Life Cannot Be Examined Like a Specimen Pinned to a Display Board

Expand

Although he lived in the previous century, Søren Kierkegaard influenced the direction of intellectual life in the 20th century as the forebear of Existentialism and its focus on the reality of experience. Existentialists distrust philosophical systems with their inevitable simplifications and categorizations. They hold that we can make our lives from the decisions we chose from a morphing array of uncertainties. Kierkegaard would agree. He held that life cannot be examined like a specimen pinned to a display board and its meaning can only be discerned through experience.

Kierkegaard also built a bridge between philosophy and theology. In commenting on Denmark’s Lutheran Church, his country’s state religion, Kierkegaard critiqued the devolution of Western Christianity into an attempt to rationalize God. Faith is not rational, Kierkegaard insisted; it overspills the boundaries of logic—and that’s a good thing, he added. A passion for the infinite and the uncertain—and the search for God in the world—is the measure of faith, he seemed to suggest.

Two recent books examine Kierkegaard, whose work was much mulled over in the last century, from fresh perspectives. Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard by Clare Carlisle of King’s College London is a highly readable biography. Kierkegaard and Eastern Orthodox Thought by UW-Milwaukee’s Agust Ingvar Magnusson relates the philosopher’s ideas to Eastern Christianity, whose tendencies are more compatible to Kierkegaard than the Protestantism of his homeland.

Expand

In Carlisle’s telling, a failed love affair pushed Kierkegaard’s train of thought—his self-sabotaged engagement to Regine Olsen. From the beginning, “this relationship was charged with anxieties about his relationship to the world,” torn between Kierkegaard’s wish to withdraw and reflect and his need to enter and engage. The inward journey proved more powerful than the pursuit of happiness. He was troubled by his desire for worldly status as author and academic, though this vacillation didn’t dissuade him a prolific outburst of writings that asked, “How to be a human being in the world?” and “Not why we suffer but how to suffer?”

Kierkegaard wasn’t the first to ask these questions, but as Carlisle reminds us, he was the first important philosopher to ask them in the modern age. Unlike such recent predecessors as Hegel (whose abstractions he despised), Kierkegaard grew up in the first stages of the revolution in communication and transportation that continues in our own day. Railroads and steamships, the telegraph and mass circulation newspapers, brought the world closer together, setting the ground for our networked, wired society. Carlisle uses Kierkegaard’s railroad journeys as a metaphor of his worldview, sitting in a train carriage with the present moving forward by the moment from a past forever receding into a future continuously slipping away.

Magnusson overlooks Kierkegaard’s biography and looks instead into his theological reflections through a cross-cultural lens. Although the Dane never encountered Eastern Orthodoxy directly, he was cognizant of what the Orthodox call “the Fathers and Mothers of the Church,” the early writers who set the direction for Eastern theology. Magnusson puts a new light on Kierkegaard’s arguments against both organized religion as he experienced it and the presumptions of the European Enlightenment. Among many other things, Kierkegaard refused to accept Lutheranism’s salvation “by faith alone” dogma. Like the Orthodox, he maintained that faith is an empty word unless embodied in positive actions and choices. Magnusson’s insight is that in transgressing the boundaries of Western theology and philosophies, Kierkegaard found his way unawares to the East.

To read more book reviews, click here.

To read more articles by David Luhrssen, click here.