Don’t worry – this is certainly my most pretentious selection of the countdown.
Born in Denmark in 1813, Søren Kierkegaard was a philosopher, theologian, and psychologist. I like him because he really tries to cut through a lot of the crap of institutional Christianity – among other things, he’s famous for criticizing the Danish National Church. He elevates and experience and feeling over pure, cold rationality. This is because Christianity is filled with paradoxes, and he would have agreed with the second-century Christian writer Tertullian’s dictum “Credo quia absurdum” – “I believe because it is absurd.” He argues that truth must answer the questions of human existence, because good, sound theology (reason) will not get you there. Truth is discovered by those who are struggling and suffering their way to understanding life. He emphasizes struggle: without despair created through our failures, we would not be ready to make the desperate “leap of faith” of accepting Christianity. His brand of faith is intensely personal for the believer. He opposed the Christian institutions, because they typically produced mindless, cookie-cutter crowds instead of promoting an idiosyncratic encounter with God.
He was just so innovative in his thinking. Ludwig Wittgenstein said that he was “by far the most profound thinker of the nineteenth century.” His writing appeals to the academic side of me. His writing is extremely difficult, but sometimes that’s a good thing.
Favorite Excerpt:
“Just as the physician might say that there lives perhaps not one single man who is in perfect health, so one might say perhaps that there lives not one single man who after all is not to some extent in despair, in whose inmost parts there does not dwell a disquietude, a perturbation, a discord, an anxious dread of an unknown something, or of a something he does not even dare to make acquaintance with, dread of a possibility of life, or dread of himself, so that, after all, as physicians speak of a man going about with a disease in him, this man is going about and carrying a sickness of the spirit, which only rarely and in glimpses, by and with a dread which to him is inexplicable, gives evidence of its presence within…
This view will doubtless seem to many a paradox, an exaggeration, and a gloomy and depressing view at that. Yet it is nothing of the sort. It is not gloomy; on the contrary, it seeks to throw light upon a subject which ordinarily is left in obscurity. It is not depressing; on the contrary it is uplifting, since it views every man in the aspect of the highest demand made upon him, that he be spirit.”
- from The Sickness Unto Death
Famous Works:
Either/Or (1834)
Fear and Trembling (1843)
Works of Love (1847)
The Sickness Unto Death (1849)
Links:
· http://sorenkierkegaard.org/
· http://www.tameri.com/csw/exist/kierkegaard.shtml
· http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/
Next Week: #6.
Hint: He's a modernist poet.
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