Søren Kierkegaard

Søren Kierkegaard

In an age intoxicated by grand systems, when philosophy under Hegel seemed on the verge of explaining everything, all of history, all of reality, all of God, as the unfolding of one vast rational whole, a strange, brilliant, melancholy Dane stood up and made a small, stubborn objection. You have forgotten something, Søren Kierkegaard said, in your magnificent system. You have forgotten the single individual, the actual, particular, existing person, you, me, who is not a tidy moment in the world-historical process but a living human being who has to wake up tomorrow and decide how to live. You can build a system that contains the whole universe, Kierkegaard granted, but you cannot live in it, because a system is finished and complete, while a human existence is unfinished, open, and underway, a thing that must be chosen, moment by moment, and never simply known. The truths that matter most, he insisted, are not the cool, objective truths a system can state, but the ones you can only become by staking your life on them. With that, Kierkegaard turned philosophy away from the system and back toward the existing individual, and became, almost single-handed and a century before the word existed, the father of existentialism.

Three ways to be a self. Kierkegaard mapped the human possibilities as three great ways of living, three "stages" a self can occupy, and the map is one of the most penetrating in philosophy. The first is the aesthetic life, the life lived for the moment, for pleasure, novelty, beauty, sensation, the life of the seducer and the connoisseur and the eternal seeker of the next interesting thing. It looks like freedom, but Kierkegaard shows it ending in emptiness: the aesthete, refusing all commitment so as to keep every option open, never actually becomes anyone, and drifts at last into boredom and a quiet despair. The second is the ethical life, the life of choice and commitment, of marriage and work and duty, of binding yourself to obligations and so acquiring, for the first time, a real and continuous self. This is higher, but it too has a limit: lived honestly, the ethical life brings you up against your own failure, your inability to be as good as the moral law demands. And so there opens the third and highest stage, the religious, the life of faith, in which the self, having exhausted both pleasure and duty, throws itself in trust upon the eternal. What is crucial, and characteristically Kierkegaardian, is that you cannot reason your way from one stage to the next; no argument compels the aesthete to become ethical, or the ethical person to make the leap to faith. Each transition is a free leap, a decision the whole self must make, and that no system and no proof can make for you. The stages are not a ladder you climb by logic; they are lives you must choose to live.

The truth you can only live. Kierkegaard's most provocative idea is captured in three words that sound, at first, like nonsense: "subjectivity is truth." He did not mean that there are no facts, or that anything goes. He meant that for the deepest questions of a human life, how to live, what to love, what to believe, whether to commit, the objective answer is not the point, and may even be a distraction. Two people can hold the very same belief, recite the very same creed, and one is alive with it and the other is dead to it; the difference lies not in the what, the content, which is identical, but in the how, the inwardness, the passion, the degree to which the person has actually appropriated the truth and staked their existence on it. A truth you merely know, that you can state correctly and feel nothing about, is, for the things that matter most, no truth at all; it becomes true for you only when you have made it your own with your whole life. This is Kierkegaard's revenge on the systematizers: the most important truths cannot be put in a book and handed over, because their truth lies precisely in the manner of holding them, which each person must achieve for themselves, alone, and which no amount of objective correctness can substitute for. He spent his genius on the gap between knowing something and living it, which he thought was the whole of the spiritual life.

The dizziness of freedom. Kierkegaard was the first to map, with terrifying precision, an experience we now take for granted as part of being modern: anxiety. Not fear, which has an object, you are afraid of something, a dog, a fall, but anxiety, which has no object, or rather whose object is nothing, the strange dread that comes over us not from any threat but from freedom itself. Stand at the edge of a cliff, Kierkegaard says, and you feel two things: the fear of falling, and something stranger and worse, a dizzying awareness that you could throw yourself off, that nothing but your own choice prevents it. That vertigo, the "dizziness of freedom," is anxiety, and it is the feeling of a creature confronting its own terrible possibility, the realization that the future is open, that your life is yours to make or to ruin, and that no one, no parent, no church, no system, can make the choice for you. We spend enormous energy fleeing this feeling, burying ourselves in routine and convention and the comforting anonymity of the crowd, where "everyone" does the deciding and no one is responsible. But the anxiety is the truth of our condition, and Kierkegaard thought it should be welcomed rather than numbed, because it is the very thing that calls us out of the herd and into a real, chosen, individual existence. A century later, the existentialists would build their whole philosophy on the feeling he had named.

The leap. And then there are the moments, Kierkegaard saw, when knowing runs out altogether and you simply have to leap. The deepest commitments of a human life, to love this person, to give yourself to this calling, to believe, cannot be reached by gathering more evidence; at some point the calculating must stop and you have to throw yourself, with your whole being, beyond what reason can guarantee. He called this the leap, and his most haunting study of it is the story of Abraham, asked by God to do the unthinkable. By every ethical standard the demand is monstrous, and Kierkegaard does not soften this; he stares straight at the horror of it. Yet Abraham, "on the strength of the absurd," holds to his faith, suspends even the moral law for an absolute relation to God, and is, in Kierkegaard's word, a "knight of faith." The point is not to recommend such a thing, which Kierkegaard found as appalling as anyone; it is to expose the structure of faith itself, that it is not a comfortable belief held with good evidence but a leap into the dark, a staking of everything on something reason cannot underwrite and that may even look, from outside, like madness. This is the source of the famous "leap of faith," so often misread as a celebration of irrationality. It is the opposite: a clear-eyed recognition that the things that matter most, love, faith, the meaning of a life, cannot be proven before you commit to them, and that to wait for proof is to never live at all. At the bottom of every real commitment, Kierkegaard saw, there is a leap.

What will you live for? The room reads Kierkegaard partly through the haze of his masks: he wrote many of his greatest books under a carnival of pseudonyms, Johannes the Silent, Johannes the Climber, the Anti-Climber, each a character living out a different stance toward existence, the pleasure-seeker, the dutiful citizen, the trembling believer. He did this on purpose, because he thought existential truth cannot be lectured; it must be lived into, and the most a writer can do is hold up a mirror in which readers recognize their own condition and are forced to choose for themselves. He called it "indirect communication," philosophy as seduction and provocation rather than doctrine, and no one has ever done it better. Behind the masks was a strange, intense, solitary life: a man who broke off his own engagement to the woman he loved because he felt called to his lonely vocation instead, who walked the streets of Copenhagen talking to everyone and belonging to no one, and who poured his last years into a furious public attack on the comfortable official Christianity of his day, insisting that to truly become a Christian was the hardest thing a person could attempt, an infinite, passionate, lifelong striving, not the birthright of anyone baptized into a respectable church. His countrymen mocked him; the wider world ignored him for fifty years. And then the twentieth century, reeling from its catastrophes and its lost certainties, rediscovered him and found that this melancholy Dane had seen it all coming, the anxiety, the crowd, the flight from freedom, the hunger for a truth one could actually live by. He had pressed the one question the modern soul cannot escape: not what is true in general, but what will you, the single individual, choose to live and die for?