Kierkegaard’s Leap | Hacker News Reader

Kierkegaard’s Leap

hudsonreview.com

For anyone contemplating reading Kierkegaard for the first time I would highly recommend starting with his journals.

Reading his daily thoughts, his love of walks, his relationship with Regine and his multitude of feuds with the newspapers and the state church gives a great perspective on his published work. It's also where you will find most of his quotable statements.

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."

I read some of Kierkegaard's works some decades ago. It seemed to me that by his time philosophers had generally concluded that Christian theology, and theology generally, was not worth serious study. And Kierkegaard couldn't accept that he no longer believed it either - Sort of the first of the school of those who argue that God must exist because the alternative is too horrible to contemplate.

Yes, he tried and push theology to a perfect interpretation, but never took the next step of abandoning it in the way Nietzsche did. "God is dead...and we killed him" to paraphrase the madman.

While Nietzsche lived later and embraced the nihilism that Kierkegaard couldn't bring himself to acknowledge, he rejected any notion of Darwinian influence in his writing.

I wouldn't say Nietzsche "embraced the nihilism". Embraced atheism, sure. Even The Anti-Christ I think says not a word against Jesus, who he seems to admire, but is aimed against the corruption of Jesus' teachings by priests and the Church. His teacher Schopenhauer–the first atheist modern western philosopher?–has much more of that nihilistic vibe - it would be better not to live, happiness is negative, lasting happiness impossible, the world is essentially annoying and horrible etc. Schopenhauer's also very Buddhisty–even had a bust of Buddha in his house–although I think arrived at his conclusions independently. Nietzsche at least tried to say Yes. Music was very important to both of them–S played flute, Nietzsche piano–and music was even more important in S's philosophy than Nietzsche's. Only through art, especially music, can we escape the miserable pressure of the Will, i.e. unconscious/life force/animal nature. Reading Schopenhauer's main book seems like Freud + Darwin. One of the essays in N's first book is the fascinating Schopenhauer as Educator. The chapters on S and N in Santayana's very readable and funny Egotism in German Philosophy are maybe the best, most insightful thing written about them.

I read a lot of Kierkegaard years ago - for a while he and Nietzsche were my two best friends! I avoided K's christian stuff - way too angsty for me, and over issues that mean nothing to me. (Well, I did have a religious phase where I could agree with him that christians are nowhere near christian enough!) But I love a lot of his other stuff. Maybe my favourite is Either/Or - some parts of it - the aphorisms, Crop Rotation etc. It's very funny stuff. He's either very compressed or extremely long-winded. And the endless whining about Regine gets very tedious..

I agree that he didn't reject life and living, just that he was of the mind that there is no overriding meaning to it. I tend to think of a nihilist as someone like Dawkins. It's not just that there is no god, but that there's no point to life except what you make of it.

I also read Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in my youth and went through a stage of intensely studying Christianity, falling out with the local churches as basically missing the point, (the time when I most felt a kinship with Kierkegaard) before ultimately rejecting religion entirely.

Dawkins?! Then you must think of every atheist as a nihilist, and the term doesn't mean much then. I don't think that's what's meant by the word, at all.

Anyway, meaning is not something things have in isolation–it is always meaning to someone. Like what's the meaning of a painting? (apart from in peoples' minds) A written word is a squiggle, but means something to someone that speaks the language. I think the nihilist/existentialist angst is from people in the generation or two after christianity, not having that cosy pre-defined meaning to their lives, of everything being god's plan. Like a child, used to the parents deciding what to do, what are the rules, punishments, structures, moving out of home and feeling...abandoned, empty. I (like almost everyone I know here in Australia) was brought up without being taught a religion, never had that loss of faith or feeling of lack or meaninglessness. Hmm well, not true, aged about 20 I had a mild 'existential crisis', wondering about the meaning of life, and learnt that it's silly (and dangerous) expecting there to be the meaning of life out there like a rock. Nihilists stop there, thinking that in "there's no meaning in X" they've captured the essential truth about things, and torture themselves with the abyss. A bit like the contemporary goth thing, thinking that seeing the meaningless, desolation, emptiness of things is wisdom. I started reading E.M. Cioran essays a year or two ago, but couldn't stand him; it was full of this vibe; going on about what a superior wisdom his ultra-bleak, desolate view of things has, as if he's better than any happy person because so miserable. Occasionally I hear some intelligent person talking as if an intelligent person must be unhappy, as if it's a given. Maybe it's from the existentialist message filtering down and being taken for wisdom. Maybe Sartre is to blame for that.

I really recommend reading Kierkegaard along with Nietzsche, they miraculously contradict and agree in pretty much everything.

Missing from this post is The Sickness Unto Death, which I think is the most important of anything he wrote. The book is about what a Christian ought to think of what it means to live and what it means to die.

> What if grace doesn’t come as a gift bestowed from beyond, but in moments of self-forgetfulness, moments in which, by whatever means and processes, the Ego simply disappears? Questions about the afterlife are not answered in this kind of thinking, but so what? If one isn’t afraid to live, why should one be afraid to die? And even if one is afraid, again, so what? Our courage and our fear will not change the fact of our dying.

https://www.naturalthinker.net/trl/texts/Kierkegaard,Soren/T...

> Oh, but even if Christ had not awakened Lazarus from the dead, is it not true that this sickness, that death itself, was not a sickness unto death? When Christ comes to the grave and cries with a loud voice, "Lazarus, come forth" (11:43), it is evident enough that "this" sickness is not unto death. But even if Christ had not said these words -- merely the fact that He, who is "the resurrection and the life" (11:25), comes to the grave, is not this a sufficient sign that this sickness is not unto death, does not the fact that Christ exists mean that this sickness is not unto death? And what help would it have been to Lazarus to be awakened from the dead, if the thing must end after all with his dying -- how would that have helped Lazarus, if He did not live who is the resurrection and the life for everyone who believes in Him? No, it is not because Lazarus was awakened from the dead, not for this can one say that this sickness is not unto death; but because He lives, therefore this sickness is not unto death. For, humanly speaking, death is the last thing of all; and, humanly speaking, there is hope only so long as there is life. But Christianly understood death is by no means the last thing of all, hence it is only a little event within that which is all, an eternal life; and Christianly understood there is in death infinitely much more hope than merely humanly speaking there is when there not only is life but this life exhibits the fullest health and vigor.

edit: Not removing the original wording, but it's an overstatement to say that Sickness Unto Death could be regarded as Kierkegaard's most important work. It's definitely not. It's just his writing that is most relevant to what the author of this post is talking about.

> in moments of self-forgetfulness, moments in which, by whatever means and processes, the Ego simply disappears?

This is very reminiscent of Buddhist thinking. Did Kierkegaard write at all about Buddhism?

That quote is from the article, not Kierkegaard himself. There's a lenghy answer to your question here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_S%C3%B8ren_Kierk...

There is a lot of commonality between some of the sayings of Christ and some of the sayings of Buddha. But the shared eastern elements are more obvious in Buddha, more subtle in Jesus.

For example, when Jesus says, "All who draw the sword will die by the sword" (Matthew 26:52), that's obviously and blatantly false, in the literal sense. But it makes perfect sense from a Buddhist non-dualistic perspective: when we kill our fellow man, we kill ourself, because we ARE (one with) our fellow man.

More to the parent's point about ego dissolution, the following words of Christ take on a totally different meaning if you view them through that lens: "In such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh" (Matthew 24:44). The surface-level interpretation is that the hour of His coming will be unexpected. But the subtler esoteric meaning is that if we want to meet the Son of Man, we need to turn off our thinking!

> Questions about the afterlife are not answered in this kind of thinking

I would argue that questions of the afterlife can be answered in this kind of thinking, specifically practices like long term meditation, self-inquiry, use of entheogens, etc. which can cause direct experience of afterlife, and direct experience of the mechanism behind things like reincarnation.

(appeal to authority: my own direct experience)

Not it can't. It can tell you how you imagine the afterlife to be, which is a different thing.

Are you saying everything is fundamentally just imagination?

I don't get the obsession with the fear of death. I'm just not afraid of it. That's not bravado. It just doesn't occur to me to be afraid of it.

I'm afraid of dying, because that's probably going to hurt. I'm afraid of other people dying, because it sucks to live without them. But the idea of my own not-existing-any-more just doesn't fill me with the dread or terror that the quotes you cite seem to take as axiomatic.

It feels like I'm being offered a cure for a disease that they're creating. While "fear of death" is certainly cross-cultural, it doesn't feel to me like it's an inherent part of the human condition. It feels as if Kirkegaard is offering a Christian solution to a Christian problem, and it offers nothing to somebody who hasn't already accepted the basic premises.

As an Athiest who has a few scrapes in the past few years with near-misses or almost dying, I tend to agree.

He addresses this sort of question in the intro:

> So it is that Christianity has taught the Christian to think dauntlessly of everything earthly and worldly, including death. It is almost as though the Christian must be puffed up because of this proud elevation above everything men commonly call misfortune, above that which men commonly call the greatest evil. But then in turn Christianity has discovered an evil which man as such does not know of; this misery is the sickness unto death. What the natural man considers horrible -- when he has in this wise enumerated everything and knows nothing more he can mention, this for the Christian is like a jest. Such is the relation between the natural man and the Christian; it is like the relation between a child and a man: what the child shudders at, the man regards as nothing. The child does not know what the dreadful is; this the man knows, and he shudders at it. The child’s imperfection consists, first of all, in not knowing what the dreadful is; and then again, as an implication of this, in shuddering at that which is not dreadful. And so it is also with the natural man, he is ignorant of what the dreadful truly is, yet he is not thereby exempted from shuddering; no, he shudders at that which is not the dreadful: he does not know the true God, but this is not the whole of it, he worships an idol as God.

> Only the Christian knows what is meant by the sickness unto death. He acquires as a Christian a courage which the natural man does not know -- this courage he acquires by learning fear for the still more dreadful. Such is the way a man always acquires courage; when one fears a greater danger, it is as though the other did not exist. But the dreadful thing the Christian learned to know is "the sickness unto death."

It's not just about not fearing death, it's about not fearing death because you fear something much worse.

... and in turn about not fearing a lot of the other things that ordinary people are afraid of. That makes a lot of sense, thanks.

As a sibling comment suggests, it offers a vaguely similar deal to Buddhism in being able to dispatch worldly fears. I don't really buy it myself, but I can see why people might.

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are the two philosophers who, when I read them, make me realize what a hypocrite I am. My favorite Kierkegaard quote in this vain:

"One must do everything for oneself and for God."

We are all often "performing" in one way or another for others. What would your life look like if you were only performing for yourself and for "God". I don't think it's possible actually, it's more of a goal to strive for.

Nietzsche's:

"I live in my own house

I've never copied nobody even half

And at any master that lacks the grace

to laugh at himself - I laugh."

I have long argued that the leap is not "over the chasm of uncertainty" but a "leap into the abyss." I don't have a reference handy to make my point, but it was the conclusion I drew from reading Fear and Trembling many years ago.

EDIT: “Yet Abraham believed, and believed for this life. Yea, if his faith had been only for a future life, he surely would have cast everything away in order to hasten out of this world to which he did not belong. But Abraham's faith was not of this sort, if there be such a faith; for really this is not faith but the furthest possibility of faith which has a presentiment of its object at the extremest limit of the horizon, yet is separated from it by a yawning abyss within which despair carries on its game. But Abraham believed precisely for this life, that he was to grow old in the land, honored by the people, blessed in his generation, remembered forever in Isaac, his dearest thing in life, whom he embraced with a love for which it would be a poor expression to say that he loyally fulfilled the father's duty of loving the son, as indeed is evinced in the words of the summons, "the son whom thou lovest.”

"Kierkegaard’s most famous book, Fear and Trembling (1843)"

Makes we wonder did that inspire Hunter S Thompson to name his book "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"?

Moreover, "Fear and Loathing", as a phrase, has been used by many writers, the first (possibly) being Friedrich Nietzsche in The Antichrist. In a Rolling Stone magazine interview, Thompson said: "It came out of my own sense of fear, and [is] a perfect description of that situation to me, however, I have been accused of stealing it from Nietzsche or Kafka or something. It seemed like a natural thing."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_and_Loathing_in_Las_Vegas...

No. IIRC it came from some book Thomas Wolfe wrote that Hunter had read, but I have forgotten which.

I don't know, but that particular phrase is old, from Psalm 55: "Fear and trembling come upon me, and horror overwhelms me"

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm+55&versio...

Interesting to know. So I assume Thompson was in Vegas, and fear and loathing came upon him :-)

Wow, didn't expect to see David Mason on Hacker News. A great poet and essayist (and all around nice guy). Have collaborated on something a while ago!

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