Vigilius Haufniensis (watchman of the harbor), Kierkegaard observes that anxiety “is altogether different from fear and similar concepts that refer to something definite.” He continues, “Anxiety is a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy,” a simultaneous feeling of attraction and repulsion.  Kierkegaard explains: “In observing children, one will discover this anxiety intimated more particularly as a seeking for the adventurous, the monstrous, and the enigmatic.

“To exist in such a way that my opposition to existence expresses itself every instant as the most beautiful and safest harmony, that I cannot.” — Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms.” — Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

Incommensurability is the lack of a common measure between two things. The incongruence that presents itself in the situation of incommensurability gives us two options: We must either abandon one term or leap from one to the other without explanation. We are put in the position to choose when faced with a paradox; something that is self-contradictory demands that we either refuse to grant one of the terms that contradicts the other or transcend our understanding - leap over it - and grant both terms despite their incommensurability. If, as many thinkers declare, human life involves a paradox, then simply living demands that we choose one of these options. Existentialism, as a branch of philosophy that concentrates heavily on paradox, offers many different perspectives on the significance and implications of the incommensurable aspects of the human condition. Kierkegaard and Camus referred to man’s position in the world as “the absurd;” though the term is shared between them and their definitions are not dissimilar, their approach to the absurd and the conclusions they draw therefrom are, well, incommensurable. In both of our thinkers’ writings, man with his concrete experiences represents one of the terms of the incommensurable; the other is what man longs for: unity, clarity, justification - in a word, God. What should we do without a common measure between what we live and what we want, the former being certain, the latter being unknowable yet desperately longed for? Is there a correct attitude toward the paradox? Since Kierkegaard and Camus share a similar starting point and end worlds apart, one leaping over the understanding and the other revolting against the incomprehensible, a discussion of their attitudes toward the incommensurable will provide two extreme positions for analysis. This could result many ways: One of these poles may stand out as the clearly correct approach; perhaps neither will ring true, but their extremity may refer us to a middle path; perhaps no conclusion can be found for such a question, because paradox may not admit of a right or wrong approach.

When discussing the lack of a common measure between man and the objects of his desire, we know the instrument of measurement of the first term: the understanding. The absurd is that which surpasses the understanding, that which defies its logic and offends its sensibility. The absurd is the incommensurability between man and God. Kierkegaard, a zealous Christian, is often referred to as the father of existentialism - interesting to consider today, since the modern connotation of “the existentialist” is highly atheistic, or at least agnostic. Kierkegaard’s thought, though, is a clear precursor to modern existential philosophy; in his treatment of paradox, he diminishes the status of reason and exalts human passion. His preference of a lyrical writing style over the more traditional linear, dialectical structure indicates his emphasis on mood rather than logic. His ideas of paradox and the absurd unfold in his writings on faith, namely, in Philosophical Fragments and Fear and Trembling.

Philosophical Fragments concerns man’s ability to know truth. In it we find the Socratic idea of midwifery and immanent truth called into question. Kierkegaard does not provide an argument against it, but provides an alternative based on a hypothetical premise: If we are divorced from truth, how can we learn it? His answer is, of course, Jesus, but this is not the focus of my present discussion. The most relevant part of the Fragments for my concerns is Kierkegaard’s chapter on what he calls the “absolute paradox.” What he describes here is essentially a drive toward intellectual self-destruction. “This…is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.” (37) Thought wants to transcend itself, but it cannot, since this would require pulling itself over its own limits. Kierkegaard gives a name to that against which the understanding wants to destroy itself: the unknown, or the god.