‘Will the tongue ligament of my spirit never be loosened; will I always jabber? What I need is a voice as piercing as the glance of Lynceus, as terrifying as the groan of the giants, as sustained as a sound of nature, as mocking as an icy gust of wind, as malicious as echo’s heartless taunting, extending in range from the deepest bass to the most melting high notes, and modulated from a solemn-silent whisper to the energy of rage.’
The 19th century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard is best known for giving us the concept of a leap of faith. He was a deeply religious thinker, but his ideas have as much relevance for secular lives as Christian ones. He was the grandfather of existentialism, a purveyor of authenticity, and of discovering, amid conflicting beliefs and the demand to conform to the rules of society, who you really are. Self-discovery.
Although he was born in 1813, his works were not widely read in English until the middle of the twentieth century.
He published Either/Or, his most famous work in 1843, and in it, through an array of pseudonyms and fictional characters, he discusses competing and contradictory ways one might live life. Should you live for the moment? Seeking pleasure? Or should you live for the interesting? Should you live dutifully? Ethically? Should you conform to the rules?
He suggests there are three stages of life, three spheres of existence: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious.
The Aesthetic Life
Kierkegaard argues that most of our choices -at least at first – are made instinctively, justified by what feels right in the moment. We have urges and we act upon them.
We might think of hedonism – maximizing pleasure – but Kierkegaard means aestheticism in its broader sense.
Today, we talk more of aesthetics as theories of art and beauty.
But what do we mean when we say something is aesthetically pleasing? That we find it pleasurable to look at, to listen to, to taste.
Aestheticism, then, is about the immediate sensation. The perception. Being in the moment.
This is deeper though than just maximizing our base pleasures.
Kierkegaard says “If I had in my service a submissive spirit who, when I asked for a glass of water, would bring me all the world’s costliest wines, deliciously blended in a goblet, I would dismiss him until he learned that enjoyment does not consist in what I enjoy but in getting my own way”
So aestheticism can be complicated. The sadist enjoys pain.
And then there’s the reflective aesthete
The hedonist, the pleasure seeker, can always plan to maximise aesethicism. In Either/Or Johannes is a seducer whose pleasure is derived not from the act of seduction but from planning the act of seduction.
Or there’s the idea of cultivating a taste in more sophisticated wines or music.
But the pursuit of aesthetic enjoyment inevitably becomes boring, repetitive, living in the moment because dull.
One solution, he says, he likens to the rotation of crops.
‘One is tired of living in the country and moves to the city; one is tired of one’s native land and goes abroad; one is weary of Europe and goes to America etc.; one indulges in the fanatical hope of an endless journey from star to star.’
Or, he suggests, “One does not enjoy in a straightforward manner, but enjoys something completely different that one arbitrarily introduces. One sees the middle of a play; one reads the third section of a book”
The character of the first half of either/or recommends nevergetting married, never taking an official post, to delay gratification. Ultimately, it’s a guidebook for the aesthetic life that slowly begins to unravel.
Are you really free if you submit yourself to the whim of unreliable pleasures. Do you ever find out who you are? What you’re capable of? Are you really in control, ever? Don’t the guilty, gut feelings inevitably creep it when you act only for yourself? The aesthete becomes uncomfortable when they see someone else doing something for another person.
Ultimately, the ethical is.
Ethical
unavoidable.
No matter what you try, you cannot avoid being confronted by questions about what’s forbidden, encouraged, popular, unpopular, wise, or misguided.
And its these questions, Kierkegaard argues, that contribute towards creating an identity that isn’t made up of arbitrary enjoyments.
An identity exists through time, it endures, it has values, and ideas.
Take chess. You might pick it up initially because you enjoy it. But then it might frustrate you, you might get bored, but if you’re wise, you might persevere because its good for you, good for your attention span and logic and strategy in the long run. This has a moral dimension. Being a good neighbor might not be something you always want to do all of the time. But you know its right.
In the second volume of Either/Or a character called the judge makes the same argument about marriage. It may not always be easy but it’s a good thing in the long term.
But more than this, the judge argues that marriage is aesthetic too – while the hedonist argues that marriage becomes boring, the judge argues that on the contrary, in creates new passions inaccessible to the base aesthete. Marriage – and ethics more broadly – are like works of art. They reveal new ideas, pleasures, and ways of being.
But here’s the problem. Whether you follow your base desires as an aesthete, or fulfil your ethical duties as a partner, father, neighbor, good worker, what it is, you’re being pushed and pulled around by either those desires or by society. How do you know what to do? Which ethical identities do you adopt? Are you a liberal, a Marxist, an existentialist, a Christian, a Daoist, a parent, a mountain climber? These identities seem to come from outside of us, from society, and so how can they ever really be you without you following your aesthetic desires?
And its not even as simple as doing what you’re good at. One of his characters tells us he gave up his position as a school teacher – a role he was ideally suited for – and so had nothing to gain from – and joined a travelling theatre company, something he had ‘no such talent for’ and ‘therefore everything to gain.’
The answer, he says, lies in the idea of subjective truth.
Imagine two types of knowledge. One is propositional, objective. You’re taught that 2 X 2 is 4.
But if I tell you that being a good neighbor is fulfilling in the long term or that burgers are delicious that’s a different type of knowledge. You have to assimilate it into your life, relate it to your other knowledge, work out what it means for you.
But even maths is like this. You can understand the sum, but to reflect on what that means for your life, how you’d use it, is, well, subjective.
He says “to understand and to understand are two different things”
He calls this double reflection. Learn. Assimilate.
‘The most important thing,’ he writes ‘is that a person should grow in the soil to which he really belongs’
Socrates compared himself to a midwife. His role as a teacher was not to pass on knowledge directly, but help students ‘give birth’ to knowledge, to help them ‘recollect’ whats already within them.
But how does this help us choose how to live? Whether we choose the aesthetic or the ethical life? How we choose to be a good neighbor.
Kierkegaard’s great challenge to his Enlightenment contemporaries was that reason could only take you so far. You might be given reasons why you should become a good neighbor, a mountain climber, or a husband, but there is no reason that can help you make that final decision, that subjective second reflection. You can only do that with a leap of faith.
Religious
Now, Kierkegaard was a deeply Christian thinker but I want to stick as much as I can to the philosophy. Some would argue that’s not possible but here goes.
To take a leap of faith – to pick an identity – is to choose what feels best for you. But that feeling is a combination of what you’ve been told and what might be true and what you feel, it is a subjective truth.
Learning algebra is not particularly important, what’s more important is how you use it, how you apply it to the world, and that’s a very personal thing
So There’s a sense in which what’s important is how you feel and act, not what the objective truth is.
Take global warming. You might believe that its true that its caused by humans and also believe that we should reduce carbon emissions. But you can genuinely and committedly believe that and still not act, still not recycle or drive less. You can still be apathetic For Kierkegaard, what’s crucial is how I embody that believe. Truth is subjectivity.
And when choosing how to embody knowledge about the world – in choosing our identities, tastes, and beliefs, we might always find reasons for abandoning the course we’re on.
He says ‘Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both.’
He was criticising Hegel’s idea that knowledge is synthesis – that there’s a middle road between bachelorhood and marriage, between salad and icecream – that combines the best of both. That over time things balance out.
Kierkegaard says no: its either/or, what’s important is the choice.
So what really matters aren’t the reasons, but the choice, based on feeling, to commit to a certain path, to have faith that it’s the right path, through the easy times and the difficult ones.
He said ‘existing cannot be done without passion”
‘for a subjective thinker, imagination, feeling and dialectics in impassioned existence-inwardness are required. But first and last, passion, because for an existing person it is impossible to think about existence without becoming passionate’
So how is this religious? Kierkegaard discusses this at length in many complicated books but I think there’s one sense that might be relatable even to the most atheistic.
When we’re working out how we should live we want to find out what’s the best thing to do across time. The aesthete lives in the moment, for the moment, but the ethical and religious person thinks more long term.
We’re looking for rules about life that will be timeless, will be successful on the good days and the bad, tomorrow and in ten years.
There’s a continuum then from the finite immediate fleeting moment through to the infinitely true, the eternally valid.
So this desire to follow the infinite, the perfect, the all-knowing is analogous with an infinite, perfect, all-knowing god.
We’re searching for the ‘highest good’, the ‘absolute telos.’
Kierkegaard scholar Stephen Evans puts it like this: ‘his attitude about eternal life parallels his attitude with respect to God’s existence. In neither case do we have objective proof that is sufficient to ground belief. However, in both cases the individual who is gripped by the proper kind of passion will naturally believe in God and seek eternal life. The proper worry is not whether there is such a thing as eternal life, but whether I am the kind of person who will gain eternal life.’
Conclusion
I’m agnostic but I think there’s a profound link in Kierkegaard between subjective belief, eternally good actions, and, as Evans puts it, being the kind of person who would gain eternal life.
He shows us a path from living in the moment to living for something bigger, more difficult, but, hopefully, more fulfilling.
That’s one of the key messages you get from reading Kierkegaard. That the big life questions – questions about who you are, and how you should live, they cant be taught, cant be directly communicated to you, they simply have to be done, you have to make that leap of faith