Enough words have been said about Kierkegaard, but nothing quite captures the enigmatic soul. My love for Kierkegaard, for "that individual", comes from his rejection of crowd wisdom and being the champion of Individualism within the Christian system.
His diagnostic understanding of modernity, capturing the erosion of passion and faith, shows his remarkable surgical understanding of the 19th century world. I do not categorise him as a "romantic Dane", and for someone battling against Hegelian rationality, he was extremely shrewd and precise in his arguments.
Despite this love, this essay will be a cavalry charge against his conclusions, particularly the leap of faith, and the psychological dangers that come with it.
To understand this enigmatic theologian better , the individual that refuses labels and classifications , we need a better historical context of his time. Denmark was a Christian majority state, and he was born into a very religious upbringing. The guilt-driven life of his father later impacted his worldview, turning him against organised religion, especially with a deep-seated hatred towards the Danish state church. His failed engagement, which he called off, fuelled resentment towards personal love and relationship, both with his brother and the external world.
As I will explore in this essay, the total surrender and the Either/Or framework couldn't have been developed without understanding his subjective upbringing.
Before the rebuttal, I would like to give credit where it is due. These are the core tenets of his philosophy that I agree with.
Through being the Christian champion of Individualism and as a precursor to Existentialism, his role was instrumental in pioneering personal freedom especially within a theological framework. I did have my few encounters with the infinite to say that this is true , the fragmented phenomenology of the human being is the paradox that needs constant attunement with the infinite. But crowd wisdom will only obscure the view from the primordial being. Then again, one needs to have the subjective experience of profound isolation to understand this paradox.
Kierkegaard was also a true sceptic of the Athenian rationalist movement, which he believed plagued the Christian worldview through rigid and objective symbolism. The symbolic interpretation of the Bible meant that a detached analogical understanding would shy away from the subjective lessons imbued in it. This was timely in all its worldly possibilities, as it came at a time when the deistic movement of the impersonal god was split from the theistic personal god.
Failing to align themselves is the true enigmatic paradox of being human. Kierkegaard believed the angst of indecision was the true pain of human existence. His hero was Abraham, who was willing to sacrifice Isaac against the universal rational ethical systems. For Kierkegaard, an individual goes through three stages of transformation , the aesthetic life driven by desire, the ethical life driven by service, and the religious life driven by an irrational leap to faith. Abraham remains the highest embodiment of this faith, specifically because of his life's context and his love for Isaac.
Kierkegaard also correctly identified that the true nature of God is beyond rational belief. The deistic enlightenment movement tried to quantify God into rational principles and axioms, for Kierkegaard, this only further strayed the individual from God.
He called it the Infinite Qualitative Distinction - God is not merely greater than the human in degree, but different in kind ; he is an unbridgeable metaphysical gap beyond human language. This serious internal tension remains unresolved in his work, and this will be the ground upon which I charge - I believe if the gap is infinite in kind, no act of human will, however irrational, can bridge it from the human side.
Agreeing with his diagnosis, I can't help but be opposed to his conclusions as I charge into the subjective and individual ground upon which Kierkegaard himself prefers to stand.
Very little is talked about how effortless the leap (without human calculations); should be, and this goes understated in his work. There is a fine and delicate balance between the irrational leap made by Abraham and the ego-driven leap to a destructive mindset taken up by the fanatics of our age. The fanatic, unlike Abraham, is ready both to kill himself and others for an idea. Any radical idea, if taken to extreme, could be extremely damaging, especially if not accompanied by receptive and effortless thinking.
The structure of the leap is itself self-defeating. The leap requires us to suspend reason, have conviction, and act with faith; which makes very little distinction between Abraham and the fanatic. The only separating quality between them is individual context, and the leap itself gives no standards upon which to understand that context.
My Buddhist influences would also say that the releasement from the cliff into emptiness, to the groundless ground, is the more defensible argument here. I am not the first to build on this growing tension; Heidegger identified it in his interpretation of Gelassenheit, where effortless release frees us from the psychological toll and angst of the ego's rational calculations.
The very act of leaping into subjective faith requires an ego-driven willingness to believe - the egotistic presumption of a Cartesian self that stands apart from the world, interpreting it from a distance. This disembodied Cartesian subject ( The subjective “I” separate from their environment) is something that phenomenology had already buried. Kierkegaard's individual leaper is just a ghost pretending to have gravity.
Kierkegaard, arising from his grave, would defend that the tension between faith and the subjective ego is something the individual has to live with. But my parry-back would be that effort itself is the first determinant against faith, that subjective willingness can't be dissolved through a leap, only reinforced. The leap would require a radical attunement to your environment - both in responsiveness and the meditative intention that comes from this phenomonological state...
In other words, lightness of feet is the first sign of divinity.