Quotes

Introduction to Kierkegaard(part 2): The Religious Solution

"If a human being did not have an eternal consciousness, if underlying everything there were only a wild, fermenting power that writhing in dark passions produced everything, be it significant or insignificant, if a vast, never appeased emptiness hid beneath everything, what would life be then but despair?" (Fear and Trembling)

As outlined in the previous video, Kierkegaard posited the human being to be a synthesis of opposing elements, of "the infinite and the finite, and the temporal and eternal, of freedom and necessity". The task which confronts every individual is to properly relate these opposing elements in a manner conducive to genuine human existence. One who accomplishes this mightiest of all tasks attains selfhood. One who does not lives in a state of despair, is stricken with a "sickness of spirit", and lacks a self.

In his works Kierkegaard investigated various life-views or "existence-spheres", and their appropriateness for the eradication of despair. In this video we will summarize these life-views.

"Every human being" Kierkegaard has one of his pseudonyms, Judge William, state, "...has a natural need to formulate a life-view, a conception of the meaning of life and its purpose."

While everyone has a life-view; an idea of what is good and how to live, not everyone consciously formulates one for themselves.

Instead, most live as mass-men, philistines, passively adapting themselves to the socially accepted values, expectations, and modes of behavior familiar to their culture. Instead of turning inward and thinking through the meaning and purpose of existence, the mass-man's gaze is forever directed outward, his thought, behavior, entire life in fact, merely a mimicry of what he sees others do:

"Just as a mother admonishes her child who is about to attend a party, "Now, mind your manners and watch the other polite children and behave as they do", so he, too, could live on and behave as he saw others behave. He would never do anything first and would never have any opinion unless he first knew that others had it...he would be more like a puppet character that very deceptively imitates all the human externalities..." (Concluding Unscientific Postscript)

The mass-man's lack of awareness of himself as an individual renders him akin to a herd animal. No matter what one thinks of the mass-man, according to Kierkegaard one thing is certain – he has no self, and therefore has failed as a human being.

But not all live and die as mass-men. Sometimes a person will become conscious of himself as an individual, separate from his social identity and the social order he is enmeshed in.

Such an awakening is often accompanied by the conviction that the bonds which tie him to society are in fact chains, highly repressive and limiting. Detaching himself from his ties to society, he becomes enticed by the multifarious alternatives open to him, and thus hyper-aware of possibility. Approaching life as a fertile ground upon which he can conduct numerous life-experiments, such an individual enters into Kierkegaard's first "existence-sphere", the life-view of aestheticism.

Experimenting with different personas, careers, relationships, and hobbies, the aesthete settles upon nothing, makes no enduring choice, and refuses to throw himself wholeheartedly into anything. He avoids any and all serious relationships; for that would diminish his freedom, his ability to discard his current life-experiments and pursue others which entice him in the moment.

"One must always guard against contracting a life relationship by which one can become many. That is why even friendship is dangerous, marriage even more so. They do say marriage partners become one, but this is very obscure and mysterious talk. When you are one of several, then you have lost your freedom; you cannot send for your traveling boots whenever you wish, you cannot move aimlessly about in the world." (Kierkegaard)