“Kierkegaard is widely considered the most important religious thinker of the modern age. This is because he dramatized with special intensity the conflict between religion and secular reason, between private faith and the public world, and he went so far as to entertain the thought that a genuine reconciliation between them is impossible.”
“Society, for Kierkegaard, is a place of leveling conventions, and the ethical principles that bind us together ignore the genuine self. It is faith alone, uncontaminated by public understanding, that distinguishes the authentic individual, and faith is something wholly interior, a leap into paradox.”
“At their limit such arguments suggest religious absolutism; they extol the believer even if his belief runs against all accepted codes of humanity. In reading Kierkegaard’s works one begins to fear that the individual whom he celebrated as “the knight of faith” too closely resembles that figure upon whom we have heaped so many of the anxieties of our own time: the religious fanatic.”
“Among his most famous works are bitter satires and invectives against bourgeois conformity that are interlaced with the same veins of explosive resentment that Dostoevsky would mine in his Notes from Underground (which was published less than a decade after Kierkegaard’s death in 1855).”
“No single line of inheritance connects Kierkegaard to our present day. One tradition bridges an unlikely divide, linking the pious Kierkegaard to the atheist Friedrich Nietzsche. In the 1920s and 1930s philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre began to pluck from Kierkegaard’s writings the central themes of existential philosophy.”
“Though they did not share his theism, they borrowed his image of the human being as incorrigibly mortal, condemned to a worldly existence bereft of all rational certainties. The French philosopher Jean Wahl assigned Kierkegaard a principal part in his Petite Histoire de l’existentialisme (1947): “The word ‘existence’ in the philosophical sense that it is used today,” Wahl declared, was originally “discovered by Kierkegaard.””
“In histories of philosophy it is still commonplace to name Kierkegaard the founder of existentialism.”
“But another legacy connects him to the rebellious movement known as “crisis theology,” associated chiefly with Karl Barth, the Swiss Reformed pastor whose Epistle to the Romans transformed the landscape of twentieth-century religious thought. It is not hard to see why Barth found instruction in Kierkegaard, whose writings meditate to an obsessive degree on the absolute chasm between God and humanity. For Kierkegaard, as for Barth, God remains “wholly other” and cannot be pressed into service for mundane causes.”
“His hatred of the mob, for instance, fosters a healthy skepticism toward political conformity but also a disabling contempt for the public good.”
“A rather different line of influence connects him to illiberal critics of modern democracy such as Carl Schmitt, the Nazi legal theorist who cited the Dane as an authority when he claimed that the ultimate problems in politics require radical decision, not reasonable deliberation.”
“Joakim Garff’s monumental biography (first in Danish, 2000; English translation, 2005)”
“the no less lengthy Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard”
“a second work in Danish by Garff, Regines gåde: Historien om Kierkegaards forlovede og Schlegels hustru (Regine’s Mystery: The Story of Kierkegaard’s Fiancée and Schlegel’s Wife), also published in 2013”
“Nor can we neglect Walter Lowrie’s A Short Life of Kierkegaard (reprinted by Princeton University Press for the bicentennial)”
“Daphne Hampson, the author of Kierkegaard: Exposition and Critique, is not a lover of Kierkegaard’s ideas.”
“This deep split in Kierkegaard’s character is still visible in the 1840 portrait sketched by his cousin: the ardent defender of Christian simplicity can be found in the eyes of the young man who is, in all outward respects, a sophisticated son of the Copenhagen bourgeoisie.”
“The Marxist theoretician Georg Lukács suggested that Kierkegaard’s entire philosophy could be found in his separation from Regine. Either/Or is in fact a meditation on the conflict between two modes of existence, the hedonistic or aesthetic (as described in the “Diary of a Seducer”) and the ethical (in which one awakens to remorse and “holiness”).”
“But for Kierkegaard this is precisely the point: faith entails a paradox by which the individual cannot make himself understood and yet “the particular is higher than the universal.” Abraham embraces the impossible proposition that through sacrifice he will receive his son alive: “Only he who draws the knife gets [back] Isaac,” Kierkegaard wrote. It is commitment, heroic yet absurd, that distinguishes Abraham as a “knight of faith.””
“Hampson is troubled (and rightly so, I think) by a religious disposition that violates our common understandings of humanity. Appealing to feminist criticism, she sees in the God of Kierkegaard a distinctly patriarchal ideal of stern (even violent) authority.”
“The charge is familiar but it reflects our own cultural preconceptions of male and female conduct. Indeed, the notion that God has gender at all involves an unwarranted lapse into anthropomorphism. The abstract deity of the Protestant West is customarily called “God the Father,” but as a matter of philosophical principle it makes no more sense to imagine God as a conventional man (the strong, silent type) than it does to picture God with the attributes we conventionally assign to women.”
“More worrisome, in my view, is not Kierkegaard’s lapse into anthropomorphism but rather the opposite: his readiness to amplify the doctrine of Protestant abstraction to a limit where the divine exceeds all understanding. Kierkegaard’s God lies at such a great remove from everyday categories as to contravene our most fundamental and enduring norms of morality.”
“When a parent believes he hears voices that command him to take a knife to his own child our proper response should be not praise for his piety but horror at his self-evident lunacy. Kierkegaard is of course aware that this is our customary belief. But he sees in Abraham’s conduct a “teleological suspension of the ethical,” which is to say, he entertains the thought that religion imposes a higher purpose on us than what ethical reasoning demands.”
“There is a painting called The Sacrifice of Isaac by Caravaggio that hangs in the Uffizi, about which the philosopher J.M. Bernstein has recently written a telling commentary.”
“For Bernstein, the painting is an allegory for the birth of secular consciousness: it expresses a dawning awareness that if faith demands barbarism, then it is faith that must yield. But Kierkegaard’s argument runs in precisely the other direction: when faith and humanity conflict, faith supervenes. He is most blessed who persists in his piety even if he has made himself utterly unintelligible to those around him.”
“Such arguments run through many of Kierkegaard’s most celebrated works, which ruminate on the chasm between God and humanity, between the individual and the collective. It is not surprising that Kierkegaard therefore despised Hegel, because it is Hegel most of all who developed the idea that individual consciousness cannot exist in the way Kierkegaard supposed.”
“During Kierkegaard’s lifetime Hegel’s philosophy had gained prestige in Denmark thanks to the promotional efforts of Hans Lassen Martensen, the court preacher who succeeded Mynster as bishop upon the latter’s death in 1854, and who Kierkegaard saw as the embodiment of everything that was rotten in Denmark. In 1846, he published his most sustained assault on Hegel in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments, a title that, like many others, was deeply ironic, since in this case the “postscript” was a great deal longer than the “fragments” (literally, “crumbs”) that Kierkegaard had published before.”
“Ludwig Feuerbach, who concluded that religion was a human creation and lacked metaphysical reality. The Hegelian critique of religion dissolved into anthropology: the modern celebration of human qualities.”
“But some students of the dialectic felt differently. Without contesting its metaphysical truth, they felt the Christian religion should transform both self and society, binding the pious individual to public reason for the betterment of modern civilization. It was this project that Martensen found appealing, and Kierkegaard deplored.”
“To “go beyond” the Christian faith, Kierkegaard feared, would not enhance its reality; it would only sacrifice its inner truth for the sake of outer decorum. Christianity’s truth would vanish into mere Christendom. As Hampson explains, “Hegelian religion à la Martensen [was] only too at home in the world.””
“As the philosopher Charles Taylor has explained, in the secular age even those who cleave to a conventional faith conceive of their religion as one option among many: it is something an individual must will to have and no longer something one is merely given as an artifact of collective history. The age of religious reform was but one stage in the historical process that Taylor calls the “disembedding” of the self from shared traditions of meaning.”
“Ironically, the desire to stand as an authentic individual beyond all such traditions is the greatest conceit of the bourgeois era and Kierkegaard was in this respect far more conformist than he cared to admit.”
“And yet none of us wishes wholly to surrender this desire for authenticity since it is also the very sign of possibility itself, the hope that life might be otherwise than it is.”
“To abandon this hope is to give up on possibility altogether. Against all the forces that counsel resignation Kierkegaard remains not just the knight of faith but something more: the eternal child.”