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0:00 Unknown speaker: This is a Partially Examined Life episode preview. You'll find the full episode available for purchase in the music section of the itunes store or at partiallyexaminedlife.com store. If you want more than one episode, you can become a PEL citizen at partiallyexaminedlife dot com membership.
0:26 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 29 is what is the self? This discussion of Soren Kierkegaard's the Sickness unto Death. For a link to that text discussion and other information, Please check out partiallyexaminedlife.com My name is Mark Linsenmayer, apparently in despair, from Madison, Wisconsin.
0:49 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, aesthetically reflecting from Austin, Texas.
0:53 Wes: And this is Wes Alwan, in despair that Mark took despairing in Boston, Massachusetts.
1:00 Seth: There are many ways to despair, Wes.
1:05 Daniel: And this is Daniel Horne suspending his ethics in San Francisco, California.
1:09 Mark: Very nice.
1:10 Seth: Fantastic.
1:11 Mark: So Daniel is our special guest, and he was someone who just posted smart stuff on partiallyexaminedlife.com and requested Kierkegaard. And I said, hey, well, why don't you come do it with us before you tell us about yourself a little? I want to test you. It's pop quiz time.
1:28 Daniel: Sure. I thought we were doing show up an hour, but okay.
1:32 Mark: All right, Daniel, what is the first ground rule for our discussion?
1:36 Daniel: Oh, man. Oh, this is awful.
1:40 Wes: Don't worry. I don't really. I don't know it either.
1:42 Daniel: No name dropping.
1:43 Mark: No name dropping. Well, that's one of them.
1:45 Daniel: Ah, dear.
1:46 Mark: Okay, not no fair name dropping. In lieu of making your point, do not say you would understand me if you only read that recent expose by Bob Woodward and Eric R. Douglas. Why does Wes hate Buddhism?
1:56 Unknown speaker: That's right.
1:56 Daniel: I think another one may. I think another one is we are going to assume that no one listening to this podcast has done any of the reading or is even familiar with the subject. So we are going to try to keep that in mind as we talk about it.
2:08 Mark: That was much more cogently put than I usually state it. And do you remember the last one? It's the meaningless one.
2:18 Daniel: I only know that we shall only do what it is we're not going to do when we find it might be entertaining. Yeah, let's just say that we'll just fill in the blank with whatever that might be.
2:27 Seth: Actually a very Kierkegaardian way of saying that we will only be who we are when now we're not trying to be who we are.
2:34 Daniel: That's right.
2:35 Mark: Yes. That's going to be number three for today. Okay. All right. So what is your deal, Daniel? Just tell the people briefly.
2:41 Daniel: Sure. Well, I am essentially a big fan of the show and I'm essentially the Courteney Cox that you guys, as Bruce Springsteen have invited up onto the stage to go ahead and dance with you guys for a while. Little 80s reference there. Maybe aging myself, but. No, but I've been following your guys show for, I think, the better part of a year now. And it came to me at just the same time that I was taking up an amateur interest in philosophy. So you guys were among the many secondary sources I was relying upon to try and get some sort of a grounding in what these various people were talking about and whether or not they might have anything to say to me.
But I have absolutely no philosophical training. I'm a lawyer by profession. So other than the fact that I have the ability to parse text and enjoy argument, I really don't know how much I bring to the game here. But I would like to think that with respect to Kierkegaard, he's so much more a literary figure as much as a philosophical one. I'd like to think that perhaps what he had to say was meant to be digested by folks who didn't necessarily have deep philosophical training.
3:37 Seth: Daniel, what kind of law do you practice?
3:39 Daniel: Immigration law. Oh, fantastic.
3:41 Seth: Interesting.
3:42 Daniel: It's very transactional, very dull, but it's the sort of thing that I sort of went into politically, so I get to feel good about what I do every day.
3:49 Mark: So who wants to do the quick summary of the Sickness unto Death? You could let Daniel do it. Oh, man, he's prepared, I bet.
3:56 Wes: If Daniel's prepared, I vote for Daniel.
3:59 Daniel: The Sickness unto Death is essentially Kierkegaard's attempt to get people to understand that despair is something that is going to impact everyone, whether they know it or not, and that what causes despair is ultimately an imbalance in the makeup of the self. And the only way to cure despair is through faith in God. He goes on to describe that the self has different aspects that are essentially syntheses of different polarities. Right, between the infinite and the finite, the temporal and the eternal, and between necessity and possibility. But ultimately, I get the sense that these polarities that he poses are, to some degree, a bit of a con job on Hegel.
I've always thought that he was a deep ironist and that a lot of the first half of the book is really trying to pose a kind of Hegelian structure that he ultimately tears down in the second half of the book. But that ultimately the thesis of the book is that despair is inherent to the human condition based upon the way that the self is constructed. And that the only way to really break through despair is to recognize that you are a self relation, that your identity is essentially a self relation between your different polarities. And the only way to ground that is to recognize that you have to be grounded in the being that created you, to wit, God.
And unless you do that through faith, you're always going to be stuck in despair.
5:15 Wes: That's good. It's concise.
5:17 Mark: There were sort of two levels here that I was getting out of it. One is this thing that you hear today from Christians, which is if you're not Christian, if you don't believe in God, well, you're really sad. You might not want to admit it to yourself, but you are really sad. Think about it, Reflect upon it. In fact, if you're too clueless to realize that you're really sad and that there's a hole in your life, then there's really a problem there. Like at least if you realize that there's a problem there, you're, you can maybe start to recover. But if you're so pathetic as to think you can just deny the whole thing, then you're, you're ignoring yourself anyway.
So it's that kind of really irritating argument that I hear today, but yet it's dressed up in this crazy ass Hegel influenced language. Which is why I picked the question what is the self? Because all the ways of being in despair are given by his conception of the dynamic of self. Like are you denying what you are? Or you're think that you're something you're not. You're denying that you could be anything. You're denying the immortal part of yourself. There's all these variations on this, right?
6:17 Daniel: And just to follow up on that, perhaps one thing I could have inserted that he identifies essentially three different types of despair, right? One is being unaware of the fact that you're even in despair. The second is recognizing that you have despair within yourself, but ultimately feeling that you're too weak to be able to come to grips with, how to pull yourself out of it. And then ultimately sort of being in this pent up state of reserve that Kierkegaard refers to. And then finally just rejecting it outright in defiance, right? Just saying this is nonsense.
I can't possibly accept these concepts. And so therefore I'm just going to reject them outright. And it's important to Kierkegaard to state that these are essentially escalating levels of despair, Right? That when he says that there are three different types of despair, the metaphor I bring to it are sort of colors on a color spectrum. You know, if you think of wavelengths of light on a color spectrum that goes from red to indigo and the wavelength increases the higher the despair gets. But that one kind of despair is definitely worse than another, right?
That in one sense. In a sense, at least in this sense of pagan innocence, right? Not being aware of the fact that there is this concept of Christianity or not really having thought about it, is less offensive. It's less bad a sin.
7:15 Mark: It's less bad a sin, but at the same time, it's further from grace, Right? At least again, if you realize, if you're in fact, for each of these types, there are a few subtypes. And just to bring one up, this whole denial. I mean, yes, there's. You could deny and say the whole thing is bullshit, but you could also admit that there is a God, but sort of defy him and say, you know, any God that would create a world like this is a bastard. You know, that kind of. You could in fact be a despairing Christian. And even though that's a bigger sin because you really realize what you're doing, according to him, it's kind of closer to grace because you could change your mind about that.
7:53 Daniel: The way Kierkegaard described it, I believe, is that if anyone is truly going to become a Christian, and I think this is something that differentiates Kierkegaard from perhaps the type of smug Christians that you may have heard uttering these things about how you're in despair if you don't accept God into your life. And that sort of thing is that to hear Kierkegaard tell it, this process of working your way through despair from essentially ignorance into defiance is a process that everyone has to go through in order to break through to the other side.
And I know that we're not supposed to be name dropping, but I'm hoping that we can refer to Hegel in this, because you guys have done an episode on Hegel. In the Hegel episode, Mark, you were given a brief description of Hegel's description of the master slave relationship and the conception of self. And I get the sense that without necessarily coming right out and saying so, this really helps define the way Kierkegaard thinks of the relationship between the despairing sinner and God, which is to Say you engage in this kind of master slave relationship in relating yourself to this higher being.
And as I understand, the struggle between the despairing sinner and God is one where you first need to become aware of it. And then you start to really wonder if you can actually meet the standard that's set by God. And the more you reflect upon that, you are going to ultimately have to reach a point where you wonder if this is even worth it, if this is even possible, if this is even true. But ultimately you have to break through that to get to the other side, which is finally acceptance, which not everybody does.
9:15 Wes: Right.
9:16 Daniel: You very much get the sense from Kierkegaard that the path is wide, but the gate is narrow.
9:19 Mark: I think Kierkegaard is actually clearer in this talk of self by far than Hegel is. So this is a good way of introducing that we are going to do another Hegel episode on this part of the phenomenology, which is his early the good Hegel. I would say the characterization that we've given this for this on past episodes is just that. Unlike an English utilitarian say, that thinks that we are all just these little balls of selfishness that have to establish our duties and bounds toward each other, Hegel has a view of self that says, to start with, we're all just kind of part of the mass, and we only gradually develop a sense of self.
And the way we develop it initially is other people treating us certain ways. That's how you learn about yourself. You're not born with this subjectivity. It's because other people treat you in certain ways. And that sort of creates this objective image of you which you can then reflect on and decide whether that's right. Maybe, you know, if you're actually develop a full sense of self, and then you can self determine. So Kierkegaard is definitely following in that tradition that most people don't have a sense of self at all. They're just big slugs and go along with the crowd, whatever.
And then like you said, Daniel, the twist here is that it's not just other people treating you certain ways, but it's somehow God treating you certain way that is supposed to ultimately determine your true self. And there are issues with that, of course, because people treating you certain ways, it's obvious they're standing in front of you talking to you. Whereas with God, maybe you're making it up just to briefly characterize Hegel.
10:44 Seth: I don't think we're going to gain anything by briefly characterizing Hegel in order for this to make sense of what Kierkegaard's talking about, we have to at least work through his idea of the self. This book opens with one of the most enigmatic sentences, I think, in the history of philosophy. Part first, section one. That despair is the sickness unto death. Man is spirit, but what is spirit? Spirit is the self, but what is the self? And here is the magical sentence. I can only imagine what this sounds like in German or Danish. The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self.
Or it is that in the relation which accounts for it, that the relation relates itself to its own self. The self is not the relation, but consists in the fact that the relation relates itself to its own self. Now, I spent a fair amount of time trying to puzzle that one out, and I have to say I struggled quite a bit trying to understand what he was getting at. At one point, he contrasts this with, say, the mind and the body, I think, or the soul and the body. And he says, you know, you can think about a relation between the soul and the body, but getting caught up in that, it's not the same thing as the relation relating to itself.
12:02 Wes: Yeah, I think you take the dyad, the relationship between soul and body, and then you do another self relation of that. So instead of the self simply being this, I guess maybe spirit inhabiting a body, or the relationship between spirit and body, it's another level upon that where the dyad is self related in some way. And I think there the idea is that God comes in and provides the grounds for that self relation. And that's why he wants to take it up another level, let's say.
12:33 Mark: I like the interpretation that he's. He's making fun of Hegel here, that this whole essay is presented under a pseudonym, Anti-Climacus, which he has a few different pseudonyms he published under. And he would do stuff like publish three books on the same day under different pseudonyms that kind of contradict each other in part. And the way he characterized some of his pseudonyms, why he would do this is Anti-Climacus is supposed to be somebody that is more spiritually developed than Kierkegaardian.
13:01 Daniel: Well, Anti-Climacus was meant to be a riff on a prior pseudonym he had used in a prior work of Johannes Climacus.
13:10 Wes: Right.
13:11 Daniel: And I believe Johannes Climacus was originally, I mean, in history, was some sort of, I think, medieval Syrian Christian monk. And the idea was that he was John of the Ladder. Right. That's Climacus in Latin. And the idea was that this is A person who's kind of gradually building this sort of ladder to heaven. But the tone that he'd taken with that pseudonym was really one of kind of someone who's not a very good Christian or someone who's not even a Christian at all. But the idea is now with the Sickness unto Death, he wanted to pose a different type of character. The point of Anti-Climacus was to be able to take an ultra Christian stance toward this. But it's not actually speaking for Kierkegaard as such, part of Kierkegaard's whole theory of literature. And he certainly didn't see himself as a philosopher. He saw himself largely as opposed to
13:58 Mark: philosophers, a Christian poet.
14:00 Daniel: Right. I think in Fear and Trembling. I think he just referred to himself as a freelancer. Right. I think the way we might think of him today is a kind of a social critic. Perhaps he's the anti Christopher Hitchens in the sense that he doesn't see himself as an academic, he doesn't see himself as a churchman.
14:13 Wes: And insofar as he's a pamphleteer, blogger, maybe.
14:17 Daniel: Yeah, it's a good point. He sees his role as someone who is free, that he's got the luxury of being able to say what he feels and whether or not anyone who reads him is sort of besides the point. But at least it gives him the freedom to speak the truth, that he doesn't really have any other agenda.
14:28 Wes: Do you want to say why he has that luxury? We didn't do a bio, so maybe we should throw in elements of that here.
14:33 Mark: This is all to explain the one sentence that Seth brought up.
14:39 Wes: Well, my advice is continue with a
14:41 Daniel: little bio, and then I'll get into
14:43 Wes: it, and then we'll come back to the sentence and we can read it on both levels, we can take it seriously. And then we can look at the parody of Hegel part of this.
14:49 Unknown speaker: Right.
14:50 Mark: It's stylistically a parody of Hegel, I
14:51 Wes: think, by way of biography and the pseudonyms.
14:54 Daniel: I think it will help attune our sensibilities to use another Kierkegaardian concept here, if we get into the biography here. So Kierkegaard was born in 1813 in Copenhagen, died at the age of 42, very young, in 1855. Soren's father, who had a very strong influence in Soren's sensibilities growing up as a child, had started out very dirt poor, had made his way, you know, largely through good fortune, but also a kind of force of will into becoming quite wealthy. But he had a very pietistic sensibility, very strict sensibility. But as I believe as a young man, when he was still a tending sheep out in rural Denmark in the cold, he had at one point cursed God.
And this apparently left a very strong mark on Michael Kierkegaard's sensibilities because he had felt that he had forever after cursed his own family and cursed his own progeny by having cursed God earlier. And I think he started to see his fears realized when I think five of his, his seven children all died at very young ages. Of the seven children, he had only two of the sons, Peter Kierkegaard and Soren Kierkegaard went on to reach adulthood. And even then, at least Soren sounds like he was a fairly sickly child. He was afflicted with scoliosis.
I think he spent like four days in the Danish military after having been conscripted and was kicked out for having been physically unfit. But he was raised in wealth. He went to the finest kind of private school, went off to the University of Copenhagen. He earned the equivalent of a PhD degree in philosophy. And his dissertation that he defended in order to get his magister certificate was on the concept of irony. And its thesis was essentially that Socrates should be seen primarily as an ironist. And the reason why that's important is that I think Soren Kierkegaard's own conception of truth, while very strictly guided by this kind of dour Christian sensibility, also felt that truth itself was somewhat unknowable, that objective truth was impossible to get at, that it might not even be a coherent concept.
And the only way to get people to understand that is to break down their sense of what truth is. And this is why Kierkegaard was somewhat obsessed with Socrates. I think he thought of himself to some degree as a modern day Socrates. And I think he sees his whole role as somewhat to use irony as a tool to get people to break down their assumptions. He was strongly opposed to the way philosophy was taught at the time, which is that it was thoroughly and absolutely dominated by Hegel. Then what defines Hegel, if nothing else, is that he's trying to build a system, right?
He's trying to build a philosophical theory of everything. And this is completely opposed to what Kierkegaard thought was possible. First of all, he thought he was anti Christian, but I think he also thought it just wasn't true, it just wasn't sensible. He wanted to make sure that as he wrote all of his various publications, that no one could actually aggregate them and to say, this is what Kierkegaard says on X. This is Kierkegaard's system. He wanted to get away from that. And so therefore the use of pseudonyms was in part to be able to allow him to take positions that he wasn't actively advocating.
Because his point wasn't to get you to believe what he said. His point was to try and get you to question what you thought you already. He wanted to make sure he could put on a different mask every time he wrote a different book.
17:51 Wes: So he takes an ironic distance towards his own claims.
17:54 Daniel: Very good. That's exactly right. And also that he himself could not be pegged down. He wanted to break down systems, he didn't want to build them up. And I think he found that a useful tool to make that happen.
18:03 Wes: Yeah.
18:04 Mark: Relating to how much he seems to go on and on in any one of these essays, I also saw a strong. The influence of sermons.
18:12 Unknown speaker: Yes.
18:12 Mark: It amazes me that people who lecture in churches can, week after weekend after weekend after week, find more things to talk about when they're just talking really about the same thing. You know, they're espousing the same creed. And he very much takes that, you know, Fear and Trembling is just taking the story of Abraham and just meditating on it and giving five different interpretations of it. And then just think about what Abraham was thinking at the time God asked, you know, and bringing in related literary references and comparing those. It's a very meditational way of doing philosophy rather than here's my thesis, now I'm going to argue for it. Yes, Hegel can be very long winded as well, but not rambling in this way. I can see why people often edit down Kierkegaard's works because they lend themselves to that. It seems to break into bite sized pieces very nicely.
19:02 Seth: So I think this is probably the principal source of my resistance to Kierkegaard in general is that if it's true that he was maintaining this ironic distance and saw himself as kind of a contemporary Socrates, and he basically uses this lifetime of work and pseudonyms to try to get people to question, you know, engage their own self in questioning, you would have to live a long time, be very conscientious and be ridiculously smart to be persuaded and influenced by somebody like Kierkegaard, because this is not easy reading. And I can only imagine the project of being persuasive to a larger public audience via the written word over a series of years, you know, creating this kind of dialogue between characters.
And I'm Curious. I didn't do the research, but he obviously was ridiculously influential to the vast majority of at least European philosophers who immediately followed him. But I wonder how popular and influential was he during the time he was writing?
20:05 Wes: Yeah, he wasn't.
20:06 Daniel: He absolutely and utterly wasn't. Because he didn't work at a university, he didn't have a position within the church. Although this is a guy with a PhD in theology. Right. So he could have gone those paths, but his wealth allowed him to avoid doing it because ideologically he felt that academia was completely passionless and banal and because he felt the church was thoroughly corrupt. And I don't mean corrupt in the way that, say the Catholic Church was accused of having been corrupt by Luther. He thought that ultimately everyone had a very smug and self satisfied sense of what Christianity was, that Christianity was essentially a lifestyle.
Right. You're raised a Christian, you are baptized at a church, you go to church every Sunday, you go ahead and go through some motions, you say, oh, great heaven. Sounds very nice. As long as I obey the laws and don't be an actively mean person. God seems like he's a nice enough guy too. So I'll go through all of that and I'll ultimately go to heaven. Kierkegaard just that did not meet with his sensibility. And he actually frittered away all of his fortune publishing his body of work. But a lot of these publications sold almost nothing. He sort of came into vogue posthumously.
He found his way into translation into German at about the same time that there were a lot of debates on Christianity going on within Germany on the direction of Protestantism that ultimately spread out to, let's say, like a young Martin Heidegger who started out in a Catholic seminary. As I understand it, Nietzsche was apparently vaguely acquainted with Kierkegaard in the later stages of his life.
21:21 Wes: There's some stylistic kinship there too.
21:23 Daniel: Right, right. But I think you raise a good point, Seth. It's not for everyone. You know, I think Wittgenstein opened up the Tractatus with this comment that this book is really only for people who already have some sense of what I'm already talking about. I wonder if Kierkegaard is almost speaking more to a kind of critical sensibility, saying, you know, is it just me or is this Hegelian stuff really deeply flawed?
21:44 Seth: Even when I was in school, I avoided and resisted reading Kierkegaard. And I think part of the reason was that you have to take up the whole study of the totality of his works almost, or his positions he's not a philosopher. That lends himself to say, east part interpretation, which makes jumping into the sickness unto death. So I led the discussion by saying, this sentence completely perplexes me. Now, on the one hand, that sentence completely perplexes me. On the other hand, I only have the text to work from because I didn't go back and read the collected works and study the biography of Kierkegaard.
And as we know that for him, biography was very important in reading philosophers. Like he was very interested in thought. It was very important that philosophers, the way they lived, was a reflection, should be a reflection of what their philosophical systems were. But to some degree, there has to be meaning in what he's saying, and there has to be a reason he's saying this. There could be multiple meanings and it could be ironic. But I also think that his points about the need for people to question the fact that the self is a relation between things, this notion of infinitude, infinitude and so forth, and that he's trying to lead you to some understanding of your relationship to God in that context, the sentence does mean something, and it does mean something that we can think about and talk about philosophically just on the merits of the text.
My fear is that the next two hours is going to be people saying, yeah, well, but in this other thing, he says this, and we have to understand this in contrast to this, his relationship to his mother or, you know, Johannes de Silentio says in such and such a passage, and if that's the way it's going to be, then I'm not going to have much to contribute. So. But it's an interesting issue whether you can take the text and read it kind of as a standalone, or do you need this whole biography in order to make sense of it?
23:34 Mark: Let me just jump in again. I think this is like a sermon, and I think it does make sense as a standalone. I think that he wrote from these different points of views to some extent, to have different stylistic approaches for different audiences. Right. He published some pamphlets, he published some long works, he published some fiction. Like, it was not all aimed at the same group. And it was not supposed to be something that, again, like Daniel said that he didn't want people to follow him and read everything that he wrote. In fact, he approaches the same problems again and again from slightly different takes, you know, like someone giving sermons would, so that it's supposed to be meaningful in itself.
So this is 1849. This is one of his last works. He died in 1851. This is him at his most mature. Whereas earlier he was sort of playing around with these other things, writing about opera and writing about the aesthetic life and things like this. This is the big time sermonizing.
24:24 Daniel: I feel like, to some degree, I felt a little bit of relief when I got the sense that there is this whole theory that says that he's joking. There are other people. By the way, I think you guys have heard of Hubert Dreyfus, a philosophy professor at UC Berkeley, a big Heideggerian scholar. He has absolutely no use for the idea that this is all just sort of comedy and mockery and irony. He really does want to take the text of this book at face value.
24:45 Mark: Yes, but you don't think the style. Because he doesn't continue this opaquely through the rest of this. It's a very understandable work.
24:52 Daniel: That's right. But at the same time, this is kind of laying the foundation for the entire rest of the book. That effectively, this is a kind of a table of contents. The way he's breaking this down, and because he's compressing so much of what he's going to go on to say in one paragraph, you're a little bit lost. But just to take it at its word, here's how I see this concept of the self relating to itself. What he means is that the self is not just a combination of body and soul. It's not a compound like hydrogen and oxygen coming together and forming a molecule.
That it's a process, it's a dialectic. To say that the self relating to itself is not just this absurd concept. What it means is that it's your interiority matching with your exteriority. In other words, it's what you believe and what you think matched against how you comport yourself in the world. The self relating to itself means how do you match your individual sensibilities and your individual subjective sense of what ought to be done or what's true with how you actually act in the world. When he says that the relation relates to itself and this is the positive third, this is the self.
But what he means by that is that just to say that there's soul and body, that's not the self. In fact, it says here the text, a human being is the synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity. In short, a synthesis. And now, by the way, when I say that this is sort of a table of contents for the rest of the book, notice that he actually explodes out these concepts later on in the book. Right. What Infinite and finite means temporal, eternal. A synthesis is a relationship between two terms.
Looked at this way, a human being is not yet a self. In other words, you shouldn't look at these as kind of a static. It's not like two Legos being snapped together and saying, oh, body and soul, this is the self. But rather that it's the way in which your soul relates to your body, the way that your sensibilities of the infinite match to the amount of time you have on earth, the way that your historicity, your necessity, what makes you historically yourself matches to your possibilities what you think you can do, and so that ultimately the relation is the self.
26:42 Seth: I think that's a really key point. And I want to just ask the assemblage here. If we take what Daniel just said, that the self is a relation and not a thing, so to speak, or at least not a substance like we've traditionally thought about it, is that a twist on Hegel, or is that something new and different that he's adding to the discussion?
27:02 Wes: I think part of it is he wants to combat that ancient Greek notion of virtue, and he's combating it with a sense of personal responsibility. There's something passive about just talking about a self as a. Call it relation of spirit and body or mind and body. So where Aristotle talked about, for instance, virtues, which were sort of states of the soul, and to a large extent, there's a lot of determinism there. A lot depended upon your childhood. Sort of like an early psychology, let's say. I think Kierkegaard wants to get to this transcendent relationship which is above that.
This sort of, you know, you take the dyad of spirit and body and then you give it another level of self relation, as Daniel was mentioning. It has a lot to do with constantly renewing your will to live in a certain way. Involving faith as something that's positive in the sense of it's not inertial. You don't just decide to believe in God, let's say, as the grounds. You know, he calls it the sort of grounds of that relationship. And then you coast. It constantly involves this effort or activity. So it's a lot different than just saying, I have a certain character trait which I could call a virtue, or, you know, I go to church every day.
I have certain habits. It's this idea of ultimate responsibility and activity. And I think that's why it's important here.
28:22 Mark: He talks about if you just conceive a relation between body and soul, for instance, and we've run in this. In other metaphysical discussions, when you talk about, like, what is a relation? Well, that seems like it's a third thing between these two things. But then wouldn't you need another thing to connect the first thing to the relation, to the third thing? Like, if a relation was just a passive thing like that, then you would have that sort of infinite regress problem. And so he's very against this kind of metaphysical analysis. He wants to give a practical analysis that when we say that I am both matter and mind or something like that, then the realization of what that means in practical terms is the activity of coming to know myself in both of those aspects.
He says the self is spirit, using this Hegelian term, which the spirit, like you were saying, is it's the thing that moves. It's an activity.
29:09 Seth: Yes. So that's, I think, the key point. And I guess I was trying to tease that out. Kierkegaard's notion of the self as it's described in here, whether you take this sentence or even later on, it's essential to the discussion throughout the book that the self is this relation between these two other terms. And a relation is not a thing in the way that those other two terms are things, or it's not a state, it's a dynamic. The self is constantly positioned between two other terms. And there's lots and lots of different oppositions that he brings into the discussion.
But in essence, the self doesn't exist without the opposition between those two things, but it is the tension between those two things, and it's the fact that it exists in that state of tension, and that's very dynamic that I think is different than a lot of the other conceptions of the self being eternal. You know, an eternal soul or a thing in a kind of Cartesian sense.
30:01 Wes: And by the way, this is his sort of variation on Hegel's self consciousness, Right, Exactly. He's getting at a very basic notion of self as self relation, as in that reflective component.
30:13 Mark: The relation relates itself to its own self. So it's not even just the relation connecting mind and body, for instance, but it's a reflection upon the relation. It's not even just the relation relationships itself to its own.
30:24 Wes: With the notion of self consciousness, you always get into that regress of consciousness, of consciousness, of consciousness and so on.
30:31 Daniel: Well, and what's important is that that's not just a tension, which sort of implies that there's this constantness to it.
30:37 Wes: Right.
30:37 Daniel: It's an activity that one has to engage in, which is why I think. Kierkegaard repeatedly throughout the book points out that a lot of people haven't even developed a self right? They're born, they live their lives, they die as a member of the crowd, never having developed a self in the first place, and that this is actually the most common form of despair because people are not willing to go through that activity. Just like jogging is an activity or brushing your teeth is an activity, it's something you have to engage in through force of will. It doesn't beat like your heart beats. It's something that you do or choose not to do.
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31:09 Wes: I know it stops just when things were getting really good, so please go
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Thanks for slogging through these difficult works for the benefit of existentialists like me out there.
It was very interesting to hear the perspective of approaching Kierkegaard anew, as opposed to his more regular readers who would generally approach his work in some sort of state of religious crisis.
I’ll be checking out the Youtube links.
Thanks, Robert. If you want an exposure to some of the Kierkegaardian concepts that can be most readily converted to secular currency, try Concluding Unscientifc Postscript. Be warned – it’s a bit of a bear. Here’s an outline:
http://www.sorenkierkegaard.org/concluding-unscientific-postscript.html
I’m actually a fan his Christian stuff too. He can be an extremely difficult read, though. One of the his own quotes about his works are that they are like cinnamon. They are a corrective, but you would struggle to live off a diet of his work alone. It’s refreshing to come across a writer who is willing to admit to that level of honesty. Ironic that he had to do it under a pseudonym though.
Still all in all, Kierkegaard has had a huge influence on me.
Good job on being a newbie on the show, by the way. I enjoyed the way you stood you ground.
Hi there,
I am an undergraduate student at the University of Lethbridge (Canada) who is doing my honours thesis on Kierkegaard’s Sickness unto Death in a paper entitled: Philosophy as Therapy. I heard you mention in your podcast that you have a powerpoint of this book . I’d be interested in obtaining a copy of that powerpoint to see your interpretation layed out in a visual manner. Could you post it to the website?
Hi, Mackenzie,
Daniel linked it from here: http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2010/12/02/the-sickness-unto-death-the-powerpoint/.
Thanks. -Mark
Hello,
For 2 hours on Kierkegaard, I am kind of disappointed that I didn’t learn anything. I have read nothing of his works except a few sample extracts in philosophy books, and a little mass-market book that is a collection of his parables.
I enjoy the podcast, but this episode seemed to repeat the same few vague points over and over, without bothering to really get into any depth about his ideas. Mainly, I learned bullet points I already knew, that Kierkegaard was a Lutheran, anti-Hagel, and wanted people to find their authentic “selfs.” In fact, a lot of his ideas were barely touched upon, such as his being a firm subjectivist. Most of the discussion seemed to center around how you can secularize Kierkegaard into self-help therapy (why?), and how we can understand him despite his Christianity. Well, that clearly can’t be done, since I don’t understand Kierkegaard any better than I did prior to listening to this podcast. All I learned is that his Christianity and Christians apparently annoyed some of the speakers, but their irrelevant annoyance tells me nothing about Kierkegaard’s actual ideas, philosophy, or mysticism.
I found myself repeatedly aggravated that several of the speakers repeatedly diverted the topic and roadblocked it from achieving any depth about Kierkegaard, to being about their own atheism or non-Christianity or whatever, as if Kierkekaard was just a useful vehicle in which to express their own atheistic rantings.
One person there seemed to repeatedly try to get into the meat of Kierkegaard’s ideas, but it seemed he was always prevented from doing so because he had to stop to address the not particularly useful nor insightful “village atheist” interjections of his fellow speakers.
Anyway, it would be great if you could make another attempt to tackle Kierkegaard again, and keep the discussion restricted to being about Kierkegaard, and leave the village atheism at home.
Ouch. Well, we’ll try to do a better job with Schleiermacher, which we’ll be recording in a few weeks. I think we did a pretty good job elaborating the points made in that particular K. reading, which were all about “self” and tied in well to the Hegel’s Phenomenology episodes just posted. There’s certainly more to be said about K, though I’m not sure when we’ll get back to him. I do think a lot of the gist of the podcast is some reflection on whether we can apply what we’re finding here to actual life, and in this case that meant determining whether K. was simply too brainwashed to be of any use to anyone who was not already of the Christian persuasion. Given his reputation as the father of existentialism, this seems an apt question.
Best, -Mark
Hi Ace,
Thanks for caring enough to write in! First, an apology. I had heartily backed Kierkegaard as a discussion topic. And yet, when given the chance, I failed to explain why I’m so taken with Kierkegaard, and The Sickness Unto Death in particular. I took two messages from TSUD: the “ironic” message of Anti-Climacus, and Kierkegaard’s more implicit warning.
ANTI-CLIMACUS: The oppositional structure of the Self leads you into a psychological spiral of despair. That’s because you can never resolve the antinomies upon which self-realization is built. Reflecting on the gap between your desires and your reality inevitably leads to despair. And most people don’t even do that! Despair (i.e., lack of faith) makes you unhappy, so the Self’s very structure necessarily leads people to sorrow (if they think about it) or delusion (if they don’t). You can escape this trap if you do the work. How? By quitting all attempts at comprehending Christianity, and accepting Christianity through will alone. This is hard work. It’s difficult to believe the impossible, because your Self’s structure forces you to endlessly reflect on life’s contradictions. But if you apply the constant effort required to “let go” and constantly reflect upon yourself standing directly before God, you will gain faith, and cure your psychological “sickness unto death”.
KIERKEGAARD: Doubt is the bane of all Christians. Hegel’s (and Kant’s) attempts to preserve religious belief via reason will never overcome doubt. If you ever try to reach God (or preserve God) through rationally constructed philosophical systems, you will always fail. Too many people opt in to a comfortable, rational Christianity, thinking reason and religion can be reconciled. They can’t. People should stop kidding themselves that they can.
I think it’s a mistake to accept A-C’s “ironic” argument at face value. But believers and non-believers alike can accept K’s “real” argument. The character Anti-Climacus is clever and bracing, but only if taken in the right spirit. It’s funny to see A-C use Hegel’s own systemic structures to subvert his Christian vision. So, TSUD was meaningful to me, because it cleverly argued that you can’t get religion through reason. That’s not necessarily an argument in favor of atheism (certainly K didn’t think so), though it could be. But K’s argument helps would-be Christians (say, me) to consider focusing their efforts elsewhere. Schleiermacher presents a different vision of “elsewhere,” so maybe you’ll find that episode interesting.
OK, that was my best shot! To see some other introductions to Kierkegaard without actually committing to the many hours necessary to read him, I recommend the following:
1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/mar/15/kierkegaard-philosophy-existentialism
2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b009fycc
3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmYVl4sgYr4
Regarding your other comments:
1. PEL’s mission isn’t to survey a thinker’s entire ouvre in one episode; it’s more a kind of philosophical book club. A two-hour episode couldn’t possibly review all of Kierkegaard’s thought. K wrote many books over his life. Reading one or two of them won’t capture all his ideas. And K took great effort to ensure he couldn’t be so easily summarized — we mentioned that on the show. Yes, K’s arguments for radical subjectivity are fascinating. They’re an obvious next step if PEL ever does K again. But subjectivity simply wasn’t addressed in TSUD or Fear and Trembling. K’s thoughts on subjectivity are largely contained within Concluding Unscientific Postscript. But unless we had made CUP the reading assignment, there was no way to address it.
2. If you read TSUD’s opening pages, it’s clearly a self-help book. The subtitle is: “A Christian Psychological Exposition for Edification and Awakening.” In its preface, K writes, “An account of anything Christian must be like a physician’s lecture beside the sick-bed….” Despair is a sickness (unto death!), and Anti-Climacus is out to cure you.
3. One needn’t be a “ranting atheist” to have real problems with Kierkegaard’s worldview. As Seth mentioned, devout Jews would reject most of TSUD and Fear & Trembling, without ever doubting G-d. (Whether or not Seth is devout, the point stands.) Alternatively, to quote Alastair Hannay’s introduction to the Penguin edition of TSUD:
“Even if you are disposed to agree about there being this religious need, perhaps also agreeing that it might be universal, there is no compulsion for you to accept the Christian scenario as a solution, even if it were the only one available. There is indeed a problem with the whole idea of believing something because one wants to rather than because the evidence pushes one into that direction. It sounds like wishful thinking.”
4. Contrary to your assertion, a great many non-Christian thinkers found value in Kierkegaard despite his Christianity. His admirers included atheists like Nietzsche and Sartre, Jewish thinkers like Buber, and unorthodox quasi-religious eccentrics like Heidegger and Wittgenstein. Furthermore, many or perhaps most of PEL’s listeners aren’t religious. I think it’s worth trying to explain why Kierkegaard might have value for them as well. Perhaps we failed at that, too, but it was worth a try.
5. Part of PEL’s charm is that Mark/Wes/Seth don’t simply summarize these books; they take the arguments seriously. That means calling BS where they find it. A critical flaw in TSUD’s argument is that it simply assumes a harsh Christian worldview. There’s value in pointing that out as a flaw. As you’re a fan of the show, I presume you’ve had no problem with Mark snarking on Heidegger, or Seth snarking on logical positivism, or Wes snarking on Dennett. So why is it not OK to mock the overconfident and self-righteous Christian arguments to which so many of us have been exposed? I had to Google your term “village atheist,” but it appears to be Christian fundamentalist-speak for “an atheist without the manners to keep it to himself.” I think your use of that term says as much about you as the person to whom you’re directing it. Now, if you don’t find the term “Christian fundamentalist” helpful or appropriate, query also what value the term “village atheist” brings to your complaint. No big deal either way, I’m just sayin’.
Thanks for listening!
To Mark and Daniel,
Thank you for your thoughtful replies, I didn’t expect a reply at all (except maybe from other listeners), so I am very surprised and appreciative that you’re this engaged with your listeners, even one’s like me that only commented to complain.
Thank you for the links, Daniel, I will check them out. And point taken about the show being only on a small sample of his works, and specifically Sickness Unto Death, your explanation helped me understand why his subjectivism wasn’t touched on.
Part of the reason I like the show is it does have a casual, shoot the shit with pals- feel to it. I have laughed out loud more than once. The humor, honesty and friendliness of the program are big draws. But a major draw is that I always walk away having learned a lot more about the subject matter that I didn’t know prior, which is what makes apprx 2 hour programs worth listening to.
But with this episode that wasn’t the case, and it was very disappointing to me because the little I have read of Kierkegaard has stuck with me, his personality and ideas which I have been exposed to were very intriguing, thought-provoking, and original.
I agree with Mark that whether Kierkegaard would be of any use to non-Christians is an apt question to ask, but it seemed to me that it was asked and answered and not worth the 2 hours devoted to it. I don’t agree with Daniel that I made any assertion that non-Christians can’t value Kierkegaard, I made no such assertion. If I made any assertion at all in that regard, it was that it seems it must be impossible to understand Kierkegaard apart from his Christianity, a semi-assertion only made as part of my gripe that your attempting to understand him apart from his Christianity left a listener such as myself not understanding him any better than I did prior to listening to the show.
I have seen it myself that non-Christians can get a lot out of Kierkegaard, as an example, on youtube I saw many atheists were very engaged in analyzing and digesting Kierkegaards Fear and Trembling. But how could they possibly divorce this from K’s theism? I’m not sure they can, but that doesn’t mean they can’t get anything out K’s ideas, nonetheless.
Daniels point about Jews getting something out of Kierkegaard, I don’t doubt that, whether they be secular or religious, surely they would get more out of something like Fear and Trembling, than say a non-Abrahamic theist would.
As I said, I didn’t make any assertion that non-Christians can’t get anything out of Kierkegaard. And just from the little I have been exposed to K, I would disagree if anyone else made such an assertion.
And my use of “village atheist” was, essentially, a comeback to the atheist rantings about Christians, Christian fundamentalists, and Kierkegaards Christianity. I guess you could say my usage of it was my way of letting it be known that atheists aren’t exempt from personality flaws, intellectual short-comings, irrationality, and annoying others – facts which seemed to have been completely lost on the atheists in the podcast, an oversight which only helped contribute to it being made even more manifest.
I don’t know enough about K to know if K was a fundie or not, from what I do know of him I wouldn’t think so. The little I do know of him does make me think his being called the father of existentialism to be fitting. I don’t think of Christian existentialists or mystics or Christian philosophers when I think of fundies. So the whole rant seemed pointless, and as I remarked earlier, that Kierkegaard was just a useful vehicle to rant and rave about annoying Christian fundies. These sort of brainless, and yes, “village atheist,” interjections completely ruined what could have otherwise been a really a great show.
Thanks again to you both for your thoughtful replies and the points you both made, take my complaints with a grain of salt, I will definitely check out the links, and I look forward to your upcoming shows. 🙂
Peace to you both.
This was a good impetus for me to re-listen to the episode, which I like to do before doing a follow-up episode (i.e. the Schleiermacher will serve as this). Just to share my time-saving hint: I like to listen on double speed, so I only spent 1 hr. instead of 2; granted this is less likely to be effective if you’re not someone who just spent several hours editing the episode a few months back.
In my initial reply here, I was accepting Ace’s analysis of the progression of the discussion, as I could certainly picture us failing to explore lines of K’s argument if they were too reliant on assumptions we didn’t accept, and could as usual picture Seth trying to pull us back on topic.
On 2nd listen, though, it seems like we gave K’s arguments in his words, and especially after just doing the Hegel discussion, I find his points on the self to be pretty thought-provoking, and think we did the best we could making hay of them, and the number of times when one of us (usually me) got just fed up with the Christian aspect of it was a pretty low percentage of the discussion. However, visiting Augusta, GA as I am this week and reading the irritating conservative editorials, I can understand how listener sensitivity to the irreverent tone in which the religious arguments are expressed could be distracting from getting what I think are quite a large number of details of K’s thought and how it relates to others that came up in this discussion.
I don’t think an argument in the context of our podcast can or should include a disclaimer to say “not everyone who believes what I’m arguing against is an idiot, and it’s equally possible that I’m just wrong about this, and certainly those in my side of this general debate are flawed too.” That’s all part of the general backdrop of the podcast as a whole, and would make things unlistenable. (I notice when I edit the episodes that some of our guests feel the need to preface everything they say with some kind of humbling disclaimer, and I find myself removing nearly all of them, as it just slows down the conversation and doesn’t add anything of substance.)
Since we’ve got your attention Ace, would you be up for responding to what I take to be the two actual anti-Christian arguments here that were the source of my frustration as expressed on the episode? Namely:
1. Christians sometimes claim that without God, you’re in despair, even if you think you’re happy. But, really, most people aren’t WHOLLY happy, and there’s always some gnawing anxiety that they can find if they look hard enough. To me, this is just a feature of human nature that existentialists have recognized, but the Christian says “no, you can fill this hole with God!” However, based on K’s own testimony of his life and what I’ve gathered from those who’ve tried this solution, is that the hole, the anxiety remains, even for those who try to fill it with God, and K’s interpretation of this is that filling the whole is a matter of a daily struggle to reaffirm faith. But if it’s a daily struggle, then it doesn’t address the problem of despair at all. Faith as a coping strategy doesn’t seem to work any better than the alternatives, and the faithful and faithless alike seem more or less equally prone to either be anxious, or on the flip-side to be self-denying of the existential insight (i.e. to affirm that they are totally at peace and self-confident and not at all anxious).
2. As detailed on the Hegel episode, developing a sense of self requires interaction with others: both direct, as when your parents treat you certain ways and you use that as a basis to play off of in developing who you as an adult are, and indirect, as when the culture sets up innumerable standards (of intelligence, virtue, beauty, etc.) that shape us, even in the event that we reject those standards and define ourselves in rebellion to them. K. thinks we can have this interaction with regard to God Himself, but that makes no sense to me, because even for fervent believers, God does not give you the concrete and specific interaction you need to develop psychologically. Yes, of course we have ethical standards (from society) which we call religious, and we can be shaped by social interaction with church members (which K. rejects, being an individualist about religion). The alternative seems to be living up to your own ideals… using the feeling of religion to inspire you to better reflect what you want to be. This is of course tricky to do on your own, as we’re not really objective judges of ourselves, but everybody ultimately has to do some part of it on their own, whatever your belief system (see Nietzsche, where we each try to make our lives into art, which is presumably self-judged). I still feel like this doesn’t capture K’s point, though, which is not an ethical one… not about how we act. So even granting all of K’s religious presuppositions, how do we make sense of his psychological account? Unless God is actually talking to us as He did to Abraham, and moreover, giving us nonverbal cues and approval/disapproval over time and all that other stuff that regular people do when we interact with and are changed by them, how could we possibly get a decent sense of Self purely out of interaction with God?
Hi Mark,
I welcome Ace or others to respond to this question, of course. But I think K would say you don’t need concrete interaction with God to imagine yourself before him. Any and all interaction with God consists of a subjective inward reflection upon God. It’s OK that you don’t “know” how–or even whether–you’re interacting with God, in the same way you would interact with other people or society. Largely, I think that’s because he’s thoroughly uninterested in objective certainty. He addresses this in excruciating detail with _Concluding Unscientific Postscript_. I’ve tried to provide a useful block quote below, but I think it’s hard to absorb CUP’s argument (which, IMO, answers your 2nd question) without at least reading a synopsis of the book. Here’s the best short synopsis I have found:
http://sorenkierkegaard.org/concluding-unscientific-postscript.html
Hi Mark,
It wasn’t your objections to his arguments, per se, that I got aggravated over, it’s not like I don’t expect you guys to analyze and criticize the reasonings of philosophers ideas and arguments. That’s part of the learning experience of the show that has been a draw for me.
Before I go any further into it, I want to say first that having had a few days to let this sink in, I think I do owe you an apology for being more offended than I probably should have been upon reflection. Truth be told, I think I let my overall aggravation with the fashionable disrespect, verbal abuse, belittling, and trivializing of Christianity and Christian thinkers that I commonly witness among the vocal atheist community on the web, I think this podcast just triggered my collective feelings and I took it out here on – it turns out – you.
I know I have a festering irritation with atheists online because so many of them squat all day on just about every Christian forum, chatrooms, etc, and too many seem pathologically obsessed with disrespecting Christians and going out of their way to prevent any meaningful conversation from happening by diverting the conversation to themselves by mocking, disrespect, making asinine objections, blaming Christianity for every woe under the sun, and boasting about how “reasonable”, “logical”, “rational” and “quick witted” they themselves are because they’re not “brainwashed Christians.”
This fashionable bigotry and verbal abuse has gotten pretty old, so I admittedly have developed a hypersensitivity and an irritable disinterest in atheists [mostly lame and juvenile] objections, and their so-called sense of humor (i.e. bigotry; verbal abuse) at Christians expense.
The way you framed your objections in your latest reply made me recall that those in fact were your central objections in the podcast, however, the way they were framed in the podcast (along with other interjections not in your reply) the actual argument was lost under the mocking tone and drawing parallels between K and annoying Christian fundies, and criticizing them and their belief in God and the Bible and whatnot. From my perspective, the way your objections and interjections in the podcast were delivered made it seem there was nothing there but the all-too-common atheist ranting and belittling designed to divert anyone from getting anything meaningful out of those annoying Christians who are by default irrational dipshits with nothing worthwhile to say.
Uh-oh, I don’t want to get myself riled up again. :/
Anyway, the way your objections are framed here made me recall what I missed in the podcast, and also cemented the growing suspicion that I probably overreacted and quite likely came into it with a hypersensitivity and detected more disrespect from you than what was probably actually there or intended. Upon reflection, I should have been more empathetic to your hypersensitivity and irritation with Christianity and Christians that was triggered by K, since I’m pretty sure I was suffering from the same thing with atheists and atheism that was, ironically enough, triggered by you.
But it would be nice to see you guys make another attempt at K, because I do maintain that much of the episode was wasted on the seemingly 2-hour long concern over how non-Christians/non-theists could get anything out of K. But in episodes on people like Nietzsche, no such concern for how Christians/theists could get anything out of them even came to mind, and why not? I perceive there is an underlying assumption or an expectation that Christians/theists should get schooled by atheists, and that they should seriously consider their views, regardless of whether or not Christians/theists find atheists or their atheistic philosophies particularly interesting or useful. It’s just expected, it’s a given. So it’s not even worth asking. Yet it’s not expected or a given when it comes to secularists getting school’ed by theists such as Kierkegaard. Why not? The seeming double-standard there was very irritating to me, especially since the concern seemed to come at the expense of understanding K and his ideas. The Nietzsche episode was a really great episode by the way, the show definitely made me want to read more his work for myself. If you guys ever do consider making another attempt at K, it would be great if he could get the same treatment as Nietzsche for helping listeners (like myself) better understand K. It’s just a suggestion, it’s your show and you offer it free, so please don’t think that I think you owe me anything, because you don’t. As I said in a previous post, I totally expected my gripes about this episode to be ignored.
As far as answering your objections, I’m not a philosopher, I’m just someone who is in the learning process and exploring ideas, and any answers I would make would only be based on my own current understanding, feelings, and experiences, 3 areas I’m not even that certain about anyway. I don’t doubt you would discover logical holes and whatnot if I even attempted to make sense of my present understanding about faith/despair. My interest in philosophy is because it has revealed to me that I don’t have an adequate understanding on a lot of things to say where I definitively stand. You won’t see apologetic defenses or canned answers from me. And because I know I’m not certain at this point in time, what I am certain of is I’m not equipped to debate philosophy nor argue in defense of philosophers assertions such as those made by K. I hope you can understand, maybe you’ve been at that uncertain place where I am right now where listening and learning has become more appealing than talking and teaching. But Daniels reply was helpful to me in understanding where K was coming from when he made those assertions, but I can’t say at this point if I agree with his foundations (like subjectivism), or even if I would make similar assertions.
I’ll leave the debate to you guys on the show, who certainly are better equipped than I in these matters. 🙂
Peace to you, Mark. And again, I sincerely apologize, you didn’t deserve the harsh treatment I gave you.
I decided to (belatedly) take-up the challenge of responding to Mark’s questions, even though I’m a some-time village atheist. Perhaps, in the spirit of K-, I could do so under an alias (but won’t).
I hope it does not mischaractarize M-‘s questions to reformulate them as: 1 – isn’t the fact of K-‘s life-long personal despair a counter argument to his own thesis that the triumph over despair will only come from a deep personal commitment to God ; and 2 – given the necessity of personal human interactions to inform beliefs, develop social norms, provide the thrill of participating in robust collective action, how can a deep personal relationship with God serve as the primary guiding relationship in our lives?
Maybe like this:
Well, before trying to defend a K-like position, a preliminary definitional point about God. I have not read enough (or much of any) K- to purport to be fluent and in a position to defend K-‘s sense of it, but from the PEL episode and other very recent short readings, I take it that the K- sense of God is not doctrinal; rather, it is substantially personal, proto-existential, and flexible. And regardless of what K- thought, that would be the only sense I could begin to defend. So, to add a little contour to a proposed use of the word, assume you can talk, i.e. you use the word God correctly, in the following ways:
1) God is placemark in our speech, in our minds, and in the way we make sense of our emotions — for things unknown and unknowable. 2) God is a guiding principle or principles as to how we lead our lives, 3) When we feel a guidedness in our lives or a deep lightening of the load, we can refer to this as God, or of the guidedness as caused by God, or be thankful to God.
1. So to make sense of Q1, could K- be Moses-like: seeing the path to a promised land but never getting there; feeling the load at times profoundly lighten as he more fully commits himself to the Christian heuristic of God and to its guiding principles, so he can see where it is taking him – but does not get there. He experiences the formation of guidedness, but can’t sustain it. Or maybe he is not like Moses, but we (he?) might say salvation does not require, or even allow, a permanent release from earthly suffering. That would mean not living and is why Christians (although certainly not I) credit after-life.
2. With respect to Q2, making a relationship with God primary might mean something like this:
By GB Shaw:
This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
Attributed to M. Theresa:
People are often unreasonable, irrational, and self-centered. Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some unfaithful friends and some genuine enemies. Succeed anyway.
If you are honest and sincere people may deceive you. Be honest and sincere anyway.
What you spend years creating, others could destroy overnight. Create anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness, some may be jealous. Be happy anyway.
The good you do today, will often be forgotten. Do good anyway.
Give the best you have, and it will never be enough. Give your best anyway.
In the final analysis, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway.
In other words, the primary relationship with God does not negate the relevance of relationships with people, it wholly informs them. A K- like view would have us totally committed to notions about how we live and guide our lives, how we obtain a sense of our lives being guided, and the resulting transformation of our contact with people is a sense of inclusion in a collective human (maybe super-human) force greater than ourselves.
Mark, in reference to #7 I’d encourage you not to be discouraged by K’s theism/brainwashing.
There is a lot there for edification that doesn’t require buying into the rest of the religious ideas. Just ask Sartre. K’s ideas of a) the individual forced to be accountable despite wishes to belong to a larger system and b) ‘yes, but here I am” arguments are worth exploring – whether or not one buys into his version of Christianity.
Hi KC,
Yes, I’d say that’s just about right!
This was excellent. Thanks to all of you. I have never read kierkegaard, but have learned a little about his ideas through secondary sources, e.g. Solomon, A Philosophy Talk episode, etc. That being said, it seems to me that any attempt to secularize him misses his point. From your discussion, I take Kierkegaard to be saying the following. The self is a dynamic relationship between aspects or polarities. As a result the self defies definition in the Platonic sense, since there is not one single fixed entity you can pin it down to. Therefore, if one becomes aware of this, one realizes that one is ultimately unanchored and ungrounded, since there is not a set self to ground oneself in. The only way out of this state of despair (this state of being lost without an anchor) is to ground ones’ self in God, since God is the only foundation encompassing enough to hold and make meaning of this dynamic self. If my interpretation is in some sense correct, then I would say that, from a kierkegaardian perspective, any attempt to find a secular solution to this problem is to trivialize it. The problem is so big (e.g. it involves the infinite as well as the finite) that the only solution is to relate the self to a God big enough to hold all the different aspects of the self. I am not sure I understand Kiekegaard correctly, but based on your discussion these are my thoughts. Thanks again, I found this to interesting.
Hi Michael,
Thanks for the kind words! You’ve described the problem very well. Whether it’s possible to secularize Kierkegaard without talking past him is a fair question. I’m not sure that you can, but I’m not sure that you can’t, either.
In any event, making the attempt is not so much to miss K’s point (believe me, we GET it) as it is to refuse to play K’s game on his terms. In other words, we were trying to accept his premises and consider whether a different conclusion might not be possible.
For example, K’s conclusion is that you must ground your existence in God, via faith. But which God? The kind of authoritarian, personalized, transcendental, judging God which Kierkegaard proselytized? Or can it be the more impersonal, abstract, immanent God for which Spinoza or Schleiermacher advocated? And if it’s possible to do so with the latter, then why stop there? Why not attempt to ground your unanchored existence in Being itself, a la Heidegger?
Note that Heidegger addressed this issue in Being & Time, when discussing Unheimlichkeit, or “not-at-home-ness,” and devised a solution to this very same (or at least very similar) problem.* But Heidegger’s solution looked quite different from Kierkegaard’s.
Now, was Heidegger “secularizing” Kierkegaard? And if so, was he “misunderstanding” Kierkegaard? Or was he adapting Kierkegaard? I don’t think doing so necessarily means that one misses K’s point, so much as one rejects it. This happens all the time amongst philosophers. Kant did that with Hume, Hegel did that with Kant, Nietzsche did that with Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein did that with Russell, etc.
*Some may argue that Heidegger’s notion of Unheimlichkeit was in no way influenced by or responding to K generally, or “The Sickness Unto Death” in particular, but you’ll never convince me of it.
Hello Daniel,
I received a BA in philosophy many years ago, but the school I attended was so heavily analytic that I was, sadly, exposed to very little continental philosophy. I read very little Sartre and no Kierkegaard or Heidegger. So I am working at a little bit of a disadvantage and am looking forward to learning more through your podcasts. That being said, to me the philosophers you mentioned largely accept K.’s premise since they all seem to ground the self in some form of the Transcendent – whether that is God or Being, with a capital ‘B’. It may be that in K’s model a personal God is necessary, but maybe not. However, I would say that some form of the Transcendent, a larger meaning or purpose to existence, does seem to be necessary. I would argue (and remember that I have not really read any of these people) that an argument along the lines of Sartre not only draws a different conclusion, but actually changes the premise. In my understanding Sartre denies any form of the transcendent outside of freedom itself – i.e. having a free will means being able to transcend the causal world of mere objects. Although this solution is interesting and currently a popular one, it relies on a very different understanding of the self than K seemed to have. Thanks for giving me an opportunity to discuss these things. Keep on doing what you are doing, there is a real value to it in a world seems to have largely forgotten about philosophy. Roger Scruton in his recent Gifford lectures has an interesting discussion of similar ideas. You can listen to is here if you are interested: http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/gifford/2010/listen/
Thanks for the recommendation, Michael, will check it out! I always find Scruton engaging, though his political views occasionally grind my teeth a bit.
Re: Kierkegaard and the existentialists, you may well have the better view. For a solid quickie introduction to K. and his legacy (other than the links I gave earlier in this thread), consider checking out Clare Carlisle’s “Kierkegaard: A Guide for the Perplexed”: http://amzn.com/0826486118. You can get a sense of Carlisle’s writing style in her Guardian columns, to which I linked above.
Thanks Daniel, Scruton’s political views grind my teeth as well. However I found his Gifford Lectures to be interesting. Take care, Michael
Oh my God that song is amazing!
Hubert Dreyfus’ commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time has an appendix that compares Heidegger’s “anxiety” and K’s “despair” and that the ultimate end state is a state Heidegger calls “equanimity”…which is not “peace” per se, as calm, but calm in the face of the change.
To understand K’s version of Christianity, he says “a lad falls in love with a lady…and upon this everything turns”. To be christian about it means that you have a love that you would die for. Dying for your love is the test of christianity. Similar to the historical jesus (which Kierkegaard never acknowledged as necessary…but says in the postscript that histories are theories, and theories we know using inductive reasoning are “approximations”. So to be christian is not to believe in an approximation. But like Jesus (as the story goes, the myth properly understood as containing psychological truths) was the only god who had a mission. Jesus was on a mission to earth, to save humanity, out of love for humanity. Put simply, Jesus was a martyr. To be a christian is to be a martyr, or have the spirit of martyrdom. This of course happens in a “moment” similar to falling in love, where you acquire a new identity, such as knight of the lady, and is the source of your identity.
This does not mean that you can have just any cause and die for it, like a soldier who dies for country for glory. A Christian has to do die for his cause out of his love for his cause. The Christian does not HAVE to die, but whould die if the situation called for it. Kierkegaard did not want everyone going out of their way to find ways to martyr themselves, like some pervereted versions of martyrdom. But the christian would do whatever the relationship calls for no mater what. The “no matter what” is the sense of determination you aquire in the “moment” and is properly called “Faith”.
Kierkegaard essentially secularizes Christianity. Another example would be MLK Jr, who died for his cause out of his love for his people (assuming that is really why he was willing to die). However, when you get one of these public causes it gets tricky. Kierkegaard did say later in life that perhaps romantic love is not the best example of this. And perhaps it is more “Christ-like” (Christ-ian) to have a love for a group of people, rather than one person. But either one counts, I believe.
While I wouldn’t be inclined to think Kierkegaard secularizes Christianity, I agree that Kierkegaard’s analogy between theistic belief and romantic love is important. Another interesting context to put Kierkegaard’s work into comes from a more modern, Christian existentialist philosopher, Paul Tillich, who outlines the idea of having an ultimate concern in the “Dynamics of Faith.” The intensity of one’s faith in one’s ultimate concern corresponds to an equally greater doubt. However, when aesthetic ultimate concerns (such as romantic love) turn out to be finite, we are left in a state of despair. In order to alleviate this despair, we may elect an infinite ultimate concern, thereby entering what Kierkegaard would refer to as the religious stage of existence. In this model, romantic disillusionment can be what drives the individual to seek its analog in the infinite. Thus, while there are important similarities between the two occurrences, Kierkegaard never attempts to excise Christianity’s irrational elements. Perhaps it is precisely those irrational elements which make his faith infinite and tenable.
Great episode and great job Daniel. I read “fear and trembling” for an under grad class and enjoyed it very much. In the end I think it all falls apart unless you subscribe to K’s Christianity. What I like about K is how he, as Mark puts it, how he bites-the-bullet. I am no longer a Christian like I was raised but that stuff gets into your DNA and so I sometime find myself still judging other’s Christianness (not as much anymore but more so when I was younger) and I would get annoyed if someone tried to reason there way to Jesus. It just never added up and I think K does a great job saying; hey that is why they call it faith! At any rate you guys coved all that so I will stop.
I am trying to figure out when to donate and figure that I should at least donate when I make a request that I want you to consider. Therefor tonight I donated, here is my request 🙂
Please have more philosophy of science episodes. I really enjoyed episode 13 and because of that episodes I am reading Heisenbert’s Physics and Philosophy the revolution in modern science (awesome suggestion). I just attended a public lecture at OSU where Sean Carroll of Caltech discussed the Higgs Boson discovery. I love physic or the sciences in general and when I was young it was the ultimate source of truth with a big-T. But once I stumbled on to philosophy and philosophy of science specifically things changed. I still love science but no longer look to science for big-T truth. Normally this is not a big deal except when it is thrown in your face like tonight. Sean said two things, 1) we now *know* that everything is a field and we just experience particles (when you are not looking the thing-in-itself is just a field). As if mass was a property of fields and the field is what you put in you ontology. But he did not help me understand what a field might really be!? The wave/particle duality problem gone “poof” and no one called him on that. I tried but they did not take my question. And 2) when asked why do this type of research his answer was honest, not to cure cancer or anything like that, it is because we are human and we want to know the answers. The implication is we want to know the big-T truth.
I think we the public really need more philosophical education to keep the claims of science in perspective. I commented to my son that scientists rely so heavily on equations that at some point they look at each variable as something “real” and the possibility that the equation could be some correlation model seems to get lost. Ok at any rate get your physics friend back, I need to know if someone can describe a field as anything other than a mathematical model.
-Tony
A little off topic, but interesting. My main background is in computer science, and the thing I found interesting about Kierkegaard’s description of self is that it is nearly identical to what is known as a finite state machine, which is the earliest description of a working computer.
Interesting. How can this be?
Well he says that the self is the continuous reflection on a relationship between the mind and body, or mind and external world.(I was never quite sure which was a better description of his views.) If we consider each of these as a node it would look something like this. M= mind, B=Body, S= the reflection on the relation. + means This can be repeated one or more times and * means can be repeated 0 or more times.
/ – -S- -\
/ ^ \
v |+ v
M B
This is similar to a FSM with the language of ((MB)+(BM)*S+) +. Which in general means M relates to B at least once and B relates to M at least once which relates to S at least once. The only thing this is really missing is a starting and terminating node. FSM have an entry location and an exit location. I don’t think this is what K had in mind, but it is interesting to say the least.
I really loved listening to this. How many are there? I’m just getting into this and how he uses his language.
Sillowine | http://timgeorgelaw.com/Areas-of-Practice/
I know you guys probably still aren’t done being done with ol’ Kierkegaard, but, as you DID promise to revisit the melancholy Dane in a couple of years and it has now been four, may I suggest the two best of his works I’ve read: The Concept of Irony and Concluding Unscientific Postscript? I’ve read both Sickness and Fear without ever haven gotten particularly excited about either, but “Concept” and “Concluding” are both better reads in terms not only of content but of style. Give ’em a shot! Thanks.
I guess everybody’s favorite episode or philosopher is the one they find the closest personal connection to and this one was mine (my choices are limited to what I’ve heard in these podcasts). And so I was disappointed that there was so little interest in ‘more Kierkegaard’.
I knew full well the atheist leanings of the three hosts so I took the snark factor in stride but had similar reactions as Ace did, just not as strong. Danial did a great job of “defending the theist perspective’ while staying in the closet but I often find myself thinking these podcasts need an apologist/defender of theism because philosophy seems to be so tied to the defense or rejection of it. On the few occasions when there have been guests who do defend it, they either feel obligated to keep the skeptic’s hat on or they really have no fist in their glove.
But to give full props to Mark & company, I was so proud and impressed with your recognition (in a different episode) that Dawkins arguments against the existence of God were lame in the extreme. His (and Kierkegaard’s) criticism of religion was valid and entertaining however.
Thanks for listening, Tracy. I think you’ll find on our more recent Ricoeur and Jesus episodes, we’re more sympathetic, and brought on an actual clergyman. We’re about to do a month of St. Augustine too (sans guest, though). I’ll admit that while I’m sure we’ll do more Kierkegaard eventually, it’s still nowhere near the top of our list at the moment.
Thanks for the welcome Mark. But No! No!, more sympathetic is not what I was looking for, the clash of ideas is what we come for 🙂 So go ‘All In’ when questioning the existence of God. I just want a more robust defense. For example, in the Ricoeur episode (I think) there was the remark (paraphrased) that we have to dismiss or at least doubt the account of creation in Genesis because science has obviously negated it. The preacher let that softball go right by him. At the very least he could have said that there could be no better description ( in the vocabulary of that day) of the Big Bang than the words “Let there be light”.
A shame the fellas appear at the end of the episode to be relieved to be done with Kierkegaard, as such figures as the Being and Time Heidegger and the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations seemed able to get their fill. Not to mention Sartre, Tillich, Jaspers…shall I go on?
We’ll circle back to him!
That’d be great. Note: by “seemed able to get their fill” should have been “seemed UNable to get their fill.” Oh, and I left out Derrida.
I’m a little late to the party, but just listened. At one point you mention being a douchebag and then repenting at the end of life as being a possible issue with K’s POV. One thing – did K believe in a literal heaven or hell? I thought he didn’t, but maybe I am misremembering. The heaven or hell portion of the the Christian program is a huge drive as to why to be good. I wonder, if he didn’t believe in that – or even if he did, but didn’t see it as being the primary motivation for a relationship with God, then the douchebag would not fit under the problems with K’s ideas as you spoke of it on this episode. I get the sense from K (from you guys) that the fruits and rewards of this path are experienced in this life. This is very much different than the Christianity I have experienced. I want to read more K just to find out if this is the case. If this doesn’t get buried and someone can understand this rambling and speak to it – I’d love to hear.
Oh! And that guest ruined it for everyone else except ACTUAL experts. Wowza