Kierkegaard, Soren
(1813-1855)
Geoffrey Hamilton
December 19, 2005
If you like Christianity and believe in absolutes without evidence, then this is
the guy for you. If you like a guy who preaches that he knows what 'God' thinks.
then read this bible thumper. If you
like Heidegger and all his absolutist claptrap and want to see where he got
it from, read this guy.
If you don't, don't bother with him. He is a waste of time and energy.
He begins his philosophy with the idea that people exist in three levels. The first is
the artistic level (which he calls the aesthetic) - this
is what the common man swims in. Here life
is a series of playful events (within illusions) backed up with more playful
illusions. This level he says leads to
loneliness and anxiety. If this was all he had to say and he said it in a few pages, he would
be worth reading, but he goes on to claim higher levels called the ethical and religious.
In these upper two levels he claims people ignore a kind of moral reality,
an illusion, of course, which
he supports. He say people should attempt to find suffering valueable
and by doing so take the next step
to the religious level. He says it is theoretically possible through subjective means
to arrive as the top man, the
spiritual man, which he calls the
"Single One". From there you just have to keep
suffering for the illusion of God, because even though his whole dogma is delusion
wrapped in illusion and sold as an escapist methodology to avoid the meaninglessness
of existence, he never escaped it. He stayed a bitter victim of his own Christianity.
I think I would rather have been eaten alive by a bear than follow his example.
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