The Germans: Kierkegaard

alright ladies and gentlemen good evening thanks for coming out in these blizzardy conditions cleared up just enough that we can that I could make it it was closed yesterday I would not have been able to make it so this is great um first an announcement a brief announcement last year I did the life philosophical retreat and I'm gonna do that again it went so well last year I was actually hesitant to do it again so I want to say for the people who came last year a thank you because it was it was amazing but they encouraged me to offer the class again so if you want interested there's information on the on my website about the class and what we do and sort of what the three days is all about it's a big three day class in June at the end of June so a couple of people have already signed up who couldn't enroll last year so if you're interested you might want sign up sooner than later because it's it's maybe about half full already and I just announced it from this minute so I'm kind of crazy I don't know what's going on but the word is out somehow so alright so come tonight kierkegaard now it's important to note that it would probably drive kierkegaard mad to be in a German philosophy series ha because he was a Danish fundamentalist specifically of the language and it's one of those telling facts about history and how things have changed that when he wanted to write his dissertation because he hated German and he hated and he loved the Danish language and he was a Danish fundamentalist he wanted to write his dissertation in Danish I mean he had to petition the King to do this which is just bizarre to think about and yet this is what happened so he petitioned the king to allow him to write his dissertation in the native language of his country but what this sounded like at the time was a dodge right because the language of Education was Latin and German anybody who was going to learn anything of value was gonna know Latin in German and so it sounded like you were trying to get out of having to be educated so they said all right seeing as how you're in Denmark and all will let you write your dissertation and Danish but you have to defend it orally in Latin so this was the this was to make sure he actually had an education right because if you just do it in Danish you're probably not educated so this is I mean all L every element of this suggests how different things are but the language of Education at the time was Latin and German and German was the predominant language of philosophy particularly Hegel and so when Kierkegaard did this he was really emphasizing his Danish nough sand his resistance to the German philosophical tradition but that's why he's so important is because while he wanted to write in Danish and he did write in Danish he was writing against the German philosophical tradition has he understood it which of course puts him firmly in the German philosophical tradition he was also at war with various theological ideas in his lifetime that were primarily coming from the you know the Reformation Luther Calvin and all that and so his intellectual life was steeped in the German tradition cultural philosophical theological even at the same time that he was fighting against that as aggressively as he could but it also raised the interesting question in his lifetime he was virtually unknown I mean own a little bit but if you made a list of important European thinkers in the year he died which was 1855 he would not have made the cup in fact if you told people that Oh in 50 years and a hundred years he's going to be one of the most important thinkers of all time they would have laughed at you like you that guy that guy but if you look at the back page here's a list a brief list not compiled by me by the way compiled by other scholars and they basically said it is - it's just impossible to list all the people who were influenced by Kierkegaard but they made a shortlist here and they said how about some important ones Kafka Emmanuel Levinas Jacque Derrida Gabriel Marcel Lev chess tothe Paul Tillich Martin Buber Gregor Lucas Karl Barth George bataille Rudolf Bultmann Karl Jasper's Mikael Henry and victim Stein most of them with a few exceptions wrote specifically about Kierkegaard or argued specifically with Kierkegaard I mean so it wasn't even like oh we were influenced vaguely by other ideas they're like oh no we're quoting character guards were arguing with character so what I want to explore tonight is how this obscure Danish writing I mean the obscure language obscure thinker writing an obscure language and didn't work which in Europe Denmark is sort of the equivalent of you know Nome Alaska right in the 1800s it's just sort of lists what's you know Copenhagen we're right on a map we don't know right it is not you know something is rotten in the state of Denmark why because that's in the middle of no place right it was oh it was a fantastical world to set Hamlet in it was a place to just where oh where someplace that we can do whatever we want Oh Denmark nobody knows anything about there right so you know so that sort of sense of what and then a hundred years later it's it's cured regard Kierkegaard Kierkegaard and to understand that transformation is what this is about now I ended or last time I talked about Nietzsche and I said in the opening sections of the spake Zarathustra Nietzsche comes down the mountain and he encounters this monk who's living in the woods and the monk says hey don't go down to the people stay here with me and sing praises of him to God and make poems to God and life will be good there's gonna waste your time and Nietzsche says oh no I'm on my way and walks off and when he gets a little farther on he says has that monk not heard that God is dead now it's important to note that Nietzsche did not say I've killed God what he said was God was dead and the monk who hadn't heard this was in fact Kierkegaard so this is the thing and there of course they didn't know each other at the time they're near contemporaries and so what not probably really that was Kierkegaard he didn't know it but that was because what happens when you get a Reformation inside the Catholic Church is you split the fundamental notion of the unitary system in which you can believe and then within the outside the Catholic Church is in the prostitution the Reformation you get Calvinism and Lutheranism and Pietism and the list is endless and it's just been multiplying Calvin you know Methodism Presbyterianism you know in baptism Baptist I mean just goes on and on you have all these different sects there used to be one one true God one true church one true way now inside of that one nobody agreed about anything it was not like this was an organized unified whole where everybody said yes to everything else they fought about everything for the entire history of the Catholic Church ah but it was all within the notion of worth all fighting within one box but we agree about the box so that was okay and when you get the Reformation you shatter that fundamental structure of belief and so Kant Hegel Schopenhauer all to varying degrees were struggling with that and because they were participants in and children of the Enlightenment that struggle tended to come to them in the form of Reason we're gonna think our way out of this we're gonna we're gonna try and find some way to get back to where we were to the truth to the ineffable to the absolute to the world spirit you know different names different places from different philosophers but the idea is we can get there somehow and we can think our way there even even that's the magic of Kant's critique of Pure Reason he says well you can't really reason you're there wait there but with reason then you know that you are there is this weird like attempt to salvage both and Nietzsche again announces no no God is dead and says now we've got to go with that what do you do now that God is dead Kierkegaard is the guy there who's going no no God is not dead he's still alive and you can't get to him with reason and so his attempt is to somehow patch back together that which had been shattered but without real he's not he wasn't reason he just said that you can't actually achieve what you need which is to get back to this unitary faith in God with reason at some level it just becomes this leap of faith so it's faith and grace and you're right back to Augustine and you know the sort of ancient church father business again but what I think is interesting or many interesting things about this is in working through this he basically lays out the foundation of three-quarters of modern philosophy they everybody else dropped God but he laid the groundwork as we'll see for what they kept because he articulated the problem so well but another aspect of his work and his thinking here as he tries to salvage God is he's not actually that much of a philosopher he's really more of a poet writer thinker because part of what he saw as the problem was this attempt to create a system so he thought that which is true Kant Hegel Schopenhauer the big Germans are trying to create a system that sort of totalized and explain everything he's like no no you've already got that that's God and there's no explaining it there's just leaping into it so he's anti system so it's this very strange mix of sort of he's rational but he's against the rational belly dilip towards faith and he's he wants to salvage God but in this unique way as we'll see a very different way of trying to solve this problem and he's writing to people who are paying absolutely no attention to it her I mean it just people had no use for him because he was just sort of crazy so biographically his biography is pretty straightforward Kierkegaard had a wonderful life and did not know it see this is the this is the key to understanding Kierkegaard is anything at all like the least trivial thing that happened to him made his mind explode and he'd like oh my god I've left the ideal world and I'm in capsule in this place of doubt and I've got to find the perfect ideal existence and then I can appeal to God and it's like but you look at what happens hey you were late to work with the help right you're just you know someone would write a mild criticism of his essay like I have to rethink my entire foundation of my existence like that it wasn't even a harsh critic so it's just really sort of friendly critias helpful observation nope he's gonna go back and rework the whole thing so he lived this a myriad little struggle with his father had an unsuccessful marriages or in relationship struggled with women as many people I mean the cultures at this time didn't not help women or men at all very much particularly not women certainly didn't help Kierkegaard um and he was independently wealthy a minute wealthy he was of independent means he didn't have to work which is one reason his writing is so crazy because you'd have to try and make money off of it and so he just went nuts and he published things all over the place often is his own expense which then people promptly ignored so you know and he wrote voluminous leave the lumen is like 16 17 18 volumes of his sort of memoirs isn't right sort of just diary I guess had long long long running diary entries and it's just so clear everything in there he's just racked racked and he keeps coming back this idea of faith and faith or the first thing I wanna note is I think it's impossible for anybody who has faith to write this much about faith right you just can't write hundreds if not thousands of pages about the centrality of faith if you have faith I just I just don't think it's possible and it's pretty clear that what he was struggling with was the notion that he really thought that he should have faith but he just could never get around to having any right and so this and but that but he sort of lived the struggle of what happens when the whole system gets shattered he wanted to maintain this concept of God but he could never quite get there and but it was a particular kind of God finally then we'll look at some of these passages here and his father and grandfather I believe was actually a preacher or theologically oriented but they were in the Pyatt astre dition which is sort of a effect conte similar to Kant had the same background very humble big emphasis on the fact that your sinning regardless that you're really a guilty guilty bad person right like I said that's why I think had he had a wonderful life and didn't know it because he lived in a tradition that told him he was terrible they didn't mean to be better they didn't mean that right they just thought that was the human condition and so he was always trying to perfect his way out of the human condition I I this quote I love that kept coming to mind when I read Kierkegaard which is you'll never hate yourself into being someone you love and I think this is really where Kierkegaard was he was hating himself as hard as he could and it didn't seem to get him to love himself right it just doesn't seem to work and if anybody ever ran that experiment its Kierkegaard and so I think we can say pretty much it's not going to work so he was in a particular tradition and so on one hand he's trying to rethink an approach to God but the God he's trying to get to is a very traditional very conservative pretty specifically pietistic orden want to think more broadly Calvinists type of God no use for the church as we'll see not the church was a total waste of space and energy and effort which is weird right so you'll want the Calvinist God but I don't want any church associated for them it's sort of it's the argument that Luther I talked about this at Luther taking the logical extremes that you can have direct access to God Kierkegaard takes that to heart so how does this obscure Danish writer pursuing practically a medieval theological tradition of God come to be the score influential thinker on virtually every modern philosopher you've heard of and many you have it as well as writers like Kafka well look at some of these quotes and I mean there and there's an infinite number of quotes from because his collected works as 30-plus volumes right so he really wrote oh one safety note before I read these by the way he did not believe in systems and so he published under pseudonyms anonymously he would publish multiple works at one time that contradicted each other so that you couldn't really tell which was the position that Kierkegaard was taking cuz he'd have one under a pseudonym wonder his name and one anonymously that all argued with each other and you're like all from Kierkegaard by the way this is something that Derrida did and I always thought that came from daring all that like I'm like wow what a great idea to publish multiple perspectives three books at once for instance he did so that you couldn't quite keep track of where his thinking was and it turns out that he stole that directly from Kierkegaard now I hadn't known that it's like oh that's cure God was doing that's great but what a great thing to lift so even his style influenced people so anytime you're quoting from Kierkegaard you always have to sort of be clear that he's not making a direct systematic argument like a philosopher normally would he's very much in the Socratic tradition you have an idea he's going to attack it in five ways and when you get done you're not sure what you think anymore but you don't know what Kierkegaard thinks either right like Socrates kept so many of the dialogues in your Socrates just going well I guess that means we don't know anything good night right and you're just like that's not that helpful so Kierkegaard is much more in that tradition of I want a critique I want to get people thinking I want to have dialogue but I don't want to have a system a Dogma a church I want God no church hard to pull off but that was his goal so anyway having said that first quote this is from his journals what I really need to get clear about what I must do not what I must know except insofar as knowledge must precede every act what matters just to find a purpose to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do the crucial thing is to find the truth which is truth for me define the idea which I am willing to live and die so if you're at all familiar with existential philosophy there it is this is why Kierkegaard is considered the first and father of existentialism is because he's this notion of you know we're born without a purpose for humans and so if we don't have a purpose well then how do you know what to do so the first step in the existential crisis by the way is trying to figure that out and you only know that you found the answer when it you're willing to live or die by it this is sort of the standard that it that is often set so if you read a Sardar de Beauvoir or Camus that's why a lot of their novels and plays and essays Center on death or people killing people Andre Melrose man's fate famously begins with an assassination the main character stabbed somebody to death beautiful scene and and because that's what they figured was core right life and death alright that's something we can at least believe in maybe but so many of their works enter on that because of the way Kierkegaard articulated it but for Kierkegaard he wants to know what God wants him to do existentialism just got rid of the God business they said exactly that passage take out God now you're really stuck right because you don't have anybody to appeal to but what what cure guards so he articulates this core problem of identity and being Hugh Heidegger and victim Stein by the way um but his escape is always oh some way of reaching God which he never figures out how to do like I mentioned but for him if he could do that then he would have a solution to the problem of being in existence what all these later thinkers did is said well you're not going to get it through God so we have the right problem but the wrong solution but almost everything he wrote was problem and almost nothing was solutions so that's why he was so influential he just sticks God in all over the place that's sort of a magic car so another quote here let others complain that the age is wicked my complaint is that it is paltry for it lacks passion men's thoughts are thin and flimsy like lace they are themselves pitiable like lace makers the thought of their hearts are too paltry to be sinful for a worm it might be regarded as a sin to Harbor such thoughts but not for a being made in the image of God their lusts or dull and sluggish their passions sleeping so he's raising this idea right okay what happens what's going on in Copenhagen at this time well you're getting this sort of the merchant class the rise of the middle class the the birds y'see if you will and what he's seeing is like Oh everybody goes to church but they don't burn heretics anymore they don't march to war and kill the people over there who believe other stuff right what kind of religion is that you know at least people used to be fervent at least you've def fervor you should get fired up used to do things they didn't just go on Wednesday afternoons and Sunday and sit quietly and go okay thanks very much nice and go away and go great I've got religion is that's not a religion that's the sort of social theater right and it is it irritated to no end he said no you've got to go and wrestle with God yourself Old Testament God get out there and fight with them burning bushes right columns of fire that's what you want that's what you have to do but only you can do that you can't send out some intermediary to sort of work it all out for you and you just go yeah okay great good it's all good all good that's fine and so it's this wheat so we had this weird double move where he really assaulted the church continuously in the name of God again he's like this Old Testament prophet coming out of the desert right going you guys are doing it wrong and everybody just said yeah you're nuts we're not listening to this but he really believed in this notion of engaged passion that's why I said he's not as much just he's like a poet like a practically like a Romantic poet as much as he is a philosopher he's like look if it's not firing you up if it's not something to live and die by then just it's certainly not God are you a worm do you worship over if you worship Almighty God you should be mining kirkegaard looked around it didn't see mighty people and said well they're doing it wrong this made him popular by the way as you have shukshin as you can well imagine his critiques were either totally ignored or were criticized for being sort of extremist and volatile because you know sort of extremists and volatile but also notion he would also write passages that would argue the other side but from his journal as it's clear he really felt that strongly right that that you know this notion that there should be fervor there should be passion there should be inspiration and that if you don't have that then you're doing something wrong another quote here one sticks one's finger into the soil to tell by the smell in what land one is I stick my finger in existence it smells of nothing by the way this right there is Heidegger I mean if you want to know where Heidegger comes from is that sentence I stick my finger into existence or being and I smell nothing hence one of his works being and nothingness is directly lifted from Kierkegaard as is much elephant Heidegger wrote by the way where am I Who am I how came I here what is this thing called the world what does this world mean who is it that has lured me into this world why was I not consulted why not made acquainted with its manners and customs right everybody has felt this way right it's that at some point there should have been some like helpful guide right welcome to the world you know step to the right here's a little manual you'll want to read that and consult the right yeah but but there isn't he's like why was I not consulted why not made acquainted with its manners and customs instead of throwing me into the wrench as if I had been bought by a kidnapper a dealer and souls how did I not obtain an interest in this big enterprise they call reality why should I have an interest in it is it not a voluntary concern and if I'm to be compelled to take part in it where is the director I should like to make a remark to him hey hey by the way it's also important to procure guard is funny I mean he's a really great writer I mean one of the things he achieved was he's a he's an important stylist in Danish I mean he is a great writer right where I'm a remark I would like to make to him might have a few comments to toss as well is there no director weather shall I turn with my complaint right and so so this is again this is the existential crisis this is Heidegger's questions of being we find ourselves in being right all of a sudden we discover that we're here right the dawning of consciousness which is slow right it takes time and all sudden you're like whoa I'm here I'm in time I exist what the hell is going on and that is the central core crisis of being where does my being come from what is it for what does it mean what am I supposed to be doing with this being where's the director I have some comments right I mean just the the the what is going on around here and to articulate at this clearly is is again Heidegger victim Stein again clearly here I mean just straight up victim Stein called him the saint you just thought which and if you know victim Stein's work there they are very close indeed tenor of their being they're both sort of monks that found themselves in period that didn't really have monks and so Kierkegaard is just pondering this out he's asking these really fundamental questions that probably most of us have asked but he doesn't stop asking it and he never shied away like I said because you'll approach things from every side he really tears into it he'll make an argument he'll go what's the counter-argument he'll make the counter arguments right as a one of the works is either/or right either this or that he takes both sides and so but but look I mean you just listen I mean again that's at least half of modern philosophy in that paragraph where did existence come from why are we here what is mean what should I do ontology epistemology and ethics bang-bang-bang central questions laid out perfectly clearly but he's so powerful because the traditional which is what Nietzsche was trying to explain look the traditional system is gone you've got to do something new and Kierkegaard's like no the traditional system is there humans have just left it so he saw she sort of sees a flipside of Nietzsche's argument God's not dead people have died Nietzsche says God is dead so now people can live right Nietzsche sees it as a weight lifted off of people and Kierkegaard seizes the weight put on people now you don't have an answer to all these classes but again I would argue that the only reason he can ask you so clearly is he has no faith at all right because somebody who has faith says where do we come from I can tell you where I have faith I mean you know he says that at times but mostly he says this I mean I mostly I mean 15 volumes or so I mean it it is a lot of Kierkegaard I've not read all of character art by any stretch of the imagination but you don't have to read all that much to get the general sense but notice you know why was I not consulted why not made acquaintance with manners and customs as if I had been bought by a kidnapper a dealer in Souls right it's it's I was someplace better I was someplace else that made sense and now I've been thrust into this place that makes no sense I've been kidnapped I've been trapped but again if you look at the details of his life he had a great life educated handsome intelligent I mean incredibly educated for his time period moderately well-off did not have to work but felt kidnapped right just could not embrace the world could not accept its fallen sorry shabby state according to him there's actually a passage where he talks about Mozart's opera Don John and he says it's the perfect character with the perfect music and so in art which again did the same influence that you see in Hegel and Schopenhauer they all talk about art a lot he says is the synthesis of the perfection of the world that you never get in the world so he looks for an abstraction a narrative about a character in the most abstract art form Mozart opera music to say that form itself is perfected and that abstract perfection of an abstraction is what is real and it's like what are you talking about right you've got an abstraction of an abstraction and that's what you think is real and what's crazy is d'Anjou and if you know the Opera he's just lust right he's like human lust incarnated Mozart in his strong suit doing something amazing writing this great opera and so everything that Schopenhauer could not deal with about being human is there and that's not what what kirkegaard saw I mean everything that Kierkegaard couldn't deal with about being human is in Mozart's opera is in that character but Kierkegaard doesn't look at that all that offends him is the perfection of the art form of this abstraction that's what he loved and you're like wow you've missed the whole thing I mean you know sort of this weird like yeah the mood give me he's great Mozart right great Wow amazing but not the character he's sort of like the character but only as an idea of a character not as as a model to try and live by he was not an embrace your passions kind of guy he was a feel guilty about your passions kind of guy he was really good at feeling guilty about his passions Don John was never noted for guilt right he was just not a guilty kind of person so yeah that those tensions are just right throughout his work and then this longest passage because it's a book of it's called the concept and anxiety also wrote books like here in and the concept of anxiety and one reason I struggle with reading Kierkegaard just because I just don't feel that way I mean we're just constitutionally different and so it's hard sometimes you read a thinker it's not that they're wrong is that their whole tenor of their being I'm like what that was your problem right but concept of anxiety right when is it stated in Genesis that God said to Adam only from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you must not eat it follows of a matter of course that Adam really had not understood this word for how could he understand the difference between good and evil when this distinction would follow as a consequence of the enjoyment of the fruit so this is really important because theologians have been arguing with this point since he made it be like you can't tell somebody that something's wrong before they have the concept of wrong and so either God was setting Adam up for the fall already it's not the snake it's God or the past it just makes no sense there's a very powerful critique of the general telling if you've heard the Garden of Eden story it's like Oh God made a rule and they broke the rule because the snake seduced even of course he used to do so Adams always the woman's fault and then they the fruit treat and then they found out about good and evil but if you don't know about good and evil how do you know not to do something you've no grounds for for comparison right so when it is assumed that the prohibition awakens desire one acquires knowledge instead of ignorance and in that case Adam must have had knowledge of freedom because the desire was to use it the explanation is there for subsequent the prohibition induces in him anxiety for abort for the prohibition awakens in him freedom's possibility so he's like before Adam was doing whatever he wants has no idea that freedom exists because he has no restrictions God comes along and gives him a prohibition that he cannot understand because he has from there good and evil but now he knows there's something that he is not supposed to do that he could do freedom freedom see this is cured regards argument once you get freedom you get anxiety rich happy God you got a lot of character guard for that you just want to send him a bottle of wine and say buddy you know relax uh but but it is this great right that now you have a choice and then choice carries with the responsibility and the knowledge which is the free shooting quote right which is where he says I I need insofar as knowledge must precede every act right now Adam needs knowledge now he's needs starting to think while I've got freedom now I could do this but should I do all now ah there you go existential crisis is right there now notice they have not eaten the fruit yet so this is where a character completely rewrites the Adam and Eve story he says it's not the eating of the fruit it's this this is the core problem that we struggle with and it's all God no snake right there is no snake here it's like God just just presents us with this impossible situation which Adam completely unprepared to deal with right also in the anxiety of freedom that the so Adam must have had knowledge of freedom because the desire was to use it the prohibition induces him anxiety for their prohibition awakens in him freedom's possibility what passed by innocence as the noting of anxiety has now entered into Adam and here again it is a nothing the anxious possibility of being able he had no conception of what he is able to do otherwise and this is what usually happens that which comes later the difference being good and evil would have to be presupposed only the possibility of being able is present as a higher form of ignorance as a higher expression of anxiety because in a higher sensitise both is and is not because in a higher sense he both loves it and flees it so a again Heidegger both in content and style there so we'll go through that slowly but being notices this idea of like it's not good and evil forget that it's the sudden awareness of this higher abstract sense of do and don't I could I couldn't I couldn't and now he has the awareness that he could and that he couldn't and that's had been induced in him and now he's like wow the anxiety of freedom that is the fall from grace the fall from grace is not good and evil that fall from grace is choice possibility supposition human imagination Adam can imagine that he could eat the Apple and he could imagine that he could not eat the Apple before he could not do this if you wanted to eat the Apple II just a bit he didn't want to eat the apple he didn't it there was no nothing but now got a higher awareness so for Kierkegaard is not the awareness or knowledge of good and evil it's the possibility of freedom as the acts associated with that that transfer there's huge burden on to the individual now of course this is happening at the time that you're getting the social revolution right where you're getting greater liberties you're getting the you know French Revolution has happened to follow on from the French Revolution you know constitutional monarchies are starting to spring up the notion of the rights at least for the middle class and the wealthy is becoming prominent and and so all us an Oh freedom everybody's like freedom is great freedom is great freedom that wild freedom was wonderful cure is like freedom is the original sin it's the original human problem it's the bringer of anxiety it's the freedom is not the paradise freedom is the fall from the Paradise so theologians didn't like this critique because they want to talk about good and evil in the snake and and Eve he writes that he rereads and he says no there's no Eve there's no snake there's just God and Adam that's the problem there was never any other problem but also if you are like a liberal political thinker you're not really in love with this forget this freedoms it's just anxiety inducing you've got to figure out how to overcome your freedom what to do with your freedom and the best thing to do with this is of course to take a leap of faith and embrace God in some way and so it's a very antisocial message which is another reason it appeals a lot is in at its core it's purely individualistic only you can make a leap of faith and by the way don't have to make it once you have to do it all the time so you can be forgiven by the grace of God but it's gonna happen over and over and over and you're never done with this which is classically Kierkegaard Ian's right that it doesn't you're not saved and then you're done it's like nope every day it's a new trial every day you're gonna fail again and every day you have to take the leap of faith so that God can forgive you again but then it's going to be another day that's really sort of depressing III find it slightly depressing but but that notion of individual responsibility see this is again carries it through if you want to get rid of church hierarchy or state hierarchy where do you put the responsibility ah well you shift it to yourself and Kierkegaard that's what he wants but he says note this is an infinite essentially unattainable responsibility you'll never fulfill it but again existential crisis you have this responsibility and you're not going to be able to fulfill it congratulations so it's it's sort of wildly individualistic which a lot of thinkers have run with it's it but it's also sort of this a thing that dissolves all possibility of like social cohesion is like jerky we're just going to be a bunch of failed individuals and again the only appeal is an individual not communal appeal to God directly and then hope for the best so again if you like X out the god stuff there's whole passages of this that just read like sterner sterner the German philosopher who's just writing this out saluté radical critique of individual versus society entirely in favor of the individual Kierkegaard is writing very much the same thing and so while society was moving away from his religious or theological ideas which were only a small part of it but it was always the answer so I did mall but necessary and angry they did look at that underlying thing and they ran with it so even though you can find a lot of what's Turner argued in the existentialist philosophers they took most of it from Kierkegaard they're much more influenced directly by Kierkegaard because he did it so systematically this notion of look you're in this impossible position for sterner being an individual helps for Kierkegaard it doesn't necessarily help that much you must be an individual but it doesn't solve your problem so he embraced open-eyed like really open eyed many of the core issues of the modern world and that's where all the sudden after he dies and his work start to circulate and become more popular more read outside of Denmark also you know people are going wow look at this he's clearly articulated the kinds of problems that we find ourselves stuck with but by the time you get to the next generation of philosophers and thinkers most of them have no association with the church whatsoever except for some people like Heidegger and so they feel completely free to just ignore that so again they look at his critique and the problems either lays out they love this reading of Genesis yeah somebody gave us freedom we didn't ask for it we didn't say we wanted it right here's the thing we're born into the world here's some freedom knock yourselves out well what am I supposed to do with it notice this is the opposite of freedom what you're supposed to do with it if someone tells you well that's not freedom if you're free to choose then that's just taking it under advisement okay they have an idea they have an idea they have an idea that an idea and what are you gonna do uh it's I think last year I was talking about somehow and Costco and one of our materialism lectures and how and somebody one of the people afterwards said the great thing about Costco is there's no choice right they have one or two of everything in huge sizes and it's so liberating right to just go oh I don't have a hundred choices I have one or two I can say yes or no this or that and I'm done what a relief right at some point we don't want or we struggle with all of this freedom that we have because we because we don't have a narrative we don't have an art we don't have an answer for the questions that Kierkegaard asked so particularly so like Socrates he was a brilliant framer and an analyzer of the contemporary problems that his society was facing the fact that the church was moribund and no one really believed in it was true the church was more abundant nobody really believed in it the way they had three or four generations before like I said they didn't burn people at the stakes anymore my favorite example is right around the turn of the century they finally had an International ecumenical council of all the religions of the world to get together and chat which just shows that nobody believes in anything anymore right history is you'd kill those people because they're wrong right and all the sudden is like oh no everybody's right it's all fine let's all live happily I think it's a good idea by the way but for a thinker like cured regard it just shows that they don't believe any longer he also looked around he said oh yeah look all these people have gotten a lot of freedom what are they doing with it nothing very impressive right so you've finally liberated humanity or or a good portion of it at his time more today and all we can do is say oh look I've got nice shoes my house is bigger than my neighbor's house right he's like that's kind of crappy use of freedom and he said even our sins are tiny right you know invade a foreign country do something really wrong right have some good sins you know there's just you know get out there right he just thought it was contemptible all the compromises all of the social posing all of the hypocrisy and so one things he's doing was with sarcasm and writing on everything because he's trying to attack and expose the hypocrisy he's trying to say oh you talk about that women are terrible and sinful except for everybody's at the brothel and everybody knows everybody's at the brothel everybody knows everybody at the brought everybody it's all public but it's all private he's like either make it public or burn it down but this sort of wishy-washy small nest drove him mad in this case in various one small way he was like Nietzsche and that he looked around the world and he thought wow we should be doing so much better but it really drove him mad that they weren't nietzsche was much better able to deal with it than Kierkegaard he wanted an ideal perfect world that he wasn't going to get because it's not that kind of world you may have noticed this and so if your options are embrace it love it work with it yourself and the world no that was not his option that was like in this is more than argument that Nietzsche makes sure guard goes the other way given the same problem he goes the other direction and says know you've got a rail against it you've got to hate yourself you've got you've got to hate your society you've got a rail against them you've got to do something to galvanize people to be not worms and to return to this personal relationship with God who as they say in theory we are made in that image that critique continues that is a really powerful critique one way to look at it and understand how we receive it today even if you've never heard of Kierkegaard is the notion of oh what are the elite supposed to do right are you supposed to make a blended stable society or are you supposed to pursue excellence which is the better path right how is an individual supposed to integrate themselves into society Kierkegaard says no that's how don't integration society is wrong you don't integrate into wrong you rail against it there's where I think er like Goethe says ah the key is to learn how to live a pleasant life within the context of the culture you're given something like Beethoven is like now light it on fire right just fight the whole way through Kierkegaard was they'll just fight the whole way through driven by this sense of despair and sort of hate and fear and anxiety but also this this just sort of sustained rage to make things different to make them ideal and so again if you more familiar most people like said familiar with Sartre and de Beauvoir and you know that notion of okay what is it someone should do what is the responsibility that someone has and so often they write about isolated individuals and isolated places making specific decisions not about oh if you look at someone like Hegel or Schopenhauer Khan they're writing about huge abstract systems world mind development and getting in touch with the ineffable spirit of all time that grows in you and and you come from it or complete rational systems all it's all these huge totalizing world spanning universe embracing and then you get this amazing change where it becomes very particular that note again like Socrates versus Aristotle right if you read Socrates he's always talking to a particular person about a particular thing on a street corner if you read Aristotle he's always in some logical abstraction about some 17 categories of something that is going to give you insight into some aspect of the world the Kierkegaard's example which you very much opposed to Hegel he said look reason is not going to get you there these systems is nonsense I want no part of any system that totalizers I want a system that's about me and my relationship to the universe and particularly to his God and so he moves it very far back to like no we don't need a totalizing system we need individuals and really press that home and so it did shift philosophy for a lot of philosophers they went oh hey wait we can go back to the particular we can go back to the individual arguing a place in society and yeah it's hard for us to heal what what it was like then but but that notion that you have to have totalizing systems for everything that's just that that's why you can't count Hegel Schopenhauer Plato Aristotle that's that tradition Kierkegaard brought back the Socratic idea no crazy irascible individual that then many of the philosophers that we read there ran with even someone like Martin Buber is sort of more probably sort of fallen off the map a bit but you know biblical exegetical thinker there you know rethinking translations and Bibles and all that you know he's he's looking at he you know there's great parable that he tells about you know Isaac and any many of the Bible stories that come from Kierkegaard like I said boo-boo as a theologian felt that he had to engage this he had to write about it that's like God this guy's taken over our territory he must be responded to even if they disagreed with him they had to fight with him well I give you two more examples of his influence one again I mentioned Derrida there but if you think about someone like Kafka so much probably everybody knows the metamorphosis if you know anything that the metaphor more Phasis were the guy one morning Gregor Samsa awoke embed' to discover he had been transformed into a giant cockroach insect in the German but cockroach in the translation which I think works quite well and and that notion of wow I've been turned into a bug I'm in this impossible position my social setting causes me anxiety and despair I'm no longer that is pure Kierkegaard absolute she regards you know emotional psychological state translated into a short story a wonderful amazing powerful short story but I am a bug a crawly bug I am alienated and anxiety prone and filled with stress and despair and the reason it's so famous is because it captures some sense Kafka's writing captures some senses our feeling of being lost in the modern world we're always displaced somehow and so you go from that extreme to victim Stein's endless ramblings on the question of being what does it mean to be was it mean to exist where are we in time how do we how do we be you know how do we bring this up how do we deal with it being in time you know all these questions that he asked again just ended he never answered any of them by the way but he did ask them fervently he's asking the questions he's expanding on that set of Kierkegaard's arguments but he's trying to solve them without God he doesn't have the magic card to play at the end so this is how an obscure writer more poet and essayist than philosopher for certain who wrote in Danish an obscure European language has come to be one of the most important thinkers for influencing pretty much most of the modern philosophy that you've heard of in read and many of the writers like like Kafka because he was he saw the problems he faced them squarely from every side in this weird bizarre way that was him and he came up with an answer that everybody ignores and we yes everybody's been arguing his problems and just ignoring his theoretical answer so as kirkegaard thank you [Applause]

Channel: Wes Cecil

Views: 26,625

Keywords: Humane Arts, Wes Cecil, Kierkegaard, Philosophy, Religion, Theology, Hegel, Danish, Lecture

Id: mnSCT0zS3QA

Length: 53min 8sec (3188 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 17 2020