• About
  • Books

memoirandremains

memoirandremains

Tag Archives: Existentialism

Kierkegaard, What it means to seek God? 2

23 Thursday Sep 2021

Posted by memoirandremains in Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Existentialism, Kierkegaard, Peer Gynt, What it means to seek God

One cannot follow an argument in Kierkegaard the way one would follow a lecture or a legal presentation. The parts do not move in the same obvious logical progression. He is famously suggestive and indirect. This is not to say that the ideas move illogically. But rather than move directly to a point, he seems to circle the topic, forcing to you to consider it from all sides. He at times will not make his conclusion clear, forcing you to think through the implications. It is as if he brings you to see a waterfall from a new angle.

And so when he comes to the main point of this sermon, What is it means to seek God, he answers with a paradox. He borrows here from Luther’s maxim that we are simultaneously sinners and justified

No man can seek God without purity and no man can know God without becoming a sinner.

Having presented that paradox, he immediately seems to back off; perhaps you will not want to proceed with me. Certainly, “This discourse … has no authority.” I cannot compel you to come with me as we consider this. It may be too much for you to seek this “stillness.”

But you must know that this stillness is not in some particular place. Then, having made plain that one does not confront God by going somewhere (recall at the first that he raises the question of how far away God may be), he shifts to the poet.

He references the “poetical” that a wordless sigh may “the best prayer.” This he compares to the one who thinks that God can be approached by traveling to some particular place. Both this moves “help to create an illusion” of worship.

No, he says, if you actually come into confrontation with God you will have words. This poetical idea springs from a vague idea of God (just as the concept that God is some place is a vague idea of God.

If one had an actual confrontation with God, you would have clear words. But this is a “difficulty not dreamed of when God is at a distance.”

He then shifts focus slightly again to our everyday world. We live in a world which proclaims that the most important thing to is to avoid this danger. It would seem that the danger is a confrontation with God.

But the nature of avoiding that danger throws an interesting light on avoiding this danger. It is one “who is neither in solitude nor confusion but in a busy absent-minded state of reflection.” It is one who simply has no thought of the thing. Solitude and confusion are the poles for the one who think of God is being found in a pilgrimage: I must go some particular place to meet God. This person is even less awake: he is not looking at all and is not even thinking of looking for God.

Notice that he is not directly addressing how to come God. Rather he is holding up a portrait of what is to not seek God. To come to God is a paradox: you may not be interested in this. You might think that it is going somewhere or perhaps a “poetical” sigh o fa prayer – well its not either. But you who are not even considering the matter are like one sleeping walking in life.

Yes, I can’t make you come to seek God: But I can show you what it is to not seek God.

How does he describe this sort of place: avoiding the “danger”? This “is the most mediocre thing in the world.” You are busy avoiding. Kierkegaard does not directly articulate what is being avoided, the implication requires the reader to think through what is being avoided so that the one who is reading and who is also avoiding God must accuse himself? What am I avoiding? God.

This seems to turn our age of authenticity on its head. The temptation of the Serpent was to define ourselves. But the one who has not confronted God (as a sinner and one pure of heart – in confession) is not actually a human being.

The idea which strikes him here is Peer Gynt who comes to the end of his life and seems to be so inconclusive he cannot even be sent to Hell.

This man who who simply goes about life in an absent minded way being himself and avoiding God – at best having vague thoughts is simply “mediocre”.

I can’t help thinking about mold of the world that seeks for us nothing better than to be tax payers, workers, consumers, busily entertained, always absent minded.

Kierkegaard: Freedom of Choice in Either/Or

20 Tuesday Feb 2018

Posted by memoirandremains in Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard, Philosophy, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

despair, Either/Or, Existential Choice, Existentialism, Jasper, Kierkegaard, marriage, Melancholy, Philosopher, Sartre

408px-Kierkegaard_portrait

Volume 2 of Either/Or is composed of two long, often tedious [the first letter, “Aesthetic Validity of Marriage” can be particularly slow, repetitious, dull], meandering, letters from Judge Vilhelm to man of volume 1 (which includes the famous Diary of a Seducer).  A primary aspect of this volume is to convince the seducer of the primacy of marriage (over a life of well… seduction).  He argues that one should choose to be ethical.

There is an aspect of irony in all this, because Kierkegaard is arguing to Regina Olson (as has been noted by many) about marriage after he had broken off his engagement to the young lady.

He argues that marriage is no duty — because it is a duty of love, which is something thus done willingly (and then as he makes this argument, he seems to almost contradict himself).  Thus, the ethical choice is one of freedom. By way of contrast, the one who lives merely for pleasure has no freedom, because he has made no choice — he has no ability to even reflect upon anything.

I have received second-hand or so some ideas of Kierkegaard and existential choice: an act whereby one chooses in some manner and thus secures some sort of meaning in life. Now, I am not an expert in the history of existential philosophy, nor have I traced all the movements in the area from Kierkegaard through Sartre and Jasper. But what I have seen — and this is perhaps the fountainhead of the concept is this section from Equilibrium in volume two of Either/Or:

That which is prominent in my either/or is the ethical. It is therefore not yet a question of the choice of something in particular, it is not a question of the reality of the thing chosen, but of the reality of the act of choice….As an heir, even though he were heir to the treasure of all the world, nevertheless does not posses his property before he had come of age [an allusion to Galatians 4:1-2], so even the richest personality is nothing before he has chosen himself, and on the other hand even what one might call the poorest personality is everything when has chosen himself; for the great thing is not to be this or that but to be oneself, and this everyone can be if he wills it.

He then goes on to explain that the aesthetic man is one not merely lives for pleasure, but one who lives immediately, without an act of choice, “the aesthetically in a man is that by which he is immediately what he is; the ethical is that whereby he becomes what he becomes.”

But because the aesthetically man is merely what he is — not having chosen something else — is “enmeshed”. He has “no time to tear [him]self loose.” This is in contrast to the ethical man (the writer of volume 2), “I am not enmeshed, either by my judgment of the aesthetical or by my judgment of the ethical; for in the ethical I am raised above the instant — I am in freedom — but it is a contradiction that one might be enmeshed by being in freedom.”

The act of choosing, ‘imparts to man’s nature a solemnity, a quiet dignity, which is never entirely lost.”

The man who merely wants to enjoy life finds himself at the mercy of “a condition which either lies outside the individual or is in the individual in such a way that it is not posited by the individual himself.” For in the inside, he gives the example of a young girl “who for a brief time prides herself upon her beauty, but soon it deceives her.”

For the man who lives constantly for some pleasure outside himself, he gives Nero as the example — nothing is able to sate him, “all the world’s cleverness must devise for him new pleasures, for only in the instant of pleasure does he find response, and when that is past he gasps with faintness.” [His discussion of Nero is particularly interesting.]

But something still troubles Nero, he cannot “break through.” He has a place which terrifies anyone who sees it – he cannot bear for anyone to look into his eyes. “He does not possess himself; only when the world trembles before him is he tranquilized, for then there is no one who ventures to lay hold on him. Hence this dread of men which Nero shares with everyone personality of this sort.”

This seems to match the diary of the seducer, who works out the desire for the woman — but cannot permit her to actually be with him — he cannot make the ethical move to marry (marriage is the constant background of volume 2).

“At least we can both learn that a man’s unhappiness is never due to the fact that he has not the outward conditions in his power this being the very thing which would make him unhappy.” — This leads to melancholy:  “But melancholy is sin, really it is a sin instar omnium, for not to will deeply and sincerely is sin, and this is the mother of all sins.”

(It continues on through many twists in turns on the nature of despair for the aesthetic man. Later, in Equilibrium, he writes, “For no intoxication is so beautiful as despair, so becoming, so attractive, especially in a maiden’s eyes (that you know full well), and especially if one possess the skill to repress the wildest outbursts, to let despair be vaguely sensed like a distant conflagration, while only a glimpse of it is visible outwardly.”)

On the other hand is the ethical choice which willing embraces duty: it is here that marriage as the basis of the argument makes sense. He is not merely telling the young man to stop being a cad, grow up and get married — he is explaining that choosing a duty to love another is not a burden but an act of love. To choose to love is an imposed duty, but it is not burden because love is the expression and obtaining of desire: “If I attach my  closely in friendship to another person, love is everything in this case, I recognize no duty; if love it is at an end, then friendship is over. It is reserved for marriage alone to base itself upon such an absurdity.” [Here is an example of the maddening paradox of this essay — it is long, twisting and the author never seems to be completely clear even to himself. He makes a point and then argues out another way.]

A historical irony lies here: if this is indeed the basis for the idea of the existential choice of which I heard and read in 20th century philosophers (and their cheaper imitators), then that choice was originally a choice offered by a moralizing older man (a judge no less), to a younger, carefree man to get married!

Why Would a European Teenage Girl Join ISIS?

03 Thursday Dec 2015

Posted by memoirandremains in Culture, Thesis

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Culture, Existentialism, ISIS, Meaning, Teenagers, Thesis, Vanity

Because, for all the awesome social services and consumer goods it can offer, Europe has become incapable of endowing the lives of its citizens, Muslim or not, with meaning. A generation of young European Muslims are giving up their relatively easy lives in Malmö, Marseilles, and Manchester for the battlefields of Syria and Iraq, because Europe is devoid of values worth living—or dying—for. They are leaving for the same reason that Europe’s Jews are moving to Israel: Strength and a sense of purpose can be found elsewhere, whether it’s ISIS, Vladimir Putin, Ali Khameni, or the IDF.

Human beings cannot live long without a semblance of purpose

 

The Existential Character of Christian Theism

17 Tuesday Mar 2015

Posted by memoirandremains in Culture, Theology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Charles Taylor, Contingency, Existentialism, Matthew Rose, Philosophy

For thinkers working in this tradition, Augustine and Aquinas preeminent among them, the fundamental philosophical problem was that of contingency—how and why anything exists at all, when it plainly need not. In the course of wrestling with this question, Christian philosophy arrived at its great insight: that contingent beings depend on a God whose very nature simply is to be. Its central theses, clarified over a millennium of philosophic labor, comprised what Étienne Gilson called the “existential” character of Christian theism. They included the demonstration that God does not “have” existence but is himself the pure act of existence; that contingent things are not identical with their existence and are sustained in being by God; and that to know the nature of any finite thing is to know its likeness to its divine cause. These claims, and the conception of rationality embedded within them, provided the metaphysical infrastructure of Catholic Christianity, whose intellectual history is unintelligible apart from it.

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2014/12/tayloring-christianity

Matthew Rose on Charles Taylor

Categories

Archives

Recent Posts

  • Thomas Traherne, The Soul’s Communion with her Savior, Book 1.1.4
  • Anne Bradstreet Meditations: Consider
  • Those unheard are sweeter
  • Thomas Traherne, The Soul’s Communion with her Savior, Book 1.1.3
  • Weakness

Categories

Archives

Recent Posts

  • Thomas Traherne, The Soul’s Communion with her Savior, Book 1.1.4
  • Anne Bradstreet Meditations: Consider
  • Those unheard are sweeter
  • Thomas Traherne, The Soul’s Communion with her Savior, Book 1.1.3
  • Weakness

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • memoirandremains
    • Join 629 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • memoirandremains
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...