Soren Kierkegaard Biography and Philosophies.
Soren Kierkegaard was born on 5th may, 1813, in Copenhagen, a small provincial town, the seat of Government and, at the time the intellectual centre of Scandinavia, with its University and its learned Academies – a closely-knit society which provided Kierkegaard with a clinical specimen of the social and political intellectual and religious currents of the day, which he could consult like a barometer. He spent his life in a brilliant literary career, producing an extraordinary number of books before his death in 1855 at the age of 42. Kierkegaard was trained in Hegel’s philosophy but was not favourably impressed by it and He agreed with the attack on German greatest speculative thinker. His is known with his popular dictum “truth is subjectivity and subjectivity is truth.”
SOREN KIERKEGAARD’S PHILOSPHY
KIERKEGAARD’S METAPHYSICS
Kierkegaard is often described as an anti- metaphysician, for with Kant he did not believe we can have logical, speculative knowledge of reality. Although he always expresses respect for Hegel’s great mind, Kierkegaard rejected his metaphysics and saw it as intellectually mistaken or comedy of errors. Kierkegaard has two major problems of metaphysics, first, metaphysics like that of Hegel’s philosophy falsified people’s understanding of reality because it shifted attention away from the concrete individual to the concept of universals. Second, Kierkegaard complained that metaphysics, we have a timeless logical system that is complete and finished. But for him it is impossible for there to be an existential system that is complete since our existence is ongoing. So, he introduced a new kind of metaphysics known as existential metaphysics which focuses on the individual as a person and not as a group. He asserted that the term existence is only associated with human being. Human beings find themselves constantly in an “existential situation”. For this reason, their thinking ought to deal with their own personal situation with a view to coming to terms with the problem of alternatives and choices. Kierkegaard made a distinction between the spectator and the actor, arguing that only the actor is involved in existence.
HIS ETHICS
His ethics is mostly found in the three stages he divided human existence. With Kant, he agreed that the decision to live an ethical life is not based on reason but once a person decides to be moral he/she can derive ethical principles rationally.
TRUTH AS SUBJECTIVITY
Kierkegaard’s focus on truth as subjectivity was originally arrived at in his attempts to stake out the Christian’s faith relationship to God. His overall was to assert the primacy of faith over reason, and thus to do away with the Hegelian notion of the absolute spirit “as a manifestation of rational human consciousness, and Christianity as an expression of his philosophy of history. Subjective truth is truth for Kierkegaard, that is, the truth by which I am prepared to live. The important question about truth according to him therefore is whether or not a thing is objectively true but whether it is true for me that is whether I am prepared to by it and commit myself to it. He argues that subjectivity is personal and involves the self commitment of the thinker. He said that, that is what truth should be. He went further to say that “subjectivity is truth” and “truth is subjectivity” he said that truth is essentially discovering objective facts. He said that while objective fact are important there is important, there is a second and more crucial element of truth which involves how one relates oneself to those matter of fact. Since how one act is, from the ethical perspective, more important than any matter of fact, truth is to be found in subjectivity rather objectivity. He went to make a distinction between subjective and objective truth, objective truth includes historical and philosophical truth, and subjective truth in other hand according to him includes religious and ethical truth. For him objective truth is characterized by outwardness while subjective truth is characterized by inwardness. He attempts to make a sharp distinction between objective knowing and subjective knowing, knowing the truth and being in the truth and the result and the process.
OBJECTIVE KNOWING VERSUS SUBJECTIVE KNOWING
In his distinction between objective and subjective knowing, Kierkegaard argued that the hardest task in life is to become subjective. Our natural tendency, he says, is to hide within the shelter of objectivity in order to shirk from the plane and crisis of making personal decision. We will most fully understand our situation as knower when we come to that truth is subjectivity he argued. Although Kierkegaard has no problem with objective truth when we are talking about issue in logic, mathematics or any area of knowledge that is not essential to ones subjective existence rather, he talks about truth been subjective to things that essentially affect our personal existence like issues of religion, moral and other areas.
KNOWING THE TRUTH VERSUS BEING IN THE TRUTH
His distinction between” knowing the truth “and “being in the truth”, Kierkegaard expresses a radical disagreement with Socrates ethics. In his ethical outlook, Socrates heavily emphasized knowing the good. However, Kierkegaard analyses, a person could intellectually embrace a very elevated moral theory, but be a scoundrel in actual practice. For him, such a person would objectively know the truth but not be subjectively living in its truth. In contrast, he argued, a person might espouse a degenerated moral theory and still be morally sensitive in his practice than his theory will allow. So for him, it is not enough to know the truth objectively but to live in it subjectively.
THE RESULT VERSUS THE PROCESSS
Kierkegaard made another distinction between the result and the process. He argued that we can acquire a certain result or knowledge by relying on the effort of others without having to go through the process of obtaining it ourselves. He argued that the individual cannot have the result apart from the way to that or knowledge. He said that what you know is bound up with how you know it. The journey to self understanding is a tortuous one that only you can take. He said to know the result without the process is found in objective truth while to the result as well as the process is found in subjective truth.
HUMAN EXISTENCE
Soren Kierkegaard is a father of contemporary existentialism. This is a loose system of philosophy that deals with concrete existence as opposed to essence. The emergence of this system shifted the attention of philosophy from the study of metaphysical realities as obtainable in the traditional philosophy of ancient and medieval period to the study of being of man and the concrete reality of his existence. Kierkegaard establishes a distinction between “existence” and “real existence”. Along with many of his basic concepts, this resulted from his view from Christian tradition. He felt that to exist is to struggle and act in the world of man. His meaning of the word “existence” resulted from his use of it in his concluding unscientific postscript. He establishes the fundamental idea that each person exist and a limited amount of time to choose and to make decisions which matters so much to him. In this short time, each person has urgent decision to make and the freedom to make them. However, this freedom may be the source of a person’s anguish as there can be found no certainty upon which these choices are made.
Kierkegaard proposed that individual passed through three stages or spheres on the way to becoming a true self – the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious stages.
AESTHETIC STAGE (SPHERE)
The aesthetic stage is the realm of sensory, experience and pleasure. The aesthetic life is defined by pleasure, and to live the aesthetic life to the fullest one must seek to maximize those pleasures. The aesthete is only concerned with his or her personal enjoyment, and because aesthetics pleasure is so fleeting, the aesthete has no solid framework from which to make coherent, consistent choice. To the aesthetic man his existence seems to be the expression of freedom. Further, the more aware a man becomes that he is living in what Kierkegaard calls the cellar of the building, the more subject he becomes to “despair”. For he finds that there is no remedy, no salvation, at the level on which he stands. He is faced, therefore, with two alternatives. Either he must remain in despair on the aesthetic level or he must make transition to the next level by an act of choice, by self-commitment. The ethical actually offer certain pleasures aesthetic life cannot. Mere thinking will not do the trick for him. It is a question of choice, either-or.
ETHICAL STAGE (SPHERE)
The second stage of life according to Kierkegaard is the ethical stage. A man accepts determinate moral standards and obligations, the voice of universal reason, and gives form and constituency to his life. If aesthetic stage is typified by Don Juan, the ethical stage is typified by Socrates. And a simple example of transition from aesthetic to the moral consciousness is for Kierkegaard that of the man who renounces the satisfaction of his sexual impulse according to passing attraction and enters into the state of marriage, accepting all its obligations. For marriage is an ethical institution, an expression of the universal law of reason.
Ethics are not in the opposition to aesthetics, but they must take prudence when they two conflict. The aesthetic must be subordinated to the ethical life as the ethical life is based on a consistent, coherent set of rules established for the good of society. A person can still experience pleasure while living the ethical life. The ethical life serves the purpose of allowing diverse people to co-exist in harmony and causes the individual to act for the good of the society. The ethical person considers the effect his or her action will have on others and give more weight to promoting social welfare than achieving personal gain. The ethical life affords pleasures that the aesthetic does not. Aesthetic steers ones way from consistency, since repetition can lead to boredom. An ethical person does not just enjoy things because they are novel, but make ethical choices because those choices evoke a higher set of principles. The ethical life does little to nurture ones spiritual self. The ethical divert one from self exploitation since it requires an individual to follow a set of socially acceptable norms and regulations. Self exploration is necessary for faith, the key requirement for properly religious life. According to Kierkegaard, somebody like Socrates was a tragic hero of ethical life because he renounces himself in order to express the universal. At the same time ethical consciousness does not understand sin.
RELIGIOUS STAGE (SPHERE)
Kierkegaard considers the religious life to be the highest plane of existence. He also believes that almost no one lives a true religious life. He is concerned how to live an authentic religious life while surrounded by people who are falsely religious. For him the relationship with God is exclusively personal, and he believed the large scale religion of the church distract people from personal relationship. He criticised passionately Christian church for what he saw as its interference in the personal spiritual quest each true Christian must undertake. One can never be truly free and this causes boredom, anxiety and despair.
True faith does not lead to freedom, but it relieves the psychological effect of human existence. He claims that the only way to make life worthwhile is to embrace faith in God and that faith necessarily involves embracing the absurd. One has faith in God, but one cannot believe in God. We believe in thing we can prove, but can only have faith in things that are beyond our understanding. Faith requires uncertainty, and thus we can have faith in God because God is beyond logic, beyond proof, and beyond reason. There is no rational evidence for God but this is exactly what allows people to have faith in him. For Kierkegaard, the man of faith is directly related to a personal God whose demands are absolute and cannot be measured simply by the standards of the human reason.
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