Kierkegaard by Steven Shakespeare .mpg

so seren kierkegaw was a danish thinker he lived from 1813 to 1855 he spent almost all of his life in copenhagen apart from a couple of trips to berlin and he actually once described himself as a genius in a provincial town because he had this thought that denmark was a bit of a cultural backwater although to be fair at that time denmark was experiencing quite an interesting cultural transition the growth of a new bourgeoisie and all sorts of new initiatives in literature the arts and philosophy were coming on stream during kikkoro's lifetime the first pleasure gardens were opened in tivoli in copenhagen the the model for disneyland to come um and kiki was fun was kind of part of the sort of new bourgeoisie because his father had been poor but had become a self-made man through uh being a merchant they'd moved to copenhagen from jutland um so kiko's family was quite well off in terms of the context of their day based on his father's business the family situation was something that was very powerful influence on kierkegaard because his father was by all accounts a very severe man heavily influenced by pietism and involved in a pietist brotherhood in copenhagen and it's always difficult to tell from kiko's accounts what's fiction and what's facts about his upbringing but it certainly gives the impression that he was brought up in an atmosphere of severe religious constraint um part of which may have been due to his father's sense that there was a some kind of curse hanging over the family uh now this would have been related to the fact that his first wife died and he subsequently remarried a servant a maidservant in the household and she was pregnant when they got married which clearly may have provided some conflict with his inherent religious and ethical views and as the family grew and there were seven children five of them eventually died before they reached their thirties a couple of them in infancy and there was a belief in the family that all of the children would die before they were 32 or 33 the age at which christ was supposed to have died in fact of course siren himself and his brother peter did survive longer than that but they were the only two so you can see there was a a paul hanging over the family in some respects despite their material comforts kiko himself didn't have to work because of his the family income um he toyed with the idea he studied theology and he's toured with the idea of seeking ordination in the danish state church the lutheran church but he never went through with that plan um he embarked on a career as a writer uh he took the equivalent of his doctorate which was then now published as the concept of irony following that he he he engaged in a welter of productivity he was hugely productive in terms of both small and large substantial works and his journals throughout his life at various points he considered giving up his writing career that he would retire to some kind of country parsonage take ordination and retire but he never did that he always felt there was some providential reason and some extraordinary ability he had that meant that he was compelled to write partly because he felt his task was to reintroduce christianity into a society that thought it was christian what he termed christendom now obviously in the danish context there was a state church and for kierkegaard this became part of the problem that people felt that christianity was part of their cultural inheritance uh whereas he felt they actually lived their lives in quite different categories and certainly towards the end of his life he engaged in quite a severe polemic against the church uh and himself stopped going to church and i think there's one account that he sort of would take coffee ostentatiously in the morning outside a cafe as people went to church to signal that he was not going himself and his family refused kind of christian funeral rights at the end of his life so clearly a polemical character a very gifted character a man of huge wit but a man also i think driven by some of the contradictions and pressures in his past a key episode in his life was his engagement with a girl called regina olsen who when i think when kirku almeida was about 14 years old they're engaged a couple of years after that he was in his early 20s he eventually broke off that engagement and i think part of his reasoning was that he could felt he couldn't fully share himself uh with her because of his melancholy because of the guilt and melancholy he and anxiety he'd inherited from his past also because he felt he was some kind of exception and had a particular vocation uh a growing writerly vocation to as i say challenge the the bourgeois complacency of his day but of course he he meditated greatly on this on this experience of the engagement and the reasons for breaking it off um dramatized his life in his own eyes quite quite a lot um and it you know attributed providential reasons for for doing what he did at the time he tried to behave as though he was indifferent and as though he was a bit of a a rogue and a rascal for doing this in order to get her off the hook so none of the blame would be attributed to her again where the fact and fiction boundary lies in this this whole story is a subject of some debate and uh there's a mother sort of a biography of keiko by joakim garf which points out the ways in which kikuguru is often presenting and re-presenting himself in sort of poetic ways not only in his authorship in the published sense but in his own supposedly private journals which he knew would be read after his life all of this mix this kind of cultural background the rising you know the bourgeoisie uh gaining its presence in denmark the changing cultural atmosphere is quite a golden era in some ways as is known for denmark in terms of its cultural productivity in the arts theatre poetry so all that's going on the rise of a popular press the rise of a kind of mass popular culture symbolized partly by the tivoli pleasure gardens kickers is his context it's a it's a distinctively modern context a distinctively urban bourgeois uh context in which the age has become both more and more reflective and self-aware and at the same time more and more aesthetic more and more looking for distraction uh looking for entertainment looking for immediacy looking for poetry looking for the things that will transform life into something interesting and the whole idea of the interesting is what kind of obsesses people later in his life because he was satirized and attacked by i suppose the equivalent of private eye the a publication called the corsair which is a satirical publication attacked him and uh caricatured him uh and he he saw this is his martyrdom by laughter that he was being you know this was how the age dealt with people not in the serious old days when people would be stoned or imprisoned nowadays people were publicly ridiculed and this led him to a more i suppose more kind of cultural analysis of his time that the rise of this popular form of the media the popular press was debasing communication encouraging people to chatter rather than engaging serious stillness or serious talk and leveling all distinctions down onto a plane onto onto one single playing field where there were no qualitative distinctions between time and eternity between good and bad everything was on the same plane everything was a kind of flux of spectacles of things that were interesting things were diverting and this i think he thought was the essentially aesthetic nature of of the age um one of the things that's often associated with kiku or is the distinction he makes between three stages or spheres of existence the aesthetic the ethical and the religious and sometimes the way that's presented is that kiku or is obviously saying that we start with the aesthetic with the enjoyment of the senses we move to an ethical form of life and then we realize that that's not enough it needs to have a reference to a transcendent absolute to god and there's obviously some truth in that but for kirkuk all those stages weren't totally separate from one another in the aesthetic sphere as he talks about it it's not simply that people are out for immediate enjoyment of the senses and hedonism it's not just that because the aesthetic personality is highly reflective highly intellectual and they seek to enjoy not just the moment but their recollection of the moment so they will have an experience in order later to recollect it and heighten the pleasure they get from it by fantasizing about it poetizing it dramatizing it seeing themselves as almost an actor on a stage you know watching themselves engaged in this activity not just immediately absorbed in it but spectating themselves spectating others and it kind of reminds me of that i think it's like gee de boer book the society of the spectacle which i think was a late 1960s book and how kikul kind of anticipated this that the rise of the bourgeoisie with a leisure uh relative leisure relative freedom from labour meant a whole class of people seeking spectacles seeking entertainment seeking diversions seeking a form of life which was about consuming the cultural products that were available to them now kikuyo thought that this was was a distraction but he didn't think you could just jump out of it for him the way to deal with it was to go through it and so you see in his writings you say about his his kind of writings the way he writes that very often he doesn't adopt a direct voice a direct authorial voice he often writes through pseudonymous characters and the books that come out are not published in his name or he appears only as an editor and even in the books that do come out in his name there's often a point of view that's being adopted which prevents it simply being taken as what he calls direct communication and there's several reasons for this i mean one was that he wanted not to take a a sort of god's eye view of things but to try and inhabit the life forms and self-understandings of the people of his time through the fictional characters and voices that he adopted and to explore those life views from within to see where they led where they perhaps broke down where they entered confusion and so on and so he does that with a whole range of characters and literary devices he doesn't write in a straightforward way and he invites the reader to sort of join him in that endeavor to share in that world view in order

Channel: Timeline Theological Videos

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Keywords: kierkegaard

Id: LYKST6gUjec

Length: 12min 1sec (721 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 18 2011